Shadowheart (33 page)

Vansen crawled to Jackdaw, who was calmly wrapping a length of torn sleeve around the bloodied meat of his own upper arm where a ball had hit him. The blood was red even in the dim lantern light, but that was almost the only thing about Jackdaw that seemed ordinary to Vansen. The fairy’s face, scrawny and so long-nosed that he seemed more bird than man, was covered with an iridescent down that in stronger light seemed purple or sometimes even pink and blue, but now seemed just black. It made his bright yellow eyes even more startling. His body, too, wherever it showed between the few pieces of light armor he wore, seemed to be covered in the same kind of feathery down.

Vansen had stared at him for a few moments during their first meeting, but the Qar’s martial personality had quickly become all that mattered: the fairy had clearly been around a battlefield, and although what ran in his veins was the right color for blood, it seemed by his actions to be something altogether slower and colder.

“We have no more serpentine or we could have brought down the stone above us and ended this,” said Jackdaw, putting his head above the barrier to look around as if leaden balls were not cracking and hissing past him. He turned to Dolomite, one of Jasper’s warders and the ranking Funderling warrior in Moonless Reach. “Is that what the black sand is called here? My people call it Crooked’s Fire.”

“Don’t know about crooked anything,” said Dolomite and grimaced. Like Sledge, he had witnessed much of the worst his own small world had to offer and did not like people to see him excited. “Blasting powder, we call it. But if we don’t have it, we don’t have it. We’ll just have to fall back to Ocher Bar and hold them there.”

“Still,” said Jackdaw, “it would be nice to have a few of those bursting fireballs your little friend brought to you, Vansen. We could roll one of them directly under that foul-smelling
seliqet
and smash him to slivers.”

“We’re getting hold of as much as we can, but at the moment we don’t have it,” Vansen said tightly. “Any other ideas?”

“Keep sticking them with things until they’re all dead,” suggested Dolomite.

Another wave of musket balls snapped by overhead. The cavern echoed with the roar of the guns until Ferras Vansen thought it might come down around their ears. “You are as clever a tactician as Sledge Jasper,” he told the Funderling. “Now, if you’ve nothing else to do, let’s get back to the business of trying to kill that monster.”

 

They survived two more assaults from the autarch’s troops and their pet, just barely driving the attackers back each time, having to fight hardest to defend the unfinished end of the wall. The
skorpa
kept attacking the spot, determined to get to all the fierce but flavorsome meat it sensed there.

“See, that is the seliqet’s weak spot!” Jackdaw cried as the jointed horror loomed over them again, huge claws clacking. From this angle Vansen could see a pale oval bubble of flesh in the center of the creature’s underbelly where the legs came together. Jackdaw and the others began jabbing their spears into this soft place. The monster reared back up with a terrible hissing noise and retreated, crushing any of the autarch’s unfortunate soldiers who could not get out its way. Its hobbling retreat soon led it back out of Moonless Reach and into the tunnels leading upground, the portion that the autarch’s troops had already conquered. The horrified screams of the reinforcements who had apparently been coming up the passage as they encountered the masterless and deranged creature were enough to bring new heart to the defenders. Vansen led a charge from behind the wall and although several fell in the assault they quickly finished those of the autarch’s men who were unwilling to surrender, but even more unwilling to flee back into the jaws of their own monster.

 

“That is at least a half dozen of those things we’ve killed,” said Dolomite as he and the other fighters, Vansen included, bent to the work of finishing the wall while the autarch’s troops were in retreat. “How many more do you think there are?”

“Not more than a hundred,” said Jackdaw with a fierce grin. His own soldiers, despite some of them being badly shaped for digging and building walls, were helping out with a will. It was almost possible for Vansen to forget that some of them looked like frogs and foxes, and others were even stranger than that. They were all becoming brothers, in the manner he had seen before: facing death together was the greatest of levelers. Perhaps, with the help of these Qar, they could actually hold out against the autarch until Midsummer had passed.

