by Tad Williams
And then the first great gush of seawater plunged down out of the heights and into the Last Hour of the Ancestor. The gush became a flood, a single jade-green column, as if the entire Irisian Ocean had been poured on them from above out of some upturned bucket. As the wall of green rushed toward them, Vansen had a strange moment's vision of a beautiful white youth trapped inside, burning and glowing like molten silver as he tumbled helplessly in the water's grip. Vansen plunged one hand as deeply as he could into the reeds of the boat, then wrapped his other arm around the limp form of Barrick's father, the king.
The speeding wave crashed over them and turned the world to silent jade. Bubbles floated before Ferras Vansen's blinking eyes, shining like stars lost from the firmament. The reed boat squirted up to the surface and for a brief moment he could suck in air, but the craft was being tossed like a wood chip by the crashing water. Vansen could not lift his head to look-it was all he could do to hang on to both Olin and the boat, bellowing with pain as the force threatened to yank his arms out of their sockets. They crashed against stone and the little craft turned over, then the boat was tossed out of the rushing green, spun, lifted, and tossed again. Once more they careened against a wall. Vansen thought he heard Barrick shouting and spluttering. Again the green covered them and spun them like a leaf in a powerful eddy. Deep beneath them, something still burned and smoldered in the depths, but even the god's flame was dying beneath the weight of so much water.
Up and out. Over, clinging without knowing which direction he was falling. Down again, then spat up and out once more. Water shook him like a dog shakes a rat. Vansen closed his eyes and hung on.
Briony was struggling to get back up when the first great shudder passed through the stone beneath her feet, knocking her to the ground again and almost rolling her over the edge and into the chasm. A roar as deep as some terrible beast of legend rose from the depths; even the Elementals slipped sideways in the air, surprised.
The roar from below had become a fierce and growing thunder. A howling gale burst up from the chasm deeps, and the rush of hot air threw Briony back from the edge and sent the Elementals flying like rags. The one with the glowing stone, the one named Shadow's Cauldron, hovered out of Briony's reach above the abyss, ready to throw down the Fever Egg and burst it on the stone to free the poisons inside.
"No!" shouted Briony as the sickly jewel rose higher and the ground shuddered beneath her hands and knees. "Don't…!"
A shape flew forward and threw itself off the edge toward the Elemental. At the last moment before falling into empty darkness it caught the floating thing and held on, grappling with Shadow's Cauldron's black insubstantiality as though the Elemental were a huge bat. The attacker was Kayyin, and for a moment it seemed his weight might pull the creature down with him, but the ragged black thing was too strong-it lifted itself and the half-fairy until Kayyin's legs dangled. Then, a moment later, another figure rushed past Briony-the girl Willow. She leaped after Kayyin, catching and clinging to his legs with a cry like a fearful child. She had surprised the Elemental. As Briony watched in horror, all three of them swayed for a moment and then tumbled away into the darkness, the Egg with them. The other two Elementals floated out over the abyss as if to see what had happened to their comrade, then abruptly vanished as if they had never appeared at all.
Breathless, horrified, Briony scrambled to the edge, staring down into the darkness, wondering if she would feel the poison when it came-would it be thick like smoke, like temple incense…?
Something was climbing up the chasm from below, something big. The wind of its coming flattened her hair against her head, but Briony could see it only as a broad moving front pushing its way up through the darkness.
Water. The gigantic hole was filling with water, and it was rushing upward toward her. Kayyin and the girl and even the Fever Egg were gone beneath it, and in a few moments she and Chert would be swallowed up, too, left to drift in it until their bones settled to the bottom. Briony crawled back toward the place where the little man lay beside the wall, still fighting to get onto his feet. She sat down beside him and waited for the end, wanting to pray but not certain to whom she should address the prayer. After a few long moments the roaring began to quiet; the water still rose, but its speed seemed to have lessened. Briony clambered back to the edge and looked down, holding the torch out so she could watch the frothing shadow as it rose, as it swallowed level after level beneath her, until to her amazement it finally stopped rising only a few dozen yards below.
