Shadowheart (42 page)

Ash Nitre was the younger brother of Sulphur, the temple’s most ancient monk, but that certainly didn’t make him young: Chert thought he looked a bit like one of those dessicated frogs sometimes found in a pocket of metamorphic stone. Brother Ash’s mind seemed lively, though, and his movements were, if not graceful, at least purposeful. This was important because he was in charge of an operation that would kill scores of Funderlings if it went wrong.

“I don’t understand you, boy,” Nitre said—the first time Chert had been called that in as long as he could remember. The monk wore eye shields of thick mica crystal—his eyes seemed big as silver coins. “What do you want with more blasting powder?” He gestured to the open area behind him where at least a dozen temple brothers were busily engaged. “I’ve already got my workers making as much as they can for bombards. . . .”

“But we need more.”

“How much?” Nitre asked.

Chert had made calculations, but he did not trust them very far. The problem was, blasting powder had never quite been used this way, so it was very hard to guess how much was necessary. Chert would have liked Chaven’s help—the physician knew a lot about many different things—but he was hard to find these days: Chert assumed he was busy helping Captain Vansen.

“Well, Blue Quartz? I do have work to do, you know.” Nitre and the temple brothers he employed were in charge of the dangerous task of crafting the blasting powder in careful allotments, because it was dangerous to store—too dry and any spark might set it off, too damp and all the labor of mining the materials and making the deadly black powder had been ruined. Already, with the need to store large quantities to make into weapons, the Funderlings had moved into unknown territory. They were about to move farther in that direction.

“Perhaps . . . two hundred barrels?”

Nitre’s eyes went so wide behind the eye shields that his lids and lashes disappeared. “Two
hundred
? Did you say ‘two hundred’? Are you mad? I am laboring to produce half that much—you cannot simply shovel these powders together, you know! Have you ever seen a rocket like the ones the upgrounders shoot into the sky during the Zosimia festivals? Imagine something hundreds of times that strong, in our confined spaces down here. . . .”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Chert took a deep breath and produced Cinnabar’s letter with the imprint of the Astion prominently displayed. “Nevertheless, I need as much as you can make for me, as quickly as you can make it.”

“Ridiculous. Sorry, Blue Quartz, but it simply can’t be done. You tell the Guild they would have to send me another two dozen workers just to sift powders. And I know, because of my own requests that they cannot do that—they do not have even a man to spare.”

Chert sat for a long moment in silence. It had been a very strange idea in the first place, a last-ditch sort of thing. He could not expect to pull workers away from making powder for the fighting, especially when the situation seemed to be growing more desperate by the hour. As the monk had said, there simply weren’t enough workers.

“I have a question, Brother Nitre,” Chert suddenly said. “Is there any reason blasting powder has to be made by men . . . ?”

“I fear this decision,” said Cinnabar Quicksilver. “No matter what we do, something will be broken beyond mending.”

Brother Nickel made an unhappy noise, a cross between a sniff and a grunt. He had been summoned from the temple, which had not pleased him, but the discovery of what was being decided pleased him even less. “Seems to me,” he said now, “that we Metamorphic Brothers have already seen our lives and peace broken beyond mending, and we have not complained.”

“By the Elders, Nickel, you have done nothing
but
complain,” said Malachite Copper. “And now that the decision is on us you want to complain again before you have even heard it!”

“Peace, you two,” said Cinnabar. “You are not making this any easier. Chaven, you have said almost nothing the whole time we have discussed this. Have you nothing to offer?”

The physician blew out air. “I wish I did, Magister Quicksilver. Either way, we will all do what we must.”

Cinnabar clapped his hands. “Then as the bearer of the Astion, speaking on behalf of our sovereign Stonecutter’s Guild, I feel we have no choice—we have to fight them and fight them now. We must try to keep them from the Mysteries.

“I know that the odds are terrible—if I were a wagering man, I would feel a fool to put a single copper chip on our chances. But everything we have heard says that the autarch has a fascination with our sacred depths, and priests and wizards with him who have filled his head with ideas about gods and black magic. We cannot take the chance there is truth to their ideas. And, more than anything else, we cannot give up our holiest places without a fight. The Elders in their stony beds would curse and condemn us, and who could blame them?

“No, we must resist them as best we can. We are only a thousand, perhaps two with the men still coming, but we will have the Qar beside us—I think you have all seen their mettle.” He lowered his head for a moment, picked up the Astion and stared at it, then tucked it back into his shirt. “We defend the Mysteries. That is my decision.”

“So the temple is to be abandoned . . . ?” said Brother Nickel, but he sounded more resigned than angry.

“We will leave some token force,” Cinnabar told him. “But if the autarch behaves as the Qar say he will, he’ll show little interest in the temple or even in Funderling Town.”

“This underground invasion is not meant to deliver the castle,” said Vansen. “We can see now that it’s the thing Sulepis came here to do. He broke great Hierosol in a matter of weeks. I find it hard to believe he could not do the same with Southmarch itself, at which point everything beneath it would be his as well, and he could starve us all out. So there is clearly some hurry to what he does, as Yasammez and the Qar suggested, something which drives him swiftly forward when there might be easier ways to reach his goal.”

