by Tad Williams
The bald Funderling gave him a doubting look. "As you say, Captain. I'm just asking if they speak properly or not."
Vansen thought about Gyir's voice, something he had never heard with his ears, but which he would never forget. "They have many ways of talking. I do not think they will have any trouble making their wishes known…"
"Oh, shite and slurry!" said Jasper loudly.
Vansen was taken aback-for a moment he thought that the little man was calling him a liar. Then he saw what Jasper had seen-half a dozen Funderling women, led by Cinnabar's wife and Chert's wife Opal, making their determined way across the chapel.
"Hold now." Jasper was on his feet, as though he would bodily keep the women from the table. "What are you doing here? The Qar are coming!"
"Sit down, Wardthane Jasper." Vermilion Cinnabar was a handsome Funderling woman, dressed in a beautifully embroidered blue-green travel robe. "We have just as much right to be here as you and your warders."
"I beg your pardon, Magistrix," said the wealthy Funderling Malachite Copper, who had quickly made himself invaluable to the struggle. "Of course your advice is welcome, but only a few days ago these Qar were trying to kill us…"
"That is neither here nor there, is it?" The magister's wife directed her companions to seats on either side of her. Unlike Vermilion Cinnabar and Opal Blue Quartz, the other women looked a bit awed to be in such a place at such a time-but then again, Vansen thought, so did the men.
One of the other women leaned forward. "Is there much danger?" she whispered to Opal, who was sitting close enough for Vansen to hear.
"No," Opal told her, then shot Vansen a look that clearly said, "And please don't disagree."
She and the magister's wife are leading their troops by example, he realized. Like any good commanders they are worried too, but they cannot show that to their forces. "We should be well," he told the Funderling woman. "We are all under a treaty of peace here and the Qar, whatever else they are, seem to me honorable creatures." He felt a touch of shame at the understatement-Gyir the Storm Lantern had been more than "honorable." He had unhesitatingly given his life to carry out his promise to his mistress Yasammez-the sorceress or demigoddess they all awaited today.
Chert and Cinnabar and the physician Chaven came in with several others, including a party of Funderling monks led by Brother Nickel. The monk even nodded courteously toward Vansen as he and his party seated themselves at the long table.
"What's gotten into him?" Vansen said, half-aloud.
Malachite laughed. "Don't you know? Cinnabar had a talk with him. Reminded him that the Guild's highwardens have to approve a new Prior of the temple-and, when it comes to it someday, the new abbot of the temple as well. If Nickel wants to carry the abbot's holy mattock he's going to have to dig when the Guild says dig."
"Ah." Vansen wasn't surprised. Even Nickel, with the sacred souls of all the Funderlings supposedly in his protection, saw things differently when ambition called the dance.
"Hello, my darling," said Chert as he bent to kiss his wife. "I hope you don't mind-I'm going to be sitting with Cinnabar. It's his idea." Chert did his best to look surprised that he had been singled out for this honor, but Vansen knew the little man not only had good sense, he was in the middle of so many of the mysteries here that he was virtually indispensable. "And how very nice to see you, Magistrix!" he said to Vermilion Cinnabar. "You're looking well."
"Magistrix, is it?" she said with an amused smile. "I'm not soapstone, Chert, so don't try to carve me. Your wife has told me all about your adventures. I think my husband wants you around just to take his mind off our boring life at home."
Chert laughed. "Oh, wouldn't we all love to be bored these days, Magi… Vermilion." He gave Opal another squeeze and wandered back to Cinnabar and the others.
"My Chert is a good man," Opal said fiercely and suddenly, as if someone might have been about to suggest otherwise. "Everything he's done has been for others."
Before Vansen could tell her how much he agreed, a stir ran through the chapel-a sense of wonder and alarm that Vansen felt before he either heard or saw anything, a primal thrill of warning that ran up his spine. He turned and for a moment only saw Aesi'uah in the doorway-a powerful, captivating figure, no doubt, but someone he looked on almost with fondness. Then the others came silently in behind her.
