Shadowrise

15. The Soiled Dove

Feival, dressed in his new popinjay finest, was waving his hands behind the prince’s head, urgently trying to signal something to her.

He’s reminding me to get back to work, Briony realized. “Tell me again of how you led your men back from the south,” she asked Prince Eneas.

“Yes, tell us again!” begged her friend Ivgenia.

“Surely you are bored with that story, ladies.” To his credit, the king’s son looked uncomfortable. “I have told it to you each time I have visited. The ending will still be the same if I tell it again.”

“But it is such a good ending, Highness.” Ivvie clearly would have been happy to listen to Eneas talk about anything, even in a language she didn’t understand.

“But so many stories of fighting!” he protested. “Surely highborn ladies like yourselves would prefer more wholesome tales.”

“Not me,” said Briony with something near to real pride. “I was raised with brothers and trained to fight by Shaso of Tuan, as you may remember.”

Eneas smiled. “I do, and I pray that one day you will let me question you about his tactics and methods of teaching. I envy you such a splendid, famous instructor.”

“Such excellent schooling was wasted on me, I fear. I was never allowed to practice my fighting skills with any men save my brother, and for all my life Southmarch did not taste war, at least not on our soil.”

“But that is no longer true, Princess—the men of Southmarch have just fought several battles against the fairies.”

“Battles that did not end well.” She allowed a hitch into her voice—it was not entirely manufactured. “Battles that took our finest men… and separated my beloved brother from me as well… perhaps forever.” She smiled bravely. “So it is good to hear of happier results, like yours. It gives me hope. Please, Prince Eneas, tell your tale again.”

Still standing behind the prince, Feival vigorously signaled approval: he himself had taught her that brave, tragic smile.

Eneas laughed and gave in with good grace. He was easy to like, this prince: almost any other man would have been only too happy to blow his own fanfare and rehearse his glorious deeds for Briony, her ladies, and Ivgenia. Gailon Tolly, the duke of Summerfield, although he had turned out a better man than Briony had thought him (at least by comparison with his murderous brother) had always been far too willing to speak at length about his own adventures hunting or riding, making it sound as though every ditch he jumped had been a triumph over Kernios the Soul-Taker .

“Our army crossed the border and stopped at the outermost of the Hierosoline garrisons,” the prince said. “Our commander, Marquis Risto of Omaranth, had been sent not so much to fight on Hierosol’s behalf as to see the lay of things and send back a recommendation to my father—that is why father had sent Risto, a shrewd, careful man. But nobody guessed that the autarch would strike so swiftly or with such numbers. At the same time as he brought a great force from the sea and launched his assault on the walls of Hierosol itself, the autarch also sent a second, smaller armada up the Kulloan Strait by night with oars muffled and sails furled. They had been led through the most dangerous part of the rocky strait by a traitor from Hierosol—a sea pilot who betrayed his country for gold.” Eneas shook his head, genuinely puzzled. “How could a man do such a thing?”

“It is impossible to understand,” said Ivvie, nodding vigorously.

“Impossible,” echoed Feival, who was prone to be a little more involved in conversations than was proper for a secretary. “Disgusting!”

“Not all people feel as strongly attached to their countries as you and I do,” Briony told the prince kindly. “Perhaps because their positions in those countries are not so secure and privileged as ours.”

“Or perhaps they are just inclined to treachery by birth or blood,” Ivvie countered. “There are peasants on my father’s land who not only poach from our forests, they withhold taxes and lie to the reeve when the counting-out season comes, claiming they have more children than they do, or less land, anything to avoid paying my father what they owe.”

Some of the other ladies made noises of polite agreement. They shared a general dislike of the people who dug the soil and harvested the crops, although, like their menfolk, they often spoke about them in a way that Briony found sentimental and false. She did not claim to know the life of a peasant herself, but she had experienced enough nights in cold barns or open fields while traveling with the players that she couldn’t believe anyone would choose that life for the pastoral joy of it. Also, Briony had seen enough of the machineries of justice and taxes to know that the ills were by no means all on the side of treacherous peasants.

Still, it would do no good to start an argument: the people in this court already thought of her as odd, and it might also poison the prince’s mood at a time when she was doing her best to make him like her.

Feival was glaring at her again, and she realized that her wandering thoughts had taken her away from Eneas describing how the Xixian invasion had caught the Syannese troops by surprise, forcing them to take refuge in a Hierosolian fortress.

“But if Marquis Risto and the others were under siege, how did you discover their plight?” she asked. “You must have told me, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.” She hadn’t, of course, but there was nothing wrong with applying a thin layer of helplessness to her appeal—not overdoing it, as she might have when playing the Miller’s Daughter in a farce like A Country Priest’s Tale, but giving it enough push that Eneas might think of her as a needy younger sister, someone whose interests wanted protecting.

“Because he was on a mission from my father, Risto was carrying pigeons to send messages back to Tessis. He had brought the last set from our frontier fort at Drymusa, and it was just good luck I had seen him there when he passed through. I decided to wait another fortnight with my men before leaving because I was curious to hear his report about the state of things in Hierosol.”

“How clever of you, Highness,” Ivgenia said.

Eneas gave her a look of gentle reproof. “It was luck, my lady, as I said. I had no idea that Risto would walk into a siege. Xis has threatened Hierosol for years, but none of us truly believed it was more than bluff, since it was easier for the Xixian autarchs to snatch prizes among the rich islands on the southern coast. In any case, word came, and I was there with a company of battle-ready men. Good fortune, as I said, was on our side.”

“A blessing from the gods,” murmured Briony.

Eneas nodded. He was known to be devout, and had quietly gifted several temples while his younger siblings were spending their own money on the pleasures of earthly existence. “Yes, a blessing indeed. Are you sure you wish to hear this all again?”

“Please,” Briony told him. “We get so little firsthand news.”

He gave her a wry look. “But I hear you have been out getting a good look at the world, both on your way here and since you have arrived, Princess Briony.”

For a moment she was nonplussed, until she realized he must be referring to her trip out of the palace with Ivgenia. But why would something like that interest Eneas? Unless he was just interested in Briony in a general way, and had been asking about her… She couldn’t afford to be too sure of herself, though: he might be interested in Ivgenia, after all—she was a pretty, vivacious young girl with a good family bloodline.

“I have found trouble for myself in all kinds of places, Prince Eneas,” she told him, ignoring Feival’s smirk. “I obviously require better advisers to keep me from mischief. I hope you will feel free to lend me your wisdom.”

He smiled. “I would consider it an honor, Princess. But from what I hear you have done well and bravely on your own.”

He really was quite handsome—there were no two ways about it. Briony was of several different minds about all of this. On the one hand, she felt like a traitor—a real one, not just one of Ivgenia’s father’s tenants trying to withhold a half-basket of barley to get through the winter. After all, she intended to use this man, not for his good or his country’s, but for her own family’s—to make up, in part, for her own failures. But there were several problems with such a plan. One was that Eneas might well be too clever to be manipulated, in which case she might alienate someone who could otherwise have become a true ally here at court. Second, the prince was not the kind of man of whom she could happily take advantage. By all accounts except his own (which tended toward modesty) Eneas was kind, intelligent, and extremely brave. He loved his father but was not blind to his own country’s failings. He was also fiercely loyal to his friends, as everyone assured her. How could she set out to use her so-called womanly wiles to get her way—the very methods she had long despised when used by her stepmother Anissa or the other ladies of the Southmarch court?

But the need is great because the cause is so important, she told herself. The lives of my people. My father’s throne.

Yes, and revenge against the Tollys, a sly little voice reminded her. Do not pretend you do not wish that as well. Not a noble motive, but one close to her heart. Hendon Tolly had taken almost everything from her. He and his brother Caradon deserved to die, preferably after much suffering and humiliation. Hendon had not just stolen her family’s throne, he had made Briony feel helpless and weak, and for that alone she wanted him dead. Sometimes she felt as though she would never be strong again until Hendon had been punished for that crime.

“Princess?”

She lifted a hand to her mouth, embarrassed. How long had she been woolgathering? She dared not even look toward Feival, who must be beside himself. “I’m sorry, I…” Might as well use the chance when it was there. “I suddenly remembered… a painful thing…”

“It is my fault.” He looked as though he believed it. “I should not have teased about your trip to the Flower Meadow market—that was cruel and thoughtless. I forgot utterly that was the day your young servant died. My deepest apologies, Princess.”

Was that what they had been talking about—the market? She had entirely lost the thread. The simple thought of Hendon Tolly grinning that fox’s grin of his as he bragged about how he had stolen her throne… “No, no,” she said, recovering herself. “Not your fault, sir. Please, you hadn’t finished telling us about the siege.”

“Are you certain that you wish to hear my dry tale yet again?”

“It is not dry to me, Prince Eneas. It is like water to a parched throat. Go on.”

He continued as Briony and Ivgenia and the other women listened intently, and even Feival kept forgetting that he was supposed to pretend he was working. Whether they were all fascinated by the prince’s relief of the Hierosoline garrison and his escape back across the Syannese border with Marquis Risto and his men, or because Eneas was simply a fascinating man with an even more fascinating place in the world, the audience was no less rapt for it.

When he had finished his tale the prince stood and bowed and asked Briony’s permission to leave her—a bit of southern court etiquette that amused her, as though the very presence of a noblewoman was like the pull of a whirlpool on a hapless swimmer, a death grip from which only the maelstrom itself could set the unfortunate free.

And what if I said no? she wondered even as he kissed her hand and bowed to Ivgenia and the other ladies. What if I commanded him to stay? Would he have to do it? What nonsense etiquette was! Something that had no doubt begun as a way to keep men from raping and killing, at least for short periods of time, had taken on such force that it could sometimes cause the most ridiculous confusions.

Ivgenia quickly broke the silence after Eneas had gone. “He seems to care for you, Princess Briony. That is the third time he has come to see you this week!”

“I am an entertaining oddity,” she said, waving the idea away. “A princess who has traveled in disguise. I am like something in a story for children.” She laughed. “I suppose I should be grateful I am not the subject of a more dreadful tale, a child abandoned in the woods or one who is mistreated by a cruel stepmother.” Her own laugh ended quickly. Neither of those things were far from the truth.

“You make too much protest,” Ivgenia said. “Doesn’t she, ladies? ” The others, maids and ladies-in-waiting, nodded their heads. “He has true affection for you, Highness. Perhaps it might become something more if you were not so stubborn!”

“Stubborn?” She had thought she was doing everything but throwing herself into Eneas’ arms to keep his attention and good will. “How have I been stubborn?”

“You know perfectly well,” her friend said. “You do not mix with the other folk at court except at meals. They think you too proud. Some say it is only that you have been so harshly treated, but others say… you must forgive me, Briony, but I will tell you the truth for your own sake… but others say that you think yourself better than the folk of the court.”

“Better!” She was astounded. That the people of this grand, decadent court should think her too proud—it beggared her imagination. “I think myself better than no one, least of all these fine lords and ladies. I do not mingle because I have lost the art, not because I despise the company.”

“There!” said Ivgenia triumphantly. “It is as I have told others—you feel out of place, but not above things. But truly, Briony, you must spend more time among the nobles here. They fall easily into gossip and Jenkin Crowel does you no favors in your absence.”

The name of Tolly’s envoy was like a splash of icy water. She had avoided the man for days and he had seemed to do the same with her.

“Ah, yes… you are no doubt right. Thank you for your concern, Ivvie, but I’m tired now and I’d like to lie down.”

“Oh, my dear Briony!” Ivgenia looked miserable. “Have I offended you, Princess?”

“Not at all, kitten—I’m just tired, as I said. Ladies, you too may withdraw. Feival, stay for a moment so I can discuss some business with you.”

When the others were gone, or at least discreetly out of hearing, she turned on the player. “Crowel does me no favors? What does she mean?”

Feival Ulian frowned. “You must know, Briony. He is the right hand of your enemy. What do you think he does? He works against you whenever he can.”

“How?” Anger flooded her—anger and fear. Tessis was not her home. Briony was surrounded by strangers and some people clearly wanted her dead. She threw down her needlework—a clumsy, irritating affectation for her at the best of times. “What is he doing?”

“I have not heard any reliable news of his actual works.” Feival had turned away and was admiring himself in a mirror hung on the wall, a habit of his that maddened Briony, especially when she was talking to him about serious things. “But he speaks against you—carefully, and never in general company, of course. He says a quiet word here, drops an offhand hint there… you know how it is done.”

She did her best to bank the flame of rage: it would do her no good to let it overwhelm her. “And what slanders does Jenkin Crowel spread?” She had grown heartily sick of looking at Feival’s back. “By Zosim’s masks, man, turn around and talk to me!”

He faced her, surprised and perhaps even a little angry. “He says many things, or at least so I hear—he is not such a fool as to speak lies about you to me!” Feival scowled like a sulking child. “Many of them are just small insults—that you are mannish, that you like to go about in men’s clothing, and not simply for disguise, that you are sour-tempered and a shrew…”

“More true than not, so far,” Briony said with a grim smile.

“But the ugliest thing he will not say directly, but simply hint. He lets slip that at first everyone thought the southerner Shasto had kidnapped you…”

“Shaso. His name was Shaso.”

“… but that now folk in Southmarch believe you were not taken against your will. That it was part of a plan you made to seize your father’s throne, and that only Hendon Tolly being there prevented the two of you from carrying it off.” He flushed a little. “That is the worst of it, I suppose.”

“The two of us? My brother Barrick and I?”

“No. In the hints he lets drop, your twin brother was a victim too, sent away by you to die fighting the fairies. Your accomplice, claims Crowel, was that very southern general Shast… Shaso—the man who killed your other brother. And that he was… more than an accomplice…”

Briony’s rage was so sudden and so powerful that for a moment blackness rushed into her head and she thought she was dying. “He dares to say that? That I…” Her mouth seemed full of poison—she wanted to spit. “His master Hendon did kill his own brother—surely that is what he is thinking of! He is telling people that Shaso and I were lovers? ” She lurched to her feet. It was all she could do not to snatch up her sewing and run out to stick a needle in Jenkin Crowel’s eye. “The infamous… pig! It is bad enough that he should insult that good old man who died trying to get me to safety, but to suggest that I would… that I would harm my own beloved brothers! ” She was weeping now and could barely catch her breath. “How can he tell such lies about me? And how can anyone believe them?”

“Briony—Princess, please, calm yourself!” The player looked almost terrified by what he had unleashed.

“What does Finn say? What are people saying on the street, in the taverns?”

“It is scarcely discussed outside of court,” he told her. “The Tollys are not particularly popular here, but it likely makes people wonder. Still, the king is popular and you are his guest. Most Syannese leave it to him to know what’s best.”

“But not here in the court, I take it.”

Feival was trying to calm her now. “Most people in the court do not know you any better than do the drunken fools in the taverns. It is because you lock yourself away here like an anchorite.”

“So you are saying…” She paused to get her breath, to feel her heart slowing a little. “So you are saying that I should get out and mingle with the others in Broadhall Palace more often? That I should spend more time with folk like Jenkin Crowel, swapping insults and telling lies?”

Feival took a breath and straightened, the very picture of a man who had suffered unfairly. “For your own good, yes, Princess. You should make yourself seen. You should show people simply by your presence that you have nothing to hide. Thus you will refute Crowel’s lies.”

“Perhaps you are right.” The heated fury was receding, but what replaced it was something no less angry, only colder. “Yes, you are right. One way or the other, I must move to prevent the spreading of such terrible, terrible stories.

“And I will.”

The temple of Onir Plessos did not have enough beds for all the newcomers but the pilgrims were a sensible lot, happy enough just to find refuge from this year’s cold spring rains. The Master Templar told them they could spread their blankets in the common room after the evening meal.

“Will we not disturb your other guests, or the brothers?” asked the leader of the pilgrims, a heavyset fellow of obvious good nature for whom the conducting of religious seekers and penitents had become, after so many years, more a business than a religious calling. “You have always been generous to me, Master, and I would not wish to gain a bad name here.”

The Master Templar smiled. “You bring a respectable class of pilgrim, my good Theron. Without such travelers, our temple would be hard pressed to shelter and feed the truly needy.” He lowered his voice. “An example of the kind I like less well, do you see that fellow there? The cripple? He has stayed with us for several tennights.” He gestured toward a robed figure sitting in the sparse garden attended by a smaller figure, a boy of perhaps nine or ten summers. “I confess I had hoped that when the weather warmed he would move on—not only does he have a rank smell, he is strange and does not speak to us himself, but has the child speak for him… or at least pass along his words, which are usually full of doom and mystery.”

Theron looked interested. The lessened nature of his own faith, or at least of his zeal, had not made him any the less drawn to the strong faith of others—the reverse, if anything, since just such strong faith had now become his livelihood. “Perhaps he is an oracle, your cripple. Was not the blessed Zakkas unrecognized in his own lifetime?”

The Master Templar was not amused. “Do not seek to teach piety to a priest, Master Caravaner. This fellow does not talk of holy things, but of… well, it is hard to say without you hear him yourself—or hear what the child says for him.”

“I doubt we will have time,” said Theron shortly, smarting a little from the priest’s rebuke. “We must leave early tomorrow. There is at least one more snow coming to the Whitewood this year, and I would not be caught in it. The north has become strange enough these days without fighting the storms. I miss the warm springs we enjoyed here in Summerfield when the king was on his throne in Southmarch.”

“I miss many things about those days,” said the Master Templar, and on this safer ground the conversation continued for a while as the two men regained their old friendship.

The fire in the common room had burned low and most of the pilgrims had fallen asleep after a long, cold day’s walking. Theron was having a quiet conversation with his wagoneer when the holy man—or so Theron was already disposed to think of him—limped slowly into the room, leaning on a dirty, sullen, dark-skinned child. The boy helped him to sit down by the hearth, close to the embers, and then took a cup from the beggar’s hand and carried it off to fill it from the bucket.

Theron waved the wagoneer off to finish what he had to do before sleeping, then watched the frail holy man for a moment. It was hard to make out much of anything about him: his face was hidden by the long hood of his stained and tattered robe, his hands wrapped in dirty old bandages. The strange shape sat still as stone but for a faint trembling. As Theron stared at the beggar he felt not an apprehension of holiness but of sudden dread. It was not that the man himself seemed particularly threatening, but there was something about him that suddenly made Theron think of old stories—not those of holy pilgrims, but of unquiet spirits and dead men who cannot rest in their graves.

Theron ran his fingers through the swaying, clicking collection of religious ornaments around his neck, some he had gained himself on his travels as a younger man to various holy sites, others given to him as gifts (or sometimes as partial payment) by the pilgrims he conducted. His hand lingered for a moment on a wooden dove, one of his favorites and long-since polished to a deep sheen by handling. It had come from one of his earliest pilgrimages, to a famous Zorian shrine in Akaris, and he found it particularly soothing to think of the White Daughter when he was troubled.

Theron felt a presence at his shoulder and looked up. It was the Master Templar. Theron wondered at this, since it was not the older man’s habit to come down to the common room after evening prayers. “You do me an honor, Master,” he said. “Will you share a glass of wine with me?”

The master nodded. “I will. I wanted to ask you a question and you said you had to leave early in the morning.”

Theron was a little ashamed to be reminded of this, since he had said it in anger. He poured wine from his own jar into a cup and passed it to his friend. “Of course, Master. What can I tell you?”

“One of your travelers told me that King Olin’s daughter is in Tessis—that she has been found alive. Is it true?”

“It is, as far as I can say—she appeared just before we left, or so everyone said. It was the talk of Syan in our last days there.”

“And does anyone know what brings… what is her name? Buttercup? ”

“Briony. Princess Briony.”

“Of course—I shame myself. We do not hear much of doings at the court here and I grow forgetful in my age. Briony. Does anyone know why she is in Syan and what it means?”

Theron noticed that the hooded beggar near the fire had raised his head as if listening. He wondered if he should lower his voice, but then decided that was foolish: what he was saying was no secret, but news that would soon be on everyone’s lips. Still, it would not be a wise idea to name the Tollys here in their own dukedom. “Some claim she escaped from… her enemies… and fled Southmarch. Others say no, that she fled after she was thwarted in her own attempt to take the throne with the help of a southerner—a black soldier who was once Olin’s friend.”

The Master Templar shook his head in wonder. “It is like the old days—the bad days of the second Kellick, when there were spies and plots everywhere.”

“Do you remember that?” asked Theron, mildly surprised.

“Fool!” The Templar laughed. “A century and a half? Do I look so old?”

Theron laughed too, shamed by his own bad memory. The doings of kings and history had never been his strength. “My book learning is mostly forgotten…”

He was started by a figure at his shoulder and turned to find the hooded beggar looming there like the shadow of Death itself. For all that his back and legs seemed bent, he still stood as tall as Theron and must have been a powerful man once. The bandaged hands came up and a dry, scraping rustle issued from the darkness of the hood. Theron recoiled in fear, but for long moments the hooded man only stood silently.

“Where is the boy? ” asked the Templar irritably. “Ah, there. Boy, come here and tell us what your master wants.”

The boy, who had apparently been cadging food in the temple kitchen, duly appeared, still chewing on a lump of dough. Now that Theron looked at the child with more attention he noticed that not all the darkness of the black-haired boy’s face was because of dirt or sun, that he had somewhat the look of a southerner himself, a color of skin usually only seen on the waterfronts of Oscastle or Landers Port. Yes, Theron thought, that was it: he had the look of one of those street urchins who lived like a harbor rat, by his wits and quickness.

“What is the cripple saying?” the Master Templar demanded.

The boy put his head close to the hood. It was impossible to hear any of the beggar’s words above the crackling of the fire, but the boy stood up at last.

“He says that Death has turned loose of her for now.”

The master shook his head in irritation. “Loose of whom? The princess? Tell him to go and find his bed and not disturb the talk of his betters.” A moment later his expression changed. “No, that is unkind of me. The gods and oniri would not have us treat the afflicted so.”

The boy was leaning close to the dark hood again. “He says that he knows death—that he dwelt for a while in Death’s own house. But then he was let go again.”

“What? He is saying that he lived in the house of Kernios?” The Master Templar clearly did not like this blasphemous turn the conversation had taken.

The boy leaned close to the hooded figure again. “And he says that since Briony has escaped he must find her.”

“What nonsense!” said the house’s master. “Take this beggar out to the stable, boy. I will not send the poor fool out into the cold but he must find someplace else to sleep tonight where he will not plague our guests.” The priest waited, but although the boy apparently whispered these words to him the beggar did not respond. Theron was both interested and disturbed. “You are taking advantage of our charity,” the Templar chief warned. This still produced no movement. “Very well, I will get some of the brothers to help me escort him to sleep with the horses and donkeys,” he said, and strode briskly off across the common room.

The beggar was whispering to his young helper again.

“He wants to know if you are going north,” the boy said to Theron.

The leader of the pilgrimage was confused: why should the old cripple want to know such a thing? “We go north through Marrinswalk, yes. This pilgrimage began in Blueshore and that is where we are returning.”

The beggar pulled the boy toward him as if his next words could not wait.

“He wishes to go with you,” the child said when the murmuring had finished.

Theron rolled his eyes. “I mean no disrepect to one whom the gods have already burdened,” he said, “but the only members of our pilgrimage who walk are those who are young and fit—we travel fast. I have seen this man move. He could not keep up and we could not afford to wait for him.”

The boy looked at him in puzzlement, although Theron thought what he’d said made perfect sense. Then the young beggar turned to look at his hooded master, who suddenly reached out toward Theron with his bandaged hand. Theron started back, unnerved, then saw something glinting there on the dirty linen. A gold coin.

“He will pay you for a place on one of the horses,” the boy said after the hooded beggar had whispered to him.

“That… that is a dolphin!” said Theron, astonished. “An entire dolphin!” It was ten times as much as he had earned in fees from the whole of his caravan of pilgrims. The boy turned as the hooded one plucked at his sleeve, whispered to him again.

“He says to take it. The dead have no need of gold.”

She was lost in the forest, but not frightened—not too frightened, anyway. The trees swayed but she felt no wind. As she passed they bent toward her, reaching with brushy fingers, but never touched her. The world was night-dark but she could see: a light moved with her, illuminating her path and surroundings.

Something scuttled across the track ahead of her, something silvery and swift, moving close to the ground. She changed direction, following it, and the path moved with her.

I’m dreaming, Briony realized.

The swift thing flickered before her again. It was both real and a shadow—she could feel it somehow watching her even as it ran before her. She knew it was trying to lead her somewhere important, that she needed to keep it in sight, but already she was falling behind. The trees grew thicker around her, the path harder to see. The silvery shape shimmered one last time, distant now, and then it was gone.

Briony woke with a sense of failure and loss far beyond the usual residue of dreams, but she could not stop to fret because she had missed something important. Her ladies were already bustling around her, urging her to hurry and get out of bed. Briony had an assignation to keep.

Dawet was wearing his usual black garb, but with a subtle difference: his clothes this time seemed more suited for courtly entertainment than going unnoticed in dark alleys and low places. His sleeves were slashed with brilliant red, the lining of his cloak the same bloody color, and his hose had also been picked out with vertical stripes of red and white.

“A new meeting place?” he asked her, looking around the Fountain Court.

“It is a little noisier here. Less likely anyone could overhear us.” Briony eyed his attire. “You look less furtive than usual, Master dan-Faar.”

He made a mock bow. “Milady is too kind. As it happens, I have a… meeting after ours.”

“With a woman?” Briony didn’t know why she should care, but it did rankle a bit.

Dawet’s smile was, for once, neither knowing nor mocking. “I am your friend, I hope, Princess. Nothing more, perhaps, but certainly nothing less. For instance, I am not your servant. My trysts are my own.”

Briony swallowed a retort, touching the Zorian vesicle hanging around her neck to remind herself of what was important. He spoke the truth: she had no right, and more than that, she had no sensible reason to take an interest in what Dawet did, and with whom, except where her own safety was concerned. “As long as we are friends,” she said. “As long as I can trust you, Dawet. I mean this truly—I need someone I can trust.”

He gave her an odd look. “You seem frightened, Princess.”

“Not frightened. But I am engaged in… difficult matters. I am embarking on a journey. Once it begins I cannot turn and swim back to shore.” She reached up again and cupped the vesicle in her hand, traced its oval shape and thought of the virgin goddess’ own journey. “Will you help me?”

“What do you need, Princess?”

She told him. “Can you do that?” she asked when she had finished. The look he gave her now contained both surprise and a hint of admiration. “Nothing easier. But…” He shrugged. “It will take payment. Such men as you want do not work for charity.”

