by Tad Williams
"My lord?" Tinwright suddenly wondered if Tolly had heard a word he was saying. "I don't understand any of…"
"Of course you don't, so shut your mouth and listen. I spent months with Okros, learning the truth that hides behind other truths. The Hypnologoi have a sign they use to know each other-Okros was one himself! Their learning is secret and shared only among themselves… and certain others, such as me, who sponsor their inquiries.
"It's the land of the gods we're talking about, poet-the very place you prating verse-spouters are always on about. The place where they sleep and dream. The autarch seeks to open it up and take the power for his own. But I know how to do it just as well as he-Okros was ready, it had been the study of his life, you see?-and I have all the things I will need to do it. The stone… that is something else, something foolish, a mere precaution that Okros already told me was likely not needed. We have a mirror that will serve the task perfectly well, whether the southerner has one of his own or not. But what we need, ah, what we need now… is the blood."
Tinwright was caught by surprise. He took a step back, heart beating very fast. "But, Lord Tolly, I have worked so hard for you…"
Tolly laughed even louder. "Do you think I mean you? Do you think any immortal is going to smell the mud that runs in your veins and come running, especially when she's been asleep for a thousand years and more?" He threw back his head and laughed even louder, an edge of madness in it. "Ah, I have not felt so cheerful all day! Your blood! Fool of a poet!" He turned and slapped Matt Tinwright across the face so hard that Tinwright fell to his knees, stunned. "Do not ever presume," the lord protector said, his voice suddenly a snarl, "that you are like me. The blood that runs in the Eddon family's veins and also runs in mine is the holy ichor of Mount Xandos-the blood of the gods themselves! But to open the proper doorway, that blood must be spilled from a living heart, and I assure you it won't be mine." He laughed again, but this time it was a distracted growl. "No, we must find a proper sacrifice. Almost all the Eddons are gone from here… but there is still one left who carries the sacred blood."
Matt Tinwright was confused and frightened. He had not heard Tolly talk this way before, as if he believed the maddest of the old tales and meant to act on them. "Eddon blood…?" Who could Tolly mean-old Duchess Merolanna? But she was from somewhere else, wasn't she? Not of the Eddon bloodline, whatever that truly meant-she had only married an Eddon, like Queen Anissa…
Anissa. He had almost forgotten about her. Tolly had been manipulating her for quite some time, long before Tinwright himself had become the lord protector's unwilling servant. Anissa, who had married the king and had given birth to King Olin's last…
"… Child?" Tinwright had been frightened before, but now he felt sickened as well. "You… you don't mean the child, do you? Anissa's child?"
Tolly nodded. "Young Alessandros, indeed. He is exactly what I need. Take soldiers and fetch him to me. Do not harm Anissa, though-I may still have some need of her." He stood looking out the window again, staring down at the lights of campfires.
Tinwright wanted it not to be true; he wanted to have misunderstood. "You want me to steal the queen's baby-the king's son?"
"If you are too craven just to take it, you may tell Anissa whatever you like," said Tolly, waving his hand as if stealing a woman's only child was an everyday sort of task. "Tell her that I mean to have the priests give him a special blessing or something like that. No, then she will wish to come along. I don't care, poet-time is short! Just bring the child back to me here. Take two guards along. Three of you should be able to deal with a single small Devonisian woman. Now go, curse you. Make haste!"
Child stealer. Tinwright stumbled out of the protector's chamber, wondering how he had been consigned to the darkest, cruelest pits of the afterlife without ever noticing his own death.
Ash Nitre's apprentice looked as though he didn't quite believe Chert. "Are you certain you only want two donkeys?"
"Just enough to pull the cart, yes." Chert nodded toward the line of waiting men, mostly stonecutters now too old for daily work but willing to do what they could to save Funderling Town. He wondered what they would say if they knew what he planned, but he also knew he could not afford to tell them until they were well away from the temple, on the site, isolated from the temptation to let a word or two slip. "The rest will be carried on foot. We've got narrow paths ahead of us. We may have to lift the donkeys over in a few places!"