It was not the full, staggering panoply of Qar types, but even this small embassy had enough variety to make those who had never seen them-perhaps three-quarters of those assembled-blanch and blink and mutter to themselves. Most frightening was the immense creature known as Hammerfoot, a war leader of the Deep Ettins, taller and heavier than even the largest cave bears. His jutting brow overshadowed his face so completely that nothing could be seen of his eyes except two gleaming coals far back in the darkness. He was wrapped in furs and armor made of stone plates held together by massive leather straps, and his two-fingered hands were each as wide as one of the Funderling shields. The giant found his way to the far side of the table and then sat down on the floor, almost knocking the table over when he nudged it with his great chest.
He was the largest of the Qar who came to the table, but not the strangest. Vansen had seen all these shapes before, and others, but he was still far from used to it. Here came the one named Greenjay, who looked like a cross between an exotic bird and a costumed Zosimia fool. Some of the other Qar looked almost human, their origin betrayed only by the shapes of their skulls or their coloring-Vansen knew no ordinary man or woman whose skin was touched with hues of lavender or mossy green. Others like the Elementals were manlike only in seeming to have a head and four limbs: Vansen had seen them in their fiery, naked forms in the Qar camp, and still saw those shapes in his dreams, but the two present today had been more discreet, wrapping themselves in robes that betrayed nothing of what smoldered beneath.
Bent or straight, small or tall, the Qar filed in to fill the other side of the table, as varied as the bestiaries so carefully painted in the margins of old books. The one thing they all seemed to have in common was the quality of watchfulness: as they took their seats they did not speak to each other, but only looked across at the gathered Funderlings and their guests.
And then, at long last, Yasammez herself came into the chamber, tall and silent, wearing her angular black armor and strange cloak like a cloud of dark fog. She looked neither to one side nor the other as she walked slowly to her place at the far side of the table, although she was the lode-stone to all eyes. She seated herself in the center of her people.
After a silence Yasammez spoke, her voice as slow and baleful as a funeral bell. "This battle is already lost. You must know that before we begin."
One voice rose above the flurry of disapproving murmurs-Cinnabar Quicksilver. "With all respect, Lady Yasammez, what does that mean? If there is no chance of victory, why are we here instead of at home making peace with the gods?"
"I cannot speak for you, delver," she told him. "But this is how I make peace with the gods."
Ferras Vansen could only stare as the room exploded into confusion. He had worked so hard to bring both sides together and now the Qar leader's arrogance was going to smash the alliance to pieces before it even started.
"Stop!" He did not realize he had stood until he had already begun to speak. "Funderlings, you are fools to argue with these people, whose suffering is so much greater than any of us can even imagine." He turned to the other side of the table. "But you, Lady, you are a fool if you think you can make peace while you still treat us as your enemies and inferiors."
"Make peace?" asked Yassamez in a voice like a cold wind. "I did not come here to make peace, Captain Vansen, I came here to make common cause. The wounds run too deep for peace between my race and yours."
Vansen pitched his reply above the tumult of unhappy voices. "Then let's speak of common cause, Lady Yasammez. Enough of the past-for now."
She stared at him, still and silent as a statue. At last the noise began to subside
as the others waited to see what she would say.
"But it is always the past, Captain Vansen," she said at last. "This room is crowded with the ghosts of those who have gone before, even if you cannot see them. But, of course, your delver allies know-they know very well, which is one of the reasons they did not want this council to happen."
"What are you talking about?" Cinnabar did not sound as confident as his words suggested: he sounded like a man prepared to flinch. "What do the Funderlings know?"
"That the blame for the destruction of the Qar is not on the sunlanders alone. Yes, Vansen's people captured my many-times-great-granddaughter Sanasu and killed her brother, Janniya-but we had been coming back to this place for a thousand years and more to perform the Fireflower ceremonies, always secret except to you delvers, and were never troubled before that day. How did Kellick of the Eddon know we were coming?"
