by Tad Williams
And now Tinwright could feel something more than merely the restlessness of ancient kings disturbed in their moldering slumber. A hatefully familiar presence lurked somewhere just beyond the edges of what the poet could see and smell and hear, the same thing that had stalked him in the mirror. It was as close as it had ever been; he could feel its attention pinioning him as if he were an insect on a tabletop. It was old and strong and had as little interest in Tinwright's mortal thoughts and feelings as he did in the hopes and cares of a stone. And it was drawing closer… "Bow down to me! I do not fear you! I have eaten your organs and stolen your courage!"
… said Hendon Tolly, his voice rising to a pitch that might have meant terror or exultation-or a grotesque combination of the two. "I command the darkness not to hide you! I command the light to seek you out and reveal you! All Heaven is my hostage and the gods are my slaves. The hour is mine…!"
Tinwright's gaze flicked helplessly back and forth between the ivory throat of the child and the flushed, pop-eyed face of Hendon Tolly, as apoplectically caught up in his own words as any wandering madman. A few yards away Elan M'Cory had slumped silently in a faint, but the remaining guards still held her tightly, their own faces gray with fear.
"Now!" Tolly shrieked. "Now, you wretch, lift the knife while I speak the final words! Then spill the blood and wash the mirror in it!"
Matt Tinwright's arm rose as if it was not attached to his own body any longer, and hung above the restless child. The flames of the torches were sucked first this way, then another. Shadows capered across the walls. The rustling all around him became loud cries and stamping sounds-were the dead rising all at once? Would the living all be pulled down into darkness this day?
He could not make his arm move. He knew Tolly would kill him if he didn't, but he just could not harm the child. Please, all you kind gods, help me…!
Something struck Tinwright so hard that at first he thought Hendon Tolly had hit him with the heavy grimoire. He stumbled back a step and the knife slipped from his suddenly strengthless fingers and clattered to the stone flags.
Tinwright stared in horror at the arrow quivering in his own chest, so close to his face that only the feathers on the end told him what it was that had struck him. He could feel warm blood running down his belly and soaking into his foul, muddy garments. Then everything spun away and Matt Tinwright's world went dark.
37
The Blood of a God "… By the time he reached Tessideme, with all the beasts of the field and the birds of the air in his train, the oak leaves had also burned away so that the weeping Orphan carried the sun's flame in his naked hands…"
-from "A Child's Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven"
Greenjay, leader of the Qar's Trickster tribe, climbed back out of the door in the stone flags with little of her usual grace. Fury sparked in her eyes. "A hundred paces below us the stairs are crammed with southern soldiers. This autarch has stolen a trick from the drows-we will have to win each yard forward with blood. We will not catch him this way, may the wind eat his name as well as his footprints!"
"He leaves us no choice," Saqri said to Barrick. "Come, manchild-the ropes must be ready now. They will have to be our way down. Haste!"
Barrick followed Saqri back through the Maze, its passages still littered with rubble and the corpses of men and Funderlings. Saqri's soldiers had prepared ropes so her troops could quickly descend to the bottom of the cavern and the Sea in the Depths; those who were too heavy, or simply not built for climbing, would make their way down the narrow trails that crisscrossed the rocky cliff.
Aesi'uah was waiting for them, several rope-ends in her hand like a bouquet of silvery catkins. "Most of the southerners have already made their way out of the tunnels and up onto the surface of the island," she told them.
Barrick, whose vision was not as sharp as Saqri's, squinted into the distance, trying to make out the dark forms across the island in the middle of the silvery sea. Behind it loomed the silhouette of the colossal Shining Man.
"Some of the autarch's men are building boats," said Saqri. "They have brought what they needed with them." She frowned; it was strange to see even such a small show of emotion on her smooth face. "We have underestimated him-even Yasammez has. This Sulepis knows the ground as well as if he had scouted it himself."
"But why boats?" Barrick asked. "He and his soldiers are already on the island."