“We will kill them one by one, then,” Vansen said. “Until we have the gunflour to blow them all right to the gates of Kernios himself.”

Jackdaw laughed. “You are funny, mortal. Do you not know where you are?”

“What do you mean?”

“We are already at the gates of Kernios, Captain. That is what is under siege here in the earth—what we defend! Our enemies seek to conquer the Palace of Kernios! We are Death’s own honor guard.”

For a moment Vansen wasn’t entirely certain what he meant, but then began to understand. At last he summoned a grim laugh of his own. “As you say, then, friend Jackdaw—that is what we will do. Defend the gates of Death’s city until we ourselves are invited inside.”

It was almost a relief to realize how futile their task was. Vansen shook his head and bent once more to his work.

When he and the boy got back to their room, Flint sat down to think his strange, quiet Flint-thoughts and Chert hurried to turn his notes into marks on his maps before he forgot what they meant. The whole of the Pit had to be traced and much of the labyrinth behind Five Arches would have to be redone as well. As Chert worked, some of the things Flint had said rolled around and around in his mind, troubling him although he could not say exactly why.

He had just finished marking the changes and was moving onto other things when an idea came to him—a strange, magnificent, utterly mad idea.

For long moments he just sat, breathless, not even certain of whether it made any sense. Opal came bustling in from her labors with many things to say about what was happening and what she had been doing, but Chert scarcely heard her. He did his best to smile and say the right things, but his thoughts were completely taken by the new idea.

It was definitely
not
the kind of thing he could discuss with Opal, much as he valued her counsel. The danger of it was appalling, and she had all but told him that if he again went off and got himself involved in something risky when they had a boy who needed him to be a father, that would be the last night she would ever sleep under his stone. And since Chert didn’t know whether Vansen and the Guild would even listen to such a lunatic idea, let alone approve it, he wasn’t going to waste an argument with his wife on it yet (an argument that he knew he would lose anyway, and lose badly.)

He didn’t want to waste any more time that should be spent on the maps, but neither did he want to wait too long before taking his audacious plan to Vansen, Cinnabar, and the rest. After the evening prayers had been called, Chert waited impatiently until Opal and Flint fell asleep, then got up, lit the lamp, and went back to his table. He made a pile of all the maps he would need for his calculations—there were many—then bent over the table in the guttering light of the lantern and began working out his scheme in the solid, old-fashioned way the Guild had taught him, filling his slates with numbers and symbols that would explain the workings of his strange, unthinkable idea.

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

 

 

 

S
AQRI WAITED AS HE CLIMBED UP out of the waves onto the rocky shore, as poised in her formless white robes as a temple statue. She was also quite, quite dry. Barrick, drenched and drizzling seawater, had barely an instant to marvel at either that or the sea meadow he had not seen in so many years, then Saqri turned and started up from the shore toward the royal lodge, which was just visible through the trees at the top of the stony hillcrest.

“There are some things you learn after a few hundred years,” the Queen of the Fairies called as he trudged after her, streaming water and making squelching noises with every step. “One of them is how not to get wet unless you want to.”

He didn’t have the strength to discuss it. Exhaustion and his sopping clothing were pulling at him like a legion of invisible goblins, making each step a terrible chore. Also, he could see the lodge more clearly now, and although the Fireflower voices seemed uncharacteristically silent, his own memories were not.

 

The crash of sound yanked him back to the present again, scattering his memories like dandelion fluff. He whirled around in the middle of the path to look back across the bay. It was hard to see what was making the noise, but thin streams of smoke were rising from the mainland town. For a moment, Barrick could almost tell himself it was the chimneys, that all was ordinary and he’d heard only thunder. After all, who would be firing a cannon . . . ?

. . . No, several of them—the Qar? Did they even use them? And where had Saqri gone? Could she be hurt? Could the cannons throw one of their balls this far? He hurried up the hillside path.