Shadowheart (87 page)

“Are the boats finished?”

Vash took a breath but hid his frustration. It was plain to see that they were. The soldiers stood lined up along the shoreline beside the completed boats, massive rafts with the bundled reeds pulled together at each end to make a bow and stern. “Of course, Golden One,” Vash said. It had been an immensely difficult task to transport so many river reeds from Hierosol on such short notice, to keep them dry and safe from mold, but there had been no way of knowing whether they would be able to find the proper materials in this godsforsaken northern wasteland, and the Golden One did not respond well to failure.

Sulepis will become a god while I will probably die and receive a makeshift grave here in this wet northern hellhole
, Vash thought,
without even a priest left behind to pray for me. But there stand the boats. I have again done what is mine to do.
Out loud, he said, “All the boats are ready. What else does the Golden One desire?”

“The prisoners, of course. All of them.”

Vash blinked. “All of them?”

Sulepis stared at Vash as though from a huge height, as though he himself were the Shining Man. “Yes. The king, the Hive girl, and the northern children. Does that suit you, Minister Vash? Or should I ask someone who has nothing better to do?”

Vash felt a cold shock down his spine. “Forgive my stupidity, Golden One, I did not understand. Of course they are all being brought. Panhyssir’s priests are getting the children, and the others are there.” He pointed to a small procession of soldiers coming forward from the tunnel they had followed under the silver sea and onto the island, surrounding the prisoners, King Olin and the girl with their hands tied behind their backs. The priest A’lat capered at the front of the procession, walking backward with a smoking bowl in each hand, wreathing the prisoners in fumes. When he turned, Vash saw with a twist in his stomach that the desert priest wore a mask that appeared to be made from the skin of someone else’s face.

“Good, good.” Sulepis peeled the gold stalls off his fingertips and dropped them to the carpet. One of the slaves stared for a moment, then quickly gathered them. “I must feel this with my own skin. Look, Vash.” His long arm swept up, indicating the cavern, the Shining Man, and perhaps other things that only Sulepis himself could see. “Be aware of everything around you—smells, sounds, sights—for within the next hour the world changes forever.”

“Of course, Golden One. Of course.” Vash was desperate for the whole sordid horror to end so that he could find some way of accommodating whatever followed, if such were even possible. “You haven’t told me what else I can do to aid your . . . ritual. Do you need an altar . . . ?”

“An altar?” Sulepis found this very amusing. “Don’t you understand, Vash? This entire place is an altar, a place where the heavens were once made to shake—and will be again! This spot is sanctified by the blood and screams of the gods themselves!” The autarch’s voice had grown so loud that soldiers and functionaries all across the island stopped, trembling in fear because they thought the autarch had lost his temper. “No, my altar is the earth itself, this silver sea and the scar that Habbili left when he sealed the way back to this world with his own dying spirit.” He waved at the Shining Man, which loomed above them like the spire of a great temple. “Do you not know what that thing truly is? That is where Habbili the Crooked tore open the very flesh of the world so that he could banish the gods! Then, mortally injured himself, he closed the hole with his own being to keep them prisoned—and it has remained that way ever since, hiding here in the earth for thousands of years, worshiped by primitives as though it were a living thing.” He bent toward Vash as if to share a secret. “But now Habbili’s wounds have killed him at last. The priests and prophets have felt it. They have told me! Habbili’s strength will no longer hold shut that wound in the world. Anyone who has the power or knowledge can reach out across the great void . . . or reach
in
.” He straightened up to his full height, leaving Vash to stare up at him like a man watching an approaching thunderstorm. “So bring on the children! Let their blood open the door and then let the gods themselves beware! Sulepis will be the master even of the immortals themselves!”

Barrick had only just alighted on the cavern’s rocky floor when he saw Yasammez standing nearby looking out across the cavern toward the dark, distant shape of the Shining Man. She was alone for once, wrapped in a vast black cloak, her eyes half-closed so that she seemed as calm and remote as a cat lying in the sun. Her hair had pulled loose from its elaborate knots during her descent and hung around her head like thorny branches.

The Lady of Weeping
, the voices whispered inside him in a kind of superstitious awe.
The Scourge. Exile of Wanderwind.

Barrick approached her but did not kneel or bow. “My lady, will you not fight beside us? This is the last day, the last hour—the moment when we write the final page in the
Book of Regret
.”

Her eyes slowly turned toward him. “That page was written long ago, before your kind had even entered the world.”

He felt the sting of that but would not be drawn. “But I am also your kind now, Lady Yasammez, whether you or I wish it to be so . . . and you are our greatest warrior. If you do not fight for us now, when will you take the field? When the rest of the People lie dead?” For a moment, the shocked clamor of his Fireflower ghosts, their outrage at his disrespect, filled him with anger. “Is that your form of self-slaughter, Lady? To wait until there is no one left to see your fall so you spare yourself the shame of defeat?”