Vansen had been told the story of the prince and princess of the Qar (or so he thought of them, though those were not Qar words) and how their pilgrimage during King Kellick's day had resulted in disaster, but what Yasammez was saying now was new to him. "Does it matter, Lady? It is two hundred years in the past…"
"Fool!" she said. "There is no past. It is alive this moment, in this rocky chamber. How did the Eddon know that Sanasu and Janniya were coming? Because the treacherous delvers told him."
Now the uproar was complete, with several of the diminutive Funderlings actually climbing onto the table to shake their fists and declare the innocence of their people. The ruckus became so great that Hammerfoot of Firstdeeps thumped a broad fist down on the table with a noise like a wall falling; his deep, rumbling growl of warning quickly silenced the Funderlings. In the sudden stillness, the only voice was Malachite Copper's.
"Stop!" the Funderling said. "Enough shouting! She is right. May the Earth Elders forgive us, she is right."
"What are you talking about, man?" Cinnabar asked, frowning. "Right about what?"
Copper looked around. "You Funderlings know me. All our people know me and my family. My many-times-great-uncle was Stormstone Copper, the draughtsman and chief mover of the Stormstone Roads. It was the great work of his life, meant to make his people safe and secure, to give us ways to come and go from Funderling Town that were not dependent on the moods of the Big Folk in the castle above. But he could not create an entirely new network of tunnels. Some of the most important passages already existed and had for centuries." Copper paused for a moment. "This is hard to tell. He brought such honor to our family name-there is not a single child of the Copper clan who has not thought, 'I am of Stormstone's blood,' and walked taller."
The rest of the Funderlings were clearly confused again. Vansen had learned enough in his time underground to know that they revered the famous Stormstone as his own people did the gods' holy oracles.
"All this is known, friend Malachite," said Cinnabar, his voice gentle, as though he spoke to someone who had fallen ill. "Tell us what we do not know."
"He… he feared that as long as the Qar came to Southmarch, one day the upgrounders-the Big Folk, and I beg your pardon for the crudeness, Captain Vansen-would discover the network of tunnels he had created. It was a terrible decision for him… but we are still shamed by what happened. I am sure he meant only for the Southmarch soldiers to frighten the Qar away…"
"You seek to put a kind face on murder," said Yasammez. "Because that is what happened. The delvers whispered to Kellick the Eddon that the Qar were coming. The Eddon went himself with his soldiers to stop them. He stole Sanasu and killed her brother Janniya and so doomed my people…"
"It was a fight," Vansen said to her. "You make it sound like murder!"
Yasammez's look was stony. "Janniya and Sanasu were accompanied only by two warriors and one eremite-a priest, you might call him. The Eddon met them with over two score of armed men, and afterward Sanasu was a prisoner and the rest of the Qar were dead. Call that what you will."
Vansen looked back at her. Yasammez was the child of a god they said, but she was also a living woman, however strange. She was angry-a bitterness that he recognized, one that was hard to let go; his father had felt that way toward the other farmers in Little Stell, that because he was of Vuttish blood they treated him as a stranger even after he had lived twenty years with them. He had died with that bitterness still on him, refusing on his deathbed to see any visitors not of his own family.
It was odd, Vansen thought, here in the midst of all these other earth-shaking events, that he suddenly felt no anger toward the man who had sired him, no sorrow, as if they had finally reconciled, despite Pedar Vansen being years dead. What had changed?
"If all this is true, Lady Yasammez," he said out loud, ending the long, whisper-scratched silence, "then there is nothing to be said by either Marchman or Funderling except that… we are sorry. We the living did not do these deeds-most of us did not know of them until now-but we are still sorry." He turned to Malachite Copper. "Is that so for you?"
"By the Hot Lord, but certainly!" said Copper, and then covered his mouth at having shouted such a strong oath in the very chapel of the Metamorphic Brothers' temple. "Ever since I came of age and my father passed this heavy secret to me-it travels thus, to each Copper heir-I have thought of my great-grandsire only with sorrow. I think he meant well but he plainly did wrong. If the rest of my family knew of it, I believe they would feel as I do and grieve at this family shame." He shrugged. "That is all there is to be said."