She laughed. It even sounded harsh in her own ears. This was difficult. It felt as though she truly was stepping out into the unknown. “I have money. Prince Eneas was kind enough to give me some—until my own affairs should be settled, he said.”

“A prince indeed.”

“Will this be enough?”

Dawet looked at the gold, hesitated a moment. The splashing of the fountain rose up to fill the silence. “More than enough,” he said at last. “I will bring you back what remains.” He stood. “I should go. There is time for me to put this matter in motion before… before my other business.”

“Thank you, Dawet.” She held out her hand. After a moment he took it and lifted it to his lips, but his eyes never left hers. “Why do you look at me so?” she asked.

“I had not thought to see this side of you, Princess Briony—not yet, at any rate.”

She felt herself flush a little, but it would be hidden by the darkening evening. “So the Zorian dove now shows herself to be soiled, eh? Is that a disappointment?”

He laughed and shook his head. “Not soiled, no. Willing to protect herself, yes. Even the most pacific of Nature’s children will do that.” His face grew serious. “I had wrongly thought that old Shaso and his teachings had driven all the good sense from you.”

“Yes, well, Shaso dan-Heza is dead.”

The public attack on Jenkin Crowel, the envoy from Southmarch, a cruel beating at the hands of three unknown bravos, was the talk of all the court at Tessis the next day. Crowel had been surprised coming out of a favorite tavern by what had seemed at first merely a trio of unpleasant drunkards, but before more than a few words had been exchanged his two guards had been disarmed and beaten, then the assault had begun.

The attack itself was strange enough, although not incomprehensible, since Crowel was already known in Tessis for his love of gambling and his unpleasant temper. But what made it a subject of rapt speculation—for a short time, anyway, since the Tessian nobility never lacked for things to talk about—was what one of the battered guards witnessed as he lay on the ground.

Just before the attackers fled, one of the criminals had crouched beside the bloody, whimpering Jenkin Crowel, but the only words the wounded guard had been able to make out were, “… learn to keep your lies to yourself.”

By the end of the week, though, when Crowel had proved remarkably close-mouthed on the subject, hiding his bruises and scars in his chambers and shunning all company, the denizens of Broadhall Palace moved on to newer and more interesting outrages.

16. In the Fungus Garden

“Are you sure you’ll be well?” Opal was twisting the hem of her cloak in her hands. She hated to be parted from them, of course, but she and Chert both knew it was the right thing for her to do. “You’ll keep a close eye on the boy?”

“Do not fret so, my only love. It’s but a few days.” He put his arms around her and held her close. For a moment she fought against it. Opal did not like being confined, even by her husband—perhaps especially by her husband. Her father, Sand Leekstone, had once confessed that he found the women in his family a complete bafflement. “Your Opal and her mother have been telling me what to do for so many years, I don’t know what I’d do if I ever got my own way in anything—likely fall down dead.” Chert, never having expected anything when he married Opal except what he’d gotten, namely a wife who both loved him and argued with him equally fiercely, had only nodded and smiled.

“Few days?” she said now. “If you listen to the folk around here, the world might come to an end in a day or two—do you think that makes me any less worried?” But she was only protesting by rote—they had argued it all through and agreed; in fact, this trip had been mostly Opal’s idea. Now that it was clear the threat of war was real, men were being mustered in Funderling Town and Opal had decided the women should also do their part: she was going back to enlist Vermilion Cinnabar and some of the other important women of the town to make sure the men called to fight would have what they needed, and to fill in for those called away from important jobs in the town. Chert was proud of her and knew she would do well. When Opal set her mind to something, it always got done.

“The world will not end while you are gone, my old darling,” he told her now. “It wouldn’t dare. Just promise me you’ll stay with Agate as you promised—don’t go back into our house. If you need something send someone else, in case it’s being watched.”

“How could it be watched without all of Funderling Town knowing?”

Chert shook his head. “You are thinking of soldiers—Big Folk. But I do not trust all our neighbors so far that I cannot imagine one of them taking some money to pass information to the Lord Constable if they see you back in our house. That is why we told no one outside the family where we were going.”

“Now who thinks the world will end if he stops making it spin?” she asked, but he could tell from her voice that she wasn’t angry. She squeezed him again, then let go. “Do keep a close eye on the boy.”

“Of course.”

“I wish I could take him.”

“And if anyone is watching, what surer way to announce our presence? No, my dearest, he must stay here and you must hurry back to us.”

Opal stood up to kiss his cheek and he kissed her back on the mouth, which surprised her and made her smile. She put the bag over her shoulder then and turned to where Brother Natron, a friend of Brother Antimony’s, had been waiting a discreet distance away while they said their goodbyes. Natron seemed an intelligent and careful young man, which made Chert’s mind a little easier, but he would have preferred the familiar and trustworthy Antimony, who was off with Ferras Vansen and some Funderling warders searching for incursions in the outer tunnels.

Worry suddenly clutched him. “Come back safe to me, my only love,” he called, but Opal and the young monk were already up the trail and out of sight.

“Papa Chert, I need you to help me.”

He could only stare at the boy in amazement—it was the first time Flint had ever called him anything like that. To make it even stranger, the boy had been largely silent for the last few days. Now, with Opal gone, he seemed to have gone through another of his odd, unsettling changes.

“Help you?”

Flint sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed, then bent and scrabbled on the stone floor for his shoes. “I want to talk to the old one. The one who has the dreams.”

Chert could only shake his head. “What are you talking about?”

“There is an old man here. He has dreams. Everyone knows him. I need to speak to him.”

A dim recollection came to Chert. “Grandfather Sulphur? But how would you know that? You weren’t here when Nickel told us about him.”

Flint ignored this unimportant detail. “Take me to him, please. I need to talk to him.”

Chert stared at this maddening, confusing, sometimes truly frightening child, remembering that moment which now seemed a lifetime ago when the sack had not yet been opened and Flint was still an unknown quantity.

And what if I had not opened it? What if I had taken Opal firmly by the arm and walked away—left it to be someone else’s problem. Would things be different? Better… or worse? Because it was hard to avoid the idea that Flint’s coming had something to do with all the other strange things that had seized their lives and the lives of everyone they knew, Big Folk and Funderlings alike.

He sighed. In for a scrape, in for all the dig, as they say. “Very well,” he told the boy. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“I do not understand any of this,” said Brother Nickel. The scion of a powerful Funderling family, he had only recently been elevated from acolyte to kainite, a common monk of the temple, but everyone, most definitely including Nickel himself, knew he was the abbot’s handpicked successor, and he generally acted as though he had already taken up the ceremonial mattock. “Already your little group has upended all tradition and habit here. Women, children, big people, fugitives—we seem to be taking them all in. Were it not that Cinnabar and the Guild swear that the need is great…”

“But they do swear,” said Chert. “Please, Nickel, just tell us where to go. We’re grateful for your help but we don’t want to steal anymore of your time than necessary…”

“Let you go off without supervision and… interrogate our oldest brother?” Nickel stood up. “I do not think so. I will take you to him myself. He is old and frail. If your questions upset him the conversation will end. Understood?”

“Very well, yes. Of course.”

Chaven the physician, who had stood watching the discussion with some interest, cleared his throat. “I think I will come along, too—if that is acceptable, Chert… ?”

“Acceptable to Chert? ” Nickel seemed far too dark a shade of red for a man of his comparatively young age. “What about the Metamorphic Brotherhood? No, by all means, let us take as many as wish to go! Perhaps we should simply declare a parade, as on the Day of First Delving—round up all the citizens, and lead a procession to the gardens to surprise the poor old man!”

“You perhaps exaggerate a little, Brother Nickel,” said Chaven gently. “I am a physician, after all. Who better to have along if you worry about Grandfather Sulphur’s health? And the child Flint has also been under my care. Yes, I think it is a very good idea that I come along.”

Chert smiled, but he already felt weary and more than a little put out and the task had not even been begun. Why did it seem he was forever helping other people get their way?

“I have not been in this part of the temple,” Chaven said as they zigzagged their way through a low-ceilinged cavern of twisted limestone shapes, following a path that Nickel alone could recognize.

“And why should you have been? ” the Metamorphic Brother demanded. “Nothing of interest to your lot happens here. These are gardens and farms where we grow our food. We had almost a hundred mouths to feed here even before all of you started arriving.”

And many more will be coming soon, Chert thought. If you’re lucky they’ll be Funderlings, not fairies. But he didn’t say it aloud.

“Ah, but you see, I am interested in such things,” said Chaven. “Any true man of science never ceases being a student. Please do not be so stern, Brother Nickel. We are grateful you have taken us in. This is a time of war and stranger things. All good people must stand together.”

Nickel snorted, but when he spoke again he sounded a bit more civil. “That is the road to the salt mine. The mine is small, but it gives us enough for our own use as well as to trade with the city above.”

Flint alone seemed uninterested in the cavern and its grotesque fixtures of living stone. His face had resumed its usual placidity: he stared straight ahead like a soldier marching toward a life or death battle.

Who are you, really, boy? Chert no longer felt certain he would understand even if someone told him. What are you? In any case, the answer did not really matter. What mattered was that his wife loved the boy and he loved his wife. What he felt for Flint himself was harder to put into words, but as he looked now at the serious child with his shock of almost white hair he knew he would do whatever he could to keep the boy safe.

“Down here.” Nickel gestured to a side passage.

Chert could smell the garden’s pungent air of mold, moisture, and animal manure long before they stepped through the opening. The cavern was lit only by a few torches and scarcely brighter than the corridor. Chaven, still not entirely used to the dim light in which Funderlings lived, stopped and held out his hands like a blind man; Chert took his elbow.

The fungus garden was surprisingly big, a natural high-ceilinged cave that had been further shaped by the hammers and chisels of the Funderlings. Most of the effort had gone into clearing the middle of the floor, which was now crammed full of low stone tables, but the walls had also been thoroughly worked, incised with deep grooves to make rows and rows of shelves.

Every table on the wide floor was laden with trays of black dirt, each tray pockmarked with little pale dots. The alcoves had also been stuffed with manure and soil: thousands of delicate fanlike fungi were growing along the walls, from floor level to five or six times a Funderling’s height, where monks on ladders tended the crops. Chert had just begun to wonder which of robed shapes was Grandfather Sulphur when he noticed a bent, bony old man perched on a stool near the center of the room, examining one of the trays with a rock-crystal seeing glass. Flint was already walking toward him, much to the distress of Brother Nickel.

“Here, now! You must let me speak to him first…” Nickel hurried after the boy and Chert trotted behind the two of them, fearing it might turn into an actual wrestling match. Flint was half a head bigger now than any of the Funderlings except Brother Antimony, so Chert wasn’t worried the boy would be hurt, but they were all guests of the Metamorphic Brotherhood: it would be a bad idea to start a brawl.

“Chert?” called Chaven from behind him. “Where have you gone?” The physician let out a squeal of pain as he banged his shin against one of the stone tables.

Chert reluctantly turned and went back to help Chaven. It was too late to catch up to Nickel and Flint in any case.

“Ah, there you are.” Chaven clutched at his arm. “I will be better in a moment—my eyes do not take to darkness as well as they did when I was younger…”

By the time they’d made their way across the dim room Flint was waiting beside the old man’s stool, his face once more expressionless, as though he had gone away somewhere inside his own head. Brother Nickel was talking to Sulphur, a tumble of words of which Chert heard only the tail end.

“… strange times, of course—you heard of the visitors, Grandfather, didn’t you? This is one of them. He wishes to ask you something.”

The old monk looked from Nickel to Flint, then back to Nickel again. Sulphur’s face was gaunt, the wrinkled skin hanging slackly as though with age his skull had shrunk. His eyes, although clearly almost blind with cataracts, were squinting and suspicious. “Wishes to ask something… or wishes to take something?” The voice was cracked and dry as a sandstone cliff.

“I have told them very strongly that they can only…” Nickel broke off, staring. Chert was staring too. The hood of the old man’s robe was quivering, as if one of his ears was trying to detach itself from his head. A moment later a grotesque little face popped out of the hood beside his cheek, so that everyone except Flint gasped and took a step back in surprise.

“Ha!” said Sulphur. “Iktis, down.” He flapped his hand in his lap and the slender, furry little animal crawled out of his hood and down his arm. It settled on the monk’s lap and turned to watch them all with bright eyes. It was a fitch, what some upgrounders called a robber cat. Some of the richer Funderlings had them in their houses to hunt mice and voles, but Chert had never seen one kept as a pet. “So, what does this child want of me?” Sulphur demanded.

Flint did not hesitate. “You have dreams,” the boy said. “Frightening dreams of the gods. Tell me about them.”

The old monk straightened up. The fitch chattered indignantly, clinging as a man in a storm might hang onto a pitching raft. “What could you know of my visions, gha’jaz? ” Grandfather Sulphur’s voice was a hoarse growl—he seemed fearful as well as angry. “Who are you, an upgrounder child, to demand the gods’ words from me?”

Nickel and Chert both began to speak at the same time but Flint calmly ignored them both. “I am a friend. Tell me. Your people need you to tell me.”

“See here, child…” Nickel began again, but Sulphur was ignoring him too. For a moment it seemed to Chert that everyone else in the great, musty room had vanished except for the old man and the pale-haired boy. Something passed between them—a language without words, like the tiny, all but invisible seeds of the mushrooms themselves, which passed through the air like a cloud of unseen spirits.

“The tortoise,” said Grandfather Sulphur abruptly. “It began with the tortoise.”

“What?” Nickel put his hand on Flint’s shoulder as if to pull the boy away. “Grandfather, you are tired…”

“The tortoise came to me in a dream. It spoke to me of the coming times—the time when evil men will seek to destroy the gods. Of the catastrophe they will bring down on the Funderlings. It was truth, that dream—I know it. It was the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone himself.”

“The tortoise…” said Chaven slowly, distantly, as if speaking to himself. Something in the physician’s voice put the hairs up on the back of Chert’s neck. “The tortoise… the spiral shell… the pine tree… the owl…”

Flint would not be distracted. “Tell me, Grandfather, what were you to do? What did the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone ask of you?”

“This is blasphemy,” Nickel sputtered. “This… upgrounder, this gha’jaz, should not be asking about such sacred things!”

But Grandfather Sulphur did not seem to mind—in fact, Chert thought the old man seemed to be warming to the subject. “He said I must tell my people that Old Night is coming and that this sinful world will end soon. He came to me in many dreams. He said to tell the people that there is nothing they can do to resist his will.”

“He told you not to fight against the will of the gods?” Flint asked. “But why would your god say such a thing?”

“Blasphemy!” said Nickel. “How can he ask such questions of Sulphur, who is the select of the Stone Lord himself?”

Chert put his hand on the monk’s arm. “Brother Sulphur is not afraid to speak to the boy, so let them talk. Come, Nickel, these matters are beyond either of us—but you must see that these are extraordinary times.”

Nickel could barely stand still. “That does not mean I should allow a… a mere child to do as he pleases in our holy temple!”

Chert sighed. “Whatever he is, I have known for a long time that my Flint is no ‘mere child.’ Isn’t that right, Chaven?”

But the physician did not reply: he was listening raptly to the old man and the boy.

“You have always dreamed of the gods.” Flint was telling more than asking.

“Of course. Since I was younger than you, child,” said the old man, not without satisfaction. He lifted a spotted, clawlike hand. “When I had but two years I told my parents I would be a Metamorphic Brother.”

“But these dreams are different,” said Flint. “Isn’t that true?”

The old man leaned back sharply, as though he had been struck. His milky eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“The dreams of the tortoise—the dreams that brought you the god’s own voice. You have not had dreams like that all your life—have you?”

“I have always dreamed of the gods…” the old man said, blustering.

“When did they change? When did they become… so strong?”

Again a long, silent communication seemed to pass between Flint and the old monk. At last Sulphur’s lined face went slack. “A year ago or more, just after the season of cold. That is when I first dreamed of the tortoise. That is when I first began to hear His voice.”

“And what came to you just before the dreams began?” Flint spoke as gently as if he were the priest and the old man some hapless, troubled penitent. “You found something, or someone gave something to you—isn’t that true?”

Chert could not help being disturbed by this newest face of the child in whom he and Opal had put so much of their hope. What had been done to this boy behind the Shadowline? More important, was he even a boy, or some kind of Twilight dweller that only looked like a child? What kind of serpent had they taken to their breasts?

“Yes, what?” said Chaven with an edge of hunger in his voice. “What came to you?”

Sulphur waved his hand. “I do not know what you mean. I am tired now. Go away.” In his lap, Iktis the fitch grew anxious; chittering, the creature vanished up the old man’s sleeve.

“That is enough!” said Nickel. “You must go now!”

“No one will take it away from you,” said Flint as if no one else had spoken. “That I promise, Grandfather. But tell the truth. Even the gods must respect truth.”

“Leave now!” Nickel looked like he meant to grab the boy and drag him away, but Chert squeezed the monk’s arm hard and held him back.

The old man’s silence grew so long and deep that for the first time they could hear the squeak of ladders being moved on the far side of the room and even the murmur of whispered conversations between the other Metamorphic Brothers, who had not failed to notice what was going on at the center of the garden. Sulphur looked down at his own hands, knotted in his lap.

“My little Iktis found it,” he said at last in a voice so quiet everyone but Flint leaned forward. “He brought it to me, dragging it all the way. He loves shiny things and sometimes he goes as far up as the town. I have had to send back many a woman’s bracelet or necklace with the brothers who go to market. Sometimes Iktis even goes upground. And sometimes he goes… deep.”

“Can you show it to me?” Flint asked him. “I promise no one will take it from you.”

Again the silence thickened. At last Sulphur reached into his thick robe, which was frosted with mold along the crest of every wrinkle. Iktis, still hidden in the old man’s sleeve, loosed a twitter of protest as Sulphur withdrew a shiny thing that hung around his neck on a braided ratskin cord.

“It is my seeing-glass,” he said. “I knew it was meant for me the moment I saw it.”

It was the thing he had been holding when they first saw him, a small, thin shard of crystal in an irregular silvery metal frame that had clearly been built around the crystal’s natural shape and decorated with intricate little carvings even Chert’s strong eyes could not quite make out. The metal was not one that he recognized, and neither was the style of the metalwork or even the crystal itself, although it was hard to be certain in the poor light of the fungus garden.

Chaven took a deep breath. “That is Qar work,” he said dreamily. “Yes. The voice of the tortoise. A cage for the white owl. Yes, of course…”

“And when the little animal brought you this,” said Flint, as calm as ever, “then the dreams of the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone began.”

“But I have always dreamed of the gods!”

“Just let me…” Chaven reached out his hand toward the oblivious Sulphur; the physician’s breath was sawing in his throat, his eyes staring like a sleepwalker’s. “Yes, let me…” His voice had grown hoarse, a loud whisper. “I must…”

Chert had seen this before, if only briefly: Chaven’s mirror-madness was upon him. He knew as surely as if it had been planned that in another moment the physician would snatch the crystal away from the old man and chaos would follow. In the end they would likely be sent away from the temple, their last and best hiding place.

Chert kicked Chaven in the shin, right on the same spot the physician had struck so painfully on one of the stone tables a short while earlier. The physician let out a shriek and began to hop up and down, trying to grab at this new wound. A moment later he fell, knocking over a pile of tools. Startled and suspicious, the old monk slipped his shard of crystal back into the safety of his moldy robe.

“What is going on here?” Nickel shouted. “Have you all gone mad?”

“Chaven hit his leg again,” said Chert. “Nothing more. Help me get him back to the temple—the poor fellow’s bleeding from the shin. Flint, you are needed too. Thank Grandfather Sulphur for his help and let’s go.”

The boy looked at the old man, whose face had gone stony and secretive again. Flint did not say anything to him, but turned and walked out of the garden, leaving Chert and Nickel to follow with the hopping, whimpering physician propped between them.

The first thing Ferras Vansen saw was a pale, yellow-green star hovering in the darkness above him. It was strange a star should move in such a lively manner: not only was it swooping back and forth across the darkness in a series of loops like a browsing bumblebee, it seemed to be talking to him as well.

Stars don’t talk. Ferras Vansen was fairly certain about that. Stars don’t… bumble, either.

“… Are you… ?” asked the star. “Can… hear… ?”

He was a bit disappointed: he had expected that if a star ever did speak to him it would have more important things to say. Weren’t stars supposed to be the souls of fallen heroes? Had they all hung in the sky so long they had become simpletons, the way Vansen’s father had in that dreadful last year of his life?

For a moment he wondered if he was dead himself and had somehow made his way into the heavens—not that he had done anything to deserve a hero’s place—but thinking of his father made him wonder if death could be so… fuzzy, so confusing. It didn’t seem likely.

“… He… more water now…” said the star.

Vansen tried to focus on the moving light. He soon realized a strange thing: he could see something beyond it—beyond the star! And not the black curtain of night he would have expected, but something that looked like a face. Could it be the great god Perin Skylord himself, inspecting Vansen’s fallen soul? Or was it Kernios, the keeper of the dead? A trembling cold moved over him at the thought of that grim god. But if it was Kernios, he looked familiar. In fact, the god of the underworld looked like… Brother Antimony… ?

Vansen finally recognized that the yellow-green glow he had been staring at so blearily since his senses had returned was only the coral lamp bound to Antimony’s forehead.

“I’m… not… dead?” His mouth was dry as sand. It was hard to make words.

“He’s speaking sense again,” said Antimony with clear relief. “No, Captain Vansen, you’re not dead.”

“What happened?” A memory rose up like a dark cloud. “We found them. Those things…”

“They used a kind of poison,” Antimony said. “A powder they blew through a tube, as our ancestors used to do. We were fortunate it did not kill you. Also, you blocked the way so the rest of us were not harmed by it.” He helped Vansen to sit up, then gave him some water. The other Funderlings crouched nearby, bald Sledge Jasper and his fellow warders. To Vansen’s uncertain eye they all seemed to be present. “Is everyone alive?”

“All of us, thank the Earth Elders,” said Antimony. “And look!” He pointed to a huge lump of darkness lying against the tunnel wall, something big as a horse. “One of the deep ettins—we killed it!”

“I did most of the killing,” said Jasper with pleasure. “Let’s speak the truth, Brother! Put my pointy bit right in its eye.”

“What is it?” said Vansen. He crawled toward the massive corpse, then wished he hadn’t: it gave off a smell so rank and musty that it made his eyes water. “You said… ettin?”

“Krja’azel,” said Antimony, the word so strange and harsh on his tongue that the kindhearted young Funderling suddenly seemed a different kind of creature entirely. “Something we have not seen since my great-grandfather’s time, and even then rarely.”

“But those were wild,” said Jasper. “This one fought beside the fairies.”

“And what is this under it?” asked Vansen, holding his nose. At first he had thought it was some sort of fin at the back of the thing’s neck, but now he saw that what protruded there were stubby little fingers. He tried to move the ettin, but the thing was several times his own weight.

“One of its masters,” said Sledge Jasper. “The ones with the powder-pipes. We saw them all rush past in their hoods when you fell, but when I spiked that thing in the eye, this one must have been caught underneath it.”

Vansen began to shove at the stinking Scraper. “Could he still be alive?”

The wardthane’s laugh was unpleasant. “You don’t know how long you’ve been knocked senseless, do you?”

Antimony came to help him, and after watching with grim amusement for a while as they struggled, Jasper and his men joined too. At last they all managed to roll the deep ettin’s corpse away. The figure under it was smaller than Antimony, and the weight of the creature that had fallen on it had pressed its face into a distorted death mask, but it was still plain even to Vansen what it was.

“By the gods,” he said, “I think it’s a Funderling!”

“Earth Elders protect us,” Antimony said in a breathless voice. “One of our own?”

“No such thing,” Sledge Jasper snapped. “Look. Look at his hands. Do I have hands like that? Do you?” The small corpse had broad, square fingertips and the nails were as long and thick as a mole’s claws.

Vansen looked at the twisted, gape-mouthed face, the lower half of which was covered in a beard as thick and unkempt as black moss. “I’ve seen people like this before. In Greatdeeps, behind the Shadowline.”

“By the Pool’s Light, he’s right,” said Antimony softly. “It’s a drow.” He made a sign on his forehead and breast. “Now I have seen everything. A drow in Funderling Town.”

“What is a drow?”

“They are our… relatives, Captain,” Antimony told him. “Long ago, they followed the Qar into the north, but I did not know any still survived.”

“I’ve seen more than a few,” said Vansen. “These must have come down from the Shadowlands with the fairy army.”

“This is bad,” Jasper said. “Very bad. They are just as clever in the ground as we are. If it comes to a fight, we could baffle the upgrounders… but drows?”

“More important,” Vansen told them all, “whether it is these drows they send or others—although I will pray they send no more ettins—the fairies have finally begun their attack on Southmarch itself. Or at least on the tunnels down here. But why now, when they could have attacked any time? There must be a reason! Why should they abruptly end what you’ve told me has been a long time of quiet, almost of peace?” He stared up the tunnel as though he could see all the way to the councils of the fairy folk and discover what he burned to know. “By all the gods, why now?”

“No one can understand the ways of the Old Ones,” Jasper said. “And now they send our own lost cousins against us.” He straightened up, glaring down at the bearded corpse. “I will gladly kill Funderling Town’s enemies—I will wipe their blood on my breeches and laugh—but I will not take much pleasure killing drows. ”

“Hold now, hold,” said Antimony thoughtfully. “Yes, this all seems bad—but perhaps there is some good fortune here, too. We will find it hard to hold off this Twilight army for long, even with Captain Vansen’s help. We do not have the men, the weapons, or the training. They will soon overrun us.”

“I must have missed the part where you explained our good fortune,” Vansen said.

Antimony smiled a little. “Simply this. If we can talk to no one else on the other side, we should be able to talk to our own cousins, however distant they might be.” He looked to Vansen. “Do you see my meaning?”

“Ah. Ah, yes, I think I do.” Vansen’s estimation of the young monk rose even higher. “Which means we must capture one of these… drows… alive.” He frowned. “But what of this one?”

“We will bury him properly,” said Antimony. “Under stone, as we do our own. Help me make a cairn.”

“A cairn?” Jasper almost shouted. “For this? But he… he was… !”

“Properly. Under stone.” The young monk spoke with such cold conviction that even Sledge Jasper, taken aback, could only nod. “If his kin come back, it will show them we still hold to the old ways—that whatever the Twilight folk have told them, we are still one people.”

17. Fish Heads

For a long time after she had caught hold of the piling Qinnitan could do no more than cling to it while the breakers dragged her up and down against the pier’s armor of barnacles. The salt water made her dozens of scratches and cuts burn like fire, but she had strength enough only to hang on and try to catch her breath. When Pigeon’s arms began to slip from her neck she nearly let go of the slimy wooden pier to hold onto him, but she was terrified the current would drag them both away under the dock and she wouldn’t be strong enough to find another safe haven.