"Problems enough of my own," the apprentice said. "Cinnabar and the rest of those unbraced Guildsmen now expect us to make five more barrels a day-five!"
Here, in this quiet part of the sheltering earth, it was doubtless hard to remember sometimes what was going on only a short distance away. Still, Chert thought, Nitre and his helpers might benefit by leaving their blasting-powder mill for a day and visiting the far end of the temple estate, where the healers were hard at work all hours of the day and even the men who had not suffered badly in the fighting had faces that looked as though they came from poorly made dolls, their eyes staring blank as buttons.
"It is a war, you know," was all Chert said.
"Oh, the Elders know I know that. Even after we go to all the work of making it, we still have to lower it down five hundred ells of rope. Do you know how long it takes to splice that much rope together well?" The apprentice shook his head. "I know it's a war. It had better be a war, to wear me out like this."
Flint, back today after another of his mysterious disappearances had driven Opal almost to distraction, clambered up onto the narrow seat of the wagon. Chert made certain the sacks of different ingredients were all tied before flapping the reins against the donkey's hindquarters to start the procession. He knew enough about the making of blasting powder now that he wasn't worried the saltpeter might catch fire and burst and kill them if it fell. Instead, he was worrying about what would happen if he had an accident on one of the steeper tracks and lost one of the large sacks completely, or-Elders forbid it!-the entire load. They had very little of anything to waste.
It was madness, of course, Chert knew. The whole idea was mad. Even if it worked correctly it might kill them all… but there was very little chance it would work correctly.
A worker walking in front of the cart slowed as others slowed before him, then at last had to set his barrow down. Chert pulled back on the reins while the road ahead was cleared of some minor blockage. He worried that he might have exaggerated the chances of success of this venture to Captain Vansen and the others.
"Papa Chert?"
He started. As was often the case, Flint had been silent so long he had forgotten he was there. "What, lad?"
The boy frowned as if trying to find the words to put across some particularly difficult notion. "I don't feel well."
"What's wrong? Is it your middle? Are you hungry?"
Flint shook his pale head. As always, he was as solemn as a Metamorphic Brother at prayer. "No. I feel strange. Something is starting up. Coming awake." He closed his eyes for a moment. "No. Not coming awake. Still asleep… but coming closer." He wrapped his slender arms around his chest as though suddenly cold. "It gets stronger. In my sleep every night I hear the singing. It's my fault. That's what it says. It's my fault and it's going to get out."
Chert opened his mouth and then shut it. He knew that what he had been about to say, whatever it might have been-Don't worry, lad, all will be well, or They're just bad dreams-would have been a lie. And one thing about Flint was, it didn't do any good to lie to him. He always seemed to know. Since the moment he had entered their lives, since the moment Opal had fed him and he had attached himself to them like a stray cat, Chert had always felt that the boy knew more than Chert did himself. And, often enough to be disturbing, Flint had proved that it was true.
"Is there anything I can do?" he asked instead.
Flint looked up at him, and there was enough of the frightened child in him still, of a true frightened innocent, that Chert's heart felt as though it woul
d break in his breast. "I don't know," the boy said quietly. "I don't think so. But sometimes I feel that I shouldn't be here-that I should go away. Far away."
"You can't do that, lad. Your mother would throw a strut and dump a load wall. No, if you're really worried about things then you should stay close to her. There's nothing on this earth, whether goblin or southron, that wouldn't be scared of Opal."
Flint actually smiled, a tiny, shy twitch of the lips that Chert had seen only twice or thrice all told. "You always say that, but you're not really afraid of her."
"Oh, but I am, lad. That woman is a terror, and I am more frightened than you can guess."
Flint looked at him closely, not certain whether he was joking or not. Chert wasn't quite certain, either. "Frightened of what?"
