“Hurry!” Vansen picked up someone’s spear from the flagstones and used it to keep the attackers at bay as the last of the Funderlings extricated themselves. He had taken so many wounds today that at any other time he would be with the other injured being cared for, but as the biggest man among his troops he knew that he was always being watched: Vansen remaining upright through all the waves of attack had done much to keep his own men in fighting spirit. But Vansen also knew that the time had come when strategy meant nothing. Each man must now sell his life for as brave a price as he could, but they would never know whether it had been enough.
Vansen and Malachite Copper and a few of Copper’s household troops were the last to retreat through the doorway and out onto the great slab of stone the Funderlings called the Balcony, which stood on the edge of the stony cliff that held the Maze. A hundred feet or more below the Balcony spread the gigantic underground chamber of the Sea in the Depths, although to call that immensity a chamber was like calling Three Brothers Temple a shack, or mighty Hierosol a village. The cavern was almost as wide as the inner keep itself, and its height was unknown. If the great cave had a ceiling, it was lost in darkness above them and could not be seen even from the high balcony of the Maze.
And at the center of the cavern lay the shining, still surface of the Sea in the Depths—“the Silver,” as he had sometimes heard the Qar name it. Veins of glowing stone threading through the walls of the massive chamber gave a faint but steady light, so that even from the Balcony, Vansen could see the thing that the autarch apparently sought and had already killed so many to reach, the gleaming crystalline monument called the Shining Man, standing on its island in the middle of the silvery underground sea.
“Look out, Captain—here they come!” shouted Malachite Copper. Vansen sighed and turned his back to the stone railing, then stepped forward so he couldn’t easily be pushed over. Some of his men would probably choose that way out by the end, he knew, rather than die on a Xixian spear. He couldn’t blame them, but that way would not be his.
Smoke billowed from the doorway of the Revelation Hall onto the balcony. For a few moments, Vansen thought it was dust again, that the Xixians had knocked over the entire barrier, but even so it seemed too big a cloud. Several figures stepped out of the rolling murk, their dark silhouettes somehow magnified by the smoke so that they seemed monsters, not men.
But it was a monster, he saw a moment later with sinking heart, or at least it was no longer anything human. Big and getting bigger every instant, the thing was a writhing shadow, uneven and unstable.
It growled out something that almost sounded like words, a horrid deep rasp. Two more just as terrifying stepped up beside it, one of them still with a hand to its mouth as though it were eating something. All three seemed man-shaped whirlwinds, as if the dust and debris of the chamber were being drawn up to spin through the air and circle them, covering the creatures like moss growing on a stone but a thousand times more swift. The shapes grew wider and even taller. As Vansen stared, dumbfounded, he heard Funderlings shrieking in terror behind him.
“Curse their Xixian devilry!” Vansen groaned. “Copper? Where are you? I need your men and their spears!”
He did not wait, but hurled his own ward-ax at the nearest of the creatures. The weapon only bounced off the swirling, shadowy mass, as ineffectual as a snowball against a siege tower. Vansen tore a spear from the hand of a staring, dumbfounded Funderling and advanced toward the things, jabbing at them as at an angry boar, but the demons did not give ground. The three shapes had grown huge now, bulky and irregular, but they still walked on two legs as they waded forward, swiping at the defenders with clawed hands big as serving platters. They moved surprisingly quickly, too—the first nearly beheaded Vansen with one swipe.
“Help the captain, you sons of the Guild!” called out Malachite Copper. “The Elders are watching you—don’t let him fight alone!”
And then other Funderlings began to push their way in beside him, jabbing bravely at the things and ducking blows from the stony talons if they were lucky; but several were sliced in half as they stood, and another was thrown into Ferras Vansen by a backhanded swipe of a malformed hand with such violence that it knocked him spinning. Vansen struck his head against the base of the Balcony’s stone railing and when he tried to sit up so he could rise and fight, all around him seemed to waver as if seen through fathoms of water.
A tiny white shape dropped down from out of the darkness above, but Vansen could make nothing of it, any more than he could of the weird, liquid roar of the devil creatures as they mowed through the shrieking Funderlings. An instant later, he realized he was staring at a small, slender woman dressed all in white armor who stood just in front of him, the rope down which she had climbed still dangling beside her.
