by Tad Williams
Underneath us, behind us, everywhere around us… Briony had thought she lived on solid ground-what a bitter jest that had become! Seeing Gailon, whom she and everyone else had believed long dead, had shaken her badly, and finding these passages hidden below the family vault only made things worse. Nothing seemed entirely firm or real anymore.
After some little while spent carefully exploring each chamber in turn, she stepped out of the last one and found herself at the head of a path. The light of the torch revealed that on the path's far side the earth fell away into a dark abyss the torch couldn't illuminate past the first dozen yards. The path itself wound down and away for farther than she could see, with the chasm on one side and an unworked stone wall on the other, like the steps that spiraled around the inside of Wolfstooth Spire. How far down did this passage stretch? And where did it lead? For that matter, where had Hendon gone…?
Just as she had that thought, Tolly dropped down on her from above, where he had been clinging to the wall like a spider. He almost shoved her off the path and into the black nothingness beside it, but Briony managed to twist and fall onto the stone of the edge. Then she struggled back toward the middle of the path, though she dropped the torch to the ground and lost her sword into the pit.
Hendon yanked Briony onto her back and knelt on top of her, his full weight on her arms as he set the cold length of his dagger against her throat.
"I have wasted a great deal of time on you, girl." Tolly's sweat dripped down onto her face. "So I'll just get on with slitting your throat."
He could hear almost nothing else but the soothing voice; its wordless approval, or sometimes disapproval, helped him to find his way, steering his steps through the dark. He felt as though he had been walking for days, but could that be? He struggled to remember where he had been before; it was slow in coming. Strange faces, strange smells, the murmur of unfamiliar tongues spoken by even more unfamiliar creatures. That was it-he had been among the fairy folk. But where was he now? And why was it so very difficult to think?
Chaven Makaros. That is my name. I am Chaven the physician… the royal physician…! Those names and titles were all he had of himself, so why did they seem so unimportant?
The wordless voice urged him to go faster, a directive he could feel in his bones and organs. Faster, yes. He had to go faster. He was needed. Nothing could happen without him, and then he would be rewarded.
But why couldn't he remember what his reward was going to be? Or who it was that would reward him?
While the fighting had raged in the Maze, Chaven had made his escape. In truth, it had been a relief to leave Barrick and the bright-eyed Qar behind. Too many questions. Too many curious glances. They were not human, that was certain, and to be truthful, neither was Prince Barrick anymore. There were moments when Chaven had felt quite naked, certain that everyone who passed him could see straight through to his hidden allegiance.
It was strange to think that only a year ago or a little more his life had been ordinary. Then he had found the mirror during some trip to a faraway market, one of the trips he made several times a year, although he had no memory now of bringing it back. Over the following days, as he had cleaned it and wondered over it, his love for an interesting old thing had turned into something more. Chaven had begun to spend long stretches of time with it, polishing the bowed glass and staring into its alluring, sometimes slightly confusing depths. And although he could not remember it happening, one day he discovered he could see all the way though. To the other side.
And then… And then… And then he could not remember what had happened. Not all of it, anyway: sometimes life had still proceeded as normal, of course, the mirror nothing more than an uncomfortable shadow at the back of his thoughts, like a hidden stain. But other times it had made things… happen. He had found himself in strange places or situations with little memory of how he had gotten there. The Kernios statue had been one of those things that just happened. He had discovered it in the center of his table one day, and although a visit to the castle archives had helped him to discover what it was, he hadn't remembered anything of how it had made its way to him until that Skimmer man had come to his door asking for money-for the gold Chaven had promised him and his kin for bringing the statue up from the deep bay waters along the outwall near the East Lagoon. The Skimmer swore by his water god that Chaven himself had told them where to dive.
Frightened by this, the physician had sent the pop-eyed man away with a token payment and a promise of more, but then pushed it from his mind as something too disturbing to contemplate. Other gaps had begun to open in his waking life, more and more of them. Now he was trudging through the deeps with this cursed Kernios statue, not knowing where he was bound or why he was carrying it.
