Suddenly beast-men crashed out of the trees on either side, shrieking like demons.
“To me, to me!” Pedder Makewell bellowed. Briony saw him grab his sister and thrust her behind him, so that the wagon shielded her back. Makewell had a knife, but it was a poor thing, little more than a blade for cutting fruit and sawing over-tough mutton. Still, he held it up as though it was Caylor’s Sighing Sword, and for a moment Briony almost loved the man.
“Together!” Finn Teodoros called. He had the wagon door open and was pulling out what arms they had, many of them little more than props. The beast-men had paused just inside the belt of trees and now were slowly advancing.
“Throw them down!” shouted the first of the things in a loud, angry voice. “Throw down your weapons or we kill you where you stand.” It was with something like relief that Briony saw that he was no magical creature but only wore a half-mask. Several of the masked men had bows, the rest were well armed with spears and axes and even swords.
“Bandits,” said Nevin Hewney in disgust.
The leader walked toward him, grinning beneath his crude fox face. “Watch your tongue. We are honest men, but what are honest men who cannot work? What are honest men whose lands have been stole by the lords, who know no law but their own?”
“Is that our fault?” Hewney began, but the bandit chieftain cracked him hard across the face with the back of his hand, knocking the playwright to the ground. Hewney got up, cursing, blood running between his fingers where he held his nose. Dowan Birch held him back.
“Bone, Hobkin, Col—you watch them,” the leader said. “You others, take what they have. And chiefly search that wagon. Go to it, men!” At this his eyes, which had been flicking from one member of the company to another, lighted on Briony and widened. “Hold,” he said quietly, but his men were already busily and loudly at work and did not hear him. He walked toward her where she stood beside Finn Teodoros. “What have we here? Young and fair . . . and passing for a boy?” He leaned toward her, his breath rank. He was missing most of his teeth, which made him seem older than he truly was. The two pegs in his upper jaw protruded below the rim of the fox mask, and for a moment it was all too much for Briony. She drove her knife up at his belly, but he was a man who had been living on the edge of things for a long time: her thrust came as no surprise. He caught her wrist and twisted it hard. To her shame, the pain made her drop the knife immediately.
The Yisti knife, had the bandit known it, was probably worth more than the rest of the players’ possessions combined, but he had chanced onto prize he liked better and she had all his attention. “You are pretty enough in your way, girl,” he said, pulling Briony close. “Did you truly fool these yokels? Did they think you a boy? You will be happy to know that Lope the Red is not so easily gulled. You belong to a real man, now.”
“Let her be ...” Finn began angrily, but the bandit cuffed him and the playwright fell heavily to the ground and then struggled to rise as Lope the Red shoved at him with his foot.
Briony stared at the bandit chieftain and suddenly recognized something in him. He was a beast, a thief and a bully, but he was also the strongest and the smartest of these men: if the world continued in the same mad fashion as it had of late, many such men would be rising up from the shadows, and some of them would make kingdoms for themselves.
This is the truth,
she thought.
This is the ugly truth of my royal bloodline and every other. Those who can take power take it, then leave it to their children . . .
Finished amusing himself with fat Finn, Lope pulled Briony close again. Then, as the bandit chief reached out a dirty hand to feel for her breasts beneath her loose shirt, he suddenly cried out in pain and staggered back a few steps, the knife which he had twisted out of Briony’s hand standing quivering from his thigh.
“Bastard!” said bloody-faced Finn, hauling himself onto his knees. “I meant that for your stones!”
The rest of the bandits had turned at their chief’s shout, and stood staring as he took a staggering step toward the playwright. “Stones? I’ll have
your
stones off, if you even have any, you eunuch jelly.” He waved his hand and two more of the bandits hurried forward, overcoming the struggling Finn in a matter of moments and throwing him to the ground, then pinning him there with the weight of their bodies. Lope the Red pulled the knife from his leg with a contemptuous shake of his head.
“In the meaty part. Ha! You are no fighting man, it’s clear.” He leaned forward. “I will show you how to use a knife on a man ...”
“No!” shrieked Briony. “Don’t hurt him! You can do whatever you want with me!”