"Water," she said, still trying to understand it.
Chert had crawled to her side. "Fracture and fissure," he said. "We did it. Oh, my ancestors, we did it…"
"And that Fever Egg fell into the water and didn't break," she said slowly. "Even now it's sinking to the bottom."
"Are you certain?" Chert asked, peering down into the darkness as if it might be floating there. "How can you know?"
"Because if the shell had broken, I imagine we'd be dead by now."
Chert was suddenly distracted. "Princess? Don't you see them?"
"See what? See whom?"
"Down there." But where he pointed, Briony could see nothing-it was too far and too dark. "None of them are moving," he said, "but there are four of them lying in the bottom of the boat."
"What do you mean?" She could not see in this dim light like a Funderling, and certainly could not see a boat, but as she stared, she saw a green gleam far down in the watery depths, growing as it rose toward the surface. For a moment, as if in a dream, she saw an impossible thing-a gigantic, glowing human shape struggling up through the fathoms of roiling water, thrashing toward the surface. Then it slowed to a drift. The light dimmed and nearly died, and the vast, manlike shape fell into dark, flickering pieces. A moment later the water was completely dark once more. It had been a dream, a vision, nothing more. Briony shook her head in confusion. "Do you still see the boat? Are there truly people in it?"
"Yes. Perhaps if I can get down to them with my rope, they can answer some of your questions. If they're still alive, of course."
"I think it unlikely." Briony stared down at the boat she could not see. What had happened here? More importantly, what had happened far below? To her family? To the autarch? The unsettled water still roiled and made waves along the edge of the chasm. How could any of them have survived? "Merciful Zoria, does anyone but us still live?"
But Chert had already gone looking for a place to anchor his climbing-rope.
Chert seemed unusually grim as he came back up the treacherous slope after tying a rope to one of the survivors, and he would not answer Briony's questions as they hauled up the first of the boat's passengers, a slender young girl with the dark skin and dark eyes of a southerner, her body cold and motionless. By the time they had untied her, the first of the Syannese troops began to appear on the path. Eneas had sent them, they told Briony, and the prince himself was close behind. With their help, the second victim came up much more quickly, and even before he had been unharnessed, she realized she was looking at her father's body.
As she lay weeping on Olin's cold chest, the guards drew up the last two from the boat. Her brother Barrick was laid out beside her father, then as she stared down at his pale, still features in growing horror, the last of the survivors was brought up. He struggled out of his own harness and walked unsteadily toward her, then fell to his knees, swaying like a tree that had been cut mostly through.
"At your command, Princess, I bring your brother back to you. I believe… I believe he yet lives…"
Then Ferras Vansen's eyes turned up and he fell senseless before her.
PART FOUR
THE PINE TREE
45
Only in Dreams "For three days and three nights Adis went up and down across Kerniou singing the story of his sad life, and at last the goddess Mesiya, wife of Kernios, let drop a tear of pity. Kernios was so angry that he banished her forever…"
-from "A Child's Book of the Orphan, and His
Life and Death and Reward in Heaven"
She was so tired, so tired. All she wanted to do was sleep until the world was different-but that was very clearly not to be…
"And the Xixian enemy, Highness?"
Briony nodded. "The city is safe. Captain Vansen says they are scattered through the hills, Lord M'Ardall."
"But there are still many of them… thousands!"
She did her best to keep her voice measured. The young earl was one of the few who had resisted Hendon Tolly's rule. She would need men like him. "They have shown no sign of wanting to continue their autarch's lawless attack on Southmarch, and our soldiers are busy subduing the last of the traitor Tolly's men inside the walls." She did her best to smile. "I promise you, good M'Ardall, we are watching all our enemies. Let's not borrow trouble until we have a better chance of paying it back."
He bowed. "I hear your wisdom, Highness."