“Wake up!” She choked and spat green water. “Pigeon! Hang on to my neck!”

The boy made a guttural noise of exhaustion and renewed his grip as well as he could. She had been fortunate her foot had touched him when she had first risen to the surface after plunging off the ship, and fortunate again that a piece of flaming mast had missed them when it hit the water a few moments later, just as she surfaced with the boy.

Another wave, small compared to open ocean but still far beyond her power to resist, flung Qinnitan against the piling again. When she opened her eyes several new cuts crisscrossed her arm, a net made of little streaks of red that disappeared as another wave splashed across them.

People were shouting and thumping across the planks above her head and the smoke of the burning ship was beginning to creep along the water. It was hopeless to stay here, only a matter of time until she lost her grip or the smoke overwhelmed her again. She was already rasping at every breath like a cart with a broken wheel. She had never been so exhausted in all her life.

There. A crude ladder of some kind hung down to the water on the far side of the dock. She hoped it was a ladder, anyway—it was a hundred yards away and her eyes were stinging from seawater and blood. She thanked Nushash and the Hive that she had spent lots of time in the deep bathing pool at the Seclusion and had learned how to swim a little. Still, she couldn’t swim that far with one arm.

“You must stay on my back and hold on no matter what,” she told Pigeon. “Can you hear me? ” She waited until she heard him grunt. “Don’t let go, even if I go under the water for a moment.”

As she pushed away from the pillar, aiming for the distant ladder, the boy wrapped his arms around her neck. She couldn’t breathe, and she floundered until she managed to yank his arms down so they were across her collarbone. Qinnitan had gone four or five strokes and was beginning to find a rhythm that allowed her to keep Pigeon mostly on her back when she saw the first triangular fin cut the water in front of her. A moment later she saw a second. Her limbs seemed to grow cold and heavy.

Sea-wolves. Not the thick bodied, axhead sharks of the Xixian canals but something sleeker and longer, pale gray and as slender as a knife blade. For a moment she paddled in place, afraid to go forward and afraid to go back, but the fins were moving away from her instead of toward her. Qinnitan prayed that they were after some other quarry.

Within moments of the disappearance of the first two she saw several more moving in wide loops as though not so sure of their destination as the first pair. Bodies in the water, Qinnitan realized with a horrible pang, sailors from the Xixian ship, wounded and dead—men she had killed by setting the ship on fire.

She couldn’t think about any of it, not about the sailors and soldiers, not about the sharks. Pigeon was clinging to her back and his arms were tightening around her neck again as he began to understand why she had stopped swimming. In another moment terror might steal away his resolve—he might let go or even begin to fight her. She had heard sailors on her voyage to Hierosol talk about the hopelessness of struggling with a frightened, drowning man. She began to swim again, as quickly as she could.

Something rough as tree bark brushed against her leg as a pale shape slipped past her. She gasped and swallowed some water, but the fin was moving away. It was only a small shark, not half her length. She thrashed forward, but she felt as though the strength was leaking out of her like grain from a burst sack. Where was that ladder? Qinnitan did not even know which direction she had been swimming. The planks were gone from above her head so she must be out from beneath the pier, but where was she?

Pigeon was sliding from her back again. She caught him with one hand, but it all seemed pointless, remote. They sank into the water and green darkness was all around. She clutched the child as tightly as she could and kicked hard with her last strength, but they barely seemed to move upward. At last, just when she felt she could hold her breath no longer her face broke the surface for an instant, but even the air she gulped did not bring life back to her legs and arms. She slipped back under, exhausted.

Something grabbed Qinnitan by the hair, yanking so hard and so unexpectedly that she opened her mouth and swallowed water again. A moment later light burst all around her and she felt her body strike or be struck by something heavy. A shark. A shark must have her. The end… but where was Pigeon… ?

The weight of the boy fell on top of her. She was lying on something hard. A moment later Pigeon rolled away, coughing and gasping, but Qinnitan couldn’t see anything except the watery mess she was vomiting up onto the planks of the pier.

Out of the water. They were out of the water.

Her stomach convulsed again but nothing more came out. She coughed and spat. A hand thumped her on the back and a little more water trickled out onto the wet boards. She was dimly aware of the smell of smoke and of people shouting and running not far away, but no one was near them except their rescuer. She reached out blindly until she found Pigeon. His skinny sides were heaving as he brought up his own bellyful of seawater but he was breathing. He was safe. She had saved him. Qinnitan let herself collapse onto her side. She could see a little of the sky now, gray-black with smoke, and the dim shape of their savior, the sun behind him so that he was only a dark shadow looming over them like a mountain, a benevolent god who had reached down a mighty hand and plucked them back into life. She tried to thank him, but she could force no words out of her burning, salt-scoured throat, so instead she lifted up her hand to touch his arm.

He knocked her hand aside. “Stupid little bitch.” It was only after a moment that she realized he had spoken Xixian, her own language. Qinnitan threw up her hand to block the sunlight, dazzling even through the smoke.

Their rescuer was the nameless man, the autarch’s stone-faced servant, but he was not stone-faced now: his features were twisted into a look of almost deranged fury.

“Do you see this?” He grabbed Pigeon’s wrist and slammed the boy’s hand down near Qinnitan’s face so hard that although he was barely sensible, Pigeon still gasped in pain. The nameless man slapped the boy so hard that Pigeon’s eyes fluttered open, then slowly widened in horror as he saw who had him. “Watch!”

In a single movement as swift as a serpent’s strike the man pulled a long, broad knife out of his waistband and snapped it down on the boy’s hand with a meaty thok like the sound of her mother cutting fish heads on the family table. Blood sprayed in Qinnitan’s face, and the tips of three of Pigeon’s fingers bounced away. The boy shrieked, a wordless noise so horrid that Qinnitan screamed too, helpless and disbelieving.

“Next time it will be his whole hand—and his nose!” The nameless man slapped Qinnitan so hard that she thought he had broken her jaw. As Pigeon rolled on the planks, gurgling and clutching his ruined hand, red wetness drizzling onto the dock, their captor pulled a cloth from his pocket and tied it roughly but tightly around Pigeon’s fingers to slow the bleeding.

“Now get up, you little dung flies, and no more noise or playing up from either of you.” He jerked Qinnitan onto her feet, then kicked at the whimpering Pigeon until the child staggered upright, his face gray with pain. “Because of you two, we have to find another boat.”

“I never expected to be king.”

Pinimmon Vash stiffened in surprise and fright at these words. He hadn’t thought to hear anyone talking at all, let alone making such a unique declaration.

It was Olin’s voice, of course—but to whom could the northern king possibly be speaking? The autarch was still in bed in his cabin, yet the foreigner was speaking as though to Sulepis himself. Vash’s skin went cold: if he had failed to note and plan for the autarch’s movements correctly then many of the things the paramount minister did each day (and especially what he was doing this very moment) were little more than elaborate forms of suicide.

Terror swept through Vash like a sudden fever. He scrambled back from the hole he had selected for eavesdropping, looking wildly from side to side although he was clearly the only person in the small locker. Fool! he chided himself—what was happening on the other side of the spyhole was all that mattered. Was Olin Eddon really talking to Sulepis? How could Vash have miscalculated? Only moments ago he had delivered the parchment bearing his morning report to the autarch’s cabin and had been informed by the body slaves that the Golden One was still asleep.

He could hear Olin again. “It was not that I was unsuited for it, or afraid of the responsibility,” the northerner was saying, “ just that I did not imagine it would happen. My father Ustin was as healthy as a bull, my brother Lorick, the heir, was only two years older than me, and I had always been sickly, prone to fevers and to long, bedridden weeks. The physicians told my father and mother I would likely not survive to see twenty years. It was a weakness of the blood, they said—one to which many of my line had been prey… had been…”

Olin hesitated for so long that at last Vash moved back to the spyhole again to try to make sense of things. The discovery of this locker had been fortuitous—it was much less exposed than his previous eavesdropping spot—but it was hard on his old bones to force himself into the narrow space, and it would be almost impossible to get out of it quickly if he heard someone coming. Still, he had decided it would be worth it, especially if it helped him understand what the autarch was planning. Those who let Sulepis surprise them seldom lived long—or happily.

But if I was wrong and Sulepis finds me here, this locker will be no more than an upright coffin.

Vash still could see nothing from his angle, including to whom if anyone the northerner spoke, so he took his eye away and put his ear against the hole instead. He would bring a dark cloth next time to cover the inside of the hole—if he lived. That would make it less likely anyone would notice his presence.

“In any case,” King Olin at last continued, “my illness and the health of my father and brother made it unlikely I would ever sit the throne. Instead of just tilting and hunting and other active sports, my youth was also spent with books, in the company of historians and philosophers. Not that there is anything wrong with learning to defend yourself! I made sure my own children would at least be able to acquit themselves well in a fight.”

Who was he talking to? Surely the autarch would never stay silent so long. Could it be Panhyssir, the high priest? Vash felt a fizz of helpless jealousy at the thought. Or perhaps it was the antipolemarch Dumin Hauyuz, the commander of the soldiers aboard and the highest ranking military man in the autarch’s party. It had to be one of them—certainly the king of a foreign nation would not speak so openly to anyone else.

Or had his captivity simply driven the man mad—was Olin talking to himself?

“Many people were wrong, of course,” the northerner said. “My illness has not shortened my life—at least not so far. My father did live a long time, but collapsed in apoplexy when he heard that my brother Lorick had fallen from his horse while hunting and was not expected to survive. My father did not regain his senses, but he did not die, either. As it turned out, neither of those strong men would die easily.

“It was a black time for my mother and little better for me. My father had never had as much time for me as for Lorick, but that was as it should have been, because my brother was being prepared to rule—who could have guessed the gods had such tricks in mind? But my father had been kind to me in his way, and now I had to watch them both clinging to life, unable to pull themselves out of the half-death in which they were immersed.

“My father died first. There was a party in court—led by the Tollys, the most powerful family after ours—who wanted to crown Lorick even as he lay senseless and dying, and then Lindon Tolly would rule in his name. My youngest brother Hardis was already married to one of the Tolly women, so they wished only to keep me off the throne long enough to find some way to put Hardis on in my place when Lorick at last succumbed to his injury. We had just enough allies in the court to resist this, but only barely. Southmarch lived in stalemate for almost a year.

“Hardis was young and easily led, and maybe even jealous of his older brothers, but I do not believe he understood that Lindon’s plans to put him on the throne would have required my death. Hardis was no fool, but I’m sure it was easier for him not to wonder why the Tollys made so much of him. Or perhaps he simply felt sure, as everyone else had all my life, that I would not live to manhood.

“As it happened, I outlived them all. My poor brother Hardis died ten years ago of a fever after having spent his life more or less a prisoner of the Tollys, although he always pretended he was happy in Summerfield Court and had no wish to see his old home. Poor Hardis.

“Back in the year of succession, Lorick died at last and the puppet show ended, but not without several times almost tearing the kingdom apart. I was crowned and the Tollys had to be content with keeping what power they had.

“Curse my foolishness! I should have routed them out like a hive of wasps. I saw the danger of your country to Eion long before any of my fellow monarchs, starting with this autarch’s cruel father, but I did not see the dangers in my own house.”

There, thought Vash, relieved but still bewildered, and took his first full breath in some time. Clearly the man wasn’t speaking to Sulepis himself—but what else could he be doing? Had the autarch given Olin a secretary? Was the foreign king dictating a letter to his family?

The northerner’s voice rose. “And that is what I hate even more than the Tollys’ treachery—my own stupidity. I left enemies behind me when I departed and then, even worse, I allowed myself to be tricked and imprisoned by that swine Hesper of Jellon. All of this may have cost our family the throne we have held for centuries, but it has cost me far more than that… it cost me my oldest son, my brave Kendrick, and perhaps my other two children as well.” His voice became halting. “Ah, sweet Zoria and all her oracles—may the gods rain curses down on those who helped me to betray myself and my kingdom!”

For long moments after that Olin did not speak, but even without seeing the man Vash could tell he had only fallen silent, not gone away.

“I tried to prepare all my children to rule so that they would not find themselves surprised and unready as I had been, should the gods decide to set any one of them on the throne. And I loved them all, as a father should, even if I perhaps did not love them all equally.

“They were the last thing I had of my wife Meriel. She suffered greatly giving birth to the twins and did not recover, becoming weaker and weaker until she passed a month later. It tore my heart out of my breast. I banished the physician who attended her even though it was not his fault, but I could not bear to see the man’s face when my dear wife was dead. She had been the one thing that made me think perhaps my own poisoned blood could be saved. When Kendrick was born, so fat and fit and laughing, it seemed that her sweetness had undone the sour strain of my lineage.

“I was a fool.

“She was lovely, of course, my Meriel, but not simply because her skin was milky and her lips were red, as the bards would have it. There were many other women in the March Kingdoms that might have been called more beautiful, and it would take a poet, which I am not, to tell you what exactly it was that made her so fair, but it was something in her eyes. All her life, until the moment those eyes last closed upon this world, she had the look of a child. Not innocent, not foolish or simple, but straight—straight as an arrow’s flight. She looked out at the world without judging, or at least without hurrying to judgement. She could not flatter but she was always kind. She did not lie, but neither did she speak rash truth when it would bring pain for no reason…”

Again Olin paused. For the first time Vash was listening with real interest: the foreigner spoke well, as a king should. Some of the autarchs Vash had served had liked poetry, but none of them had spoken it or written it with any facility. In his younger years, the paramount minister himself had occasionally written a few lines, but no one had ever seen them.

“In fact,” Olin continued, “Meriel was what I often thought a goddess might be like, if that goddess was kindhearted, for she was not above the pain of others. Ah, that she should have been taken from the world instead of me, with my tainted heritage and my doting self-regard! When she died the castle put on mourning and would not take it off, every servant and every courtier. That is true. They had to be told by the priests after a year had passed to doff their mourning clothes, that to mourn beyond the official time was to insult the gods! Can you imagine? We all loved her. The worst thing that ever happened to my children, far worse than us losing the throne or even Kendrick’s death, was that they did not know their mother, the sweetest woman who ever lived. I thought I did not deserve her—I could not believe that she could be mine.

“She was not, of course. The gods reminded me of that… as they are wont to do.”

Olin laughed then, a sound so painful that even Vash (who had heard the shrieking, pleading ends of dozens of men’s lives, many of those executed at his own orders) had to fight the urge to stop his ears with his hands.

“I do not know what I mean to say,” the king began again at last. “I started out to tell about my family. It has been nearly a year since I have seen them. Kendrick is dead, likely at the hands of the Tollys, but perhaps killed by some other. My brave son—he wanted only to do what was right. He would grow so angry when others broke the rules, even his younger brother and sister! They would play at hide-and-seek with him, then hide somewhere they had promised not to go and laugh at him when he found out. He could never make himself play the way they did, but instead would try to convince them that when the rules were broken the game was spoiled. Kendrick would have been a fine king—with my other son as his chancellor, perhaps, to remind him not to trust others to obey the rules just because Kendrick himself did. Because Barrick, if he still lives, may the gods protect him, lives in a very different world.

“Barrick was always troubled, always querulous, but after the first time the affliction struck—my affliction, passed down to him like the waters of a fouled river—he ceased to trust in the goodness of Fate entirely. And who could blame him? When he was young the sickness took the same course as it did in me. He would fall to the floor in fits of rage, choking, trembling, scarcely able to breathe, and struggle so that two strong men were needed to check him even though he was but a child. I grieved, of course, that I had brought this curse into his life, but I felt I could teach him how I had survived, the way I locked myself away when I felt the fits coming upon me. But then his sickness changed and found a different path.

“In Barrick, it became something that no longer made him rage and flail like a madman, but instead which slowly poisoned him on the inside. His view of the world became darker and darker, as when an eclipsing moon divides the earth from the sun. In my foolishness I thought at first that when his outward fits stopped it meant that he was getting better—that he was somehow fighting off the curse that had so polluted my life. I was wrong, but by the time I understood that, he had crawled so far into the shadows that I could no longer reach him. He was witty, clever, yet so crippled by my own poisoned blood that I think only his love for his sister kept him alive.

“For he did love her, and Briony loved him. They were twins—did I say that?—and their hearts beat as one from the moment they came into the world, born in the same hour. Perhaps that had something to do with their mother’s death. Ah, gods, I no longer know! It has been so long, yet the pain feels as fresh as when I cut myself with my shaving blade yester morning.

“And here is another shameful confession—I loved Briony most of all. No, let me say love, not loved—please, may the gods grant that she lives! I loved Kendrick’s honor and kindness and his dutiful nature, and I loved him because he was my firstborn. I love Barrick despite all the pain I gave him and he gave me… but I love Briony with such comfort and certainty that I cannot express it. She contains all that is best in me, and much of what was excellent in her mother. To think that such a powerful love should have failed her so completely—that I should have failed all of them so utterly…”

Again the northern king fell silent. When he spoke again his voice was quite different, somber and almost without feeling.

“I have bored you long enough. I thank you for indulging me. I think I will go and walk up and down the decks of my prison a little while and listen to the gulls.”

The paramount minister of Xis heard Olin move, followed by his guards, the footsteps slowly growing fainter. After he was gone, no one else moved or spoke. Had he been talking to the guards, or to empty air after all, addressing only the cloudy spring sky? Vash slid himself out of the pantry as carefully as his stiff old bones would permit and hobbled down the stairs to the deck, then climbed back up to where Olin had been. The king had indeed left—Vash could see the top of his head at the far end of the ship, where he leaned on the rail under the wary eye of several soldiers—and there was no sign of the autarch or Panhyssir or Dumin Hauyuz or any other rational being. The only soul on the deck was the halfwit scotarch Prusus lolling in his chair, hands and head jerking, a thread of spittle dangling from his chin. For a moment Prusus the Cripple seemed to look back at him, but as Vash walked toward him the scotarch’s stare rolled vacantly, as though the paramount minister had suddenly disappeared from his view.

Pinimmon Vash stopped in front of the quivering shape and looked the scotarch up and down, thinking… wondering…

The world has slipped its mooring, Vash thought. Yes, the world I knew has drifted out of familiar waters. Where it goes now, only gods and madmen can guess.

“Something is following us,” Barrick whispered.

“Aye.” When the raven spoke quietly he was hard to understand, all rasp and whistle. He fluttered down onto a stone and clung to the mossy surface, then lowered his head between his shoulders and fluffed himself bigger. “Silkins,” he croaked. “Saw them when us flew over trees. Five nor six, us guesses.”

“Let them come.” He feared them, but Barrick also felt strangely sure he had not come so far and survived so much to die at the hands of these spindly thread-covered monstrosities. He felt strong—weirdly so, as though something powerful bubbled inside him like the foam on a mug of beer. It almost made him want to laugh out loud.

“Let them? Kill us both, they will—or worset, take us back to they hanging nests and put they grubs in our bellies.” The raven flapped up into a tree branch several paces ahead. “Seen it happen to Followers, I have. Not even dead when the younglings hatch…”

“They won’t do it to me. I won’t let them.”

The black bird shuddered and puffed up his feathers again. “Did you take a bump to the head when you climbed so long on that dire hill? Not at all the same since then, you.”

Barrick couldn’t help smiling. It was true, although he wasn’t certain why. He did feel different—stronger, more certain… better. Even the constant dull ache in his crippled left arm, a pain that had plagued him for most of his life, was now gone: the only discomfort was an occasional prickle of the skin, as though he had slept on it.

Barrick held the torch near his forearm. The scars the Sleepers had made were all but gone, only three white stripes remaining that looked years old, although it had been no more than a day or two since he had descended from Cursed Hill. Even his hand, the loathsome crab-claw he had always tried to hide, now looked scarcely different from his other hand. What magic had those blind things done to him? It seemed they had brought him only good, but a nagging memory reminded him that they had spoken of a price…

Barrick tripped on a root and stumbled badly before regaining his balance. The ground was slippery from the mist that cloaked the twilight forest. A healthy arm wouldn’t keep him from falling and hitting his head.

“Surely us must find a place to be safe, Master,” Skurn said in a wheedling voice. “To rest. Tired, you are, and tired makes mistakes, as our old mam always said.”

Barrick looked around. He had been walking for what seemed most of a day, following the raven’s recollection of the best route toward the city of Sleep and its fearful inhabitants, the ones Skurn called Night Men. It wouldn’t hurt to stop and rest, especially if a group of silkins were following. He could roast the roots he had dug that morning, which would at least make them seem a little more like actual food: he had discovered several things that grew here which he could eat and keep down, but cooking them definitely helped.

“Very well,” he said. “Find me a place with a rock I can put at my back.”

“Wise you are, so wise. Us will find a helpsome spot.” The raven flapped heavily up through the canopy of trees and out of Barrick’s sight.

The thing was, Barrick reflected as he chewed, roasting these pale, soggy roots made them taste more like food, but it didn’t make them taste like good food.

“Couldn’t you find us an egg or something? ” he asked. “A bird’s egg? ” He had learned that it was important to be specific.

The raven turned toward him, the legs of some crawler he had pulled from under a log still wriggling in his beak. He tipped back his head to gulp it down, then shot Barrick a look of reproach.

“Hasn’t Skurn looked and looked? Didn’t us offer you the best us found, not even keeping none back for ourself?”

The “best” had been a large, soft grub the size of Barrick’s thumb, pale and waxy as a candle and leaking greenish fluid where Skurn’s beak had crimped it too fiercely. He had thanked the raven for his generosity and given it back.

“Never mind. These roots are fine.” He laid three more pieces of wood that had been drying on the flames, then began to sharpen the head of his broken spear with a round stone. He could not get over the strange pleasure of having two arms that did not hurt.

“Tell me another tale,” Barrick said after a while. “What happened to Crooked after he threw the gods into his grandmother’s lands?”

“Great-grandmother’s,” the raven said, looking around as though something else toothsome might be crawling by. “It were his great-grandmother, Emptiness. She taught Crooked all her tricks of coming and going.”

Find Crooked’s Hall, the Sleepers had told him. Crooked’s Hall, Crooked’s roads, Crooked’s doorway—did they actually expect Barrick to travel as the gods traveled? “So what happened? Did he become the king of the gods?” But Crooked, who until now had always been Kupilas as far as Barrick knew, was just a minor god, wasn’t he? The Book of the Trigon talked of Kupilas only as the clever patron of blacksmiths and engineers. And physicians, he remembered. Chaven had a statue of him in his house. “What happened after he killed Kernios?”

“Is us a Night Man, full of secrets?” the bird said with a touch of indignation. “Do us know all the Firstborn know? Anyroad, Crooked didn’t kill nobody—he threw the Earthlord and them others into the place where they sleeps forever.”

“But what happened to Kupilas? To Crooked? What happened to him?”

Skurn shrugged, a motion where he lifted his feathers in a ruff around his neck and wiggled his head. “Don’t know. Him were hurt bad by Earthlord’s spear. Dying, some say. Don’t know any more of the story, us. Mam never told it.”

And Barrick had to be content with that.

He was half asleep and drifting when he felt something poking at his hand, something sharp and hard. A beak.

“Hist!” The raven crouched beside him, spotted feathers all a-prickle so that he looked more hedgehog than bird. “I hear somewhat…”

Barrick sat up straight but stayed silent, listening. He gradually became aware that something sharp was poking into the back of his neck, and this time it wasn’t Skurn. He swatted at it but could not dislodge the painful thing from his skin. An instant later something else dropped down from the branches and caught the meat of his right arm—a thorny branch, bent like a hook, on the end of a strand of pale silk.

Before he had time to think several more strands came whipping down from the shadows above him. A few only flailed past him and then snapped away, but two more caught in his ragged clothes and pulled tight, like the thorny barbs already snagged in his neck and arm. Small, sharp pains bloomed all over him.

“They come, Master!” Skurn shrieked, flapping up into the air just as another barb shot out and swung through the spot where he had been. “Silkins!”

Now Barrick could see them, thin gray-white shapes scuttling through the upper branches above his head, casting down their weighted, thorn-hooked barbs to entangle him. He tried to reach into his belt for his broken spear but one of the creatures yanked on a silk strand hooked in his arm to keep him from reaching the weapon. Barrick grabbed the silk and pulled back hard until it slackened and he could grab the spearhead. He leaned out with his left hand and swept it up to cut through the strand imprisoning his arm, saying a silent prayer of thanks he had sharpened the edge. It took longer to work loose the thorny branch in his neck, and when he brought his hand away his fingers were smeared with blood.

Two of the maggoty things came tumbling out of the trees, silent as ghosts in the twilight, swinging their silks like horse-trappers as the dark wet spots of their eyes gleamed with reflected twilight. Barrick ducked under a flailing silk rope and felt the barbed hooks catch and tear at his scalp. He tore them loose from his head just as the creature leaped forward. Its strange, boneless limbs folded around him, and although it weighed little, the force was still enough to knock him off his feet. He fell and rolled, the silkin clinging to him until they both tumbled to a stop, Barrick’s right arm pinned beneath his own body. A strand whipped around his neck and pulled tight. For a moment, with only his useless left arm free, he knew he would die.

But his left arm wasn’t useless any longer. He reached up and caught the strange, slippery-but-sticky thing on his back and dug in his fingers. The strand around his neck tightened for a moment, but then he had tugged the thing loose and dragged it down onto the muddy forest floor.

I’m strong! He could have shouted it—he could feel it in him like a joyful flame. Strong!

Barrick was not able to get a solid grip on his attacker but as it rose up into a crouch he lunged forward and shoved the creature backward into the campfire even as another pale, half-human figure leaped down onto his back.

A horrible, whistling shriek went up from the one that had stumbled into the fire. The burning silkin staggered out of the firepit, pale yellow flames running up its legs and torso, the blackness beneath its mummifying threads beginning to ooze and bubble as the fire took it. Within a few heartbeats it was blazing like a torch, filling the twilight with shrilling screams so high in pitch that Barrick could hardly hear them.

The way to survival suddenly seemed clear. He leaped toward the fire, dragging the second silkin with him, and grabbed a burning piece of wood. With the broken spear in one hand and the flaming brand in the other he turned on the silkin clinging to his ankles and shoved the fire into the creature’s featureless face until it sizzled and bubbled. Piping in agony, it pulled free of him and leaped away, blindly tearing at its own head before striking a tree trunk. It lay twitching for a moment, then crawled away into the undergrowth, rolling and lopsided as a drunkard.

