Shadowheart (60 page)

Ferras Vansen could no longer even guess at what day it was. Time itself had been smeared into a succession of hours with very little difference between them. They might have as many as three days before Midsummer’s Eve, but Vansen had no precise idea and was far too busy fighting for his life to find out.

The Metamorphic Brothers’ temple was only a distant memory now, far behind them and far above them: the autarch’s superior force had driven them downward along the twisting passages between Five Arches and the Cavern of Winds, then out of that vast cavern and all the way down to the beginning of the dark Maze, the place where the Funderlings took their initiates.

Vansen’s troops had slowed the autarch’s progress considerably, but they continued to pay a high price for their resistance: the Funderlings had numbered less than two thousand at their greatest strength, when they had first entered the tunnels near Five Arches, but now they were less than a thousand and had stacked their dead three and four deep in the side tunnels as they gave ground—too many bodies to give any of them more than a cursory death-blessing before leaving them behind.

It was the grimmest struggle Vansen had ever seen, his undersized defenders hungry, exhausted, slippery with sweat, and forced to fight for hours beside the unburied bodies of their friends and kin. But what made it worst of all was the knowledge that their ending was already assured. This defense, however heroic, could only end in death for all of them, and what followed might even be worse for the survivors they would leave behind—their families and their neighbors.

Exhausted though he was, Ferras Vansen was finding it nearly impossible to sleep. The war was always on his mind, and he stayed awake long past his comrades trying to puzzle out impossible chances because he already knew that none of the possible chances would allow them to survive. When he did manage to fall into a shallow, uneasy slumber, he would be startled awake again by the feeling that all the stones in the world were tumbling down on top of him.

He was near the bottom, and the bottom was growing closer by the hour.

 

“Gods, but your men have fought well, Magister,” he told Cinnabar. “I do not mean to sound surprised—I expected no less—but I am even more impressed by their bravery since you have no tradition of war.”

“War isn’t the only forge of bravery.” Cinnabar reached over and ran his hand through his son’s hair, but the boy didn’t look up. Young Calomel had been kept out of the worst of the fighting but had still seen more than any child his age should have to see. He had gone from being the mascot and delight of the makeshift army to only another silent, weary, terrified young Funderling whose stare made Vansen’s heart ache. “But make no mistake, Vansen, we Funderlings were warriors once upon a time.”

“I have never heard it.”

“Then you have never studied the history of Eion, sir.” Cinnabar spoke sharply, but Vansen thought it was more from fatigue than any real animosity. “We fought in the greatest war of all, just to name one—against our own kin, the Qar.”

“The Godwar?”

“Yes, but we fought in the wars of men, too. We were miners and sappers in all the great empires, Hierosol and the Kracian States and Syan and even here, in Anglin’s day. Who do you think secured these caverns again after the Qar invaded? That was Funderling work and almost as bloody as this. Say what you will against the Qar but they are fierce, fierce fighters—thousands of our folk died taking these caverns and tunnels back. We called that time the ‘Kinwar,’ and we still have an expression, ‘Lonely as a Kinwar maid,’ because there were so few men to be husbands.” He shook his head sadly. “If our people survive this, there will be far too many widows and unmarried girls again in the years ahead.”

“If only the Qar had stood with us.” That betrayal troubled him far more than any of his own wounds. He had misjudged the Twilight People badly, and now the whole Funderling tribe was paying for Ferras Vansen’s stupidity. “I still can’t believe ...!”

“Don’t torture yourself, Captain.” Sledge Jasper looked up from his whetstone. The Funderling sharpened his knife so frequently that the blade was growing hard to see. “The Earth Elders have a plan for us—no mortal can claim to know as much as the gods.”

“But this time it’s the gods we must fight, or so it seemed from what the Qar told us.”

Cinnabar snorted. “Me, I take nothing the Qar say on trust, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever the truth, this southern king, this autarch ...
he
thinks he can free the gods, and he’s battering his way into our holiest of holies. That’s reason enough to stand our lives on the balance. That you fight alongside us, Captain Vansen, is more than anyone could ask. Don’t waste your strength on regrets.”

Vansen wished it were so easy, that he could command his feelings like soldiers; but that army was far less obedient than these brave Funderlings.

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

 

 

 

H
E AWAKENED SLOWLY, as if swimming up from Erivor’s pounding depths.

“Why do you hide from the battle, Barrick Eddon?” One of the Trickster Qar grinned down at him like a fox. “There is still much to do.”

“Yes,” said another smiling nightmare. “You should not sleep so late.”

But even as they taunted him, these long-limbed Tricksters—three of them, as far as he could see, in different downy shades of gray or brown and with angular faces like laughing demons out of the
Book of the Trigon
—had been clearing away the dirt and stones that had engulfed him when the wall of the cave collapsed. He could still hear the sounds of strenuous fighting outside the cavern, but at least the cannons had fallen silent. Barrick wanted very much to get out in the open before they began firing again.

As he staggered to his feet and began to knock the worst of the clumped dirt from his armor, the first Trickster handed him his sword, hilt-first. “Perhaps you would like to go out and stick some other sunlanders with that,” the creature suggested.

“Perhaps I would.” He examined the strong, slim Qar blade, which was scratched and dented in a few places but not too badly damaged. “And since you helped dig me out, perhaps you would like to keep me company while I do so.”

“It would be a pleasure, Barrick Eddon,” said the creature, its gray face shiny as ancient leather. “Oh, yes, we all know
your
name. I am Longscratch. These are Riddletongue and Blackspine, my quarterling cousins. We came here to kill sunlanders, but if it is now the southern sort we kill instead of your sort ... well, let it be so.”

The Qar had already made clear how they felt about his people; Barrick was undaunted. “Very well, then, you feathered bandits,” he said. “Show me what you can do.”