The Throne hall was in ruins, so the seat of power was now a quartet of dining hall benches set in a tent in the middle of the residence's front garden until the residence itself was sufficiently repaired. At the insistence of Prince Eneas of Syan, Briony alone had been given a chair, both to make sure she held pride of place in the makeshift throne room and to alleviate the misery of having to wear a dress and stays again. She hated it, but it was a sacrifice she would make to show her people that things had gone back to the way they were-even those things she had loathed.
If only my head didn't feel like an anvil, she thought. If only their voices did not feel so much like hammers, beating on it…
As she looked at the faces around her, many of them as familiar as members of her own family, she could not help a moment's pang at the strangeness of her situation: though a few still survived, not a single person around her now was an Eddon. Anissa had taken baby Alessandros and retreated to her old haunts in the damaged Tower of Spring. Her great-aunt Merolanna was in ill health and kept to her rooms. Briony's father lay in state in the one remaining public hall of the residence, his bier surrounded by candles. Briony had wept over him many times. And her brother…
Ah, Barrick, where are you…?
"Princess? I am sorry, should I come back some other time?"
She opened her eyes to see Hierarch Sisel doing his best to look patient. If nothing else, having Hendon Tolly as a master had made the hierarch and other members of the aristocracy more cautious about angering their ruler.
So I suppose that's one I owe you, dead man. "No, Eminence, no," she said out loud. "It is my fault, not yours. Please, ask me again."
"It is just that we cannot put off your father's funeral much longer and there is much to decide. The Eddon family chapel is ruined, and the great temple in the outer keep has been badly damaged as well…"
"Then we shall have his rites beneath the sky, Eminence. I think he would have preferred it that way."
"I will arrange it, Princess," Eneas said, heading off any objections from Sisel. "If you will permit me, of course."
She nodded. "That is kind of you, Prince Eneas." But his willingness to help troubled her, too. She could not lean on him too much: she still owed him an answer. "Now, what else? I find myself muddleheaded, and I fear I am not the best judge of things this moment. Nynor? It is good to see you back, my lord. What do you wish to say?"
The old man had been struggling to rise, but let her wave him back into his seat. "How could I stay away when my lady needed me? And your father was one of my dearest friends, a gem among princes, an example to ordinary men…"
Briony was trying to hide her impatience. Didn't people understand there was no time now for such formalities and pretty words? Things had to be done. The March Kingdoms, especially Southmarch itself, were in a shambles. Bodies still lay in the ruins as well as in the caves and tunnels beneath the castle, and they were starting to stink. The living needed to be fed, and Tolly had emptied the treasury. Briony doubted he could have spent everything-more likely he had shipped gold and jewelry back to his family home in Summerfield, so on top of everything else she had to contemplate waging war on her relatives to retrieve her own exchequer.
Nynor was still enumerating the ways in which the current state of finances-and in fact the entire day-to-day administration of Southmarch-was a disaster unseen since the days of the Great Death: "… And who will stand witness against the malefactors?" he complained, wagging a knobby finger. "It is virtually impossible to know for certain which of the people supported Tolly and which stayed loyal…"
Briony did her best to disguise a sigh as a change of position. Why was she tired all the time, every day? "That is not of chiefest importance, my lord," she told Nynor. "How could the men and women of Southmarch know what to do except support the throne and whoever sat on it?" She had thought about this a great deal on her way back from Syan, all those long days riding through what had been her father's orderly kingdom but had now, like a deserted farm, begun to go back to nature. "It is not up to us to punish them if they cast in their lots with Tolly, it is up to us to show them the way forward. Unless they used Tolly's rule as an excuse for crimes and cruelty! Then I will be as hard as steel."