Barrick grabbed the spearhead tight and beat his hand upon his breast. “Come on, then!” he shouted at the ghostly shapes still swarming in the trees above. “Come and get me!”

Two more jumped down, then a third. Skurn came out of nowhere and snatched with his talons at the one nearest Barrick, which gave him a moment to swipe the torch against it. He narrowly missed singeing the bird, who flapped up again, cawing in alarm. The silkin’s wrappings did not catch, but Barrick stabbed at it again with his blade and spilled its black ooze, then turned and shoved the flame up against the next one even as it lurched forward. For long moments he could not tell how many of the silkins surrounded him, or how he was faring, but he could smell the ghastly, salty stink of the things as they burned. He began to laugh as he slashed with spearhead and torch, striking at everything that moved. From the corner of his eye he saw Skurn beating his way up into the air, looking for safety. Barrick only laughed louder.

An hour might have passed, or only moments—Barrick couldn’t tell. The last moving silkin was at his feet, trying to hold in its slow-dripping innards where Barrick had slashed its belly wide open. In a fever of gleeful rage Barrick dropped his spear and grabbed at the creature’s head, his fingers compressing the silk-wrapped ball as if it were a rotten melon. He pulled it upright, then shoved the torch into its gaping, sticky eye.

“Die, you filthy thing!” He held it down with his foot until it was burning too hot to stand over it. Three more of the creatures lay motionless and oozing at his feet, and nothing else moved in the trees.

Barrick lifted his hands before him, staring. He had known he would win—he had known it! What a marvel it was to have two strong arms, to be like anyone else! He kicked the smoldering corpse of the silkin and turned his back on it.

I have been given a gift. And what have I paid for it? Nothing.

He no longer felt any pain. Even the old miseries and the old losses—his sister, his stolen father, his murdered brother—troubled him no more; he had hardly thought of them in days. Just as the pain of his arm had gone, all his painful feelings had vanished, too.

When Skurn at last found the courage to come down again from the trees, Barrick was still laughing quietly.

Because I am whole for the first time, he thought. The real Barrick Eddon, at last.

18. King Hesper Is Unwell

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Golden One.” Pinimmon Vash looked up. He had lowered himself onto his old, aching knees: when the autarch was in one of his unpredictable moods, he had found the conservative approach was safest. “I thought we were bound for… I have forgotten the name of the place. Your… guest’s little kingdom in the north.”

“Southmarch. And so we are.” Sulepis stretched out a hand to admire the spread of his long fingers, each one tipped in gold as bright as the honey of Nushash’s bees. “But first we are paying a visit to another ruler. May I not pass the time as I wish, Paramount Minister Vash? Surely life is too beautiful to be always hurrying!” The autarch smiled his lazy, crocodilian smile.

“May you… of course, Golden One! It goes without saying! Even the stars in the sky pause to know your plans.” Vash squeezed himself a little closer to the floor, despite the pains sparking in his shins and hips. “We all live only to serve you. I just wished to… to know more of what you planned… so that we might better accommodate your needs.” He tried to laugh, but instead of a knowing chuckle it came out as a shaky wheeze. “May you! You play a trick on your oldest and most dedicated servant, master! I would die to serve your smallest wish.”

“I would like to see that.” Sulepis’ laugh was much more convincing than Vash’s had been. “But not this morning, I think. Arrange boats to go ashore and bearers for the tribute. And tell the antipolemarch he may stand his soldiers down—I will take only the bearers, my carpet servants, and you. Oh, and I think King Olin might find the visit amusing too. Four guards should be enough for him.”

“No soldiers?” Vash realized he was questioning his monarch again, but surely even the autarch was not so mad as to enter a foreign court with only four guards. “I am old, Golden One. Did I mishear you?”

“You did not. Tell Dumin Hauyuz that as long as his men remain on the ship and we remain ready to sail, he may otherwise do as he pleases.”

“For which he will be profoundly grateful, Golden One, I have no doubt.” Vash tried to back out of the cabin without standing up, but he quickly realized he no longer had the flexibility for it. After he had slid himself far enough backward, he clambered slowly to his feet and backed out of the presence of the inscrutable, incomprehensible living god on earth.

It seemed that the entire population of Gremos Pitra, capital city of Jellon and Jael, had lined up along the steeply rising road between the harbor and the palace to watch the strange procession. It was a small procession, as Sulepis had directed, with the autarch himself leading the way (except during the moments when the carpet slaves dashed in front of him to lay out the next section of cloth-of-gold carpet so that his sacred feet never touched the ground). Vash walked behind him, trying manfully to move onto the next piece of carpet each time before the sweating slaves snatched up the old one to carry it ahead of the god-king once more. The paramount minister was so terrified that one of the onlookers might do something untoward—what if one of them threw a rock at the autarch?—that his stomach ached.

Olin and his guards came next, walking on ordinary earth as ordinary men should; they were followed by the silent priest Vash had seen on the ship but whose name he did not know. The man had the dark, weathered skin of the deep-desert tribes and was covered with flamelike tattoos, and though he was not old his eyes were gray with cataracts. He carried a staff that clicked and jingled with the dangling skeletons of a dozen serpents. Everything about the priest made Vash fretful; he had been grateful during the voyage that the man had largely stayed belowdecks.

The snake-priest was followed by several dozen muscular slaves, each one carrying a huge tribute basket on his back—heavy baskets, too, from the frozen, uncomfortable grimaces of the men carrying them.

The onlookers crowding along the road watched and whispered in dull astonishment, both at the appearance of the tall southern god-king in his gleaming, golden armor and the almost complete absence of soldiers guarding him. Vash clearly was not the only one to be surprised that the famous enemy of all Eion should walk unarmed through a hostile city.

Pinimmon Vash did not find much chance to pray these days but he prayed now.

Nushash, I follow your heir. All my life I have been told the autarch carries your blood. Now I follow him into terrible danger in a hostile country. I have waited upon three autarchs and have always done my best to serve the Falcon Throne. Please do not let me die here in this backward land! Please do not let the autarch die under my protection!

He blinked dust from his eyes. At least the scotarch Prusus remained upon the ship, protected by Xixian soldiers. Even if the worst happened the ancient laws would be observed; the Falcon Throne would not go unfilled.

But Prusus is a cripple, Vash thought. A drooling lackwit. Still, it was said that some of the previous autarchs, especially those who reigned before the Ninth Year War, had not been much better. Tradition was what mattered. The scotarch would only rule until the council of noble families met and a new autarch was approved. Sulepis had several sons by several mothers. The line would not die.

The paramount minister was startled out of these gloomy thoughts by a stirring in the crowd. The Golden One’s procession had reached the outer gates of Gremos Pitra and a party of armed soldiers stood waiting for them. Vash hurried forward as fast as his aching legs would carry him. The autarch could not speak directly to underlings. Surely things were not as topsy-turvy as that—not yet, in any case.

“I am Niccol Opanour, gate-herald of Gremos Pitra and of his majesty, Hesper, king of Jellon and Jael,” said the leader of the soldiers, a fox-faced man with a short beard and the look of a good gambler. “State your business with King Hesper and his court.”

“Business?” Vash had been carefully schooled by the autarch in what to say. “Surely a great king like Sulepis needs no petty excuse to stop and greet a fellow monarch? We bring your master gifts from the south—a gesture of goodwill. You would not make my monarch stand in the road like a tradesman, would you? You can see we come with no soldiers. We are at Hesper’s mercy.”

Which, as most of the other kings of this northern continent could attest, was as much as to say “hopeless.” Hesper was only merciful for gain, a friend to other rulers only when it suited him, and everyone knew it.

Gate-herald Opanour frowned. “I mean your king no disrespect, but we were not told to expect this. We are not prepared. As it happens, King Hesper is… unwell.”

“That is a pity,” said Vash. “However, I feel certain that the gifts we bring him will cheer him somewhat.” He hadn’t spoke the Hierosoline tongue of the north in a long time, and was pleased to discover its subtleties hadn’t entirely escaped him. He beckoned forward one of the sweating bearer slaves, then swept away the top of the man’s basket. “See the generosity of Xis.”

The handful of soldiers leaned forward in their saddles and their eyes grew round as they saw the gold and gems that filled the basket.

“That… this is most impressive,” the gate-herald said. “But we must still ask our king for his permission…”

The autarch himself suddenly stepped forward, making the carpet slaves scurry to get another length of cloth-of-gold in front of him before his sandaled foot touched bare ground (which would reputedly cause the world itself to totter and collapse). The horses of the Jellonian soldiers shied away as though Sulepis was a kind of creature they had never seen before—as in fact he was, Vash thought: he was beginning to think the world had never seen anything quite like his master.

“Please say one thing to these men of Jellon for us, Paramount Minister,” Sulepis said in Hierosoline. His voice seemed pitched softly, but it carried a long distance. “Remind them that even a benevolent king has limits. We have a warship full of long guns just outside the harbor, and several more will arrive by tonight.” Sulepis smiled at the Jellonians and folded his arms across his breast, his golden armor clinking gently. “We come in peace, yes, but we would hate to see the spark of suspicion start a fire that would be hard to put out.”

It was quickly decided that one of the soldiers should ride back to the palace to inform Hesper and the court that the autarch was coming.

The palace of Gremos Pitra was perched on a clifftop above the harbor, but in the years of peace the steep, narrow old path leading to it had been rebuilt into a series of wide, gentle switchbacks. Even Vash, old and sore as he was, did not find it too agonizing to climb from the harbor to the palace gates, but he still could not understand why so much time was being spent in such an odd exercise.

The gates swung open as they approached and the full panoply of Hesper’s power appeared, guards on every parapet and a hundred more on either side of the entrance. The autarch walked serenely past them as though they were his own loyal subjects, looking neither to the left nor the right and walking in a measured but not overly slow pace so that the carpet slaves had to scurry to stay ahead of him. The procession crossed a formal courtyard rapidly filling with Jellonian courtiers and servants, those in back standing on tiptoe or trampling the hedges in their determination to get a view of the infamous Mad Autarch of Xis.

Many of the Jellonian troops filed into the great hall behind the parade of basket-hauling slaves, so that the autarch’s party was hemmed in on all sides by armed soldiers wearing ceremonial green tabards bearing the blue rooster and golden rings of Hesper’s Jaelian clan. The king’s tall, canopied chair stood at the far end of the high-ceilinged room, surrounded by dozens of courtiers gaping at the new arrivals, too fascinated even to whisper among themselves. Vash squinted—it was a long room—trying to make out the small figure slumped in the huge covered chair, which looked more like a sack of clothes to be washed than a man. As the herald had suggested the king of Jellon looked old and ill, his skin pale, his eyes blue-ringed and sunken. He was dressed all in white, which had the unfortunate effect of making him appear to be a corpse wrapped in its burial shroud.

Sulepis strode toward him, the carpet slaves hurrying to prepare the way, and then stopped a few yards from the steps leading up to the chair. Vash thought his master might become angry at being forced to stand beneath a less powerful monarch, but if he was, the autarch showed no sign of it. The Jellonian guards fidgeted nervously with their weapons, but their ruler held up a shaking hand.

“So,” Hesper said hoarsely, “the much feared Emperor of the South. You are younger than I supposed, sir. What do you want?”

“I am told you are not well,” Sulepis said in a simple and matter-of-fact tone. “It is kind of you to rouse yourself to meet me.”

“Kind?” Hesper straightened up a little. “You threatened me with your warships if I would not see you. Do not be absurd.” His voice, which should have been forceful, had been robbed by his weakness of all but petulance. Still, Vash could see that he had once been a formidable man.

“Perhaps you are right,” said Sulepis. “Perhaps we should put away our masks. I did not come only to give you gifts—although they are very fine gifts indeed.” He waved his golden fingers toward the slaves, who still held their baskets high on their shoulders, as though the floor of the throne room were too dirty a place to set such down valuable objects. “But also to tell you that I am displeased with you.”

“Displeased with me?” Hesper shook his head irritably. Vash could not stop looking at the man. The king of Jellon was not even sixty years old—much younger than Pinimmon Vash himself—but looked like he had lived a hundred years or more, and hard years at that. “Am I a child that I should care about such things? I am displeased that you disturb my rest. Say your piece and be gone.”

“You promised me something, Hesper.” The autarch spoke with the stern but loving tone of a disappointed father. “You had something I wanted—something I specifically asked you to acquire for me—but you sold it to someone else instead.”

The courtiers began to murmur. Even without knowing what his master intended, Vash guessed they would have much more to wonder about before too long.

“What are you babbling about?” Hesper demanded, but he had the look of a guilty man caught in a lie.

“But you see,” Sulepis said, “I have obtained it despite you.” He clapped his hands and his guards pushed King Olin forward. The courtiers murmured more loudly, but it was clear most of them did not recognize the ruler of the March Kingdoms.

“What… what… ? ” Hesper stuttered. “What foolishness is this… ?”

“I think the one who promises something to me and then does not keep his bargain is the foolish one,” Sulepis said calmly. “I told you I wanted Olin of Southmarch. I gave you gold to show my goodwill. You kept my gold, Hesper, and then you sold Olin to Ludis of Hierosol. That is not the way to make me look kindly on you.”

Vash was beginning to feel truly frightened. Hesper might be old and ill, and Sulepis might have warships outside the harbor, but at the moment the Xixians were surrounded by armed enemies and the harbor was a mile away. Why was Sulepis provoking a confrontation? Had he taken the idea of his own godhood too seriously? Did he honestly think that the Jellonians would not dare to touch him, let alone hack him to pieces where he stood? Perhaps the autarch believed that these northerners were like his own people, bred with a hundred generations of reverence for their god-king.

“Well, King Olin?” Sulepis certainly appeared as comfortable as if he stood in his own throne room surrounded by worshipful subjects and his own Leopard guards. “Have you nothing to say to your betrayer now that you stand before him at last? This is the man who took you from your family and sold you like the merest beast.”

Olin looked from Sulepis to Hesper, then cast his eyes down again. “I have nothing to say. I am a prisoner. I am not here of my own will.”

Hesper tried to stand but could not, and subsided gasping into the huge chair. He pointed at the autarch. “Do you think to humiliate me in front of my own subjects? You may rule a million blacks, but here in Jellon you are nothing but a fool dressed like a golden peacock. You pushed yourself upon me. You are no guest and I owe you no safety.” He tried to say something else, but a long spasm of coughing prevented him. When he could again speak, his voice rasped like a loose cart wheel. “I do not know whether to ransom you or simply do away with you.”

“All will proceed as heaven plans it,” the autarch said, smiling. “Olin, are you certain you have nothing else to say? I have given you a chance to confront your enemy.”

Vash was feeling a terrible pressure in his bladder and his heart was beating so fast he feared he would swoon in front of all these foreigners.

“Hesper has done me wrong,” said Olin, “but it is you who brought me here like one of your tribute baskets—something to show off your wealth and power. I will not play your game, Sulepis.”

“Enough,” said Hesper, and coughed again. “I… I have…”

“It is too bad you do not understand all I am doing for you, Olin,” said the autarch. “Lifting you from an ignoble fate to the most heroic end there could be. And this as well…” He turned back toward the throne. “Hesper, you have been ill a long time, I think—almost a year, I would guess. It began when you passed Olin to Ludis Drakava, did it not?”

Hesper’s eyes bulged with pain and frustration as he tried to stop coughing. A little spray of red decorated his white robes. One of his servants stepped forward with a cup but Hesper waved him off. “Ill, yes,” Hesper said at last in a breathy whisper. “And deserted in my need by that whore I had smiled upon and lifted up from nothing. Betrayed me, she did—left me for that cur Enander!” He paused then and looked around, as confused as though he had just woken up. A moment later he blinked and wiped red spittle from his chin. “It matters not,” he said. “But I will live long enough to see you sent screaming down to hell, Xandian.”

“You still do not understand, do you? ” Sulepis smiled. “You are dying, Hesper, because you have been poisoned—I reached out all the way from Xand to accomplish it.” He grinned, which only made him look more predatory. “You see, it is worse than you thought. Not only did Ananka leave you, she took my gold and poured death into your cup before she went.” The autarch ignored the gasps and cries of the Jellonian courtiers as he turned from the wheezing, pop-eyed king of Jellon back to Olin. “Now you see how you have been avenged,” he told his prisoner. “And King Hesper learns the price of betraying a living god.”

Hesper recovered enough breath to flail his hand toward Sulepis and shout, “Guards!” but even as the first of the soldiers stepped forward—more hesitantly than Vash would have expected for men facing unarmed slaves—the autarch raised his hand high and they all stopped as though Sulepis were their king instead of blood-drooling Hesper.

“But wait!” the autarch cried and then began to laugh, a sound so strange and unexpected that even the armored soldiers flinched. “You still have not seen the gifts I bring!” Sulepis flicked his fingers.

The bearers lifted their baskets high above their heads and dashed them on the floor. Gold and jewels spilled out onto the tiles, but not only treasure: from each broken basket a cloud of black wasps rose like a moaning whirlwind, each wasp as big as a man’s thumb; a moment later, even as the screams began, hundreds of poisonous hood snakes crawled out of the ruined baskets as well. The snakes immediately slithered off in all directions, striking at anything that moved including many of the helpless bearer slaves. Already the great hall was a chaos of shrieking courtiers and servants struggling to escape. Many held their hands over their faces to defend against the wasps only to stumble into a tangle of serpents and fall screaming to the floor, where they thrashed helplessly until the creatures’ venom silenced them at last.

Vash was too astounded to do anything but stare at the horror around him, but wasps were snapping past him like sling stones and the first of the angry snakes had almost reached the place where he cringed by the autarch’s side.

“A’lat!” called Sulepis.

The dark-skinned priest stepped forward and raised his rattling serpent-staff, then rapped it on the floor and shouted something Vash could not make out. A moment later the air around the priest seemed to grow as shimmery as a heat-mirage, then the strange blur stretched out and swallowed up the autarch and Vash and Olin Eddon and the guards as well.

It was like being covered by fog: Vash could still see the jerking, staggering shapes of courtiers and soldiers but they had become remote and hard to make out, like shadow puppets held too far from the screen. Still, the priest’s spell, if that was what it was, had done nothing to diminish the sounds in the great hall, which only became worse as the gurgles and groans of the dying began to supplant the screams of the living still struggling to escape.

“A’lat,” said the autarch, “I believe some smoke would add to the scene and make our exit even more impressive.” He spoke as calmly as if he were deciding what kind of trees should be planted in the gardens of the Orchard Palace. “Vash, it will be rather confusing when we go out—please remind the carpet slaves that they must pay close attention.”

Vash could only watch, slack-jawed with amazement, as the dark priest A’lat lifted a round object the size of a small cannonball and rubbed it with his hands while singing a few quiet words until the ball began to billow persimmon-colored smoke. The priest rolled it across the floor toward the doorway leading out of the great hall, then the autarch and his carpet slaves stepped after it.

The door to the courtyard was open and the garden itself was littered with bodies, some moaning and twitching, some silent. Some of the courtiers had even gone so far as to climb trees to escape the hood snakes, and could be seen clinging to branches with one hand while they tried to swat away angry wasps with the other, but their screams and the corpses lying at the base of some of the trees with shiny black insects still walking on their faces told a tale of futility, even through the blur of the priest’s spell. The magical fog seemed cover the autarch wherever he went, like the royal awning slaves held over him on particularly hot days. The Jellonian guards still trying to reach the throne room and protect their own monarch rushed past the little procession as though they could not see it.

Vash had seen hood snakes before, although never in such numbers, but he had never seen anything like the huge wasps, creatures that seemed to have no other desire than to sting anything that moved and keep stinging it until motion ceased. Even in the midst of such madness and death he could not help wondering where they came from.

When they reached the gate, Sulepis told the priest, “More smoke, I think. It will serve to distract the multitude.” The autarch then waited calmly as his guards winched open the massive portcullis and unbolted the outer door. A’lat rubbed another of his smoke-fruits into life and held it in his hand as he led Sulepis and the hustling carpet bearers out through the palace gate. The people who had lined the road before had lost all order and were now blocking the autarch’s passage.

A’lat ignited a second smoke ball and held one high in each hand. The Jellonians shrank back, crying out in fear and amazement. Sulepis raised his hands.

“The great god of fire has destroyed your wicked king!” he shouted and some in the crowd cried out, while others fell into murmuring, confused talk. “He has sent doom down on Hesper from heaven itself—stinging insects, fierce serpents, lions, and dragons! Run! Run and you may yet be saved!”

Even as the Jellonians stared, some drawing away but some starting forward in anger and distrust, the first swarm of wasps issued from the open gate of the palace, flew past the autarch and his party as if they were not even there, and fell upon the nearest of the people in the road like a cloud of death. The screeching of these victims set many of the others running, and a moment later a dozen huge snakes wriggled out of the gate into the sunlight and the crowd dissolved into mindless terror just as the courtiers inside had done. The autarch’s party walked down the road toward the harbor, the carpet slaves scuttling back and forth to keep the golden path always stretching before their master.

“Lions and dragons?” Vash looked around worriedly.

“The tale of what happened here will grow in the telling,” the autarch said. “I merely add a few details to make the eventual history richer.”

Olin Eddon had the bloodless look of a man living a nightmare, and staggered a little as he walked. His guards moved closer to help keep him upright.

“Is Hesper dead?” Vash asked.

“Ah, I hope it is not so.” Sulepis shook his head. “I would like to think he will pass his last month or so before the poison kills him dwelling on what it means to cheat me and knowing that I will come back at my leisure and devour his little country like a sweetmeat.” He paused and turned to gaze back at Gremos Pitra, an expression of great serenity on his long face. “After this, the people of Jellon will crawl to me on the day I return. They will beg to become slaves of Xis.”

“Not everyone in the north will beg to become slaves,” Olin said darkly. “You may find that many would rather die than bend their knees to you.”

“That too can be arranged,” the autarch told him. “Now come, all of you—step lively. It has been a busy morning and your god-king is hungry.”

Qinnitan was still reeling when the nameless man dragged her out into the sunlight and began to lead her across the docks. Poor Pigeon limped beside them, his hand dripping blood through the makeshift bandage, his little face emptied by the shock of what had happened.

How could it be? How could all she had suffered and survived have given them only that few moments of freedom? Were the gods utterly evil?

Spare us, great Nushash, she prayed. I was a priestess in your sacred Hive. I have only tried to do what was right. Heavenly bees, protect us!

But there were no bees, only smoke and flecks of burning sail wafting on the wind. The ship that had brought them here was all but gone, only a bit of its burning forecastle still above water, the mast long since burned black and collapsed. Hundreds of people crowded the waterfront, shouting bits of the story to each other, staring as survivors were pulled from the water by men in small boats.

Some of them were innocent sailors, she thought suddenly, like the men on Dorza’s ship. Some of them might have been good men. Dead because of me…

It did no good to think about it—no good to think about anything. She was being taken to an unimaginable punishment at the hands of the autarch and her only hope of escape had proved futile. Even if she were to dive into the water, this nameless, relentless killer would only dive in and pull her back out again. Perhaps if she swallowed as much water as she could…

But that would leave Pigeon alone, she realized. This monster would give him to the autarch to be tortured… killed…

Suddenly a horrifying pain stabbed at Qinnitan’s arm. She shrieked and staggered a step or two, then fell to her knees. For a moment she thought her captor had grabbed her elbow and broken it, but he was on the other side, holding the other arm. He tried to yank her back upright, but her limbs were as limp and boneless as wet string.

Blackness swam before her eyes and she hung her head, thinking she might vomit. The pain in her arm was growing fiercer, as if a sliver of the burning ship had been driven into her like a nail into soft wood, as if the joint in her arm were being carved with a sharp knife.

“Gods! Stop this!” she cried, or thought she did, but she was tumbling down into blackness and could not be certain of anything any more.

Shadows moved around her, eyeless things murmuring words she could barely hear.

“Tears…” whispered one.

“Spittle…” said another.

“Blood…” quavered a third in a voice so low she could scarcely make it out.

Her arm burned as if the bone had become a white-hot poker. The darkness swung around her in a wild dance, and for a moment she saw the face of the red-haired boy… Barrick!… but he clearly did not see her, although she tried to call to him. Something covered him and kept her from him—a frozen waterfall, a cup of glass—and her words could not travel to him. Ice. Solid shadow. Separation…

Then the world wheeled back into place around her, the cry of seagulls and the shouts of people on every side snapping into place like the last piece of a wooden puzzle. The hard, gray planks of the dock were beneath her hands and knees. Somebody was pulling her roughly to her feet, but she was not ready and almost fell again; only the strength of that powerful, iron-hard arm held her upright. The pain in her own arm was fading but she was still breathless with its memory.

“What are you playing at?” her captor, the nameless man, shook her hard. He looked around as though someone might notice, but no one on the dock was near enough to hear, even if they would have cared. We must look like a father with two willful children, she thought. Behaving badly.

Something struck her then—not more pain, but a realization: if she continued to walk this path there was no hope. She could feel it, feel things closing in, possibilities withering, so that only death stood at the end of the road—death and something more, something worse. It’s waiting, she realized, although she did not know what it was. Something hungry, that was all she knew for certain, and it was waiting for her in the darkness at the end of her journey.

Qinnitan regained her balance and waited until the man took his hand off her to grab at Pigeon, then she turned and ran as fast her unsteady legs would carry her, straight toward the edge of the dock, not slowing even at a shout from her captor. The planks were wet and she almost slipped and tumbled into the water, but managed to stop herself by grabbing at a post. She held onto it, swaying, then raised her hand as the man began to walk toward her, dragging Pigeon behind him.

“No!” she said with as much strength as she could muster, the word a harsh croak in her sea-roughened throat. “No. If you take another step before you hear me out, I’ll throw myself in. I’ll swim for the bottom and drink in so much ocean I’ll be dead before you reach me.”

He paused, the look of rage on his unexceptional face changing to something else, something colder and more calculating.

“I know I can’t get away from you,” she said. “Let the boy go and I’ll do what you want. Try to bring him along and I’ll kill myself and you can take my body to the autarch instead.”

“I make no bargains,” said the nameless man.

“Pigeon, run away!” Qinnitan shouted. “Go on, run. He won’t come after you. Run far away and hide.”

The boy only stared at her, the shock of his injuries changing into something much more heartbreaking. The man still held his wrist. Pigeon shook his head.

“Go!” she said. “Otherwise he’ll only keep hurting you to make me do what he wants. Run away!”

The nameless man looked from the boy to her. He bent and picked up a piece of coarse rope that lay in haphazard loops on the dock like an exhausted snake. “Tie one end around your waist and I will let the boy go.” He flipped a coil of the rope toward her.