"That I'll disappoint her. That I'll let her down. That she'll finally decide she shouldn't have married me-that she should have accepted my brother's offer, instead. Oh, he fancied her, your uncle Nodule did. But she thought he was a blockhead." He laughed. "Blockhead-that's what she said! A wise woman, your mother."
He found Opal, Vermilion Cinnabar, and the rest of the women sitting in the deserted courtyard of what had once been the old way station between the Great Delve and the temple, talking and enjoying the cool, moist air. The way station was not only near the place Chert had chosen for his undertaking, but the air came down to it from vents above sea level, so it was always a bit cooler than the rest of the temple's lands. That was one of the reasons they had chosen it as a spot to mix gunflour: even mill dust could burn and explode if the weather was too hot and dry, so how much more dangerous would the mixture they were making be?
Opal and Vermilion had explained to the others most of what was to be done, the need for careful separation of the saltpeter from the other sands (it would be added at the last moment) and crafting the blasting powder into little balls the size of peppercorns, which according to Nitre made it burn hotter, faster, and more evenly.
"We will come only two times a day to carry back the blasting powder you ladies have made," Chert explained. "That way we can apply ourselves to our own tasks and you can do yours without too much interference."
"Too much interference from men, you mean," said Pebble Jasper, Wardthane Sledge's wife, who had her husband's delicate touch with a joke. "Men trying to interfere with us women, is what I mean."
"Since when do you run away from that?" another called. "We've heard you down on Gem Street, mooing like a lost cow outside the guildhall-'Sledge! Sledger, my beauty! Come home to your Dolly! I'm a-lonely!'"
Several of the women laughed so loud Chert thought they'd hurt themselves. He felt a bit awkward to have the boy hearing this, although of the two of them, only Chert was blushing. "Enough, good ladies. We all need to get to our work. Opal, a moment?"
She looked well-good color, as though she had been out in the upground sun. It was clear she had been working hard as well as talking and laughing. "So you're off, are you?" she asked.
"Have to, my old darling. We'll be back by suppertime to see how you ladies are doing and take away what you've made so far. Did Nitre show you all the tricks?"
"It's not a lot different from making a stew," she said dismissively. "We've got it written down-Vermilion writes a beautiful hand. Like something you'd see here in the temple, in a book." Her frown of preoccupation abruptly softened and she looked straight into his eyes. "Oh, my old man, you are so full of mad ideas! Do you really mean to bring down so much stone with this blasting powder? What if the whole world caves in? You frighten me, sometimes. You always have."
"What does that mean?" He had to admit it was mildly pleasing to be thought of as full of mad ideas. Certainly it was better than being Magister Nodule Blue Quartz's less-successful brother.
She looked around as if others might be listening in, but the women were busy overseeing Chert's men as they unloaded the various powders from the cart and their barrows, making certain each was delivered to its proper place and taking the opportunity to show off the innovations they had thought of, which of course set the men to arguing with them.
"You are my husband," she said, so quietly it might have been a secret. "I love you dearly, old fool, whatever you have got us into in the past-and I do not even wish to think what you might have done to us this time." She laughed, but her eyes blinked, and Chert realized to his surprise that they were full of tears. "You remember that as you dash about with your… strategies and wars." She made them both sound like play-things for errant boys. "Come back to me safe. I demand it of you. Do you promise?"
He looked at her face, her adored, familiar old face. "I do-at least I will do my best…"
"No. Promise." She had his hands tightly. "Don't go without saying it. Say you'll come back safe."
He looked at her, felt once more what he had felt other times-that she wanted something important from him, but he could not understand what it was and she could not tell him. "I promise," he said at last. "I'll come home safe."
"Good." She let go of his hand and swiped her sleeve roughly across her eyes. "Go on then. We'll be fine. We're Funderling women-we'll get the job done."
"I know." He leaned in and kissed her on the lips. "The boy should stay here with you. I do not want to have to keep an eye on him out where I'll be. Too many cross-passages, too many places to fall."
She nodded. "Fine. Go on, before I start blubbing again."
