More Xixians were scrambling toward him now, ducking the rocks being thrown by Vansen’s men from behind the last barricade. Vansen scooped up Jasper, whose small, stocky body was heavier than he expected as well as slippery with blood, and ran to the barricade. He delivered the wardthane into waiting hands, then dragged himself over to momentary safety as a flurry of arrows snapped against the stones all around him.
He bent to the wounded man but it was too late: Jasper had stopped breathing. His eyes were open but saw nothing. Vansen felt a cold hatred seize his guts and squeeze them.
“The Elders’ blessings on you, Sledge,” he said quietly.
The Xixians had not attacked again, but he knew they soon would. Vansen turned to the other Funderlings, who watched him with wide-eyed fear or exhausted despair. This last wall had been built smaller and higher than the others in this narrowest part of the cavern, with the hall’s only exit behind it. He made a quick estimate of how many men he still had—perhaps two or three hundred able to fight, no more. Even so, most of them were wounded, and Vansen himself was covered in blood too, much of it his own. He thought of several things to say, discarded them all.
“Sit up straight, men,” he told them finally. “Be pleased, not ashamed. We have nothing else left to do today except make a brave death. We have already made certain that these southerners, twice your size and ten times your numbers, will never be able to speak the name of the Funderlings or of Revelation Hall without sorrow at their losses and surprise at who caused them.”
A small murmur ran through the huddled men, including what might have been a ragged cheer or two.
“Enough of this talking,” Vansen told them. “Cinnabar is still here—he’s just a little under the weather, but he still breathes. And Malachite Copper? He’s here in his best suit—aren’t you, Master Copper?”
The Funderling cleared his throat. “Here indeed, Captain.”
“And Wardthane Jasper will be in the line outside Nozh-la’s Gate with the rest of our friends who’ve gone ahead, watching to see what you do in the next hour. So don’t disappoint them! Up, men, up!”
As they struggled wearily to their feet, Vansen raised his voice to make sure even those in the back could hear him. “Put your shoulders against each other and lift your spears, men. Those who still have shields, keep them up and locked with your fellows’. Don’t give ground except back toward the doorway . . . and whatever you do,
do not break unless you hear me calling the retreat
. More than our own lives depend on it.”
“ ’Ware the wall!” someone shouted. The Xixians had brought up a ram and had begun trying to knock down the barricade. Suddenly, the Funderlings were all up and hurrying into place as if the moment of quiet had never happened. Vansen saw a face appear near the top of the wall and took a swing at it with his ward-ax. The Xixian soldier dropped away unscathed and went looking for a spot where the defenders were not so tall. After that, Vansen had little time to do anything except avoid being killed.
Something bad had happened to Ferras Vansen’s left arm; he could no longer lift it above his shoulder. Something else bad had happened to his leg. He could still stand on it, but every time he shifted his weight he felt weakness and pain pierce his knee like a hot needle.
Xixian rams had knocked holes in their last barricade in several places; beyond, Vansen could see manlike shapes and the flicker of torches. Another part of the barricade now shivered as more stones worked loose and tumbled to the floor, one of them crushing an already wounded man’s leg. The fighting had grown too fierce even to pull the injured out of harm’s way. Vansen had never been so exhausted in his life, not even in the lost months behind the Shadowline—it took all his strength simply to remember where he was and what was happening around him. Still, the ladders coming over the top of the barricades at either end were no dream, and the men climbing them were as real as Death itself.
Nearby, several of the Naked warriors leaped down from the top of the barricade, swinging their curved swords and hand-axes. He realized he was staring like a drunkard while men died—
his
brave, brave men.
“It’s time!” Vansen shouted. “Back through the door! We’ll make our stand on the Balcony. Fall back!”
This time the distance was short. Vansen actually grabbed men and tugged them back from the fighting, but many others had been waiting for this moment and were already hurrying toward the doorway at the back of Revelation Hall in a retreat so ragged that some fell and others stepped on them. More and more Xixians were swarming over the final barricade.
“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 island 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”
“I
T 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!”