They dashed out of the cavern. The sun had mostly set, though a bit of it was still spread on the horizon like melted butter, and the sky had begun to show its first stars. It would be full dark soon, which would help the Qar, but even so, what chance could they have against the autarch’s vastly larger force?

Barrick was surprised to see that the cannons facing the hillside had been abandoned, but only when a flight of a dozen or so birds swept past him and the shrill voices of their riders floated to him on the wind did he begin to understand some of what had happened. Birds were swooping down without warning all over the near side of the beach and at the edge of the picket around the Xixian camp, but attacking only southerners. That was because little men were
riding
on the birds—Queen Upsteeplebat’s Rooftoppers, he realized. Thick leather and Mihanni plate didn’t protect the soldiers’ eyes and throats from the tiny darts the little men were firing at them. All around him, Xixians were running madly, hands clapped over their faces; many more lay unmoving on the sand, a-bristle with miniature arrows.

Barrick looked back to the cavern they had just quitted, but there was no sign of more troops coming. “Where is the queen?” he asked the Tricksters. “Where are the rest of our troops?”

“We are the end of the line,” Longscratch said. “Our army is all in the field.”

The flying Rooftoppers had only managed to drive the nearest Xixians back toward camp, but the attack from the air had given the rest of the Qar a chance to escape the hill caves without being blown to pieces by the autarch’s cannons. But the Xixians were hardened fighters and had discovered that, as astonishing as little men on birds might be, they were not impossible to fight; some of the southerners had grabbed burning brands from their campfires and swung them through the air like rippling banners of flame.

Longscratch and his cousins finished scavenging up loose arrows, stuffing as many as they could find into their quivers, which, other than their arm-shields, seemed the only thing they wore.

“We must find Saqri and the others,” Barrick called. “Follow me!”

He sprinted across the sand and then leaped over the ring-pit the southerners had dug around their camp. Some of the wooden barricade still lay on the ground, smoldering. A great knot of men and horses were caught up in a whirlpool of battle a few hundred paces away along the broken fence. Hundreds more of the autarch’s men were running across the camp to join the struggle, some of them covering their heads with tent cloth against the claws and arrows of the bird-men. The Xixians were clearly beginning to regroup.

Barrick and the three Tricksters reached the rest of the Qar, who were trying to hold their newly won position against an ever-widening force of Xixian soldiers, but every time a southerner fell, another stepped up into his place. The rest of the autarch’s troops, just arriving from the farther parts of the camp, were organizing themselves for a counterattack; in moments they would swoop down and wipe the few hundred Qar away like a storm wind threshing sea foam to oblivion.

Barrick could not pause to think about the worsening odds. The fighting was all around him now, spears leaping out at him like striking serpents, the bearded Xixians yelping and growling like dogs around a midden. His Qar armor was so light he hardly felt as if he was wearing it, but it was becoming cruelly hard work simply to stay alive on the ground, and now even more enemies were rushing toward them, many of them mounted. As if awakened by all this chaos, the Fireflower voices were threatening to overwhelm his thoughts.

Moments Barrick Eddon had never himself experienced washed over him and he found himself slowing, stunned by so many new ideas. A Xixian spear slipped past his shield and dug into the joint between his sword arm and the shoulder of his armor. He stumbled and almost dropped his blade as a line of fire burned across his skin and sinew. One of the Tricksters—the darkest one, Riddletongue—jumped forward into the breach and caught a second Xixian stab on his arm-shield, little more than a padded tube of bone too large to come from any creature Barrick knew. The Trickster then jabbed at the attacker with his own spear, an ivory-white needle only a few handspans longer than a sword.

Rasha
, something in his memories whispered.
The tooth.

The Trickster flung his arm up and let another attack scrape off his arm-shield.
Omuro-nah,
the Fireflower voices murmured.
The bone.

Rasha-sha, omuro-nah, rasha-sha, omuro-nah!
chanted ghosts from a hundred different battlefields in a hundred different centuries.
Tooth and bone, tooth and bone!
They had sung it in victory many times, but they had sung it even more frequently as their allies had died beside them and as they themselves had formed the ring in which they would postpone defeat as long as possible.

Barrick scrambled forward to fight beside these anciently familiar yet barely known allies, trying to remember all that Shaso had taught him. Each moment that unfolded was so full of sharp blades and screaming faces that for a while even the singing of the Fireflower rolled off him, as unremarked as a light rain.

 

He stopped at last to rest, lungs burning, sweat stinging his eyes, dozens of small and large cuts stinging him too. He was amazed by his own strength and stamina; even the Tricksters could not keep up with him.

They woke your blood
, a voice sighed in words he could just separate from the din around him.

Ynnir? Speak to me!
Dizzily, he looked around. The southerners were giving ground, but Xixian arrows still fell all around him, appearing suddenly and quivering in the churned ground of the city’s bayside commons like some odd crop.
They are so many, Lord! What can I do to help Saqri?

You can make haste
, the voice told him.
Midsummer comes with the morning. If the southern king can keep you here until tomorrow, he has won—he has already nearly reached his prize.

Tell my sister-wife that you and the rest of the People have served your purpose here. You must find a way down into the depths before it is too late ... too late ...!
The king’s voice, already faint, trailed into silence.

Barrick could not find Saqri. The sun had set behind the hills, but that was not the reason. He could see much better than he should have been able to, so that the night seemed no darker than late afternoon. Catlike, his eyes made use of light he had never noticed before, light which gave edges and colors to things that ordinarily would have been obscure and gray. And his muscles and sinews seemed already to have recovered enough to begin fighting again. It was as though the power and experience of all the kings inside him were plaited like the fibers of a rope, strengthening all that he was, making him a newer, stronger thing.