Yasammez looked from him to Vansen, and then paused, staring at nothing, making Vansen wonder to whom she spoke in her silent thoughts. Then she took up the great, dark ruby around her neck, slipped the heavy chain over her head, and let it fall to the refectory table with a loud clatter. As the rest of the assembly stared she drew out her strange sword, pure white in color but its glow as shimmery as mother-of-pearl, and set it atop its sheath on the table before her as well.
"This is the Seal of War," she said, gesturing with a long, thin finger toward the stone, baleful as a dying ember. "Because I bear this, the decisions of life and death I make are a bond upon the People-the Qar. This is Whitefire, the sword of the sun god himself. I swore that I would not sheathe it again until I had destroyed this mortal hall where our great ancestor, my father Crooked, fell." She swung her gaze around the table. Even Vansen found it hard to meet those eyes, which had looked out at the world since Hierosol itself was young.
Then Yasammez took the hilt of the white sword in her hand and lifted it. Anxious whispers turned to outright cries of alarm before she slid it into the scabbard with a noise like the snap of a door latch.
"Today I swallow my own words. I default upon my oath. The Book of the Fire in the Void will find a way to even my account, I am sure." Yasammez lowered her head as if a great weariness had just come over her, and for a moment the entire room grew completely still. Then she straightened, her face a mask again, and donned the Seal of War once more. "I decree that my people are still at war… but only with the autarch. Today I have made myself an oath-breaker, but there is no escaping it-this man's danger must be faced. For he comes here to wake a god on the night of Midsummer, but down in the place you call the Mysteries there is more than one god waiting to be awakened, and many of them are angry with all the living."
4
The Deep Library "He could play his shepherd's flute well, and with it would delight all who heard him, man or beast. He could also understand the speech of the birds and the beasts of the field. Even the lions that lived in Krace in those days did him no harm, and the wolves shunned his flock…"
-from "A Child's Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven"
When he awakened, he was still as tired as if he had run for hours. It was impossible to tell how long he had slept; the luminous gray sky outside, the swirling clouds and damp, ancient rooftops seemed unchanged. He sat up on the bed, thoughts blurry and wordless, then put his feet on the floor and had to stop there, dizzy. He remained tha
t way, head in hands, until he heard the queen's voice.
"Manchild."
He opened his eyes to find her standing over him. He was in a room that was plain but comfortable. Beside the bed a window with an open shutter looked down onto an enclosed courtyard and an overgrown garden of white-and-blue flowers. All of the other windows Barrick could see were shuttered.
"I had a dream…" he began.
"It was not a dream," Saqri told him. "You were on your way to the fields beyond, almost obliterated by the strength of the Fireflower. But my husband is with you now, helping you. Or a part of him is-the part that your need has prevented from going on." Saqri's dark eyes were solemn. "I do not know whether I should hate you for that or not, Barrick Eddon. Ynnir was meant to go on. He chose to go. But now because of the bond of responsibility or shame he feels to you, he lingers."
"Ynnir is… inside me?"
"They are all inside you, it seems, all the men of the Fireflower, in almost the same way the women are all inside me, my mother and grandmothers and great-grandmothers, our family stretching back entirely to the days of the gods. But though a part of them remains with you, the Ancestors of the Father have in truth gone on to whatever lies beyond…" She shook her head. "No. There are no words that will truly speak it from my thoughts to yours. But my husband… my brother… he cannot…" Her face changed and she fell silent again. He heard a batwing whisper in the dark depths of his own being, but from a voice that was neither hers nor his own-"Sad she is sad she misses me even through the fury oh proud sister you are still beautiful…!"
"I must spend some time in thought about this-about everything," Saqri told Barrick at last. "I will go. Harsar will attend to you until I call you."
Shortly after she had left the room, the strange little servant Harsar came to him with a tray containing what Barrick could only regard as a feast-bread and salty white cheese and honey and a bowl of the fattest, sweetest, most thin-skinned plums he had ever tasted. Harsar did not leave immediately, but stood watching Barrick eat.