The bandit laughed. “I
will
do whatever I want with you, trull. But first I will carve this one like a joint of beef ...”
The air hummed and Lope the Red stopped for a moment, then slowly straightened up. He lifted his hand to his face and tried to take off his mask but found he could not: an arrow, feathers still trembling, had pierced his brow just above the eye and nailed it to his skull.
“I . . .” he said, then toppled backward like a felled tree.
“Take them!” someone shouted. A dozen armed men crashed onto the road from out of the trees. Arrows were buzzing in every direction, like furious wasps. One of the men who had pinned Finn to the ground leaped up in front of Briony only to fall back against her an instant later with three feathered shafts quivering in his chest and guts.
More arrows snapped past her. Men screamed like frightened children. One of the bandits clutched a tree as if it were his mother; when he fell away he had left it painted broadly with his blood.
Briony threw herself down on the ground and covered her head with her arms.
The Syannese soldiers dragged the last of the bandits’ bodies onto the pile. “All here, Captain,” one of the men-at-arms said. “Best we can tell.”
“And the others?”
“One dead. The others only have a few small wounds.”
Briony scrambled to her feet. One dead? Estir Makewell was on her knees, sobbing. Briony hurried toward her but one of the soldiers grabbed her arm and held her back.
Estir turned from the tall man’s corpse and pointed in fury at Briony. “It’s your fault—
your fault!
If not for you, none of this would have happened and poor Dowan would be living still!”
“Dowan? Dowan’s dead? But . . . I didn’t ...” There was nothing Briony could say. Even the other members of the troop, Estir’s brother, Nevin Hewney, even Finn, seemed to stare reproachfully at her from the spot where the guards had rounded them up.
The soldiers wore Syannese colors but an insignia Briony had never seen—a fierce red hound. Their captain stepped forward and looked her sternly up and down. His beard was long but carefully shaped; a bright white plume adorned his tall helmet. Briony thought he had the look of a man who thought himself quite elegant. “You are Princess Briony Eddon of Southmarch, late of our king’s court in Syan?”
No point in denying it now—she had done enough harm. “I am, yes. What will happen to my friends?”
“Not for you to think about, Mistress,” he said with a grim shake of the head. “We’ve been looking for you for days and days. Now come with me and don’t make trouble. You’re being arrested, you are.”
36
Hunting the Porcupine
“The fairies who survived the second war with men and fled back into the north called down behind them—in an act of sorcery unseen since the days of the gods—a great pall of cloud and mist that men named the Shadowline. All mortal men who cross into those lands are now in danger of losing at least their wits if not their lives.The few who have gone and returned claim the whole of the north is now beneath the cover of that shadow.”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
I
SEEM DOOMED to be part of strange trios in strange places,
thought Ferras Vansen as they clambered up the curving track that Antimony called the Copper Ring.
First across the Shadowline with the heir to the throne and a Qar soldier with no face, now through the depths of the earth with two little people. I survived the first one . . . if only just . . .
But even now he was still dumbfounded by what had happened: why should he have fallen through a doorway behind the Shadowline and come out in the Funderlings’ own halls beneath Southmarch?
There was no answer, of course. Perhaps the gods had a hand in it, although he wasn’t certain about even that. The one thing that had become clear during this year of madness was that even the gods did not seem to be masters of their own fate.
Antimony and the grubby little creature known as Browncoal were arguing. The monk was a head higher—he was the largest Funderlings Vansen had met, the top of his head reaching the bottom of Vansen’s ribs—but he could not match the drow’s ferocity: the little man was snarling like a cornered cat. It was strange to see the two of them so close together, see both their similarities and differences, as though one were a wild pony, bristly and undersized, the other a handsome, stolid farm horse.
“What is all this about?” Vansen demanded.
Antimony scowled. “It is a trap or a trick. He wants to lead us up Old Quarry Way to Tufa’s Bag, but I was there only yesterday. There is no way out of it! We call it a bag because that’s how it is—you can only come out the way you came in.”
Vansen looked at Browncoal, who was glowering like a badger who’d just been dug up. “Does he say why he wants to go there if there’s no way out?”