But Chaven could not turn back any more than he could leave his skin and become someone else. First the mirror, now the statue-whatever moved him to acquire these things had only tightened its hold, gripping him so surely now it did not even bother to fog his thoughts. He was a tool, he realized. A weapon. He belonged to someone and could no longer pretend otherwise, but he didn't know who his master was.
Chaven of the Makari trudged downward through the lonely spaces beneath the Maze, the sounds of distant battle wafting to him through the warm, dank air.
"Never think when you can feel what is happening," Shaso had told her many times. "Thinking will get you killed."
But she had stopped to think, and just as the old man had warned, she was as good as dead now-as dead as Shaso himself. Her sword was gone, and Tolly was sitting on her chest and arms, his weight preventing her from pulling out the long Yisti dagger in her belt. Tolly's knife blade felt like a strip of ice against the skin of her neck. She felt him shift his weight to slash her throat, but at that instant something made a noise in the passage behind them. A footfall? Loose stone pattering down? Hendon Tolly hesitated for just a moment as he turned to look, but it was enough that a desperate Briony could free her hand to make a fist and drive it into the lord protector's crotch.
Hendon Tolly had given up his Tessian codpiece, she was grimly pleased to discover.
He groaned, gagged, and hunched forward, shifting his weight just enough that Briony could tug her other hand free. Before Tolly could get his knife back against her neck once more, she tugged her small Yisti dagger out of its sheath at her wrist and shoved it into the underside of his jaw. His eyes widened in surprise as he reached up to clutch his neck, the blood sheeting through his fingers, and as he stared down at her in astonishment, she yanked the dagger free and stabbed him again, this time in the eye. Hendon Tolly shrieked and clung to her even as his death throes took him; the two of them rolled toward the edge of the path, but Briony could not tear his slippery, bloody hands from her clothing. He would have pulled her with him as he slid over into blackness, but something caught at her belt and held her back from the brink. Tolly's fingers pulled free and for a single moment he turned his blinded eye toward her, the Yisti knife still lodged in the socket and a look of disappointment on his face, then he tumbled out of view.
"My lady… Princess Briony… are you alive?"
She looked down at the little man stretched on the ground beside her, still clinging to her belt. She could not help laughing a little at the strangeness of it all. "Chert," she said. "Praise Midsummer, you… you saved my life." Briony was shaking so badly now she could barely pull herself back into the center of the path. When she was safely away from the edge, she collapsed, panting and shivering, determined that whatever else might happen, she would not cry. "But I have taken back my family's throne-did you see? He's dead. Hendon's dead. I killed him like the mad dog he was."
The Funderling patted her back awkwardly, clearly uncertain of how to comfort a wounded, shaking princess.
At last Briony was able to sit up again. The torch still lay on the path a short distance away, burning fitfully. Chert wrapped a strip of his shirt around her wounded arm. "What's down there, Chert?" she asked. "What li
es underneath my family's tomb?"
He looked at her, a little surprised. "Why… everything, Highness. This tunnel track leads down into the very depths of my people's sacred Mysteries."
"Where my brother and the Qar have gone." She dusted herself off and rose shakily to her feet. Every inch of her ached. "Where the autarch is. And my father as well." She bent and picked up the torch. "Eneas will take care of the rest. Will you lead me?"
"Lead you?" The Funderling got up too, staring at her as though she had suddenly begun speaking a different language. "You want to go… down there?"
"Yes. With you as my guide." She slid her knife into its sheath. "Unless you have something better to do, here on the last day of all."
"But… it will take us hours to reach the bottom. Everything will have ended down there long before. You will never reach it in time…" A thought occurred to him. "And there are dangers you do not know yet, Highness…!"
"Never say never to an Eddon, Master Blue Quartz. We are a stubborn family." And without waiting to see what he was going to do, Briony stepped past him and began to walk down into the depths.