"Because he knows that with his men holding the tunnels he used to get past us, we will be forced to attack him from this side of the Sea in the Depths. He wants to send troops across to keep us at bay." Saqri made the gesture Unwilling Blindness. "We can waste no more time in talk. Grab a rope, Barrick Eddon! Every heartbeat brings us closer to catastrophe."
And that catastrophe, he could not help understanding, would be nothing like the Great Defeat that Saqri and her kin had been awaiting all these centuries as a lover anticipates the return of the beloved. This end would be something much different-dark, wild, and pointless.
The ropes creaked, but despite their astounding slenderness, they held. Every now and then one or the other of Barrick's feet slipped and his body spun away from the cliff face, and in those perilous, nauseating intervals he could see boats pushing off from the island onto the odd, metallic sea. And each boat, he knew, was full of Xixian soldiers, men ready to paint over their own fear-which now, in this strange place, must be great indeed-with the blood of as many Qar and Funderlings as they could destroy.
He looked back up to the clifftop where Ferras Vansen and the Funderlings were finishing up their own slower, more cautious rigging, preparing to descend and join the Qar in what Barrick could not help feeling would be at best a glorious shared suicide.
"Remember Greatdeeps!" he shouted to Vansen, and his voice echoed from the cavern's distant walls. The guard captain raised one hand in a salute.
Barrick had surprised himself. Why should he do such a thing? There was nobody more human than Vansen, with his stolid goodwill and his unthinking loyalty, and there was no mortal less human than Barrick Eddon had become, the Fireflower smoldering in his heart and thoughts. What did he care for mortals and mortal things?
Pinimmon Vash had seen many strange places, from the secret water dungeons underneath the Orchard Palace to the infamous crypts of the Mihannid Blue Kings, and even the autarch's own family tomb, the legendary Aeyrie of the Bishakh which stood out against the sky as if it had grown from the very stone of Mount Gowkha… but he had never seen anything quite like this.
The cavern itself-well, it seemed foolish even to call it a cavern. This immense chamber deep in the earth appeared to Vash to be almost a quarter the size of the entire Orchard Palace in Xis with all its grounds. Veins of dimly shining stone and knobs of glittering crystal in the cavern's arching walls made it seem some kind of celestial model built to grace a god's table, but in the middle, almost directly above Vash's head, stretched only darkness. Any roof to the great cavern was much higher above their heads than the feeble light of the Xixian torches could reach. The sensation, Vash thought, was that of looking up from the bottom of a deep well.
He stood, with the rest of the autarch's army, on the island at the center of the Sea in the Depths, but it was the Shining Man-the mountainous, man-shaped lump of dull stone at the heart of the island-that truly dumbfounded and oppressed Vash. It wasn't a statue. No hands, human or otherwise, had crafted it as a replica of some actual being. Instead, it had the look of something cruder, as if someone had poured molten gem-stones into the impression a man had made falling headlong into mud. But there was more to it than that. Although at the moment it glimmered only with the reflected, refracted light of the chamber itself, Vash had seen a stronger glow throb briefly within it, like a candle guttering behind old glass, and his hairs had stood up on his neck and arms. The paramount minister had no wish to see it again, that pulse like a huge, diseased heart beating.
All around him, the rocky island swarmed with
Xixian soldiers doing their best to ignore the ominous surroundings as they finished tying together the reed boats. Vash noted that he and the antipolemarch seemed to have correctly planned how many bundles of reeds the men would have to carry down from the surface, and he felt a moment's relief before he realized how foolish that was: what difference did it make that Vash had done his duty, that the autarch could find no fault with his arrangements? In a moment, they might all be dead, or the autarch himself might gain the strength of Heaven. Either way, nothing would ever be the same again.
"Where is my trusted paramount minister?" the Golden One called. Vash felt his hackles rising again.
"Here, O Great Tent." He hobbled across the sliding, rounded stones until he reached the place where Sulepis stood tall and slender in his golden armor, a glorious vision even in this inconstant light. "How may I serve you, Master?"
"Are the boats finished?"