“He says there is. And he says I’m a blind fool for thinking I know otherwise.” Antimony balled his fists. If Vansen had been Browncoal’s size it would have made him very nervous.
“Let’s see where he leads us. If it’s a trap, it’s a rather strange way to go about it, leading us down a dead end. Besides, I’m sure he knows if he proves false he’ll be the first to die.” Vansen showed the sullen drow his ax. “But it wouldn’t hurt to remind him of it.”
Browncoal led them farther up Old Quarry Way until they had left all but the most occasional cross-passages behind them. The corridor took a distinctly downward slant; then, after a bit more silent trudging, they reached a fork.
Antimony pointed to the rightmost of the branching tunnels. “That’s Tufa’s Bag.”
“And where does Old Quarry Way go from here? ” Vansen asked, pointing along the other branch.
“Back up again until it finally connects with the Copper Ring on the far side of Funderling Town. That’s one of Stormstone’s roads.”
“And why would somebody make a dead end here?”
“That was the original path of Old Quarry Way, but the digging proved too hard—there was no blasting powder in those days. They went this way instead,” he said, gesturing to the left hand fork, “where the stone was softer.”
Despite Antimony’s distrust, Vansen allowed Browncoal to lead them both down the spur tunnel, which twisted and turned and grew low enough in places that Vansen had to get down on his haunches and move forward in an awkward crouch. At last they came to a slightly wider spot. By the pale golden light of Antimony’s coral lamp Vansen could see that the monk’s summation seemed accurate: the corridor ended in an abandoned scrape and a pile of rubble. There was no way out.
Even as Antimony shook his head in dour satisfaction, Browncoal stepped forward, bent, and reached under one of the broken stones piled in front of the scrape. He grunted as he lifted; to Vansen’s surprise a few individual rocks rolled away but the rest of the stones came up together in a single block. Vansen hurried forward and saw that one of the drows’ round battle-shields had been covered with some kind of cement and garnished with stones so that anything except a very careful inspection would reveal nothing more than an innocuous pile of rubble.
“Perin’s Hammer!” he said. “A secret door!”
Browncoal looked up them with a near-toothless grin of triumph, then slipped his legs into the hole revealed beneath. He pulled at the rope around his ankle until the length between him and Brother Antimony had gone taut, then dumped the rest of the coil down the hole before letting himself drop in after the rope. For a moment after the drow had disappeared Antimony and Vansen could only stand, staring, as the rope first went slack and then tight again.
“By the Elders,” said Antimony in sudden shock, “he is down there by himself!” He tossed his pack over the edge of the hole and quickly followed. When he was gone, Vansen hesitated for a moment. He did not like the idea of letting himself down into something he could not see and did not know.
“Brother Antimony?” he called at the edge of the hole. “Are you there? Are you well?”
“Come down, Captain Vansen,” the monk called up from what sounded like only a short distance below. “You can jump. The landing is easy, and down here there is . . . stay, you must see it for yourself. Wonderful!”
Vansen had his doubts, but was reassured to hear the Funderling. He dumped his pack in and then turned around and let himself drop, shielding his face with his arms.
His armor shirt didn’t weigh much, but it still made his landing clumsier than the others’: Vansen slid, stumbled, slid again, and just managed to turn around before his feet went out from him altogether and he landed on his tailbone in a pile of hard stones.
“By the Thunderer!” he swore, groaning as he got to his feet. “You call that an easy landing?”
“But look,” Antimony said. “Is it not worth the tumble?”
Vansen had to admit it was—if you were a Funderling. The down-tilting passage at the bottom of the disguised hole opened out after a few sliding steps down a pile of tailings. The flickering golden glow of the coral revealed a huge cavern, its ceiling covered with strange, rounded pillow-shapes, each one almost as big as Vansen himself, so that he and the two smaller folk seemed to stand in the center of a motionless cloud. At the center of the room was a lake, lit by an odd, pearly light of its own. In the dim light the water was so still it seemed like crystal. As Vansen gazed down into depths no coral lamp could have reached he suddenly understood why the Funderlings believed that their creator god had arisen on the shores of such a pool.