39
The Very Old Thing "Aristas took the piece of sun and, praising the Three Brothers, he threw it into the sky, where it hung and began to warm the northern lands. Soon the snow was melting from the tip of the Vuttish Isles southward to Krace as the land came back to life…"
-from "A Child's Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven"
The Autarch and his soldiers had dragged the elements of a small city down into the depths and onto the strange island, tents and lumber and the makings of many reed boats. Now a legion of the Golden One's carpenters were laboring to build a great platform near the edge of the silver sea even as a battle raged only a few hundred paces away, so that the clatter of the builders almost drowned out the screams of the dying.
All along the shore blades gleamed and guns barked flame. From this distance Qinnitan could barely make out what was happening, but it looked as bloody and desperate as any of the fighting on the walls of Hierosol. Farther down the shore, the autarch's enemies had made their way in among the landed boats, and one of the small craft had even floated back out into the middle of the shining silver; Qinnitan yearned to be in that loose boat, drifting apart from the madness.
The monster of Xis himself, architect of all this confusion and suffering, sat atop his litter in his bright armor, shouting orders at men who were clearly already working as hard as they could. Several of them were bleeding only a little less than the soldiers in the fighting.
"The children!" Sulepis shrieked, standing up so suddenly that the twelve naked slaves holding his litter swayed and some of them had to struggle to keep their balance. "Where are they? Where are my prisoners?" One of the Nushash priests was leaping up and down beside the litter, trying to tell him something. "I don't care!" the autarch shouted. "Vash! Vash, where are you? By my father's tomb, where is Pinimmon Vash? Is he missing as well? I shall have him and the priest both torn to pieces!"
But before the paramount minister could be found and torn apart, High Priest Panhyssir appeared at the head of a procession of lesser clerics, soldiers, and children, thus distracting the Golden One. Qinnitan stared as the youngest prisoners trudged past the place where she and King Olin stood fettered to a large, deep-sunken post. Four or five dozen in all, the children had the look of northerners, their eyes hopeless and empty, their faces made even more wan by weeks spent in confinement on the autarch's ships. She wondered dully what he planned to do to them.
"Look away, Qinnitan," Olin told her. "Do you understand me? Look away."
But she could not. Here at the end she found herself greedy for every instant, no matter its horrors, because soon she would see nothing at all.
"Hurry them to their places," Sulepis called to the guards. "And you builders, away from the platform-all of you, away! It will serve as it is. The hour is nearly upon us."
The Xandian workmen began to scramble down off the platform, a simple wooden structure as crude and functional as a gallows. Sulepis' bearers carried him forward until he could step from his litter directly onto the wooden floor and look out across the silvery expanse of the Sea in the Depths. To the autarch's left, his soldiers were spread along the island's curved shoreline, many of them firing guns at the struggling armies on the far side of the silver sea, although even Qinnitan doubted they could tell friend from foe in the general confusion. Not that it mattered much. The leader of the attacking force, a slim figure in white armor, had just fallen, and the rest of the outmanned force was retreating. Now they fought just to stay alive against the autarch's superior numbers.
A pair of the autarch's Leopards came toward the post. They ignored Qinnitan entirely as they unchained King Olin's iron shackles from the post.
"Don't be afraid, Qinnitan," he said. "I am not."
"I'll pray for you," she told him. "May the gods bring you peace, Olin Eddon…!"
The king's arms were still bound; the guards kept him upright as they led him away across the slippery stones, toward the platform and the waiting autarch. The Golden One looked back and forth between the reflective stillness of the Sea in the Depths and the massive, man-shaped stone outcrop at the island's center-the Shining Man. The stone seemed dark as black jade, but Qinnitan had seen gleams of color pulsing through it-almost furtively, as though whatever lived inside it did not yet wish to make itself known.
As Olin's guards led him up the crude stairs onto the autarch's platform, the other soldiers herded the captive children down to the shore of the island, then forced them down onto their knees at intervals along the water's edge. Panhyssir the high priest had appeared and had been helped up the steps so he could stand near the autarch. Several other priests were with him, and were already filling the air around the Golden One with incense and the sound of their prayers.