“The shame of defeat?” In cold anger she threw back her cloak to show her black armor and the naked blade of Whitefire that she leaned on like a cane; its gleam leaped to his eye like a tongue of lightning. “Child of men, I
am
the defeat of our people in the breathing flesh. I have lived with the foreknowledge of my own death since your people gnawed uncooked bones in the forest. I will not survive this day and I know it, but I will not have such as
you
questioning me. Begone, child of a stolen heritage, and do what you will with the end of your own life.”

The black murk of her cloak and the dark spikiness of her armor framed her pale, fierce face like storm clouds around the moon. For a moment Barrick saw things in her bottomless eyes he had never seen before, or perhaps in that strange place and time he merely dreamed them, but to his utter astonishment he felt a tear overspill his lid and trickle down his cheek.

“If I have wronged you, Lady, then I ask your forgiveness.” He bowed and turned away.

 

Saqri was waiting for him, her hair strayed from its diadem and fluttering in the strange winds of this deep place like black spidersilk. “Here is the bearer of the Fireflower,” she said and the Qar around her stirred and turned away from their enemies on the far side of the cavern. “Now our strength is complete.” She looked from Barrick back to Yasammez, who still stood by the base of the cliff. “Did she have a word for you?”

“Yes. Several.” He pulled on his helmet. “Lead us, Saqri. I need to smell blood in the air. That will make me stop thinking.”

Unexpectedly, she laughed. “Come, then!” she called to the surrounding Qar, who banged spears and swords against their shields or threw back their heads and bayed up at the cavern’s ceiling and the moon hidden so far above it, the moon that was in their blood as the Fireflower was in Barrick’s. “The hour is upon us! The last of the old years begins to die tonight! Let us show this presumptuous mortal king how the People dance at Midsummer!”

With a shout the Qar leaped forward and raced across the cavern toward the southerners stepping off their boats along the near shore, soldiers as numerous as ants. The Xixians were already nocking arrows and bending bows, waiting for the Qar to come in range.

“Midsummer!” cried Barrick, and the voices within him wept and exulted.

Ferras Vansen had been in battles both fierce and frightening. He had stood with his master Donal Murroy against both bandits and rebels. While scouting he had hidden in a tree for half an agonizing day, knowing that even the slightest noise or movement could bring death because a troop of mercenaries had camped almost directly beneath him. He had disarmed a maddened Southmarch guardsman who had killed his own wife and their four children, wrestling with the man in the smeared blood of his dead family. He had fought the Qar themselves on battlefields as strange as nightmares—but nothing had prepared him for this final deadly struggle deep beneath Southmarch.

By the time Vansen and those Funderlings still able to fight made their way down the cliff, the Qar and their small, silent queen had already flung themselves at the first of the autarch’s men to land on the shore. Vansen could not see well enough to guess who was getting the best of things because the light in the monstrous chamber had begun to flicker and gleam as colors he could scarcely recognize pulsed in the depths of the Shining Man the way red heat rippled in the embers of a fire.

“Double-fast, men!” Vansen shouted. “Otherwise the fairies may not leave us any!”

“Ha!” Malachite Copper was gasping along beside him. “I knew the Old Ones to be uncanny—I didn’t know they were greedy, too!” Copper’s leg had been injured in the final melee in the Initiation Hall but he was limping along gamely, doing his best to keep up. He had cursed when Vansen suggested he stay behind and tend his wound. “Well, Captain, we will just have to take what they leave us.”

Vansen looked back. The Funderlings following were wide-eyed with something more than fright, a look that seemed to search beyond the moment and perhaps even beyond their own short mortal lives. Weighted down with weapons and armor, none of them much more than half Ferras Vansen’s size, they still hurried to keep up with him, as if after all they had suffered they remained intent on proving themselves. “Sledge Jasper would be proud of you,” he called to them now. “He is watching!”

“Make your Wardthane proud, boys!” gasped Malachite Copper, stumbling for a moment in his weariness. They had reached the outskirts of the fighting, a twilight world of unsteady shapes locked in struggle as the stones overhead glowed and then darkened, glowed and then darkened.

“At them!” Vansen’s heart was strangely full here at the end, despite all that he had lost, all that he had never had. “At them, my brave men!”

To Beetledown’s astonishment, the queen of the Rooftoppers herself was waiting for him when he reached the stables in the ruins of Wolfstooth Spire. His favorite mount Muckle Brown had been saddled and was scratching impatiently—a fine, strong young female flittermouse, dark as sweet ale and almost as large as a pigeon—but Beetledown had eyes only for his mistress.

“Majesty.” He bowed as low as he could. “You do us too thickish an honor.”

“Nonsense.” Upsteeplebat smiled. “You are the best of my scouts, Beetledown. Still, we must not waste time in talk. If the Funderling Chert Blue Quartz says that the hour grows short, then you must fly now into the depths to find this man Cinnabar. Are you ready?”