Vash took a breath but hid his frustration. It was plain to see that they were. The soldiers stood lined up along the shoreline beside the completed boats, massive rafts with the bundled reeds pulled together at each end to make a bow and stern. "Of course, Golden One," Vash said. It had been an immensely difficult task to transport so many river reeds from Hierosol on such short notice, to keep them dry and safe from mold, but there had been no way of knowing whether they would be able to find the proper materials in this godsforsaken northern wasteland, and the Golden One did not respond well to failure.
Sulepis will become a god while I will probably die and receive a makeshift grave here in this wet northern hellhole, Vash thought, without even a priest left behind to pray for me. But there stand the boats. I have again done what is mine to do. Out loud, he said, "All the boats are ready. What else does the Golden One desire?"
"The prisoners, of course. All of them."
Vash blinked. "All of them?"
Sulepis stared at Vash as though from a huge height, as though he himself were the Shining Man. "Yes. The king, the Hive girl, and the northern children. Does that suit you, Minister Vash? Or should I ask someone who has nothing better to do?"
Vash felt a cold shock down his spine. "Forgive my stupidity, Golden One, I did not understand. Of course they are all being brought. Panhyssir's priests are getting the children, and the others are there." He pointed to a small procession of soldiers coming forward from the tunnel they had followed under the silver sea and onto the island, surrounding the prisoners, King Olin and the girl with their hands tied behind their backs. The priest A'lat capered at the front of the procession, walking backward with a smoking bowl in each hand, wreathing the prisoners in fumes. When he turned, Vash saw with a twist in his stomach that the desert priest wore a mask that appeared to be made from the skin of someone else's face.
"Good, good." Sulepis peeled the gold stalls off his fingertips and dropped them to the carpet. One of the slaves stared for a moment, then quickly gathered them. "I must feel this with my own skin. Look, Vash." His long arm swept up, indicating the cavern, the Shining Man, and perhaps other things that only Sulepis himself could see. "Be aware of everything around you-smells, sounds, sights-for within the next hour the world changes forever."
"Of course, Golden One. Of course." Vash was desperate for the whole sordid horror to end so that he could find some way of accommodating whatever followed, if such were even possible. "You haven't told me what else I can do to aid your… ritual. Do you need an altar…?"
"An altar?" Sulepis found this very amusing. "Don't you understand, Vash? This entire place is an altar, a place where the heavens were once made to shake-and will be again! This spot is sanctified by the blood and screams of the gods themselves!" The autarch's voice had grown so loud that soldiers and functionaries all across the island stopped, trembling in fear because they thought the autarch had lost his temper. "No, my altar is the earth itself, this silver sea and the scar that Habbili left when he sealed the way back to this world with his own dying spirit." He waved at the Shining Man, which loomed above them like the spire of a great temple. "Do you not know what that thing truly is? That is where Habbili the Crooked tore open the very flesh of the world so that he could banish the gods! Then, mortally injured himself, he closed the hole with his own being to keep them prisoned-and it has remained that way ever since, hiding here in the earth for thousands of years, worshiped by primitives as though it were a living thing." He bent toward Vash as if to share a secret. "But now Habbili's wounds have killed him at last. The priests and prophets have felt it. They have told me! Habbili's strength will no longer hold shut that wound in the world. Anyone who has the power or knowledge can reach out across the great void… or reach in." He straightened up to his full height, leaving Vash to stare up at him like a man watching an approaching thunderstorm. "So bring on the children! Let their blood open the door and then let the gods themselves beware! Sulepis will be the master even of the immortals themselves!"
Barrick had only just alighted on the cavern's rocky floor when he saw Yasammez standing nearby looking out across the cavern toward the dark, distant shape of the Shining Man. She was alone for once, wrapped in a vast black cloak, her eyes half-closed so that she seemed as calm and remote as a cat lying in the sun. Her hair had pulled loose from its elaborate knots during her descent and hung around her head like thorny branches.
The Lady of Weeping, the voices whispered inside him in a kind of superstitious awe. The Scourge. Exile of Wanderwind.