Whispers passed between the courtiers and nobles and others gathered in the large tent, many of whom were wondering anxiously how their own actions over the last two years might weigh on such a scale. Good, she thought. I will be fair, and even more merciful than some might, but I do not want the wicked to think their deeds will go unnoticed and unpunished. But it pained her to think of all the work to come. And without her father, without many of the old advisers, and even more painfully, without her brother…
"Where is Avin Brone?" she asked suddenly, interrupting Nynor in the middle of a disquisition about grain stores. "Why isn't he here?"
Nynor's wrinkled face flushed at the neck and cheeks. "Lord Brone said… he said he will come at your summons, Princess Briony. At any time of the day or night."
"But he does not feel obliged to be here at the time of our greatest need?"
Nynor cleared his throat. "He… he said you did not seem to need or want his help, so he would wait. He said he is at peace with the gods and his ruler, and will do as you wish."
She stared at the old courtier, wondering how he would feel if he knew the things she did. "I will see him, then. Tomorrow or the next day." She smiled in a way that made a few of the courtiers wince, even though they didn't know the reason for it any more than Nynor did. "Tell him it should be at his convenience, by all means." She turned to Prince Eneas. "And of course there are still a hundred or more of Tolly's men gone to ground in Funderling Town like rats under the rushes. Captain Vansen and your Lord Helkis will be occupied there some days, I think."
Eneas nodded. "As long as the traitors get no support from the Kallikans living there."
"Funderlings," she said a little more sharply than she had intended to. "They are called Funderlings and they are as loyal as any men."
"Yes, Princess, of course, Funderlings." Eneas did his best to smile.
"Forgive me," she said hurriedly. "I have a beastly ache in my head. I did not mean…"
"Forgiven and forgotten, Princess." He would have said more, but Briony's attention was drawn to a very arresting figure in the doorway being kept there by anxious soldiers. "I think we have an embassy to attend to," she said. "Guards, this visitor is welcome here."
The gray-skinned woman was now the center of all eyes. Some among the assembly only knew the Qar as the creatures that had tried to kill them; these stared at her with open dislike. Some even scurried back from the tall, slender figure. Others, like Sisel, who had escaped the castle before the siege began and had weathered the worst days on his family lands, watched her with less fear and more interest. But nobody, Briony felt certain, least of all herself, could look at the newcomer without mixed feelings.
"I am Aesi'uah, counselor to Barrick Eddon, the Lord of Winds and Thought." The fairy-woman had skin the color of a dove's breast and bowed like a willow in the wind. "I bring
his greetings and his gratitude."
As the courtiers whispered at this, Briony stared at the woman, trying to see past her skin and robin's-egg eyes. "My brother seems to have found a home among your folk. I am pleased for him-it was not always easy for him here, surrounded by his family and people."
"You seem angry, Princess Briony," Aesi'uah said.
"Angry that I have scarcely seen my brother since we all nearly died?" For a moment it was all she could do to contain herself. She took a breath. "Yes, you are right. I cannot help wondering why he does not come to see me, or at least pay his last respects to his own father, who will be buried soon."
Aesi'uah nodded. "These are strange days, Princess. It is… difficult for him."
Briony could not help looking doubtful. "Do you think so?"
"Please, Highness, you sent a summons. Your brother did not answer it himself, but he sent me. Let me answer any other questions you have, and your brother will make the rest of his thoughts clear to you soon."
Briony looked at the confusion and fear on the faces of those around her. A little less than a month ago Southmarch had been at war with these same Qar. She did not want that fear to return-conditions were too volatile. She softened her voice. "Of course, Lady Aesi'uah. Your words make sense. I understand your folk are camped beneath us, on the outskirts of Funderling Town."
"Until the rest of your enemies are driven from Funderling Town, we thought it best that we remain there, yes. Along with our Funderling hosts, we have made certain your enemies cannot escape into the tunnels, especially those that lead up to the mainland."
"It is appreciated. And after these last enemies are captured? What will your people do then?"
"We will return to our country in the north. Many of our survivors left families behind all over the shadowlands, and Qul-na-Qar, the great house of our people, is almost deserted. We are too few now to remain scattered."