So this was how it ended, Qinnitan realized. All her struggles to escape, all her desperation, all of the times she had thought herself finally free… it all had come down to this. She was grateful she had saved Pigeon. But look! As if to prove how pointless rescuing a single child had been, now a hundred other children would be slaughtered here in front of her. Were the gods really so intent on showing her how worthless her efforts had been? "Those awake cry to those who sleep, 'Here! Our door is open-come through, come through! We have torn down the wall of thorns. We have cleared the path of stinging nettles,'"
Panhyssir chanted in a version of Xixian so antique Qinnitan could barely understand it, the high priest's great beard bobbing up and down against his swollen chest. The soldiers around the edge of the island, each one standing by a kneeling prisoner, watched the platform intently.
"You have me," Olin shouted at the autarch. "Now let the girl go!"
Something was trying to get into Qinnitan's head.
"Thank you for reminding me," Sulepis said. "Guards! Bring the girl, too!" Another pair of soldiers hurried to unchain her from the pole and then shoved her stumbling toward the platform, but Qinnitan scarcely felt their rough hands.
Something else is watching us, she realized. The soldiers dragged her up the steps and dumped her beside Olin. Her heart, already beating fast, now began to pound against her ribs like a woodpecker's beak. That monstrous thing I feel when the Sun's Blood is inside me… it's here.
The cavern seemed to be getting darker, but Qinnitan somehow knew it was not the world but herself that was sliding deeper into shadow. The presence was all around her, yet it was in her too, scenting the world of daylight and air through her senses, waiting just on the other side of some incomprehensible door that had been closed against it thousands of years ago.
Here, she realized, her thoughts flailing in sudden terror. This is where the door was shut, and it's been waiting here all this time… waiting to come back…! "Do not let the Immortal slow your coming! Do not let the Whirlwind steal your footsteps! We the dying say to you, the undying, 'Come through!'
"
Panhyssir raised his arms in a dramatic gesture, unaware that as he did so an entire world of darkness held its breath like a cat crouching beside a mousehole, stone still but for the lashing of its tail. "Step through the Gate of Bronze, which the Dragon of Reason guards. Step through the Gate of Silver, which the Lion of False Belief guards. Step through the Gate of Gold, where the dark things crouch in shadow, fearful of your bright light and majesty…!"
"Now!" The autarch's voice quivered with pleasure and excitement. "Ah, now! The blood!"
The soldiers along the shore grabbed their child captives by the hair and bent back their heads. As each raised a blade to a slender neck, Qinnitan knew that what was happening here was even worse than the murder of children-a hundred times worse! A thousand times! All along the island's coast the prisoners' reflections stared back in horror, a hundred children and then a hundred more mirrored in liquid silver. Qinnitan opened her mouth wide to scream out a warning-didn't they understand what the autarch was doing, the forces he was unleashing?-but the eager darkness was inside her as well as around her and would not let her make a noise.
The blades dipped, slid, and the children fell to the rocky ground as if they were sacks of meal-but to Qinnitan's astonishment the young prisoners were all unharmed, their flesh unmarked; the guards had only pretended to slit their throats. But the reflections of the children, unlike the real children, had been mortally slashed by the reflected guards. Blood fountained from their ruined throats in the reflecting waters of the Sea in the Depth, but in the real world the children still lived; yet a red stain had begun to spread through the silver.
"Do you see, Olin-it is the sacrifice in the mirror lands that matter!" the autarch laughed. Qinnitan could barely hear him through the hammering in her skull, the feeling that her head would split open like rotten fruit. "It only matters what happens there, on the far side-that the mirror is clouded with innocent sacrificial blood!" He spread his hands to take in the whole of the Sea in the Depths. The silver sea roiled with scarlet, a bright stain that was spreading swiftly now in all directions as if real blood had been spilled, gallons of it. "And this is the greatest mirror that ever was-a mirror made from Habbili's own godly essence!" He turned to his guards. "The children are no longer needed. The ritual has succeeded. You may dispatch the prisoners."