Barrick approached her but did not kneel or bow. "My lady, will you not fight beside us? This is the last day, the last hour-the moment when we write the final page in the Book of Regret."
Her eyes slowly turned toward him. "That page was written long ago, before your kind had even entered the world."
He felt the sting of that but would not be drawn. "But I am also your kind now, Lady Yasammez, whether you or I wish it to be so… and you are our greatest warrior. If you do not fight for us now, when will you take the field? When the rest of the People lie dead?" For a moment, the shocked clamor of his Fireflower ghosts, their outrage at his disrespect, filled him with anger. "Is that your form of self-slaughter, Lady? To wait until there is no one left to see your fall so you spare yourself the shame of defeat?"
"The shame of defeat?" In cold anger she threw back her cloak to show her black armor and the naked blade of Whitefire that she leaned on like a cane; its gleam leaped to his eye like a tongue of lightning. "Child of men, I am the defeat of our people in the breathing flesh. I have lived with the foreknowledge of my own death since your people gnawed uncooked bones in the forest. I will not survive this day and I know it, but I will not have such as you questioning me. Begone, child of a stolen heritage, and do what you will with the end of your own life."
The black murk of her cloak and the dark spikiness of her armor framed her pale, fierce face like storm clouds around the moon. For a moment Barrick saw things in her bottomless eyes he had never seen before, or perhaps in that strange place and time he merely dreamed them, but to his utter astonishment he felt a tear overspill his lid and trickle down his cheek.
"If I have wronged you, Lady, then I ask your forgiveness." He bowed and turned away.
Saqri was waiting for him, her hair strayed from its diadem and fluttering in the strange winds of this deep place like black spidersilk. "Here is the bearer of the Fireflower," she said and the Qar around her stirred and turned away from their enemies on the far side of the cavern. "Now our strength is complete." She looked from Barrick back to Yasammez, who still stood by the base of the cliff. "Did she have a word for you?"
"Yes. Several." He pulled on his helmet. "Lead us, Saqri. I need to smell blood in the air. That will make me stop thinking."
Unexpectedly, she laughed. "Come, then!" she called to the surrounding Qar, who banged spears and swords against their shields or threw back their heads and bayed up at the cavern's ceiling and the moon hidden so far above it, the moon that was in their blood as the Fireflower was in Barrick's. "T
he hour is upon us! The last of the old years begins to die tonight! Let us show this presumptuous mortal king how the People dance at Midsummer!"
With a shout the Qar leaped forward and raced across the cavern toward the southerners stepping off their boats along the near shore, soldiers as numerous as ants. The Xixians were already nocking arrows and bending bows, waiting for the Qar to come in range.
"Midsummer!" cried Barrick, and the voices within him wept and exulted.
Ferras Vansen had been in battles both fierce and frightening. He had stood with his master Donal Murroy against both bandits and rebels. While scouting he had hidden in a tree for half an agonizing day, knowing that even the slightest noise or movement could bring death because a troop of mercenaries had camped almost directly beneath him. He had disarmed a maddened Southmarch guardsman who had killed his own wife and their four children, wrestling with the man in the smeared blood of his dead family. He had fought the Qar themselves on battlefields as strange as nightmares-but nothing had prepared him for this final deadly struggle deep beneath Southmarch.
By the time Vansen and those Funderlings still able to fight made their way down the cliff, the Qar and their small, silent queen had already flung themselves at the first of the autarch's men to land on the shore. Vansen could not see well enough to guess who was getting the best of things because the light in the monstrous chamber had begun to flicker and gleam as colors he could scarcely recognize pulsed in the depths of the Shining Man the way red heat rippled in the embers of a fire.
"Double-fast, men!" Vansen shouted. "Otherwise the fairies may not leave us any!"
"Ha!" Malachite Copper was gasping along beside him. "I knew the Old Ones to be uncanny-I didn't know they were greedy, too!" Copper's leg had been injured in the final melee in the Initiation Hall but he was limping along gamely, doing his best to keep up. He had cursed when Vansen suggested he stay behind and tend his wound. "Well, Captain, we will just have to take what they leave us."