Lightened of its load of blast powder makings, the cart bounced over every stone as they wound along toward the Stormstone Roads, and Chert bounced with it. He reflected that it would probably be more comfortable to be walking and pushing an empty barrow like the others, but somebody had to make certain the donkeys didn't roll the cart into a pit.
Where are the others now? he worried. Vansen, Cinnabar, all of them-are they still alive? Fighting for their lives down there? His hours in the Maze and beside the Sea in the Depths were never far from his memory, a foreboding he could not shake off, like a terrifying dream. How will I even know if they want me to go through with the plan? I suppose I could send down a message with Nitre's gunflour, wait for them to send one back up the same way.
But what if they didn't reply? What if they couldn't? Who would make the decision then? Chert could not imagine making it himself. Chasing his adopted son through the Mysteries had been bad enough, but this was a responsibility that might horrify the Earth Elders themselves.
Ferras Vansen could no longer even guess at what day it was. Time itself had been smeared into a succession of hours with very little difference between them. They might have as many as three days before Midsummer's Eve, but Vansen had no precise idea and was far too busy fighting for his life to find out.
The Metamorphic Brothers' temple was only a distant memory now, far behind them and far above them: the autarch's superior force had driven them downward along the twisting passages between Five Arches and the Cavern of Winds, then out of that vast cavern and all the way down to the beginning of the dark Maze, the place where the Funderlings took their initiates.
Vansen's troops had slowed the autarch's progress considerably, but they continued to pay a high price for their resistance: the Funderlings had numbered less than two thousand at their greatest strength, when they had first entered the tunnels near Five Arches, but now they were less than a thousand and had stacked their dead three and four deep in the side tunnels as they gave ground-too many bodies to give any of them more than a cursory death-blessing before leaving them behind.
It was the grimmest struggle Vansen had ever seen, his undersized defenders hungry, exhausted, slippery with sweat, and forced to fight for hours beside the unburied bodies of their friends and kin. But what made it worst of all was the knowledge that their ending was already assured. This defense, however heroic, could only end in death for all of them, and what followed might even be worse for the survivors they would leave behind-their families and their neighbors.
Exhausted though he was, Ferras Vansen was f
inding it nearly impossible to sleep. The war was always on his mind, and he stayed awake long past his comrades trying to puzzle out impossible chances because he already knew that none of the possible chances would allow them to survive. When he did manage to fall into a shallow, uneasy slumber, he would be startled awake again by the feeling that all the stones in the world were tumbling down on top of him.
He was near the bottom, and the bottom was growing closer by the hour.
"Gods, but your men have fought well, Magister," he told Cinnabar. "I do not mean to sound surprised-I expected no less-but I am even more impressed by their bravery since you have no tradition of war."
"War isn't the only forge of bravery." Cinnabar reached over and ran his hand through his son's hair, but the boy didn't look up. Young Calomel had been kept out of the worst of the fighting but had still seen more than any child his age should have to see. He had gone from being the mascot and delight of the makeshift army to only another silent, weary, terrified young Funderling whose stare made Vansen's heart ache. "But make no mistake, Vansen, we Funderlings were warriors once upon a time."
"I have never heard it."
"Then you have never studied the history of Eion, sir." Cinnabar spoke sharply, but Vansen thought it was more from fatigue than any real animosity. "We fought in the greatest war of all, just to name one-against our own kin, the Qar."
"The Godwar?"
"Yes, but we fought in the wars of men, too. We were miners and sappers in all the great empires, Hierosol and the Kracian States and Syan and even here, in Anglin's day. Who do you think secured these caverns again after the Qar invaded? That was Funderling work and almost as bloody as this. Say what you will against the Qar but they are fierce, fierce fighters-thousands of our folk died taking these caverns and tunnels back. We called that time the 'Kinwar,' and we still have an expression, 'Lonely as a Kinwar maid,' because there were so few men to be husbands." He shook his head sadly. "If our people survive this, there will be far too many widows and unmarried girls again in the years ahead."