“We of the People have served you poorly, Ferras Vansen,” she said in a voice so sweetly calm he was half-certain he must be dreaming it all. “Now we will try to make up for that, at least in some measure.”
She was Qar, that was obvious, but he had never seen her before. He wondered again if he might be dreaming . . . or dying. “Who . . . who are you?”
“My name is Saqri. I must go now.”
Other shapes were falling down out of the darkness all around him, many figures sliding down on ropes and jumping to the Balcony before swiftly springing forward to attack the clawed demons. Vansen tried to get up, but the world spun so briskly that he fell back and did not try again to rise; it was all he could do just to lie on the stone and listen to the weirdly musical sounds of desperate battle, the clang of stony claws on smooth Qar armor. Flashes of light made the carved walls of the Maze jump out in sharp relief and revealed dozens—no, hundreds!—more Qar as they dropped down onto the Balcony like graceful spiders.
One of the demon creatures died with a Qar arrow in its eye all the way to the feathers. It thrashed and gurgled wetly for a long time until the life finally leaked out of it. Another stumbled as it charged and was then jabbed with fairy-spears until it went mad and tumbled over the railing—it roared like receding thunder all the way down. The last, as far as Vansen could tell, was set on fire somehow from within and died in a smoking mass in the middle of the balcony, leaving a corpse that looked like a chimney hit by lightning.
Vansen sat up, his arm and leg throbbing horribly, trying to make sense out of what was happening. Where were the rest of the autarch’s soldiers? Why had they stopped attacking? Had his Funderlings actually defeated the Xixians with the last-moment help of the Qar?
A tall warrior in gray Qar armor came toward him across the balcony. “Ferras Vansen,” this newcomer said, crouching at his side. “By the gods, I never thought I’d see you again. Never.” The stranger took off his helmet and for a moment Ferras Vansen could only stare at the shock of red hair in aching bemusement.
“Barrick . . . ?” he said at last. “Prince Barrick? Is it really you?”
The prince gave him a cold, serious gaze. He looked ten years older. “Yes, it’s me, Captain. How are your wounds? Will you survive?”
“I . . . I expect so ...” Vansen shook his head in amazement. “But how do you come here? How did you escape from the shadowlands?”
A human expression, a little smile, twisted Barrick Eddon’s lips. “I’m sure we both have many stories to tell ...” he began, then another Qar woman hastened up, one Vansen recognized. It was Yasammez’ gray-skinned adviser, Aesi’uah.
“Captain Vansen,” she said. “It is good to find you alive.” She turned to Barrick. “Saqri says we cannot delay. It is a feint, as she feared. They are already gone.”
“What?” Vansen struggled to get up. He hated this feeling of weakness. “Who is already gone?”
“The southerners,” Aesi’uah said. “This last attack by the autarch’s Stone Swallowers was meant to destroy you and your men, but he was not waiting for you to die. There are long stairways back in the Maze which lead far down, then cross under the Sea in the Depths to the isl
and where gods fought and died—the place where the Shining Man stands. The autarch and his priests and soldiers stealthily went that way while we fought. They have slipped past beneath us.
“Despite all your bravery and all our haste, Captain Vansen, we have lost.”
36
When the Knife Falls
“The poor Orphan had to wrap the piece of the sun in oak leaves, but at last these also burned away and he had no other choice but to carry it in his soft hands.”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
“IT IS A HANDSOME THING, is it not?” Hendon Tolly held it up so Matt Tinwright could see it; but in fact Tinwright could see almost nothing else: the blade was so close and its presence so alarming that his eyes nearly crossed. The knife was as long as Tinwright’s forearm and palm, its slender jade handle inlaid with unfamiliar golden symbols, as was the even slenderer blade. “It is Yisti work, I was told, from the southern part of Xand,” Tolly said. “A ghostmaker, it is called. We will see if it is also a godmaker.” He laughed, but it seemed perfunctory. Tolly was pale and sweating, as if, despite his usual air of confidence, the events of the last few days had shaken him very deeply. “Just think, poet! A thousand years or more it lay in a Hierosoline tomb, and you will be the first to wield it again in all that time. That is something worth making a rhyme about!”
