The Office of Shadow (65 page)

Mauritane was at the front of the line, leading Bear Company toward the gate
of Elenth. Once the gate was breached, they could fight their way into the
city, and he and the Annwni commanders could rendezvous. The battle, he
felt in his bones, was as good as over. All around him men shouted, swinging
blades in strong arcs. Clatter and shriek. Hoofbeat and shout.

A new sun erupted behind him, and a moment later a force like the hand
of a god threw him from his horse, landing him facedown on the trampled
ground. Surprised shouts and screams of pain came from all around him.

Mauritane sat up and looked back toward his camp. A column of flame
rose up from the top of the rise at the edge of the valley. Trees hundreds of
feet away were on fire. Smoke rose from the flattened grass on the slope. The
Seelie camp was gone. If he hadn't rushed into battle, he'd be dead now.

The Einswrath had come. The Shadows had failed. After so much effort,
so many turns, it seemed there was no escaping the inevitability of loss.

But at this point, Mauritane didn't care. He stood up, waved his sword
in the air, and screamed. "The Seelie Heart!" he rasped. "Onward to Elenth!"

Many of his soldiers rose along with him, rallying to the sound of his
voice. Not all of them, but perhaps enough.

Across the Unseelie, things began going wrong for Mab. In her rooms atop
the new City of Mab, reports went from bad to worse. The Annwni High
Council had rebelled against her, slaughtering her governor and proconsul.
They'd sent word to their troops to ally with the Seelie, and now they were
wreaking havoc across the entire front.

At the same time, every Arcadian in the Empire seemed to have risen up
as one. They were stealing horses, dismantling supply wagons, intercepting
orders. An entire company of the Fifth Battalion had defected to the Seelie:
Every one of them had been infected with Arcadianism.

Mab paced in her rooms. Hy Pezho would be back soon. He would
swiftly build more Einswrath, the lunatic. If only he didn't somehow manage
to wake Ein in the process.

Mab and Fin had a history together. Their relationship had ended on a
sour note.

Soon Hy Pezho would return. And Titania would finally kneel before her.
All the rest was just a momentary hiccup.

"Why?" only matters over the long term. In the moment,
"How?" will suffice.

-Master Jedron

e're Shadows," said Silverdun, stepping toward the flying man,
dagger in hand. "Who the hell are you?"

"The infamous Shadows! I should have known!" said the man. He bowed in
the air. "And I am Hy Pezho. The Black Artist. I'd be hurt that you didn't recognize me, but I'm a bit changed of late. I suppose now you are my nemeses."

"We're here to stop you building the Einswrath," said Silverdun. "We're
here to end it."

"Hm," said Hy Pezho. "That's interesting."

"Is it?" said Silverdun.

He cocked his head to the side. "No, I was just wondering: How are you
standing on the floor? It's solid iron."

"Not anymore," said Silverdun. "We've changed it. If that's why you're
in the air, you can come down."

Hy Pezho's face took on an expression of pure horror. "What do you
mean, you changed it? That's impossible!"

"We have our little secrets," said Silverdun. "Now come down from
there. You're outnumbered."

"Stop it!" shouted Hy Pezho. "Whatever you're doing, stop it at once!
Do you have any idea what you're doing?"

Silverdun looked at Ironfoot. This wasn't quite the reaction he'd have
expected from the Black Artist Hy Pezho.

Hy Pezho threw up his arms and illuminated the entire room with bright
white witchlight. "Look around you, you fools! Don't you know where you are?"

Silverdun looked. It took a moment for him to take in what he was
seeing. The space took up the entire interior of the castle save for the small
entryway through which they'd passed. It was empty except for a number of
massive platforms, made of iron, but already changing to cobalt under the
influence of Faella's spell. Each platform was the height of a man, and at least
forty feet long and twenty feet wide.

But it was what rested on the platforms that gave Silverdun pause.
Wrapped in bindings of iron were twelve giant bodies. They had the features
of the old Thule Fae, the true elves, their ears long and swept to elegant
points, their eyes large, their bodies tall and slender. They were all dressed
the same, only in different colors and with different insignia on their long
gowns. Six were male, six female.

Twelve figures in all.

"What is this place?" said Silverdun.

"You don't know?" shouted Hy Pezho. "You're meddling around in here
and you don't know where you are?"

"Well, we will if you tell us," said Silverdun.

"I should think it was obvious," said Hy Pezho. "You got here the same
way I did, I assume. Using a cynosure to direct a fold?"

"That's right," said Silverdun.

"A Chthonic artifact," said Hy Pezho. "Look around you; these are the
Chthonic gods. The bound gods."

"You're kidding," said Ironfoot.

"You're in Prythme," said Hy Pezho. "The place where the gods were
locked up millennia ago. And if you don't stop whatever it is you're doing,"
he said, pointing at the branches of gray that were even now spreading across
the bindings that held the figures down, "you're going to let them out."

Hy Pezho glared at them. "And trust me when I say that you don't want
that to happen."