“Pigeon, move back,” she said as she bent to pick it up, but the boy only stared at her, his face full of helpless misery. “Move back!” She turned to the man. “When he is at the edge of the dock by those steps, I’ll tie it around my waist. I swear as an acolyte of the Hives of Nushash.”

The man actually laughed, a harsh rasp of amusement. Something was different about him, she realized for the first time—something odd, as though he had lost a bit of his stony outer armor. He was still terrifying, though.

The man nodded. “Go ahead, then.” He called over his shoulder to Pigeon. “Run, child. Once I see that rope tied, if you are still on the dock I will cut off the rest of your fingers.”

Pigeon shook his head again, violently, but Qinnitan thought it was less in negation than in desperation. “Go away!” she shouted. A few people at the other end of the dock turned, their attention finally distracted from the fire in the harbor. “I cannot live with your suffering, Pigeon. Please—it’s the best thing you can do for me. Go!”

The boy hesitated half a dozen heartbeats longer, then burst into tears and turned and ran away across the broad dock, his bare feet banging on the planks. Qinnitan considered throwing herself into the cold green water again, but whether it was the horror of nearly drowning earlier or the feeling that she had somehow changed what lay before her, if only a little, she tied the rope around her waist and then let herself be pulled toward the nameless man. Pigeon, she was relieved to see, was no longer in sight.

The only person left in this world who loved me, she thought. Gone now. Qinnitan let the man lead her off like an animal going to holy sacrifice, away from the sparking chaos of the harbor and back into the shadowed alleys that ran between the narrow buildings clustered beside the docks of Agamid.

19. Dreams of Lightning and Black Earth

She was digging desperately through dark earth, but every time she caught a glimpse of her twin brother’s pale, sleeping face he sank farther into the soil and out of her reach.

Once or twice she actually managed to touch his garments before he slid deeper into the ground, but no matter how hard she worked or how fast she threw aside the dirt she could not catch up to him. Barrick seemed alive but unaware of her, writhing as though trapped in a frightening dream. She called to him over and over but he wouldn’t or couldn’t answer.

She touched something at last and her fingers curled in the damp cloth of her brother’s shirt, but when she braced herself and pulled up hard, what appeared out of the black loam like the cap of a mushroom was not her brother’s pallid features but those of Ferras Vansen. Shocked and startled, she let go, but as the soldier disappeared back into the dirt the earth beneath her abruptly collapsed as well. She fell down into smothering, gritty dark.

She was in a tunnel, bits of white roots worming down from the rocky soil above her head. A flash of silver now appeared ahead of her—just a glimmer, but enough for her to recognize the thing she had chased before… in another…

When? She couldn’t remember. But she knew it was true, and knew that the silvery thing had eluded her once more. She was determined it would not happen again. Still, although she scrambled after it as quickly as she could, she was not meant for traveling on all fours while the thing she chased clearly was: it remained always a turn ahead of her, giving her only glimpses of a pale, fluttering, brushlike tail.

Then she stumbled and bumped against the wall. The tunnel fell in on her and Briony Eddon woke up.

She shook her head, disconcerted to find she was wearing a heavy headdress—why would she wear such a thing to bed? Briony opened her eyes to find herself in her sitting room. Her ladies were sewing and talking quietly among themselves. She had fallen asleep sitting up, in midday, and probably drooled on herself as well like some ancient crone.

Her friend Ivgenia was watching her with a little smile on her face. Briony hurriedly wiped at her chin. “How terrible I am, how rude!” she said, sitting up straight. “I must have dozed off. Why do you look at me so, Ivvie? Did I say something terrible in my sleep?”

“Oh, Highness, no.” The smile widened. “Poor thing. Too many late nights.”

“You’re teasing me. It was only one late night—and it was the last night of Greater Zosimia. You are the one always telling me I should go out and be seen by the people of the court.”

“And you were seen. And you even danced! No one will ever again criticize you for holding yourself aloof, my dear.”

“Danced? ” Briony winced a little. She had intended no such thing, but the revelries had come at the end of a long, tiring day and she had clearly taken at least one cup of wine too many. “You make it sound terrible. Did I make a fool of myself ?”

Ivvie smiled again. “You attracted much attention, but it was the sort many of the other girls envied, I think.”

“Stop. You are cruel.”

“We shall see. Your secretary has a few things for you to look at.”

“What? ” She really did feel terribly thick-headed. These nights of poor sleep and strange dreams—forests, digging, dark tunnels full of roots—were clearly taking a toll on her. Still, that was no excuse for playing the fool.

Feival Ulian had been standing in the doorway with his arms folded on his chest. He had taken to court life very quickly: no other secretary or cleric in Broadhall dressed so well or so colorfully. “Have we finished our little beauty nap?” he asked. “Because there are several messages awaiting your reply—and a few other things as well.” He rolled his eyes. “One of the packages is addressed to ‘The Lovely Dancing Princess’—I suppose that’s you.”

“Oh, dear. You’d better let me see it.” She took the small fabric-covered box from Feival. “What is it?”

Ivgenia giggled. “You goose! Open it and find out.”

“Is it a gift? It says it’s from Lord Nikomakos.” She fiddled it open and drew out a small velvet bag.

“He’s an earl’s son—the one with the yellow hair you spent so much time dancing with last night.” Ivgenia laughed. “Surely your Royal Highness didn’t drink so much wine that you can’t remember him at all?”

“I do remember. He reminded me of Kendrick, my… my brother. But he wouldn’t stop talking about his hawks. Hawk, hawk, hawk… Why should he send me…”—she lifted it out of the bag—“Zoria preserve me, why should he send me a gold bracelet?” It was a lovely thing, if a trifle gaudy, the kind of ornate work that she seldom wore by choice—a twining white rose, the blossoms picked out in pale gems. “Oh, merciful goddess, are those diamonds? What does he want from me?” She was horrified—she would never drink wine in public again. Instead of sounding out the nobles who might be sympathetic to her family’s cause and could help put gentle pressure on King Enander, as she had meant to, she had apparently made a spectacle of herself to shame the worst provincial.

“Are you really such an idiot, Highness?” Ivvie demanded.

“I mean, certainly I know what he wants, and I suppose I’m flattered, but…” She stared fretfully at the bracelet. “I must send it back.” She thought she could actually hear Feival pursing his lips in disgust. “Are all of these gifts from him?”

“From him and others,” her friend said.

“Then I must send them all back.”

“Truly? All of them? ” Ivgenia held out a large parcel wrapped in cloth. “Even this one from Prince Eneas himself… ?”

Briony took it and opened it. “It’s a book—A Chronicle of the Life of Iola, Queen of Syan, Tolos, and Perikal. Of course—the prince and I spoke of her the other day.”

“How romantic,” Feival said with a certain asperity.

“So are you going to keep it?”

“It is a very thoughtful gift, Ivvie—he knows I am interested in such things. Iola lived in secrecy for several years when young because her family had been usurped during the War of Three Favors.”

“Which means you want to keep it, Princess. What of the bracelet? Do you still mean to send it back?”

“Of course. I hardly know the man.”

“So you will keep a book and send back a jeweled bracelet? Do you wonder why half the court thinks you have set your cap at Eneas and the other half thinks you mad?”

It stung. There was something in what Ivvie said, of course—Briony did have some feelings for the prince, and it had been clever of him to give her such a gift instead of something merely pretty. Eneas understood that she was not like other girls.

Which made what she planned to do to him even more terrible.

“What about these others? There are half a dozen more letters and gifts.” Ivgenia held out a carved wooden box. “This is pretty.”

“I don’t want any of these.” Briony shook her head. “You open it.”

“Truly? May I keep what’s in it… ?”

“Ivvie! You are terrible! Very well, I might as well know—what is it?”

“It’s… empty,” said her friend, but her voice sounded odd. “Oh. I’ve hurt myself. On the clasp.” Ivgenia held up her finger to show Briony a single drop of blood like a carnelian bead. A moment later the girl swayed and then fell heavily to the floor.

Briony didn’t like the formality of Broadhall’s Great Garden at the best of times, but today it felt utterly barren and oppressive.

It wasn’t the size, although it covered many acres, but the tamed, controlled nature of the place. None of the hedges or ornamental trees were taller than a person’s head, and most were far shorter; between them lay only geometric arrangements of low box hedges and careful, concentric flower gardens. You could stand in any part of the gardens and see almost all the rest, including who shared the garden with you. Perhaps the Tessians liked it that way, but she preferred a little more solitude, especially now, when it felt like malicious eyes watched her everywhere she went. The much smaller residence garden back home had several little hills and stands of tall trees that effectively divided the space into many separate locations—a world in miniature, as her father had once called it. (He was talking sourly of how parts of it had been allowed to go to seed, but what he said was still true.)

“I am sorry to keep you waiting, Princess.” As Eneas emerged from the back of the scriptorium Briony had a momentary view of a legion of beetle-black scribing priests sitting side by side at the long tables, hard at work. “And even more sorry to keep you waiting at such an unhappy time. There is no way I can express my sorrow and shame that such things should happen in my father’s court—and twice! Please, how is the Lady e’Doursos?”

“She will live, thank the gods, that is what the physician told me… but she will be a long while getting better.” Briony fought back tears for what seemed like the hundredth time in the last few hours. She was so tired she felt as though she were made from frail glass. “It was a near thing. I sat up with her all the night as she passed in and out of her fever. I thought many times we would lose her, but it seems the sharpened piece of the clasp only barely pierced her, or it might have been the poison was weak.” Briony still could not guess who had tried to murder her this time. Surely Jenkin Crowel had been frightened out of trying such tricks again, but if it hadn’t been the Tollys’ envoy then who could be behind it?

“We must praise the Three Brothers for that blessed bit of good fortune, then.” Eneas offered Briony his arm. “Will you walk with me? I am mightily tired of the sound of pens scratching. I have been sending letters to every garrison between here and Hierosol about the autarch’s attack. A damnable amount of work.” He colored a little. “Not that I had to do all the copying myself, thank the gods!” He was speaking swiftly now, as though afraid to let silence fall. “I must get one of those writing machines the pamphleteers and poets use—or stamping machine, I suppose it should be called, for they work by stamping out letters and words as a royal seal stamps signs into wax. It would certainly speed the giving of orders to our field commanders…” He shook his head. “Listen to me, prattling on when you have just survived an attack on your life!”

“An attack that harmed me not at all.”

He frowned. “You say that as though you wish it had succeeded.”

Briony shook her head, although even such small movements felt nearly beyond her strength. “I don’t wish that, Prince Eneas, of course I don’t. But I feel terrible that others should suffer on my behalf.”

“You are an admirable woman, Briony Eddon. I promise that I will do everything I can to keep you safe. I will send more of my guards. There are no more loyal men in all Syan.”

“I’m sure of that, Highness,” she said. “But even the finest soldiers are scant protection against poison.”

He seemed more upset than Briony was herself. “Still, we must do something. This is an outrage, Princess—a deadly insult to my father’s name and throne. Here in our own court!” He turned then, stopping them in the middle of the path, and took her right hand in both of his. “And it is especially disheartening to me, Briony Eddon, because I hold you in such high regard. There is nothing I would not do for you.”

She blinked. His hands were warm. He had taken his gloves off.

“Surely you are not surprised.” The prince looked troubled. “Was I so foolish as to be completely wrong when I supposed you might also have some feelings for me?”

Briony held her breath for a moment. She had been working toward this moment for weeks, but now she was confused. Eneas was admirable, kind, and clever. Everyone knew he was brave. And, as she looked at him now, she saw his strong, even features and knew that although he was no godlike beauty, any woman would be glad to have him even were he not the prince and heir of mighty Syan. But he was. And she needed his position and his power desperately to save her people, her family’s throne. So why did she suddenly feel confounded and tongue-tied?

“I have struck you silent, Princess. You are not the type to be silent in the presence of men. I fear that I have offended you in some way.”

“No. No, your Royal Highness—Prince Eneas—you have done me great honor.” For a moment her imposture and the truth of her heart were so close she could not tell one from the other. “I think a great deal of you. I think you are the most admirable man in this whole great kingdom…”

He gently tugged his hand away from her, disguising his unhappiness a little by pushing his dark hair back from his forehead. “ ‘But,’ you are about to say. But there is someone else to whom your heart has already been given—maybe your troth even plighted in the temple.”

“No!” But it wasn’t completely untrue—she did have feelings for someone else, as confusing and inappropriate and even ridiculous as those feelings might be. But that person could not save her kingdom. Eneas could—if any human agency could perform such a task. “No, it’s not that. It’s just that… I cannot let myself have feelings for anyone, even someone like you, though you are the dream of any sensible woman. I cannot.” She tried to pull away, caught in the moment like a leaf scudding on the wind.

“But why?” Eneas would not let her go. He was strong. He would be masterful for anyone, she sensed—especially any woman—who wanted to be mastered. “Why can’t you let your heart lead you?”

She had planned just such a moment—imagined it almost gleefully, as a hunter might dream of the moment the stag stood exposed and unaware on a hillside, breast vulnerable to the killing shaft. Now that it had come, though, it filled her with unease. How could she take advantage of a good man this way, even to save her family’s throne? How could she pretend to love him just to gain his help?

Even worse, what if she was not pretending?

“I… I must think,” she said. “I had not expected anything like this. I had hoped to find allies here in your father’s court against my family’s enemies, the usurping Tollys. I had not expected to f ind… someone I could care for. I must think.” She looked off across the ordered rows of the garden. Distant figures acted out their own dramas, too far away to be recognized—each of them, herself included, as helpless in their actions as characters created out of air and smoke by Nevin Hewney or Finn Teodoros, ideas committed to paper and performed for the price of a night’s food and lodging. How had she come to such a strange pass? Was she the player or the thing being played?

“Of course,” Eneas said at last. The prince could not disguise the heaviness of his words. “ ’Of course I will give you time, my lady. You must be true to yourself.”

She should have slept like the dead that night, but instead she rolled and tossed through more nightmares of tunnels collapsing and dirt always beneath her fingers. This time there was no silvery shape to lead her, and the longer the dreams went on the farther down into choking darkness she went.

At last she found herself in a deep place, so deep that she understood somehow she had dug out on the other side of the world, that what lay beyond the small patch of ground on which she stood was the empty blackness of a sky with no stars, a blackness into which a single misstep could send her tumbling forever. And there, at the center of that dark otherness, she found her brother.

He was pale, senseless, as he had been before. He lay stretched before her as Kendrick had lain while the servants prepared him for burial, but Barrick was not dead. She did not know how she knew it, but she did.

The three shapes that crouched over him were no servants or funerary priests but something else entirely—dark, eyeless shadows singing wordless songs as they moved their hands above him. Then one of them lifted Barrick’s crippled arm up to the emptiness of its face and her brother began to fade.

Tears, one of the shapes whispered, and the echo was swallowed by the damp, dark earth all around.

Spittle, said another.

Blood, said a third.

She tried to call to her twin, to wake him and warn him about what these terrible specters were doing, but she could not. She felt the change spreading through Barrick like flame, a train of fire from his arm to his head and heart that was also a spreading, burning agony through her own body. She tried to throw herself forward, but some invisible hand held her back.

Barrick! Her cries seemed all but silent. Barrick! Come back! Don’t let them take you!

And at the last, just before the thing of cobweb shadows that had been her brother grew too dim to see, Barrick opened his eyes and looked at her. His stare was empty, utterly dead and empty.

She woke up choking on her own tears, feeling as though the most important part of her had been cut out with a dull knife. For long moments she could only lie on her bed sobbing helplessly. Barrick… Would she truly never see him again? The dream had felt so terrible, so final. Had something happened to him—something bad? Was he… ?

“Oh, gods, no… !” she moaned.

Briony dragged herself up. She could not even bear to think of the possibility. These dreams—the nightmares—they were stalking her as though she were their prey. Would she never sleep again without seeing some parade of horror? So tired that she could barely set one foot in front of the other, she stumbled to the chest she had brought with her from her time with the players, the locked box with the clothes she had worn and the few small objects she had picked up on her journey south.

Briony opened the lid and began digging through it, scattering the boy’s breeches she had worn and the pamphlets that had been handed to her, not even knowing what she sought until her fingers closed on it and she felt the fragile bird’s skull and the tiny dry flowers.

Lisiya’s charm in her hands, she crawled back across her dark chamber and into bed. She held the charm tightly to her breast and tried not to think of the dream-Barrick’s dead eyes. One of the maids whimpered a little in her sleep, and that was the last thing she remembered before the dark took her again.

She was in the forest once more, but this time she could see the thing she had been chasing so long. It was a fox, black on the underside but tipped all over its back with silver, and silver on its tail and sharp face as well. As it sped away it looked back at her, teeth bared in a grin that might have been fatigue but seemed more like mockery. Except for a thin ring of orange, the creature’s eyes were as black as its belly.

The fox leaped over the roots effortlessly, but even in her dream Briony could not move with such liquid ease. She must have stumbled, for she found herself falling forward, the trees suddenly turned into whirling torrents of black. For a moment she thought she was back in the terrible, crumbling earth, but then she passed through that spinning darkness into a forest glade. The silvery fox had stopped running and now crouched with its back to her in front of an ancient tumbled altar of stone.

Briony staggered up and fell to her knees. Things seemed curiously painful for a dream: she could feel twigs and rocks digging into her skin.

“Who… who are you?” she gasped.

The beast turned. This time there was no question: its grin was one of mockery and disgust. The fox shook its head. “I said it before and I’ll say it again—I fear for the breed.”

The little animal hopped lightly up onto the ruined altar and lowered its muzzle to sniff. Thunder rumbled distantly. “Look at this,” the fox said, and there was something familiar in the creature’s voice that cut through the fog of Briony’s dreaming thoughts. “Is this what people think of me, that my sacred places are left untended even here? Even in the dreamlands?”

“Lisiya?” Briony whispered. “Is that you?” But as soon as she said the name she knew it was true.

The fox turned; a moment later the black and silver beast had vanished and the old woman sat upon the altar, her gnarled bare feet dangling as if she were a child. “Lisiya Melana of the Silver Glade, do you mean?” she said with more than a trace of irritation. “Bad enough you summon a goddess and then fail to meet her, but to forget her name as well… !”

“But… but I did not summon you.”

“You most certainly did, child. Three nights running, although I could barely hear you the first few times. Weak as a newborn kitling’s, your voice was, but finally tonight I could hear you well enough to find you.” Thunder boomed again above the forest, as though mirroring Lisiya’s irritation.

Briony could not shake off the feeling that she was misunderstanding something. “I… I dreamed of you—or at least of chasing you. Through the forest. And through tunnels in the earth. But I did not see you before, only your… tail.”

Lisiya levered herself off the edge of the altar and dropped to the ground; Briony almost cringed, afraid the demigoddess’ bony old legs would snap like twigs. It was strange to feel so awake and yet to know she was dreaming! Other than a light-headed feeling such as came upon her when she had more wine than she should, she felt quite ordinary.

“Come along, child. I suppose it doesn’t matter why you summoned me. In your heart you must have known you needed my help.” Briony followed the demigoddess past the altar, out of the clearing, and into the trees. Thunder boomed again and a faint shimmer of lightning lit the sky overhead. “Restless,” Lisiya commented, but did not explain.

In many ways the journey through the forest was as dreamlike to Briony as the pursuit of Barrick through the crumbling earth, but it was maddeningly ordinary as well. She could feel every step, every breath, even a moment of discomfort when she scraped her arm against the trunk of an oak tree.

“Where are we?” she asked at last.

“At the moment? Or in some larger sense?” Lisiya was laboring along at a good pace and Briony had to hurry to keep up. “We are very close here to the lands of the dreaming gods—all the old gods that Crooked sent to sleep. Your kind call him Kupilas, of course. Even we didn’t always call him Crooked—that came after the three brothers and their clan tortured him. When Crooked was born he was named Brightshine—a son made by the dawn and the moonlight—you can guess why he was thought a beautiful child. No wonder he hated his uncles so much for what they did to him, let alone the tricks and cruelties and even murder they performed on the rest of his family.”

There was a brief pause as lightning whitewashed the sky for a moment, but before Briony could ask any more questions, Lisiya began again as though she had.

“We are not on Crooked’s roads here—a mortal cannot pass through them safely—but we are traveling in some of the lands that those roads traverse—do you see? Such roads belong to his great-grandmother Emptiness, of course, but she gave him safe conduct to travel them, and he made much of that freedom.”

Before Briony could ask Lisiya to start over because she hadn’t understood a word, the demigoddess abruptly stopped.

“So here we are,” Lisiya said. “Now you can tell me what you need.”

They stood before a small, rough house made of unfinished logs, its roof thatched with leafy branches. A crash of thunder shook the air and for a moment turned the house as flat and pale as one of Makewell’s Men’s painted backgrounds. Shoots of green grass grew between the dead leaves on the ground, but the house itself looked old and long deserted.

“Don’t just stand there gawking, child. Follow me.” Lisiya bent and clambered through the low door.

The rain was coming down now like arrows, but the hut was dry and surprisingly warm inside. Briony settled onto a fur rug, one of many that covered the dirt floor. Still, though, for all its homely comforts, it did not quite seem natural: every time Briony stared at anything very long it seemed to grow farther away in a way that made her feel a bit dizzy. She jumped as the thunder crashed again, rattling the walls.

“Not just restless,” Lisiya said with a disapproving frown. “More like a sleeping bear smelling spring. Quick, girl, we may not have much time. Tell me what’s troubling you.”

Briony told her of the dreams, first those of her brother Barrick, especially the most recent and most frightening one. She still could not remember the way his eyes had looked without a chill on her heart.

“I can give you scant help there, I fear,” Lisiya said after a long moment’s silent thought. “Your brother is hidden to me—whether because of where he is or the company he keeps, I cannot say. Still, something tells me he is not dead.”

“Praise the gods! As long as he is alive, there’s hope,” Briony said—and meant it. Her heart already felt lighter. “Thank you.”

“You thank a goddess with a sacrifice,” Lisiya said. “Honey would be nice—clover or apple blossom make my favorites—but a pretty stone will also do. You can leave it on one of my altars…” She looked up, suddenly distracted.

Briony did not want to tell the demigoddess that she had never heard of an actual altar to Lisiya—not in the waking world, anyway. “I will. May I ask you another question?”

Lisiya slowly returned her attention to Briony. “I suppose. But swiftly, child. The weather is growing strange.”

Briony quickly told her of the dilemma—how her kindly feelings toward Eneas seemed likely to destroy her plan to enlist his aid. “He’s a good man! A truly good man. How can I do such a thing to him? Even for a good cause?”

The demigoddess cocked a draggled eyebrow. “But he is a man, for all the things you say—a grown man and a prince. He will make his own choices—to be with you or not, to do what you wish or not. Have you promised him, ‘Help me and I will marry you’—or even, ‘Help me and I will take you to my bed’?”

“Of course not!”

Lisiya laughed sourly. “You needn’t act so disturbed, child. You are a woman in all but name now, I see, and if it were so terrible an act I think there would be a parcel fewer of mortals in the world.”

“No, I didn’t mean… well, I did, but… in any case, I am a virgin!”

“It’s a common enough condition, child. Nothing to brag about.”

“But that’s…” Briony took a breath as a flash of lightning made light burst in through every crack in the hut walls and ceiling. A few moments later thunder boomed again, so close it seemed right overhead. “That’s not what I mean! I mean that I would give anything, even my maidenhood, if it would save my family. I would even give it falsely! But I don’t want to give it falsely to… to a man who is truly kind. Whom in other circumstances I could truly care for.” She shook her head. “Is there any kind of sense to that at all?”

Lisiya’s expression softened. “Yes, child. But I do not think you tell me all the truth.”

“I did… !”

“I think you already care for him. What is his name?”

“Eneas, the prince of Syan. But… but it is really another that I care for. At least I did—I am no longer certain.” Briony started to laugh, then suddenly felt like weeping, but the laugh bubbled out anyway. “He and Eneas could not be more different, except that they are both kind men. He has no connections, no expectations—he is a commoner! And I do not even think he still lives. He went away a long time ago and almost everyone who went with him is dead.”

“Your problem is like an apple on a high, thin branch,” the demigoddess said, “—a branch that is too high to reach from the ground, but too thin to climb out on to reach the apple. But sometimes such an apple can be plucked anyway—with help. You can climb up to stand on the base of the branch, and thus lower the apple enough that someone on the ground can jump up and pluck it…”

Briony was about to ask her what in the name of Zoria’s mercy she was talking about with all this apples and branches nonsense when the brightest blaze of lightning yet burst in through the cracks, accompanied almost simultaneously by a peal of thunder so loud that Briony and Lisiya bounced like dried peas in a bowl.

Except it wasn’t thunder, Briony realized in terror as she rolled on the floor, trying to regain her balance: what she heard was a voice, too loud and low to understand, raging and bellowing as if a giant stood just above the house, shouting from the depths of the biggest lungs in the world.

“Get out, child!” shouted Lisiya. “Now!” She grabbed at Briony’s arm and yanked her toward the door. Now the dream turned completely nightmarish: no matter how Briony struggled and stumbled forward, the door that should only have been a step or two away remained out of her reach. Lisiya had vanished and the hut had become an immense black space cracked like a broken pot, lit only by flashes of jagged light.

“Lisiya, where are you?” Briony screamed.

“Here! Here!”

And then she could feel the old woman’s hand again, the calloused skin wrapped tight around hers. She was yanked forward, a tumble into dark space through sudden winds, then out into light and the rain-lashed forest. The sky above was frantic with lightning, burst after burst blanketing the sky and turning the trees into snapping, dancing silhouettes. The thundering voice, still unintelligible and still terrifyingly close, pressed in on Briony from all sides until she thought the very weight of it would crush her skull like an egg.

“What is it?” she shrieked, holding her hands over her ears, an action that helped nothing.

“He is starting to wake!” Lisiya’s faint voice was all but blotted out by the deep, wordless roar. “Run!”

“Who is?” Briony screamed, the force of the wind and thundering voice making her sway and almost fall.

“Run!” shouted Lisiya. “It is later than I imagined! I should have told you…”

“Told me what?”

“Too late. You must go to the Stone People… they must take you to you their ancient drum… their stone drum… !”

And then the demigoddess was gone. The air was full of whirling leaves and branches stripped from forest trees, all smacking at her like angry hands, scratching her, making her all but blind. In the momentary bright smears of lightning, though, she could see one thing, a huge dark shape looming high overhead, far above the trees, blotting out the sky.

Briony covered her head with her hands and ran and ran and ran, through falling trees and hurtling branches, through air that tightened and boomed with the roar of rumbling laughter.