The knife was so close that Matt Tinwright was beginning to think Hendon Tolly might be about to test it on him, despite his promises. Tinwright looked to the soldiers, three hardened men in Summerfield colors, Tolly’s handpicked guards, but they would not even meet his eye. The protector’s madness was as clear as a large livid bruise on pale skin. No one wanted to endanger himself by catching Tolly’s attention.
“What do you w-want me to do . . . ?” Tinwright didn’t even want to touch the knife. The green handle and the tomb-patina made it look envenomed.
“Follow me, of course.” Tolly lowered the knife and pointed to the steps leading down into the Eddon family vault. The sun was well behind the hills now and the opening seemed a gateway to the void itself, the naked emptiness that came before the gods. “We have work to do, fool, and midnight is only hours away. If we are to beat that brown dog Sulepis to the prize, we cannot wait any longer.” He turned to one of the guards. “When Buckle arrives, send him down to me at once.”
The guard nodded. Tolly turned back to Matt Tinwright. “Come, now. Bring the child. Haste!”
His stomach roiling so he feared he might vomit, his head full of confused and fearful thoughts, Tinwright wrapped the blankets a little tighter around the squirming royal heir and followed Hendon Tolly down into the tomb.
Tolly led them to the old vault, which lay behind the first outermost chamber where Okros Dioketian had died and Tinwright himself had been caught by a returning Hendon Tolly. The old vault was larger and higher than the front chamber, a hollow, six-sided mountain of stone, each of the six walls honeycombed with niches, and each niche holding its own stone or lead box. Most of the old coffins bore no images of the dead, and few even had inscriptions; those who slumbered inside, many of them kings and queens of Southmarch, had now become nameless and faceless.
“No one has been buried in this room for hundreds of years,” Tolly said, walking slowly around the hexagonal chamber with his hands behind his back like an idler out for a stroll. “Kellick built the outer chamber, it is said, which means that great Anglin himself must be here, crumbling in one of these hidey-holes.” He looked up to see whether he had shocked Tinwright with his blasphemy. “But nobody knows which!” Tolly laughed. “No matter how famous in life, when you are dead, you are nameless clay!” The baby in Tinwright’s arms was beginning to cry steadily now, the hitching sobs becoming a single wail. “By Perin’s beard, poet, will you give that cursed child a shake?” Tolly said, frowning. “Make it be quiet.”
Matt Tinwright held the small creature gingerly. What did someone like him know about comforting an infant? “Does he have to be here, Lord?”
“What are you babbling about? Of course he has to be here—we cannot perform the ritual without him! Might as well try to have a dinner with no roast!” Tolly closed his eyes as if he could bear no more, but he kept them closed for longer than Tinwright would have expected, and when he opened them, they had a perilous cast. “I said, silence that child.”
Tinwright could think of nothing else to do except to give the tiny creature his finger to suck. It was a trick he had seen Brigid use on her sister’s child to quiet it. Little Alessandros continued to hitch and sob for a while even with the finger in his mouth, but gradually grew silent.
Tolly thrust out his hand, and one of the guards handed over a sack he had been carrying. “Where is that other fool? He should have been here by now.”
“My lord . . . ?”
“Shut your mouth, poet, I am not talking to you. Well?”
The guard who had handed him the sack squirmed beneath his master’s bright, disturbing glare. “Buckle? I’m sure he’ll be here right quickly, Lord Tolly. ...”
Tolly silenced him with a mere movement of his hand. “Enough. Go and wait outside for him, both of you. I would talk with Master Tinwright.”
The guards, only too willing to leave the Old Vault, hustled away. Tinwright heard their footsteps going up from the new vault to the surface. When they died away he became uncomfortably aware that he was trapped far beneath the ground—in a tomb, no less!—with a dangerous madman.