"This is ludicrous," said Ironfoot. "Bound gods, Prythme. And I suppose
that you're actually Uvenchaud and you just came from slaying the last of the
dragons."

Hy Pezho gingerly landed on the ground. The silver armor flowed off of
him, its individual pieces retracting to allow him to simply step out of it. He
was dressed in a simple robe and was unarmed. The silver suit flitted up into
the air and disappeared in the shadows among the arches on the ceiling,
where Hy Pezho's witchlight did not penetrate.

"Trust me, this is all very real."

Faella and Sela stepped around the platform beyond which Silverdun and
Ironfoot were standing. Hy Pezho looked curiously at Faella. "You're doing
this, aren't you?" he asked. "The re coming from you. It's like that of the ...
hell, you're her."

"Who am I?" said Faella.

"You're the one with the Thirteenth Gift. Faella. You think that Mab
hasn't noticed you? You burn in Faerie like a bonfire in the night."

"I'm flattered," said Faella.

"Mab launched her invasion for two reasons," said Hy Pezho. "One was
to grind Titania under her heel. The other was to kill you."

"And why do I merit such undue favor from your empress?" said Faella.

"Because you're capable of doing incredibly stupid things like what
you're doing right now," said Hy Pezho. "If you don't stop and turn those
bonds back into iron, we're all dead. Maybe worse than dead."

"Explain to me what this place is, and perhaps I shall."

Hy Pezho looked up at the platform next to them, which was growing
more and more gray by the second, and sighed. For some reason the branches
seemed to have a harder time crawling up the platforms. Were they somehow
reinforced?

"It was during the Rauane Envedun-e," said Hy Pezho, "the era during
which the vast majority of the most ridiculous and dangerous things in Fae
history took place." He looked up again, licking his lips. "The Chthonic
faithful had been around already for a thousand years, happily worshipping
their twelve gods. Worshipping them with an astonishing fervency, in fact.

"Now, at the time, these gods didn't actually exist. They were the prehistoric Thule beliefs, inventions of superstitious natives to explain the rising
of the sun and the fortunes of war. One sees such things in many worlds.

"But Faerie, of course, is not like other worlds. And during the Rauane, there was more free re than at any time before or since. Magic was everywhere,
capable of just about anything. So the worshippers of the Thule gods inadvertently performed a staggering feat of thaumaturgy, perhaps the greatest
ever accomplished.

"They channeled all of their vast essence into their faith, into their
devout worship. They prayed for so hard and so long that they actually worshipped their gods into existence. "

"You're saying they created gods on the spot," said Silverdun.

Hy Pezho looked up at the ever-graying bonds and glared at Silverdun.

"Not just that. They did such an incredible job of manifesting them that
the gods actually became what the faithful believed them to be. They truly
were responsible for the rising sun, and the fortunes of war, and for who fell
in love with whom. The believers wished their gods into existence from the
beginning of time, so that they not only existed, but always had. They created immortal gods out of whole cloth."

"That seems a bit far-fetched," said Ironfoot.

"This was the generation of Fae who turned the rain to wine when they
were too drunk to stand up for another bottle," said Hy Pezho. "They turned
the sky orange for fun, drafted sea monsters from their imagination on a
whim. One of them taught an entire forest of trees to talk as a practical joke.
There was nothing they couldn't do."

"How did the gods end up here?" asked Sela, looking strangely sad.

"Well," said Hy Pezho, and now he was talking through clenched teeth,
his anxiety growing by the moment. "It turned out that having their gods
among them was far less fun than the original Chthonics had imagined it
would be. The gods were created to be in charge, so they took charge. They
were created to judge, and they judged. They had been set above the Fae, and
they took to their assigned parts with relish.

"Unfortunately for them, however, not all of the Fae were believers. They
did not care to be judged by gods that they, themselves, did not believe in.
So a very large and powerful coterie of wizards crafted a very large and powerful binding, and went to war against them. There was a great battle, the
gods lost, and the wizards locked them up down here for eternity."

"And that was that," said Silverdun.

"Not exactly," said Hy Pezho. "The Chthonics continued to worship
their gods. They worshipped them even though they were powerless, trapped
in this otherworldly prison. At the end of the Rauane one of their cleverest
thaumaturges constructed the cynosures, whose sole purpose is to direct the
faith of the Chthonic worshippers here, into Prythme."

"To keep them alive," said Sela.

"To keep them alive and to one day free them," said Hy Pezho. "These
bodies are massive storehouses of pure undifferentiated re. Growing more full
with every passing Chthonic service. Someday they would have been strong
enough to break their bonds, I suppose, though it would have been long after
we were dead. Of course, you've moved up their timetable quite a bit."

"So the power source for the Einswrath," said Ironfoot. "It comes from
them."

"Each bomb contains a single drop of Ein's blood," said Hy Pezho.
"That's him up there, by the way. Ein, I mean." Hy Pezho pointed up at the
platform where he had minutes before been floating. "I was drilling out a few
drops when you showed up."