She woke up without screaming this time, but covered in sweat, her heart beating so fast her chest hurt. She lay clutching Lisiya’s talisman to her chest, praying for her brother and herself and all she loved. Briony was so tired that she felt older and frailer than the ancient demigoddess herself, but even after her heartbeat had slowed to its ordinary pace she could not get back to sleep until dawn had almost arrived.

20. Bridge of Thorns

I am the worst spy the Godsever made, Matt Tinwright had to admit. The first time someone asks me what I’m doing here I shall scream like a little girl and swoon.

He had never been in this part of the royal residence as far as he knew; with its unfamiliar, echoing halls and ancient floor-to-ceiling tapestries full of staring beasts it might as well have been an ogre’s cave in the deep forest, carpeted in the bones of unwary travelers. Doom seemed to lurk around every corner.

The gods curse you, Avin Brone, he thought for perhaps the hundredth time. You are a monster, not a man.

Tinwright had only risked a venture into this frightening territory because most of the household were out on the castle walls looking at some devilry the fairies had begun across the water. He had wanted to go and see for himself, of course, but knew he could not afford to miss this opportunity. So far Brone had scorned all information Tinwright had brought him, dismissing a list of mirrors to be found around the residence as “blithering nonsense” and threatening to have the poet skinned and made into a hat. While even Tinwright did not believe he was likely to wind up in a milliner’s workroom, he had no doubt that the Count of Landsend was losing his patience: every word of the man’s last shouting denunciation had shivered him to the very center of his bones.

But now he had been wandering the residence halls for over an hour. He had been forced to tell several curious servants that he was lost, making up false errands to explain his presence, and each time his feeling of dread had increased. What if he was caught? What if they brought him to Hendon Tolly and he had to look into those horrible, piercing eyes and try to lie? He would never manage. Matthias Tinwright had learned long before that although he could write poems about heroes like Caylor, describe in stirring words how they stood before the direst foes with faith in their hearts and a smile on their lips, he was no hero himself.

No, I will tell my captors everything, he promised himself, long before the first red-hot iron nears my skin. I will tell them Brone made me do it. I will beg for my life.

Gods help me, how did I find myself in this evil trap?

Tinwright walked beneath an arch and paused, staring up at the faces lining the walls. He was in the royal portrait gallery—but how had he strayed so far? The kings and queens looked down on him, some smiling but most dour and forbidding, as if disturbed to find this callow interloper in their midst. The earliest, brought from Connord with Anglin and painted in the crude style of the early Trigonate era, seemed no more human than the beasts from the tapestries, all staring eyes and stiff, mask-like features…

Now, suddenly, he could hear voices in the passage outside the hall. Tinwright looked around in panic. He was caught in the middle of a large room—by the time he reached the far side and the door the speakers would see him. Did he dare hope it was only more servants and try to brazen out yet another encounter? The voices, getting nearer by the moment, sounded loud and authoritative. His heart raced even faster.

There. The wall was open just across from him—a stairwell. He dashed across the stone flags and up onto the bottommost step just as the men he had heard swept into the room, their voices suddenly growing and echoing beneath the tall ceiling. Tinwright crouched, shrinking back against the stairs so that he could not be seen, although it meant he himself could not see who had entered.

“… Have found something in one of the old works—Phayallos, I believe—that refers to such things. He called them Greater Tiles because of their size, and believed that they were—how did he put it?—‘Windows and Doorways, although few can cross their thresholds.’ ” Tinwright could almost recognize the voice—he was certain he had heard it before, hoarse with age, breathy but sharp-edged.

“Which tells us little we don’t already know,” said the other. Tinwright shrank even farther back into the shadows of the stairwell and held his breath in fear. The second voice belonged to Hendon Tolly. “Look at all these cow-eyed fools!” Tolly was obviously speaking of the Eddon portraits. “Generations of kings no better than shepherds, content to tend their little pasturage.”

“They are your ancestors, too, Lord Tolly,” the other man observed respectfully.

To Tinwright’s continuing horror, the pair had stopped in the middle of the great chamber, not far from where he crouched. Why did I hide? Idiot! There’s no way to pretend innocence now if they catch me!

“Yes, but not my ideal,” said Tolly. “Great Syan to the south has been weak for a century, beautiful to see but rotten inside. Brenland and the rest are little more than peasant villages with walls around them. With only a little determination we could have ruled all of Eion.” Tinwright could hear him spit. “But things will change.” A deeper tone entered his voice—something cold and harsh. “You will not fail me, will you, Okros?”

“No, Lord Tolly, fear not! We have solved most of the riddles already, except for the damnable Godstone. I begin to believe it doesn’t exist.”

“Didn’t you say this Godstone was not absolutely necessary?”

“Yes, my lord, as best I can tell, but I still would like to have it before we attempt…” The physician cleared his throat. “Please remember, these are very complicated matters, sire—not like readying a siege engine. Not a matter of simple engineering.”

“I know that. Do not treat me like a fool.” The dangerous chill in Hendon Tolly’s voice deepened.

“Never, my lord!” Tinwright had seen Okros Dioketian around the residence, a brisk, unsmiling man who seemed always a little contemptuous of those around him, though he masked it with etiquette. But he did not sound contemptuous now—he sounded terrified of his master. Tinwright could sympathize. “No, my lord, I say it only to remind you that there is much still to do. I am laboring all hours of the day and night to…”

“You said we must employ the charm at Midsummer or miss our chance. Is that not right?”

“Yes… yes, I did say…”

“Then we cannot wait any longer. You must show me how it is all to be done, and soon. If you cannot… then I will find another scholar.”

Okros did not speak for some time, moments in which he had clearly struggled to master his shaking voice. He had not been entirely successful. “Of course, Lord Tolly. I… I think I have pieced together most of the ritual now—yes, almost all! I merely have to deduce what some of the words mean, since Phayallos and the other ancient scholars are not always in agreement. For instance, there is one who says most emphatically that for the charm to be successful, ‘the Tile must be clouded with blood.’ ”

Hendon Tolly laughed. “I do not think we should have any trouble with that—a few less mouths to feed in this gods-blasted anthill of a city would be welcome.” His voice grew fainter as he began walking again. Tinwright said a silent prayer of thanks to Zosim that he would not have to crouch in hiding much longer: his back and buttocks were beginning to ache.

“But I cannot help wondering what that means—‘clouded’?” Okros sounded like he was following after. “I have checked three translations and they all say something like it. Clouded, fogged, never smeared or anointed. It is a mirror, lord. How do you cloud a mirror with blood?”

“Oh, gods,” said Tolly in evident frustration, “slit a few virgin throats I suppose. Isn’t that what those ancients always want? Sacrifices? Surely even in this blighted city we can find a few virgins—there are always children, after all.”

Even as the horror of what Tolly was saying sank in, it abruptly became clear to Tinwright that the voices were coming back toward him once more—that Hendon Tolly had reversed his direction and was approaching the staircase where Tinwright was hiding. Without even taking the time to stand up, he turned and began to scramble up the staircase on his hands and knees. When he got to the first turn he pulled himself upright and hurried on, trying to match speed to stealth. He could still dimly hear Tolly and the physician arguing below him, but only a word here and there: to his measureless relief, they did not seem to be following him up the stairs.

“… Phantoms… lands that do not…” Okros was faint as wind around the castle’s turrets. “… we cannot chance the…”

“… Gods themselves…” Tolly was laughing again, his voice rising in glee. “The whole world will fall to its knees, shrieking… !”

As he reached the top Tinwright tumbled out of the doorway and onto the landing above, his fear no longer just that of being caught. Something in Hendon Tolly’s voice had changed—those last words had sounded like the cry of something not quite human.

For a long time he stood by the stairwell, trying to breathe silently as he listened for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, but he no longer heard even the voices. Still, Okros and the Lord Protector might only have moved to the next room. He would wait a long while to make sure it was safe to go down. Tolly terrified him at the best of times, but to hear the man talk so blithely of blood sacrif ice—and that laugh, that terrible laugh… ! No, he would stay until nightfall if necessary just to make sure he avoided the master of Southmarch Castle.

At last, feeling the need to stretch his legs but not yet ready to venture downstairs, he took a quiet walk along the upstairs hall, past the open doors of storerooms now being cleared out to provide more accommodations for highborn refugees. At the far end of the hall a window faced south across the garden toward the gate of the inner keep. In fact, from the small mullioned window Tinwright could see all the way to the stretch of bay where the causeway had once joined mainland Southmarch and the island castle. The far shore looked strange somehow. Tinwright stared at it for a long moment before he remembered the fearful conversations he had heard during the morning, courtiers whispering that after a long, quiet time the fairies were up to some devilry.

“Strange noises,” some had said, saying they had been wakened in the dark of night. “Chanting, and singing.” “Fog,” others had claimed, “a great fog rising up everywhere. Not a natural one, either.”

Tinwright saw that a vast cloud of mist did indeed lie along the bay front on the mainland side, and at first he thought the dark, slowly moving shapes in the murk were plumes of black smoke, that the fairy folk had lit huge bonfires on the beach, but though mist itself eddied in the wind, the dark tendrils did not. Something… something was growing out of the mist. But what? And why?

Tinwright shook his head, unable to make sense of it. After several quiet months it had almost become possible to forget that the Qar were still there, malicious and secret as a fever. Was the long, fretful peace over?

Trapped between the fairies and the Tollys, he thought. Might as well slit my throat now.

Matt Tinwright decided he had hidden long enough—it was probably as safe to go down now as it would ever be. Avin Brone would want to know what he had heard here. Tinwright also had a responsibility to another, equally frightening authority.

“She is most unsatisfactory, this girl,” his mother proclaimed. “I bring her good food from the marketplace and she turns up her nose at it. Does not the book say, “The poor must be sausaged?”

Solaced, he almost told her—but what was the point? Trying to tell his mother anything was like talking to a statue of Queen Ealga in the castle gardens. A very loud statue. “Are you not eating?” he asked the patient.

Elan M’Cory was propped up in the bed. Her color had come back but she still had the sagging look of a child’s rag doll. Tinwright did his best to ignore a flash of annoyance that the young noblewoman was still in bed. She wasn’t well. She had been poisoned—albeit lovingly. She would be well when she was well. “I eat what I can,” Elan said quietly. “It’s just… I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but some of the things she brings back…” She gave a limp shudder. “The bread has beetles in it.”

“Not beetles, only ordinary wholesome weevils.” Anamesiya Tinwright clicked her tongue in disgust. “Not as though they were alive and walking around, either. Baked in—a bit crunchy, like a nice roasted pine nut.”

Elan’s shoulders quivered and she brought her hand to her mouth. “Of course, Mother, I’m sure it’s perfectly good, but Lady M’Cory is used to a different sort of fare. Look, here is a Brenlandish two-crab piece—no, a pair of them.” He had been writing love notes for a court that, with summer approaching and the Qar still beyond the gates but quiet, had been full of a sort of fatal giddiness. Also, Brone had given him a silver starfish for his information about Okros and Hendon Tolly and had barely shouted at him at all, so Matt Tinwright was feeling unusually well-fixed. “Find Elan some nice bread made with good flour. No weevils. And a piece of fruit.”

His mother snorted. “Good luck to you. Fruit? You’ve been living with the nobs too long, boy. Do you know how many people are sleeping in the streets? How hungry they all are? You’d be lucky to find a single wormy apple left in all Southmarch.”

Elan looked beseechingly at him.

“Well, just try to get her something nice to eat, Mother—the best you can come up with for those two coppers. I’ll sit with Lady M’Cory until you come back.”

“Oh? What about me? What kind of son sends his mother off like a Kracian pilgrim without so much as a crab for herself ?”

Tinwright did his best not to roll his eyes. He pulled another coin from his pocket. “Very well. Buy yourself a mug of beer, Mother. It will be good for your blood.”

She looked hard at him. “Beer? Are you mad, boy? Zakkas’ Ale is good enough for me. I’ll put this in the gods’ offering bowl to take a little of the stink of your sinful life off my hands.” Then, before he could even try to snatch his copper back from its journey to oblivion, she was out the door and gone.

He turned to the bed. Elan’s eyes were closed.

“Do you sleep?”

“No. I don’t know,” she said without opening them. “Sometimes I wonder if I did not truly die when I took the poison, and all this is but a phantom of my expiring thought. If it is the true world around me, why can’t I care? Why do I only want it all to go away and let me fall again into dreamless darkness?”

He sat on the end of the bed and wished he dared to take her hand. Despite the fact that he had saved her from Hendon Tolly and that she belonged to no one now if not to him, Tinwright felt that in some way Elan had become more distant than ever. “If your expiring thought can manufacture a gargoyle like my mother out of pure imagination, then you are a more skilled poet than I will ever be.”

She smiled a little and opened her eyes, but still would not look at him directly. Somewhere in the upper stories he could hear a baby crying. “You are droll, Master Tinwright, but you do your mother wrong. She is a good woman… in her way. She has done her best to keep me comfortable, although we do not always see eye to eye on what is best for me.” She made an unpleased face. “And she pinches pennies most severely. The dried fish she brings… I cannot even tell you what it smells like. It must be caught where the residence privies drain into the lagoons.”

Tinwright could not help laughing. “You heard her. She saves money so that she can sneak her extra coins into the offering bowls whenever she gets the chance. For a woman so holy, she seems to feel the gods are as stupid as unruly children and must be reminded constantly of her devotion.”

Elan’s face changed. “Maybe she is right and we are wrong—certainly the gods do not seem to be paying much attention to their mortal children. I would not dare to call the gods foolish or stupid, Master Tinwright, but I must say I have long wondered if they are too distracted to keep order here.”

The idea was interesting. Tinwright felt a sudden urge to consider it—to think of what could take the gods’ attention away from their human creations, leaving men to suffer and wonder without guidance. He might even make a poem of it.

Something like “The Wandering Gods,” he thought. No, perhaps “The Sleeping Gods”…

The door banged open so suddenly that Tinwright jumped and Elan let out a cry of surprise. Anamesiya Tinwright pushed the door shut again behind her with an even louder thump, then fell to her knees on the board floor and began to pray loudly to the Trigon. The infant upstairs, startled by the loud noises, began to cry again.

“What is it?” Tinwright knew, with a sinking heart, that it must be something bad: his mother usually spent more time preparing a clean place to kneel than she actually did praying. “Mother, talk to me!”

She looked up; he was shocked to see her familiar, bony features so pale. “I had hoped you would find time to repent of all your wickedness before the end,” she said in a hoarse voice. “My poor, straying son!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The end, the end. I have seen it coming! Demons sent to destroy us because we’ve angered the gods.” She bowed her head once more in prayer and would not be interrupted no matter how many questions he asked.

“I’ll go and see what this is about,” he told Elan.

Tinwright made sure the door was locked behind him, then went out into the street. At first he followed the anxious throngs who seemed headed to the edge of the harbor, the nearest part of the city’s outer walls, but after a moment he turned against the flow and struck out toward Market Road Bridge, which crossed the canal between the lagoons. If it was something happening across the water in Southmarch Town, he would be able to see it just as well from the outwall behind The Badger’s Boots, a tavern near the end of North Lagoon where Tinwright had spent many a night with Hewney and the others. The alleyway that ran behind the place was not well known, which was why he and his drinking companions had found it a good place to take tavern whores.

As he walked east he listened to fragments of conversation from the people who passed him. Most of them had only heard rumors and were on their way to see what was happening for themselves. Some were terrified, babbling prayers and shouting imprecations, but others seemed only slightly more concerned than if they had been on their way to the Zosimia festivities.

“A sign!” many said. “The earth itself is against us!”

“We’ll throw them back,” others cried. “They’ll learn what Southmarch men are like!” Some of the arguments became fistfights, especially if those who disagreed were drunk. The sun behind the high clouds had scarcely passed noon, but far more people than usual seemed to have started their drinking early.

Was this what it was like when the gods fought their great war? Matt Tinwright wondered. Did some mortals go to the battlefield only to watch it happen, caring not that the world might end?

It was another strange, interesting thought—the second in one day that might make a poem. For a moment he almost forgot that whatever he was on his way to look at had reduced his dragon of a mother to raw terror.

But what could it be? All I saw was mist and smoke. And why should that frighten so many?

He slipped past the Boots, which was even louder than normal with the sound of argument and lamentation. For a moment he strongly considered just going inside and drinking up the rest of the money Brone had given him—after all, if the world was ending, might it not be better to sleep through it all? As far as he knew, nothing in the Book of the Trigon actually forbade being drunk on the Day of Fate.

Ah, but what if he had to wait a long time for judgment? At a moment of universal catastrophe there would doubtless be huge crowds wanting to be judged, as when the king gave away grain in times of famine. Not even drunk, then—by that time I’ll be sobered up, with a dry mouth and throbbing skull. Gods—it was bad enough to face Brone’s bellowing with a clear head: how much worse to stand before Perin himself, lord of the storms, whose very hammer was a thunderclap!

When he reached the alley behind the tavern Tinwright made his way up the hill to the base of the looming wall, then inched his way along the top of the berm toward the abandoned guardpost. To his surprise, he found that at least a dozen other locals had apparently had the same idea. One of them, a grim-faced young man wearing a leather apron, even leaned down to help Tinwright up the broken steps so that he could join them.

They had an unimpeded view of the north end of mainland Southmarch. Most of the activity, though, seemed to be happening at the mainland city’s nearest end, on the beach beside the remains of the ruined causeway. The murk Matt Tinwright had seen earlier had spread and he could see glimmers in its depths, flashes of light that looked less like the flicker of flames than the steady glow of smelted metal. But what he had thought were pillars of weirdly frozen black smoke were not smoke at all.

Monstrous black trees had sprouted from of the murk, their branches like gnarled fingers, as though a dozen giant hands reached out of the mist toward the city walls on the far side of the narrow stretch of bay. The clawlike limbs were bent almost sideways, clearly growing out over the water and toward the castle where Tinwright and the others watched in stunned, frightened silence.

“What are those gods-cursed things?” someone asked at last. A young man who should have been too old to cry began to do it anyway, deep, wracking noises like a consumptive cough.

“No,” was all Matt Tinwright could say as he stared across the water. The things, the trees or whatever they were, had doubled or even tripled in size since he’d seen them from the residence window. But nothing in the world grew that fast! “It can’t be true.” But it was true, of course.

No one spoke after that, except to pray.

The fog was unsettling enough—it came from everywhere and nowhere, making the world outside their prison as daunting as the dim, lifeless fields surrounding the great castle of Kernios in the tales Utta had been told as a girl—but it was the noises that made her most uncomfortable: deep groans and creaks shivered her bones, as though some vast ship a thousand times bigger than any human vessel was sailing past their window, mere inches away but invisible behind the thick, cold mist.

“What is that dreadful sound?” Utta began to pace again. “Have they built some kind of—what are those things called… siege engines? One of those monstrous towers to bring against castle walls? But why would the fairies be pushing it back and forth along the beach all night? The noise gave me such terrible dreams!” In one, her family, years lost to her, had stood at the rail of a long, gray boat begging her to come aboard and join them, but even in the dream Utta had known from the dullness of their eyes that they were all dead, that they were inviting her to join them in a voyage to the underworld. She had woken up with her heart beating so swiftly that for a moment she had feared she was truly dying.

“Sister, you are sending me mad with your walking back and forth!” Merolanna complained. When they had first been prisoned in this abandoned merchant’s house facing Brenn’s Bay the older woman had spent days cleaning, as though each fleck of dust she wiped away lifted them a little farther beyond the power of the fairies and their dark mistress. But the opposite was true, of course: the more the duchess cleaned, the harder it was to ignore the fact that when the tidying was done they would still be prisoners. And now that the place was as neat as Merolanna could make it the older woman seemed to have fallen into a torpor of misery. She scarcely got out of the chair most days, although she seemed to have strength enough to complain about Utta pacing or making what Merolanna considered to be an undue amount of noise.

Blessed Zoria give us both strength, Utta prayed. It is our predicament that makes us pick at each other this way.

Not only had they so far avoided execution, but they had been housed in a spacious building with three floors and had been given the materials to make quite acceptable meals. Still, there was no doubt they were prisoners: two silent guards, strange and threatening as demons out of a temple carving, stood always outside the door. Another waited on the roof, as Utta had discovered one day to her horror when she had decided to take advantage of a little sun to lay out some clothes to dry. The unnatural creature had jumped down onto the balcony as she emerged with a bundle of damp things clutched to her breast, frightening her so badly she had thought she would fall down dead.

This fairy had been different than the other guards—less like a man and more like some kind of shaved ape or smooth lizard, with claws protruding through the ends of his gloved fingers, a misshapen nose and mouth like a dog’s muzzle, and amber eyes that had no pupil. The fairy guard had grunted so angrily and waved his leaf-shaped knife at her so vigorously that Utta had not even bothered to show him the harmless chore she had planned, but instead had simply scuttled back inside.

What do these creatures think we are going to do? she had wondered that day as she staggered back down the stairs to the main living chamber. Leap from the balcony and fly away? And would he have killed me to stop me doing so?

She felt uncomfortably certain he would have.

“Why do they hold us?” Utta demanded as the unsettling noises continued. “If that woman in black hates our kind so much—their queen or whatever she is—why doesn’t she simply kill us and have done with it?”

Merolanna made the sign of the Three on her bosom. “Don’t say such things! Perhaps she intends to ransom us. Ordinarily I would say no, never, but I would give much to be back in my own bed, and to see little Eilis and the others. I am frightened, Sister.”

Utta was frightened too, but she didn’t think they were being saved for ransom. What could the bloodthirsty Qar possibly want in trade for a dowager duchess and a Zorian nun?

Somebody knocked on the doorway of the main chamber, then the door swung open. It was the strange half fairy, half man who called himself Kayyin.

“What do you want?” Merolanna sounded angry, but Utta knew it was a cover for her fear at this unexpected arrival. “Does your mistress want to be sure we’re suffering? Tell her the house could be draftier—but only just.”

He smiled, one of the few expressions that made him look almost entirely human. “At least she cares enough to imprison you. She thinks so little of me that I am allowed to run free, like a lizard on the wall.”

“What is going on out there, Kayyin?” Utta asked him. “There have been the most terrible noises all morning but we can’t see anything except this fog.”

Kayyin shrugged. “Do you truly want to see? It is a grim thing. This is a grim time.”

“What do you mean? Yes, we want to see!”

“Come,” he said with the air of one surrendering to folly. “I will show you.”

They followed his silky progress up the stairs and out onto the balcony on the highest floor, which Utta had shunned ever since the reptilian guard had driven her away. The fog still billowed here, but from this height they could see how low it hung, like a down comforter thrown haphazardly onto a bed. The creaking noises seemed even louder here, and for a moment Utta was so taken by the view—the great cloud of mist, and beyond it the bay and the distant towers of Southmarch Castle, her unreachable home—that she forgot about the monstrous guard. Then he swung down from the roof above them and dropped onto the balcony.

Merolanna shrieked in surprise and terror and might have fallen to the ground had Utta not supported her. The guard waved his wide short sword and snarled—it was hard to tell if he spoke a strange language or simply made threatening noises. His teeth were as long and sharp as a wolf ’s.

Kayyin, though, was unmoved. “Begone, Snout. Tell your mistress I brought these ladies out for some air. If she wants to kill me for that, she may. Otherwise, take your leave.”

The thing stared at him with brightly furious eyes, but there was more to its expression than simply that of an angry animal.

What are these creatures, Utta could not help wondering, these… fairies? Did the gods make them? Are they demons or do they have souls as we do?

The creature snorted what sounded like a warning, then it scrambled back up to the roof as swiftly as it had descended and was gone from sight.

“Oh, that gave me a dreadful turn!” Merolanna detached herself from Utta’s grasp, fanning her face with her hands. “What was that horror?”

Kayyin seemed amused. “A disciple of the Virtuous Warriors clan—cousins of mine, in fact. But he knows I am not to be touched, and my shadow seems to cover you two as well.” He sounded as if he hadn’t been completely certain the creature would obey him, which made Utta wonder how close they’d just come to being sent back… or worse.

“How could you call such a monstrosity your cousin?” Merolanna was still fanning determinedly, as though trying to disperse not just air but also the unpleasant memory. “You are nothing like it, Kayyin. You are almost like… like one of us.”

“But I was shaped to be so, Duchess.” Kayyin bowed his head. “My master knew I would be long among your kind, so he gave me a gift of changing to make me… it is hard to explain… soft like bread dough, so that I could take on the semblance of that which was around me. So I remained for years—a poor copy, but sufficient—until I was awakened again.”

“Awakened to do what? ” It was the first Utta had ever heard of all this. She had thought Kayyin merely an accident of nature or congress between the tribes of fairy and man.

Kayyin shook his sleek head. Now that Utta’s attention had been drawn, she could not help thinking that there was indeed something strange about him, a lack of distinctive characteristics. She could never remember what he looked like when he was not around. “I do not know the answer myself,” he said. “My king wished to prevent war between your race and mine if he could, but I do not think I have done much to make that so. It is a puzzle, to be honest.” He cocked his head. “Ah, there—do you hear? It is beginning again.”

He moved toward the balcony railing and Utta moved with him. She could hear it now, too—the deep, creaking sounds that had plagued them all day. Beneath their balcony, hidden deep in the roiling fogs, a dull light flared and abated but never quite died, as though down on the hidden beach below someone had lit a massive bonfire of blue and yellow flames.

“What is it? What are your people doing?”

“I am not certain they are my people anymore,” said Kayyin with an odd, sad smile. “But it is the work of my lady’s eremites, of course. They are building the Bridge of Thorns.”

“Blessed gods!” murmured Merolanna. Utta turned to see a vast black something appear slowly out of the murk, like the tentacle of some awesome sea creature. In the moments before wind swirled the mists back around it again, she could make little sense of it. A plant, she realized at last—some kind of monstrous black vine as big around as a peasant’s cot and covered with thorns long as swords. A breeze from the invisible bay tugged at the mist again; this time she could see not just the nearest branch but several more in the foggy depths, all twining upward. The terrible rumbling, screeching noise, so low and loud that it made the very timbers of the balcony they stood on quiver in sympathy, was the sound of the thing growing—growing up from the shore beneath them, stretching out like greedy fingers toward Southmarch Castle on the far side of the water.

“The Bridge of Thorns…” she said slowly.

“But what is it?” Merolanna demanded. “It makes me sick just to see it. What is it?”

“They… they will use it to attack the castle,” Utta told her, fully grasping it all only as she said it. “They will climb the branches like siege ladders, across the bay and over the castle walls. They will clamber over it like ants and kill everyone. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Kayyin said. He might have been a little sad about it. “I expect she will indeed kill everyone she finds. I have never seen her so angry.”