“It’s almost time,” Hendon Tolly said after some moments had passed. “Did you hear the bell as we came down? That would have been ten of the clock. The Syannese must have taken the residence by now—much good it will do them!” The lord protector laughed. Of late he had stopped trimming his beard and paying close attention to his clothing. Now, ragged and almost untended, Hendon Tolly no longer looked like the mirror of Tessian court fashion. “They will strut and imagine themselves as conquerors, just as that Xixian dog beneath our feet dreams himself to be the chosen of the gods—but they will both be wrong! Because I will beat them to the post. The goddess’ favor will be mine!”
Tinwright could no longer keep track of what his fearsome master planned to achieve with his dreadful sacrifice. Sometimes he talked as though the goddess Zoria would serve him personally, other times as though he himself would become a god. Tinwright might have marked it all as the ravings of one moonstruck, but he had felt the cruel power that lurked in Tolly’s mirror, had felt it stalking him like a hungry wolf. He didn’t want to feel it again and he certainly did not want to hurt a child, royal or not. But what else could he do? Run? Even if he got away from Tolly, the sentries were just outside.
Better to let Tolly kill him, perhaps. If they fought, at least his death might be swift. He could go to the gods with the knowledge that he had refused to do an inexcusable thing.
He squeezed the baby tightly against him, which made the infant burst out crying again.
“My lord,” Tinwright began, “I can’t . . . I won’t ...” but even as the words came out of his mouth—and admittedly, they were not loud to begin with—Hendon Tolly silenced him with an imperious hand.
“Quiet. Do you hear that?” He cocked his head. “There. That fool Buckle has finally arrived. You will enjoy this, poet. A little surprise planned just for you.”
“F-For me . . . ?” But now he could hear it, too, a commotion in the other vault, the sound of people moving, of boots on stone and a woman’s voice, protesting, pleading . . .
Oh, gods, has the monster brought Queen Anissa to watch what happens to her child? Was there no limit to Tolly’s depravity?
The soldiers dragged the struggling woman into the room. When he saw who it was, Tinwright’s knees almost buckled beneath him.
“Ah, and here is that last member of our convocation,” said Tolly cheerfully. “Lady Elan, how I have missed you. You were a cruel, fickle girl to let me think you had run away.”
&n
bsp; Elan M’Cory stopped fighting against the guards who held her arms. “You’re a monster, Hendon—a goblin! A demon!”
Tinwright could only stare. The world seemed to be falling in on top of him.
“Nonsense, my dear.” Hendon was at her side in a moment, then pressed her cheek with the blade of the jade-handled knife as the guards held her. He pushed a little too hard and a thread of shining red appeared. “Our friend the poet will do everything I say because he will not want to see harm come to a single hair on your lovely head. Did he not go to great lengths already to hide you from me?”
Tinwright felt as though his insides had turned to sand and cold water. “Oh, gods help us, how . . . how did you find her?”
“Oh, the gods will be helping you soon enough, never fear.” Hendon Tolly’s glee was mounting by the instant. “I have had you followed every time you left the castle, little poet. You may have thought yourself clever with your twisting courses, but all you have done is make my soldiers tired and angry—you fooled no one. Honestly, did you really think to hide a noblewoman of Summerfield in your sister’s hovel?”
Tinwright turned to catch Elan’s eye. “I’m sorry. I never thought ...”
“Enough.” Tolly lingered a moment to sniff at her hair and face like a cat at a fleck of carrion. “Ah, I hope he does what he says, my dear,” he whispered loud enough for Matt Tinwright to hear. “I pray no harm must come to you. I want you back, you see. I have missed marking your white skin and I have missed the sounds of your suffering. It is like a sickness, this longing of mine. ...”
“Do nothing that he wants, Matt!” Elan called to Tinwright. “I was already a dead woman when we met—I was a corpse from the first time he touched me ...!”
“But our poet is not made of such cruel stuff,” Tolly said. “He will do what he is told. He will help me perform the ritual in place of poor, foolish old Brother Okros. He will sacrifice the child.” Tolly came to Tinwright then and touched the king’s child on the forehead with his dusty white finger, leaving a mark. “Because if he does not, he will watch me take the skin off his beloved Elan before he dies.”