Copper turned to Vansen. “Why aren’t the Qar here at this council, Captain?”

“I can’t tell you.” Vansen stood. “The Qar—as always, I suspect—will come in their own time. What is important is that we now have Magister Cinnabar’s decision. If you’ll pardon me, I have much to do and time is short—the southerners will be moving again soon.” He turned to the others. “We will meet here after the hour of the evening meal. May the gods protect us and protect Southmarch. And Funderling Town,” he added quickly.

“We will certainly need help from somewhere,” said Chaven.

“The Qar must come,” Vansen said quietly, almost to himself. “We will fail without them.”

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

 

 

 

T
HE BOAT LIFTED AND SAGGED on the waves of Brenn’s Bay, and the silhouette of the castle grew ever larger against the moon.

Barrick’s vision seemed much sharper than he remembered, even from the previous night. The very stones of the castle’s seawalls seemed to glow; not with light but with intensity of color and detail he could see even in the evening dark from hundreds of ells away. And as his eyes moved across every crack in every stone he could feel the history of the place breathing out at him from the depths, amazing true tales of the gods and their servants that sprang from his deepest memory as if they had grown there in the dark like mushrooms.

Ancient stories told that Hiliometes himself had entered here once, tasked by Mesiya the moon goddess to steal the golden hawk that watched over her and kept her a virtual prisoner of her husband Kernios. And in an earlier day, before mortals had even come to the land, Erivor had fought the monstrous serpent-bull Androphagas here and stabbed it to the heart with his barbed spear. Some claimed that the body of Androphagas had become Midlan’s Mount, but the Elementals declared that the Mount had been here always.

The Last Hour of the Ancestor, as the Qar called Southmarch, was a place that only a few of the Twilight folk had visited in recent centuries, but it was old and strong in their lore. Their knowledge of it—as well as their fear of it, and their fierce, painful longing for it—enfolded everything Barrick saw like a heavy mist, but with Ynnir’s largely silent help, he was learning ways to live with it. Back in Qul-na-Qar he had stopped thinking almost entirely so that he could cope with the strangeness of these new memories; now Barrick Eddon was beginning to take his first cautious steps toward letting the Fireflower become a true part of him.

As he stared at the shadowy walls and the jumbled granite boulders of the shoreline, wondering how they would enter a castle under siege, Barrick suddenly realized where they were going—it all but bloomed in his head. “The Sea Postern,” he said out loud.

Saqri turned to look at him and then returned her serene gaze to the water. The moonlight behind her made her look as still as a painted wooden figurehead.

The walls now loomed high above them. Rafe carefully began to bring the pitching boat in close to the boulders of the breakfront, which were stacked in haphazard piles like the telling-stones of giants. As the side of the boat scraped on granite, Rafe reached out one long arm and found something beneath the water, then tied his boat to it. A moment later he had clambered up onto the piled rocks, a dim, tall shape that began to turn into stories of the entire Skimmer race if Barrick stared too long and too incautiously. Rafe climbed a short distance and then grabbed a wide, irregular chunk of stone that looked a little like a juggler’s tenpin, bigger near the water than at the top, bottom hidden in the splashing waves. The young Skimmer reached around behind it and popped something loose—a hidden latch that protected it against being moved by tides and storms.

“Hold tight, all you,” Rafe said. “ ’Be a splash.”

He swung his weight against it, and the stone began to tip downward. Barrick knew what was going to happen but it was still astonishing to see. The stone toppled slowly toward the water, but with the slow precision of one of the bronze Funderlings on the great Market Square clock swinging his bronze hammer. The stone itself was only the visible half; a stone counterweight of almost exactly the same weight lay underneath the water on the other end of the ancient lever, so that a single strong man or woman could open the Sea Postern if they only knew where the latch was hidden.

The stone tipped down into the bay heavily enough to make the boat bob like a curl of bark. Rafe made his way back to his craft, untied it, and steered it through the opening. Before they had drifted more than a few yards past the opening the young Skimmer tied the boat up again, then caught a rope that hung down from the darkness above and swung easily onto a stone in the middle of the narrow watercourse. His weight on it pushed it beneath the water, which brought the other stone back up to cover the entrance, and suddenly all light was gone but for a tiny gleam trickling down from above. Other than the black watercourse beneath them, they were entirely surrounded by stone.

Rafe got back into the boat and lit and hung a lantern in the bow, then used one of his oars as a pole to move them through the narrow crevice. Barrick felt completely encased, as though the stone that surrounded him were the body of a living thing, a sleeping ogre or dragon.

But Southmarch
was
a living thing, he realized for the first time. It was not the Qar voices that told him so, because to Fireflower phantoms everything in the world was as alive or dead as everything else—being “dead” or “alive” was, they seemed to feel, a largely meaningless distinction. Barrick didn’t know why he suddenly knew it, too, or why it seemed so significant, but Southmarch was indeed alive, and in a way that almost nothing else was. It was alive because it was full of doorways, and it was full of doorways because it was curiously, even uniquely alive. The gods, the Qar, even the late-coming humans, had not
made
this place the heart of so many happenings. They had all come here because the place itself was as vital as a beating heart.