“Oh!” said the duchess. For a moment Utta was afraid the older woman would fall again. “Oh, you monster! How can you… just speak of it, as though… as though…” She turned and stumbled back into the room. A moment later Utta heard her make her way slowly down the stairs.

“I should go with her,” Utta said, hesitating. “Is there nothing anyone can do to talk your mistress out of this terrible attack?”

“She is not my mistress, which is a small part of the problem—instead, the king is my master, and if there is one thing Yasammez hates it is disloyalty, especially from family.”

“Family?”

“Did I never tell you? Lady Yasammez is my mother. The birth was years and years ago and we have been long estranged.” His bland face reflected nothing deeper than the interest of someone with a mildly diverting tale to tell, but Utta could not help feeling there was a great deal more behind his words—there must be. “I am by no means the only child she ever had, but I am almost certainly the last one living.”

“But you said once you thought she would execute you one day. How could a mother do such a thing to her child?”

“My people are not like your people—but even among our people, Lady Yasammez is a strange and singular case. The love she bears is not for her own offspring, but for her sister’s. And though she carries the Fireflower, unlike all others in our history, she carries it alone.”

Utta could only shake her head in confusion. “I do not understand any of this. What is a Fireflower?”

“The Fireflower. There is only one. It is our great lord Crooked’s gift to the Firstborn, because of the love he felt for one living woman—Summu, my mother’s mother. And it is the legacy of the children he bore with her.” He saw her expression and paused. “Ah, of course, your people know Crooked by a different name—Kupilas, the Healer.”

In other circumstances Utta would have dismissed his words as the babble of a madman, and certainly there was a quality in Kayyin’s dull, unexcited tones that made him seem deranged, but she had met the terrifying Yasammez; that, and watching the thorny results of the great magics the dark woman had put into effect made it hard to dismiss such things out of hand. “You are saying… that your mother Yasammez was fathered by a god? ”

“That is your word, not mine—but yes. In those distant days the ones you call gods were the powerful masters, but your people and mine served them and were sometimes bedded by them. And at times true friendship and even love ripened between the great ones and their short-lived minions. Loving or not, though, some of the unions resulted in those you call demigods and demigoddesses, in heroes and monsters.”

“But Kupilas… ?”

“What Crooked truly felt for Summu no one can know, since they both are gone now, but I do not think it would be wrong to call it love. And the children that they made together were like no others—they became the rulers of my race. All whom Crooked fathered had the gift called the Fireflower—a flame of immortality like the gods themselves carried. In Yassamez and her twin Yasudra it burned fiercely indeed, and it still burns in Yasammez, because she has never surrendered it to another. In fact, none of Summu’s three firstborn children—my mother, Yasudra my mother’s twin, and Ayann their brother—allowed their gifts to be diluted.

“Yasammez has kept her own Fireflower through the lonely centuries, and it has made her the longest-lived and perhaps most powerful of our folk. Yasudra and Ayann did not keep it to themselves as she did, but instead passed it to the children they made together—the kings and queens of my folk. Thus the Fireflower was kept pure in their blood…”

“Wait, Kayyin. Are you saying that your first king and queen were brother and sister?”

“Yes, and all the royal line since then have descended from that single pair as well, from Yasudra and Ayann, with each generation maintaining the purity of the Fireflower.”

Utta had to think about this strange idea for little while before she could speak again. “So… do you have this Fireflower too?”

He laughed, seemingly without anger. “No, no. My mother Yasammez has never diminished her own gift by sharing it, which is why she has lived so long. None of her children have been allowed the Fireflower. Instead she has made it the duty of her endless life to watch over her sister Yasudra’s line. And now her sister’s descendant, our queen Saqri, is dying. In revenge, Yasammez planned to go to war to destroy your kind, but my master the king forced a bargain called the Pact of the Glass. Apparently, though, that bargain has now failed, so Yasammez is free again to make war against your hated people.”

“Hated? But why? You said revenge. Why is she so anxious to destroy us?”

“Why?” Kayyin’s expression was impossible for Utta to read. “Because it is you humans—and most particularly, the humans of Southmarch—who are murdering our queen.”

21. The Fifth Lantern

Ferras Vansen kept his hand on Jasper’s shoulder as they stepped out of the tunnel, even though it forced him to lean at an uncomfortable angle. By the broadness of the echo, they must have reached the cavern called the Great Dancing Chamber, but of course he had no way of knowing for certain. Vansen felt like a child or a cripple—how could the Funderlings see in this blackness? And how could he hope even to fight alongside them, let alone lead them, when he was all but blind in places where both the Funderlings and their enemies could easily find their way? How he longed for the moment he could unshutter his lantern!

“The air feels loose here.” Sledge Jasper’s mouth was almost touching Vansen’s ear. “But the far end’s stubbed, so there must be an upthwart hole—but there isn’t. It makes no sense to me.”

It made no sense to Vansen either, but that was because he wasn’t a Funderling—the chief warder might as well have been speaking ancient Ulosian. “Stubbed? Upthwart? What does any of that mean?”

“Quiet!” Jasper whispered.

Vansen had only an instant to wonder at that before Jasper grabbed his arm and yanked him forward and down onto his knees. A moment later metal clattered violently against stone behind them: something fast and sharp had flown past them and struck the wall where they had been standing an instant before.

“What is it?” he hissed as loudly as he dared. “What’s… ?”

“A trap!” He was jerked again, downward this time as Jasper dropped onto his belly. The Funderling’s grip was astonishingly powerful considering he was no bigger than a child. “Keep your head down!”

“I’m going to uncover the lantern,” Vansen said. “Get some idea of what’s going on…”

“Not near your head!” growled Jasper. “In fact, don’t do it near any of us.” The other Funderlings in the little troop were just now crawling up from behind them. Vansen stretched out his arm and set the lantern down a little way above and to the side of where they lay on the uneven floor. What kind of room was this? They called it the Great Dancing Chamber, but it felt more like a gravel quarry than a ballroom. He flicked up the shield and the lantern’s glow spilled out, suddenly giving form and depth to what had been an endless, frightening blackness.

He barely had time to draw his hand back before several arrows whined through the spot where his fingers had been. One struck the lantern a glancing blow; the cylinder of metal and hard sea-glass was knocked spinning onto its side but the light did not go out.

Vansen risked raising his head for a quick look. A handful of moving shapes, some holding short bows, were scrambling for cover at the far end of the chamber like rats surprised in a storeroom, their shadows gigantic and spidery in the light of the single, dim lamp.

Ferras Vansen had not planned on facing arrows—the narrow underground passages had seemed to make them an unlikely weapon—but here he sat in a classic infantryman’s nightmare, pinned down by a force he could barely even see with no way to fight back other than a hopeless frontal assault. It was pure luck that he and the Funderlings had not been slaughtered where they stood: they had apparently caught the Qar by surprise. Now all they could do was wait and hope that Cinnabar and the rest of the Funderling Town reserves would come as they had promised. But how to keep them from walking into the same trap?

“Simple enough,” said Sledge Jasper after hearing Vansen’s whispered concerns. “If there’s a vein of drumstone between here and the Brothers’ temple we’ll have no problems, Longshanks—that’s how we talked in the mines and even sometimes farther, but those were the old days. Anyroad, we’ll just keep hammering on it until someone hears us. But whatever you want to say likely ought to be short and sweet.”

Drumstone. That was a new one. Vansen raised his head again and peered across the chamber to where the enemy crouched behind what looked like a forest of stony towers, most of which stretched no higher than a tall Funderling. One of the Qar saw his movement well enough to snap off a shot: the arrow hissed past him and shattered against stone; a broken piece caromed off and dug into his hand. Vansen grunted in pain and sucked at the blood. “How about two words? ” he asked Jasper. “ ‘Help’ and ‘trap.’ Short enough for you?”

They sent a pair of men back to the seam of drumstone that crossed the road they had followed to the Dancing Chamber. The warning worked. Cinnabar and his troop of two dozen men came swiftly but carefully into the great cavern, carrying slings and other long distance weapons, and despite the inexperience of these new fighters, many of whom did not even have the rudimentary exposure to violence the warders had, they managed to help Vansen and Jasper chase the dozen or so armed Qar back out of the Great Dancing Chamber. The victory cost them: two Funderlings were killed, one of them a warder named Feldspar, so it was a somber group that headed back toward the Metamorphic Brothers’ temple.

Vansen and Cinnabar walked behind the men carrying the bodies. Ferras Vansen was doing his best to divide his attention between complicated thoughts about the day’s losses and lessons and the need to watch for low ceilings. He had been living with the Funderlings long enough that they sometimes forgot he was twice their height and couldn’t see as well as they could, and thus didn’t warn him when a low threshold was coming.

“I wish I had known of this drumstone before,” he said.

“There are only a few small veins connecting parts of Funderling Town,” Cinnabar said. “It was pure luck Jasper had seen that seam. The greatest use of drumstone was over longer distances, but we almost entirely stopped using it over the last hundred years or so as we lost touch with other towns and cities.”

“Still, what a wonderful thing, if I understand Jasper correctly—to be able to signal over a distance underground! Have the… the Big Folk, as you call us, ever known of this?”

Cinnabar laughed. “I can assure you they did not. You’ll forgive me if I say we thought it more likely to be something we needed to protect ourselves against your people than to aid them.”

“Fair enough. And I promise I will keep the secret—the gods know I owe you and your folk that much and more. But it seems to me another example that you Funderlings have misplaced your trust when you ask me to lead you. Even were I as veteran a commander as you suppose—which, I assure you, I am not—I still know too little about this underground world in which we fight. The Qar reaching that chamber before us caught me completely by surprise. How did they do it?”

Cinnabar’s amiable, weathered face showed surprise even in the thin light of Vansen’s lantern. “But Jasper says he told you. The road should have been stubbed there, but he knew by the smell of the air that a second opening had been made, so that means there must be a new tunnel upthwart the stub-end at the far side of the Great Dancing Chamber…”

“There, you see? I still don’t understand.” He raised his hand. “No, do not explain it to me now, Magister—there is too much to do. But when we return and have our council, I need you and Chert and the others to help me learn. We must find a way to remedy my ignorance before I get us all killed.”

The Funderlings and the two Big Folk were grouped around one of the large tables in the refectory of the Metamorphic Brothers’ temple, a place that had become the seat of the Funderling War Council, as Vansen had come to think of it—mostly because only the refectory and the chapel were large enough for many to sit down together.

In the previous days Ferras Vansen had sometimes viewed his involvement with these little men and women as almost amusing, as if he had been asked to lead an army of children, but that had ended long ago with the first assault by the Qar. Anyone who still doubted the seriousness of their situation need only descend to the deep, cold room beneath the main altar where the bodies of the two fallen Funderlings, Feldspar and Schist, lay waiting for their burial cairns to be built.

Vansen looked across the table at Jasper, Magister Cinnabar, and Brother Nickel. Nickel’s power within the Brotherhood seemed to grow stronger by the day: there had been no confirmation yet that he would be the next abbot, but the other monks seemed to take it as a given. Chaven was also at the table—the only other person Vansen’s size—but the physician seemed fretful and preoccupied. Beside him sat Malachite Copper, another important Guildsman, tall and slender for a Funderling, who had brought a contingent of volunteers down from the town to help defend the lower tunnels. Although the cavern-dwellers had no lords as such, Copper was the closest thing Vansen had seen down here to what he would have called a noble. Judging by his clothes, he was certainly the richest of them all. Young Brother Antimony rounded out the group: Vansen had been told that Chert Blue Quartz and his strange adopted son were off on some private errand and could not be present.

“I must beg your pardon,” Vansen told the others. “I simply cannot accustom myself to the way you talk—upwise, thwart, sluiced, scarped, stubbed—I cannot understand it, not swiftly enough to lead men into battle. I am used to fighting on solid ground that spreads like a blanket before me, but here I find the blanket is wrapped around my head. I think you should give this task of leadership to someone like Cinnabar or Copper.”

“I do not like to fill my head with details.” Malachite Copper spoke lazily, as though it was almost too much effort to finish what he was saying. “I will have enough to do with leading my own scrapesmen. No, not me.”

Cinnabar also shook his head. “As for me, I have not the knowledge of fighting, Captain Vansen, but I will do my best to help you to think as we think.”

“But how can I learn all your people know? These drumstones, Stormstone’s tunnels—I do not have time to become a scholar, even had I the wit for it!”

“Likely none of us is fit to perform the job entire,” Chaven said. “If we want to survive we must work together and try to forge a single martial leader from among our disparate parts—a patchwork soldier, as in the old tale of King Kreas.”

“Still,” said Copper, “even if the mighty Stone Lord himself were to come out of the deeps to lead us, we would need more men than we have. Cinnabar, my dear, you must send a message to the Guild telling them to send every able-bodied fellow who can be spared to fight—sadly, we cannot pull the workers from the few jobs Hendon Tolly has given us without causing suspicion. That may bring us as many as a thousand. Until then we have less than two hundred all told, four pentecount at the outside, and only a few of those capable fighters. How many Qar wait on the far side of the bay?”

Vansen shook his head. “We never knew when we fought them—that was part of the hardship, that they could make their numbers and positions so confusing. But judging by what I saw of them marching, long ago, I guess they still muster several times our numbers.”

“And from what you say, we could not hope to outfight them even if we matched them man for man,” Cinnabar said.

“The March Kingdoms could not defeat them with many thousands, including hundreds of veteran fighters, cannon, and armored cavalry. But we were overconfident.” He smiled sadly. “We will never be so again.”

“Is there any chance the upgrounders—I mean your people, Captain Vansen—might help us? Surely Hendon Tolly does not want the Qar roaming free beneath his castle!”

“No, but first you would have to convince him,” Vansen said thoughtfully. “That might be done… but then even if he agreed to help you he would never simply give you back Funderling Town afterward. Once he knew of the Stormstone tunnels and everything else belowground, he and his soldiers would be here to stay.”

Malachite Copper broke the long, morose silence. “But the fairy creatures must fight us down here,” he pointed out. “Surely that should be to our advantage, if we can only improve our numbers.”

“Don’t forget they have Funderlings of a sort among them,” said Cinnabar. “And other creatures of the deeps as well, like ettins, some of which we only know from old stories…”

“So it is hopeless. Is that what you are saying?” Nickel stood up. “Then we must all prepare to meet our maker. The Lord of the Hot Wet Stone will save us if he sees fit—if we have pleased him—but if not, then he will do with us as he wishes. All this warlike posturing is for nothing. The Nine Cities of the Funderlings will be emptied but for dust and shadows.”

“We do not need that kind of talk,” Cinnabar said angrily. “Would you terrify our people into recklessness? At the very least, Nickel, think of our wives and children. Ah, but I forgot—you Metamorphic Brothers do not have time for such trivialities!”

“We do holy work!” Nickel shouted and the argument began in earnest, even Copper joining in, but Ferras Vansen was no longer listening.

“Enough,” he said. When they did not heed him, he raised his voice, deeper and stronger than any of theirs. “Enough! Shut your mouths, all of you!” Everyone in the room turned to stare at him in surprise. “For the sake of the wives and children you mentioned—for all of our sakes—stop this squabbling. Brother Nickel, I heard you say ‘the Nine Cities of the Funderlings’—what does that mean?”

Nickel waved a dismissive hand. “It is only an expression—it means all the Funderlings together, not just those here in Funderling Town.”

“So there are other Funderlings? Where? Magister Cinnabar, you said something to me earlier about towns and cities, but I thought you meant ordinary towns, Firstford and Oscastle and the like.”

Cinnabar shook his head. “I understand your interest, Captain Vansen, but if you are envisioning thousands of Funderlings sweeping in to save us from all over Eion, I’m afraid I must disappoint you. Some of the so-called cities are long gone, and little remains of most of the others—those that are in reach, that is. Two of them are behind the Shadowline and one is on the southern continent Xand.”

“But are there still Funderlings who live outside of Southmarch?”

“Some, of course. Even long after our days of glory there have been Funderlings living in most of the biggest cities, working in stone and forging metal for the Big Folk, but their numbers have grown smaller and smaller. Here too. Just a hundred years back we were nearly twice as many as now.” Cinnabar shrugged. “There is still a good-sized settlement in Tessis and another in the quarry mountains of Syan—between them they might have as many Funderlings as here. And I’ve heard some still live in our old city of Westcliff in Settland, although it is scarcely more than a village now. Perhaps another thousand of us are scattered around the other cities of Eion. At year’s end we usually come together for the great festival called the Guild Market, but I do not think we will survive here long enough to be able recruit any help at market.” He shrugged. “Have I anticipated your idea incorrectly, Captain?”

“No, you have hit it squarely, Magister.” Vansen frowned. “But I would still like to know if these drumstones will speak as far as Syan.”

“They used to,” said Malachite Copper. “But the stones have long since fallen silent between here and there.”

“You said there are as many Funderlings in Syan as here,” Vansen said to Cinnabar. “Perhaps they will help us. Doubling our numbers would certainly keep us alive a good deal longer.”

Cinnabar nodded slowly. “I suppose we can’t afford to overlook even so unlikely a chance. In the old days there was a train of drumstones between here and what the Big Folk call Underbridge, the Funderling settlement in Syan. Unless the ground has shifted badly I see no reason they shouldn’t still suffice.”

“Forgive me,” said Malachite Copper, “but I really must ask a question. What good is it if we could even bring five times the numbers we have now from somewhere else? We still would have too few to defeat the Qar, if everything I’ve heard today is true. What then is the point? It will take weeks for help to come from Underbridge—until Midsummer at least, even if they choose to send it, which I doubt. But even if they come, what real difference could it make?”

“You’re right,” Vansen told him. He had been thinking, in his slow, careful way, and he could see no other road forward. “It is true—we cannot defeat the Qar. They are fierce fighters, but they also have a terror and madness on their side like nothing I have ever seen or felt. But I do not intend to beat them.”

Brother Nickel snorted in disgust. “Then why do we not simply surrender now? At least then we will be choosing the manner of our deaths.”

Copper scowled at him. “Be quiet, you burrowing, slithering priest! I for one would gladly choose to die with a war hammer in my hand, not slapping my head and begging the Earth Elders for forgiveness!”

“Gentlemen… brothers,” said Cinnabar, spreading his arms. “This is not right…”

“Stop. You did not let me finish, Brother Nickel,” Vansen said loudly. He wished that convincing the others, as difficult as it would be, was the hardest part of what he envisioned. “I do not intend to defeat the Qar because, as I said, we cannot defeat them. We cannot even hope to hold them back for very long. But I know a little of what they want here, and I may know some things even their leader does not yet know—important things.” Still, even the mere thought of the Qar’s dark lady made him weak with fear—he had seen her in so many of his nightmares, visions left in his head by Gyir’s thoughts like shadows cast on the wall of a cave. He was terrified to face her, but what else could he do? He was a soldier, and he had given his loyalty to these folk as completely as he had to the Eddon family and their throne when he first became a royal guard. “Here is my plan,” he announced as the others at last fell silent. “I intend to make peace.”

“Peace!” barked Copper. “With the Twilight People? With ettins and skinshifters? That is madness.”

Vansen’s smile was grim. “If so, then madness is the only thing that can save us.”

An isolated sliver of moon hung in the sky as they crept out the side door of Chaven’s observatory beside the old walls. Chert had not smelled open air for weeks and for a moment the sharpness of it was almost overwhelming. He took a couple of reeling steps, light-headed, before finding his balance. The night seemed… so big!

Flint did not seem to notice. He looked briefly to either side and then trotted down the steps. At the bottom of the stairwell he turned to follow the road beside the wall, headed directly toward Skimmer’s Lagoon as though he could see it. Chert could not suppress a shiver of fear. How did the boy know things like this? It made no sense—in fact, it refuted good sense entirely.

Still, sensible or not, if Chert lost the boy he would catch the rough side of Opal’s tongue for certain. He hurried after him.

“Where are we going?” he whispered as Flint led them along Sheeps Hill Road at the base of the New Walls, past what seemed like a single endless encampment of refugees huddled around miserable little fires. A few of these looked up to watch the pair go past—Chert could only hope they thought he was a child, too. He grabbed Flint’s arm. “Get back in the shadows, boy!”

Citizens of Funderling Town were banned from being aboveground in Southmarch by night, in large part because of Chert himself, so not only did he have a price on his head, the mere fact of him being a Funderling would be enough to get him dragged to a cell in the stronghold. Either way, if the guards got hold of him, he was doomed.

What am I doing? How did I let myself get talked into this? Opal would have my skin if she knew. He had a sudden moment of terror—what if his wife came back to the temple while he was gone? What would he tell her? She would scorch him! But I suppose if I’m alive at that point for her to scorch, I’ll already have my joists in, he thought glumly. Might as well not borrow trouble. “Flint, where are we going?” he asked again.

“Across Market Road Bridge, turn toward the guard tower, then stop at the fifth lantern.”

“And how do you know that? Who told you?”

The child looked at him as though Chert had asked him why he kept filling his lungs with air. “Nobody told me, Father. I saw it.”

As they approached the bridge Chert did his best to hide his face from everyone who passed. Market Road Bridge was a short, high-arching span that crossed the canal between the outer keep’s two lagoons. Where the canal crossed a muddy field to join with the North Lagoon it made a small estuary, usually the home of many birds, but in this time of privations and with so many hungry folk packed into the castle, most of the birds had long since been caught and eaten. The torch on the bridge had gone out; the little patch of water and grass and sand lay silent and almost invisible on either side, even to the Funderling’s keen eyes, as though they passed through a void between stars.

On the far side of the bridge they stepped off the road and onto a small, almost invisible path of rough logs along the edge of the water. They proceeded along this dark track until they reached the dim glow of a fish-skin lantern hung from a pillar at the canal’s edge. Continuing on and passing four more lights brought them to a largely empty section of Skimmer’s Lagoon, but the last light, the fifth lantern, shone on more than just black water and the dockside path: a rickety gangway made of boards and rope stretched out from the pool of lantern light onto the dark lagoon and toward a dark, uneven shape pricked with a few smaller, reddish lights, like a campfire that had burned to embers. Small waves patted at the edge of the walkway near their feet.

“What are we doing here?” Chert whispered. “How do you know this place? I will go no farther without some answers, boy.”

Flint looked at him, face pale in the fish-skin glow. Chert was suddenly frightened, not by the boy himself but by what he might say, what changes it might bring. But Flint only shook his head.

“I can’t give you answers, Father—I don’t know them. I saw this place when I was asleep and I knew I had to come here. I know what I must do. You will have to trust me.”

Chert stared at the small face, so familiar and yet so unknowably foreign.

“Very well, I’ll trust you. But if I say we leave, we leave. Understood?”

The boy did not reply, but turned and headed down the swaying gangway.

The barge at the end of it was low but wide, its deck a clutter of cabins and outbuildings—it looked more like the floor of a storage room than any seaworthy vessel. Lights flickered in several of the tiny windows, but Flint headed unerringly toward a patch of absolute darkness on the side of the barge; by the time Chert caught up with him the boy had already rapped twice on the cabin door there.

The door opened a crack. “What do you want?” a quiet voice asked.

“To speak with your headman.”

“And who is it wants to speak with him?”

“A messenger from Kioy-a-pous.”

Chert stared at the boy. Kioy-a-pous? Who or what was that? And what in the name of the Earth Elders was going on?

The door swung open, spilling amber light. A Skimmer girl stood there, waiting for them to enter. Chert had never seen one of her tribe close up. Her solemn face looked just like some of the ancient carvings he’d seen beneath Funderling Town, which made no sense—why would the old Funderlings have carved pictures of Skimmers?

The girl led them down a long, dark passage. Chert could feel the ship continuously moving beneath his feet, a most distressing sensation for someone who had lived all his life on stone. She took them into a low, wide cabin where half a dozen Skimmer men sat around a table whose height reflected the close-hanging roof: all the Skimmers sat on the floor, their knees bent and high. As they turned toward the newcomers the men’s large, wide-set eyes and hairless faces made them look like a gathering of frogs in a pond.

“My father, Turley Longfingers,” the girl told Flint and Chert, gesturing toward one of the men, “He is the headman of our people here.”

“What is this, Daughter?” Turley seemed upset by this sudden intrusion—almost shamefaced, as though he and the others had been caught planning something wicked.

“He says he comes as a messenger from Kioy-a-pous,” she said. “Don’t ask me more, for I can’t tell you. I’ll bring some drink.” She shrugged, then made a sullen little curtsy to the men and left the cabin.

“Why declare yourself with such a name, young one?” Turley said. “You have the stink of the northern king on you—old Ynnir Graywind. We do not serve him or his dying master. Too many broken promises lie between our peoples. We are the children of Egye-Var, Lord of the Seas, so what do we care for Kioy-a-pous? What do we care for the one called Crooked?”

Flint reacted very strangely to the Skimmer’s words: for the first time since he and Opal had found the child in a sack beside the Shadowline he saw a look of fury cross the boy’s face. It was a moment’s expression only, a flash like the white smear of lightning across a dark sky, but in that instant Chert found himself truly afraid of the child he had brought into his home.

“Those are old ideas, headman,” Flint told the Skimmer, his anger gone again, or at least invisible. “Taking the side of one of the Great Ones against another—that is a strategy from when the world was young and mortals had no part but that which the Great Ones allowed them. Things have changed. Egye-Var and the rest were banished for a reason, and you and the other inheritors would not like it if they came back to reclaim what was theirs.”

“What do you mean?” the Skimmers’ headman asked. “What have you come to tell us?”

“It is not what I have come to tell you that is important, it is what I need to ask,” the boy said with invincible calm. “Take me to the keepers of the Scale.”

The chief of the Skimmers was so startled he actually leaned back as though this odd child had struck him, his mouth working uselessly for a moment. “What… what do you speak of?” he demanded at last, but it sounded like weak bluster.

“I speak of the two sisters, as you already know,” Flint said. “Many things may depend on this. Take me to them, headman, and do not waste more time.”

Turley Longfingers looked helplessly at the other Skimmer men but they seemed even more taken aback than he was, their eyes bulging with anxious surprise.

“We… we cannot do it,” their chief said at last. Resistance was gone. His denial was an admission, not a refusal. “No shoal-mooted man may visit the sisters…”

“They need to go and my Rafe isn’t here,” said the headman’s daughter. “If you cannot take them, Father, I will.”

If Chert thought Turley Longfingers would rage at the girl, hit her or drive her from the room, he was wrong. Instead he sounded almost apologetic. “But, Daughter, this is not a day to approach the sisters… not a shriven day, no salt has been sprinkled…”

“Nonsense, Father.” She shook her head as if he were a child who had made a mess. “Listen! This child speaks of things no outsider knows, let alone any landlegged child. He speaks of the Scale! As if we did not already know that a time of change is upon us.”

“But, Ena, we do not…”

“You may punish me later if you wish.” She stood. “But I am taking them to the drying shed.”

This finally opened the floodgates: the other Skimmer men all began to talk at once, arguing, hissing, vying for Turley’s attention, pointing their long fingers at the chieftain’s daughter as though she had walked into the room naked. The noise swelled until Turley flapped his long hands for silence, but it was not his voice that stilled them.

“Take us, then,” said Flint. “We have no time to waste. It is less than a turn of the moon until Midsummer.”

“Follow me, then.” Ignoring the looks of outrage and open befuddlement from the Skimmer men, the girl drew a shawl from a hook on the wall and draped it around her shoulders. “But walk carefully—some of the way is dangerous.”

To Chert’s surprise, the girl led them no farther than the floating dock attached to the stern of the ramschackle barge. The moon had vanished somewhere behind the castle’s outer walls and the night was so dark that but for the dull sparkle of stars when the wind blew the clouds aside, they might have been in one of the deepest tunnels of the Mysteries.

Ena pointed to a rowboat bobbing beside the dock. “Get in.”

Chert thought there could be nothing more frightening than getting into a boat, with only air above him and water beneath him. He quickly found out he was wrong.

“Now put this on,” Ena told them, handing Chert and Flint a length of cloth each. “Tie it over your eyes.”

“Blind ourselves??” Chert was almost choking. “Are you mad?”

“If you do not, I will not take you. The way to the drying shed is not for landleggers, even those who claim to serve Kioy-a-pous.”

“Please, Father,” Flint said. “All will be well.”

Oh, certainly, Chert thought. Why not? Perhaps when we fall in the boy will charm the sharks, too, like one of the holy oracles. With great reluctance, he tied the stiff, salty rag over his eyes; a moment later he felt the boat beginning to move. What truly happened to this child behind the Shadowline—and when he went to the Shining Man?

The Shining Man. Chert could not help thinking of how the boy had lain at the great figure’s feet. Like the rest of his people, Chert had been taught that the Shining Man was the image of their creator, the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone. During the Mysteries it had even been hinted to him and the others crossing into adulthood that the great crystalline shape was somehow alive—that the power of their god lived inside it. So why had the boy struck off on his own to find it? And what had he done with that strange mirror—the one that Chert had later risked execution to deliver to the terrifying Qar woman? And just as important, what in the name of the Earth Elders was the boy up to now? Flint had questioned ancient Brother Sulphur until the old man had flown into a rage, and now he had demanded—and been permitted!—access to some treasure of the secretive Skimmers. Sisters, scales—Chert had no idea what any of it might mean, but he knew for a certainty that he had no more control of events than a man caught at the top of a rockslide: all he could do was hang on and pray…

These thoughts and a hundred more flitted through his mind as the oars creaked and the waves splashed gently against the side of the boat. At some point they passed through a long tunnel, with echoes bouncing off the stone. When the echo dropped away again the water, which had been as mild as one would expect on a lagoon inside the castle walls, suddenly began to rock the boat so strongly that Chert began tugging at his blindfold in panic.

“Don’t!” said Ena. She sounded breathless, as though she was working hard. “Keep that cloth on you or I’ll turn us around.”

“What’s happening?”

“Never you mind, Funderling. Just sit back.”

Chert felt Flint reach over and squeeze his arm, so he reluctantly left the rag across his eyes. What was going on? Were they on the open sea? But how would they have got out through the harbor and past the harbor chain? What about the besieging Qar? It didn’t make sense.

At last, after what seemed an hour or more on the water, the last half tossing and pitching in a very queasy way, Chert felt the prow of the boat bump up against something solid. The girl jumped out and helped them both up onto a dock, and from there onto dry land.

“Keep the eye-cloths on,” she said. “I’ll tell you when to take ’em off.”

At last Chert heard a door open and he and Flint were led through, guided by Ena’s careful, rough-skinned hands. Immediately his lungs and nostrils filled with harsh, salty smoke.

“You can unbind your eyes now,” she said.

When he stopped coughing, Chert did. They were standing in what looked like some kind of upgrounder barn. A great fire roared in a stone pit in the room’s center, flames twice as tall as Chert painting everything a dull red-orange. On either side of the fire long poles stretched from one end of the high-ceilinged, rectangular room to the other, supported every few paces with thicker, rough-hewn wooden pillars. On the poles hung hundreds of splayed fish carcasses.

“By the Elders, it really is a drying shed,” Chert murmured, then found himself coughing again from the smoke. His eyes were already stinging painfully.

“Oh, who’s there, who’s there?” The voice, though quiet, seemed to speak right in his ear. He jumped and whirled around but saw only Ena and silent Flint—for all he could tell, it might have been the split carcasses of the fish that spoke. “Dear, dear, we seem to have frightened Papa Sprat.” The invisible voice laughed, a cracked bray. “Come here to us, darlings. Nothing to fear in the drying shed—unless you’re a fish. Isn’t that right, Meve?”

Chert hesitated, but Flint was already walking toward the fire. As he made his way around the firepit Chert saw two small shapes sitting on a bench near the flames. One of them, an old Skimmer woman, rose as Flint approached. She was tiny, barely taller than Chert himself, and although all of the fisher-people had a little of the frog in their looks, this ancient creature was like one of the entombed toads or mudskippers the Funderlings sometimes discovered in the foundations of buildings they were excavating—a withered, seemingly lifeless creatures that nevertheless would recover if dipped in water, though it had been sleeping in the clay for centuries.

“Good evening,” said the ancient Skimmer woman. “Gulda I am, and here is my sweet sister Meve.” Gulda gestured to the other figure, even smaller than she, huddled in a coarse robe with the hood pulled close, as if even beside the fire Meve felt uncomfortably cold. “She talks not as much as she once did, but what she says is wise—is that not right, my love?”

“Wise,” croaked the other woman without looking up.

“And greetings to you, Turley’s daughter,” Gulda said to Ena. “You can wait with your sea-pony. The great ones have naught to say to you tonight, although doubtless they will another time.”

“Another time,” Meve echoed in a dry rasp that suggested she had been in the smoky shed for a very long time indeed.

Ena looked disappointed but did not argue. She made a curtsy to the sisters and walked to the door.

“You are the keepers of the Scale,” suggested Flint when the girl was gone.

“And why wouldn’t we be?” Gulda’s leathery, pop-eyed face seemed almost merry, although there was an edge of irritation in her voice. “Given the lore by our mother, we were, and she by hers, stretching back since keels first ran on ground here—who else would keep it and polish it and know its secrets?”

“And the god speaks to you through the Scale,” said Flint, as though the sentence made absolute sense. It certainly must have to Gulda, because she nodded sharply.

“When he sees fit.”

“When he sees,” added Meve, nodding gently, as if too violent a motion—even coughing, which Chert himself was doing again—might shake something loose. Howold were these creatures?

“The god has been speaking much to you of late,” said Flint.

For the first time, Gulda hesitated. “Yes… and no…”

“No,” said Meve. “Yes.”

“He speaks to us.” Gulda shook her head. “But sometimes it seems as though the dreams have changed him. He seemed not so angry before as now. As though something had come into his sleep and pained him.”

“Sleep and pain,” added Meve.

“Perhaps he remembers how he left the world,” said Flint, each word taking him further away from Chert, who was feeling as though there was nothing solid in the earth to stand on anymore. “Perhaps he finally remembers.”

“Aye, could be,” said Gulda. “But still he seems changed.”

“And what does the Lord of the Green Depths say to you?”

Gulda peered at him for a while before answering. “That the day of the gods’ return is coming. That our lord wants us to do everything we can to help him come back to us.”

Flint nodded. “To help Egye-Var come back. But you said he seems different when he speaks to you these days.”

Gulda nodded. “Closer, like. And never so angry before, even in our grandmothers’ days. Hot, not cold. Impatient and hot and grasping, like a thirsting man.”

“Thirst,” Meve said, and then began to struggle slowly to her feet. She swayed as she rose, a tiny, brittle bundle like a dried bird’s nest, all mud and sticks. Gulda went to help her but Meve swatted her sister away with a tiny, trembling hand. When she turned back to them, Chert saw her eyes were white with pearl-eye—she was almost certainly blind.

“Dreams… changed…” she rasped, thrusting her hand at Chert as though he had stolen something from her. “Hot. Hot sleep! Cold time. Angry!”

He shrank back but Flint stepped forward and took her bony fingers in his own. The tiny old woman was shaking all over as though with a fever.

Her sister hurried to comfort her. “Oh, there, my love, my sweet, there,” she said, kissing the sparse white hairs on her sister’s head. “Don’t fear. Gulda’s with you. I’m here.”

“Fear,” said Meve in a rasping whisper. “Here.”

“What’s here, my love? What’s here?”

The little old woman spoke so softly Chert could barely hear her. “Angry…”

Ena, Longfingers’ daughter, brought them back to the fifth lantern on the estuary path and let them take off their blindfolds again. Chert was glad to have his sight back, but he had been even happier just to escape the salty, smoky air of the drying shed.

“So, did you find what you were looking for, little man?” the girl asked Flint.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I am touching unfamiliar things in the dark, trying to make out their shapes.”

“A strange one, aren’t you, boy?” The Skimmer girl turned to Chert. “I remember now who you are—Chert of the Blue Quartz.”

Chert, who had thought the long night of strange surprises was over, stared at her. “How do you know me?”

“Never mind that. Better not saying. But you’re a friend of the Ulosian, Chaven, aren’t you?”

Even if she had helped them in some way—and since Chert had no idea what Flint had been doing, he couldn’t even say that for certain—he was not such a fool as to tell a near stranger anything about the fugitive physician. “I used to visit him. That is common knowledge. Why?”

“I have a message for him. We helped him and he promised us payment. Days of work we gave him and because he has not paid us our due it makes my father look foolish in front of the others. If you see him, tell him that—the Skimmers want their payment.”

As Chert and Flint made their way through Chaven’s house toward the hidden door and the tunnel to Funderling Town, they heard noises—footsteps and what sounded like distant, ghostly voices. Chert’s superstitious fright quickly gave way to a more straightforward terror when he heard the voices more clearly and realized that some of Hendon Tolly’s guardsmen were in the house looking for them.

They must have been watching the place, he thought, fighting down panic. But we stayed in the shadows—perhaps they are not sure we came in. Earth Elders, let it be so!

Chert knew the place better than did any guards, at least the lower levels, and they managed to get out the door at the bottom of the house before any pursuers caught them. Once outside, Chert jammed the door closed with shards of rock and hoped that if the guards found the door behind the tapestry on the other side, they would think it had been sealed off long ago. But it meant that Chaven’s observatory was being watched carefully. The place was no longer safe.

We are running out of ways to escape Funderling Town, he thought as he followed the boy back toward the temple. Or even just to see the sky. Soon we will be like those rabbits trapped in their run by hunters. Stormstone’s worst fears for our people are coming true.

22. The Patchwork Man

The many rivulets that Barrick had seen or even crossed as he made his way down from the heights around the Cursed Hill now began to join together, streaks of dull silver snaking through the gray-green moorlands in the perpetual twilight, one emptying into the next and then the next until they had swollen into a single cataract too wide to cross, whose thunder was always in his ears.

“This must be the river Fade.” Barrick paused to rest a moment on a high, rocky part of the bank as the water foamed past beneath him. A cloud of mist wet his clothes but for once he did not mind being damp. “Does it stay like this all the way into Sleep?”

“Not so much,” said Skurn as he fluttered from side to side, unwilling to land on the wet rocks. “At bottom of hills it goes a bit more calm, like, and a good bit wider—you’ll see it. But it follows all the way to that bad place, yes. Are you different minded now?” he asked hopefully.

Barrick shook his head. “No, bird. I must go there.” The whole venture was foolish, of course, and almost certainly doomed to fail, but a curious, unfamiliar sort of bubbling in his blood was leading him on. He felt inexplicably certain he would find solutions to his problems when he needed them.

Is this what it feels like to be well, he wondered, worrying about no one save myself, and not much about me?

Part of it was having a healthy body: his arm, which for most of his life had felt like it was not part of him except for the pain it caused, no longer bothered him. More than that, it felt as strong as his other arm, although he could tell by some small experiments that it wasn’t. The muscles were shrunken from long disuse and he could not squeeze a stick as hard as he could with his healthy hand; still, the transformation was remarkable.

“I am changed,” he said to the twilight sky. “I am saved.”

“Pardon?” Skurn, who had been exploring ahead, flapped down to land on Barrick’s shoulder. His odor was worse than usual, if such a thing were possible.

“Nothing. What have you been eating?”

“Fish. Found it on the rocks down there. Leaped out, it did, missed the water coming down. Been softening in the air for days. Very beaksome indeed.”

“Get away from me. You stink.”

“Be no posy thyself,” said the bird in a hurt tone as he flapped away.

The moorlands were covered with green but desolate meadows, empty lands that showed every sign of once being inhabited, although by whom Barrick could not have guessed: stone ruins overgrown by grass and brambles dotted the lonely fields, cottages of almost every size, from stony lean-tos built into the sides of the hills, some of which looked big enough to house fabled Brambinag and all his family, to delicate miniature villages whose tallest buildings barely reached Barrick’s waist, constructed of bark and grass and river-smoothed stones. Had he not already met the Tine Fay he would have thought these structures were like his sister’s doll house, built only to amuse children. But why would the little people leave a civilized existence to move into dangerous Silky Wood and live like savages such a short distance away? What had driven them out of this green place, along with all the others who had lived here, leaving behind only these quiet, sad remains?

“How far?” he asked Skurn yet again. It was his third day in the meadow and his new sense of confidence was beginning to fade into the unrelenting sameness of following the river down from the moors and into these empty meadows. The wind blew almost continuously here, making Barrick feel as if he was trudging uphill even on the most level ground, and his tattered clothes did little to keep him warm.

“To the Night Man city? The bad place?” Skurn shook his shiny head in weary disapproval. “Fearsome far, still. Days and days walking.”

Barrick frowned. What had the blind king said in the dream the Sleepers had given him? “Come quickly, child. We are rushing toward darkness.” Time was growing short, that was clear… but what was the darkness the fairy-king feared?

Not everything about the river meadows was bleak. Unlike the tangling forest, these lands were at least open to the gray sky of the shadowlands, so that for the first time in a while Barrick could watch it through the course of the day. It remained in perpetual twilight, but it was not as unchanging as he had thought: the clouds moved as the wind rose and fell, and the sky itself darkened and lightened from a pearly, pale fog-color to the harsh, bruised hues of thunderstorms. Flights of birds winged overhead, too far away to see clearly, but apparently as natural as those he remembered from more wholesome lands. And the river, although slower here than in the heights behind him, was still lively enough that for nearly the first time since crossing the Shadowline Barrick could actually see himself moving forward, making progress.

Sometimes it was almost like being back in the lands of sunlight. Despite the lack of full darkness or bright light, both banks of the Fade were full of life. In low spots the river spread out into the meadows, creating marshes full of pale nodding reeds like thin bones; in other places drooping willows dangled branches in the water like women washing their hair. Swollen black frogs full of high-pitched, questioning noises fell silent as he went by, then resumed their piping when he had passed. Occasionally something larger rattled invisibly in the reeds, and once he saw a huge stag look up from where it had been drinking at the river’s edge, dark but with a magnificent rack of silvery antlers, its silence and calm gaze making it hard for Barrick to believe it was only an animal, so impressive that despite his almost constant hunger it didn’t occur to him until the beast was long gone that he could have tried to kill it.

There was also life in the river itself, from little shoals of glittering fishes that filled the backwaters to larger things he could not quite see, visible only as spiny backs breaking the surface or as long shadows slipping through the water.

Still, all of this life did him little good as far as filling his stomach. He discovered after a cold, wet hour or two wading in the river that the shiny fish were too swift to catch, and the closest he came to any of the birds haunting the marsh was uncovering an occasional nest of small, oddly colored eggs. Those and the edible roots and reeds Skurn suggested were Barrick’s only fare. Although he now had fire, being able to cook food meant little when he had no food to cook. And after what must have been a week or so following the river through the apparently unending grass-lands, even Barrick’s healed arm began to seem unremarkable. It was hard to rejoice over being able to move an arm freely when his stomach always ached from hunger, and though the fingers that had once been crimped like a bird’s claw now miraculously moved, they were still red and raw from the endless cold wind.

When the trees growing beside the river began to spread out into the surrounding land, first in small copses, then into larger stands of birch and beech interspersed with clumps of evergreens and other trees he did not recognize, Barrick at first found it a relief. It seemed a little warmer under the canopy of leaves, and it certainly held back the worst of the wind. But it also made it harder for him to make his way forward while staying next to the river, and it brought back uncomfortable memories of the silkins as well. Did the pale, hideously wet-eyed creatures live in this new forest as well? Or might something even worse make its home here—snakes or wolves or creatures no mortal had ever survived to give a name to?

Skurn was even less help than usual. As the woods began to grow thicker he was often distracted by the prospect of new and interesting meals, and although some of these benefited Barrick as well, especially the greater abundance of bird’s nests, others—such as some spotted gray slugs the raven declared “sweetish and softly slurpsome”—were of no use to him at all. He was hungry enough to try one bite of the quivering thing, but nothing on earth could have induced him to take a second.

So it was that after days of walking through the empty lands toward Sleep, it was a wet, weary, unhappy, and very hungry Barrick Eddon who met the patchwork man.

Rain was pattering heavily on the leaves above his head, loud enough to be heard even over the rushing of the river. Barrick had struggled with damp kindling for a long time before finally getting it to light, and had just got the fire burning well enough to continue on its own when he heard a sound and saw an upright shape moving through the reeds near the river’s edge some distance away. The intruder was not making much attempt to conceal itself—in fact, it was making a rather considerable amount of noise—but the hairs lifted on the back of Barrick’s neck and he rose to a crouch, pulling the broken spear from his belt.

He stayed in this position, silent and alert, as the thing stumbled nearer. It seemed oblivious to Barrick’s presence—unless, he reminded himself, it was trying to trick him. He held his breath and did not move as it emerged from the reeds and turned its grotesque head toward him. For a moment it seemed his worst fears had been made flesh—the thing was some sort of monster, a shambling heap of strange colors and waving fronds.

Barrick had already scrambled onto his feet, uncertain whether to attack it or run away, when he realized that what he had supposed was its head was only the hood of a cloak pulled low against the rain. The fronds were its tattered clothes, the colors surprisingly gaudy and bright, so that the strange figure seemed more like something out of a religious procession than any forest wild man.

Skurn dropped down onto his shoulder, startling Barrick badly. “Not right,” the bird said in a quiet, anxious rasp. “Seen naught like that before. Don’t go near. Us doesn’t like it.”

The thing had spotted their fire and hurried toward them, arms waving, shouting meaningless words in a scratchy voice: “Gawai hu-ao! Gawai!”

Barrick sprang back a step, brandishing his spearhead. “Stop!” he shouted. “Skurn, tell it some fairy-talk! Tell it to stay back!”

The tatterdemalion figure stopped and pushed back its hood, revealing a pale, mud-streaked face that Barrick could not help thinking looked rather ordinary, not to mention as human as his own. “What… what did you say?” the newcomer asked. “Is that sunland speech?”

It was a moment before Barrick remembered that was what the shadowland folk called the other side of the Shadowline. “Yes,” he said, but kept his weapon leveled toward the newcomer. “Yes—that’s where I’m from. You speak my tongue?”

“I do! I remember it!” The stranger took a few more staggering steps toward him. “Oh, by the Black Hearth, and you have a fire—all blessings on you, sir!”

Barrick waved him back with the spearhead. “Stop there. What do you want? And who are you?” He examined the odd figure. “You don’t look like a fairy. You look like a man.”

This startled the stranger, who wrinkled his face into a comical squint as he considered. He certainly had none of the exaggerated boniness of the Qar. His face was straw-thin and dirty, with grime in every wrinkle, and his hair was a wet tangle festooned with twigs and leaves. Still, though he had more than the usual number of missing teeth, he didn’t look much older than the prince himself.

“Man? A man?” The fellow nodded slowly, his multicolored rags swaying. “That’s a word. Yes, that’s a word.”

“Where are you from?” Barrick looked around in case the grimy creature might have confederates standing by to jump out and rob him, but there was no sign of anyone else nearby.

“From… yes, from the sunlands,” said the stranger at last—slowly drawing it out, as if he had come up with the answer to a nearly impossible puzzle. “But I don’t remember it well,” he added sadly. “It was so long ago.”

“What is your name?”

The patchwork man showed a sickly smile. “Master calls me ‘Pick.’ ”

Barrick stepped back and let him approach the fire. Pick scuttled past him and squatted, holding his hands up to the low flames, his entire body wracked with shivers.

“What do you want?” Barrick asked at last. “Are you lost? Or do you mean to try and rob me?”

The one named Pick cowered as though he’d been slapped. “No! Please, do not hurt me, I beg you. I have been looking so long for someone who can help me. It is my master, my poor master!”

Every nerve and muscle urged Barrick to walk away from this ragged madman—Skurn had already flapped into the air, as though the man’s folly might be infectious. “What are you talking about?”

“One of the blemmies fell out of the boat. I tried to help, but I fell too. I nearly drowned! I have been trying to find help for hours. But my poor, sick master…”

“Blemmies?”

“Just come.” Although he was still dripping wet, the patchwork man now leaped up from the fire and began trotting back toward the river, turning every few steps like an eager dog to see if Barrick was following. “Come and you will see!”

Skurn hovered over Barrick’s head making dire predictions as he made his way down to the wide bank of swaying reeds and the path Pick had already trampled through the weeds and mud. “Enough, bird,” Barrick said at last. “Do something useful. Fly ahead and see if the fellow’s waiting for me with a club or something.”

The raven appeared a few moments later. “He’s standing looking out at the water, waiting, like. There’s a boat out there, but us don’t like it—there be somewhat fierce wrong with it.”

When Barrick reached Pick’s side he saw that the smaller man was, as Skurn had said, standing on a patch of trampled weeds staring out at a place where the river widened into a calm backwater. At the center of it, a long stone’s throw away from the bank, a black boat was being rowed in slow circles by a strange, hunched figure.

It took Barrick a moment to make sense of size and distance. “The one rowing is a big, big man. Is that your master?”

Pick looked at him as though Barrick had said something utterly mad. “That’s the other blemmy. He’s only got one oar.”

“Still, he could pole his way back to shore,” Barrick suggested, wondering what kind of half-wit rowers Pick’s master had hired. “Tell him that.”

“He’s…” The patchwork man wiggled his hand beside his head. “Can’t hear,” he said at last.

“Oh, for the love of…” Barrick looked out at the hunched figure and the long, circling black boat. “Then just swim out and show him.”

Pick was pulling strands of river-weed out of his hair. “Can’t swim. Almost died when I fell in, but I found a place where the bottom was shallow, praise the Betweens.”

Barrick looked at him, then turned back to the river. “Anything in that water I should know about? Anything with big teeth, for instance?”

“I got out,” Pick said. “But I thrashed around a long while first.”

Barrick cursed silently under his breath and waded in. Halfway out the muddy bottom fell away beneath his feet and he had to begin swimming. As he neared the slow-moving boat he expected the rower would turn toward him, but instead the man only stayed in his odd, bent-over position like someone who had gone dizzy, but meanwhile his wide back flexed and the thick arm plied the single oar in its lock, over and over.

The rower finally noticed him when Barrick’s fingers closed on the wooden gunwale of the boat and he began to pull himself on board. He had only a moment to note that both the boat and the rower were even larger than he had guessed from the shore, and that a long, pale figure lay underneath a small tent on the deck, then the massive rower turned to look at him, still without raising his head.

That was because he had no head, Barrick saw—only two wide, wet eyes on his chest. With a shriek, Barrick jumped back into the water, almost hitting his head on another oar which was floating there. He dipped under the surface and then came up again. In his sudden fright he swallowed more than a little of the green water.

“Gods in heaven, what kind of demon is that?” he spluttered.

“No demon!” Pick called from the reedy bank. “Just a blemmy! It will not harm you!”

If he had been on dry land it would have taken Barrick a much longer time to work up the courage to approach the boat again, but he could not tread water forever. The creature turned to him as he crawled onto the boat once more, but otherwise did not react. Its broad arms continued plying the single oar, steady as the paddles of a millwheel, and the boat continued to circle the backwater in wide, lazy loops.

When they passed close enough to the other oar, Barrick scooped it out of the water and offered it to the blemmy, trying not to look too hard at the dull, unblinking eyes in its chest or the empty place between its shoulders where a neck and head should be. The creature did not seem to see it, but when Barrick slid the oar back into the lock the blemmy clutched it without hesitation and began plying both oars together. The boat headed out toward the downstream current.

“How do I make it head for land?” he shouted. “Does the cursed thing have ears?”

“Put your hand on it and say, ‘s’yar’!” Pick shouted back. “Loud, so it can feel you!”

Barrick put his hand on the blemmy’s shoulder, which was overlarge but otherwise natural to the touch, and said the word. The monster shipped one oar until the little boat had swung around to face the bank, then began rowing with both oars again. Within moments the boat’s thin black keel ran up onto the muddy reed forest and Barrick leaped out. When the boat would go no farther the blemmy merely stopped rowing, its eyes staring from its chest at Barrick and Pick with no more curiosity than a cow in a field.

The patchwork man scrambled up onto the boat and folded back the tent, then kneeled beside the unmoving figure. His excitement gave way within moments to quiet weeping. “He is worse! He will never live to reach Sleep!”

Barrick tried not to look startled. “Your master is… from the city of Sleep?”

“Qu’arus is a great man,” Pick said as if Barrick had suggested otherwise. “All of the Dreamless will mourn him.”

“Kyow-roos.” Barrick tried it on his tongue. “And he is one of them? One of the Dreamless?”

Pick wiped his eyes but it was useless: the tears kept flowing. “Yes—he saved me! I would be dead were it not for his kindness. And he almost never beat me…” He collapsed onto the silent figure’s chest, his body heaving, as Barrick climbed back into the boat, stepping gingerly around the silent blemmy to get a look at Pick’s master.

Although he had been half expecting it, it was still a shock to see the silky gray skin and gaunt features so similar to the demigod Jikuyin’s murderous pet wizard, Ueni’ssoh. Pick’s master was in the grip of some delusional fever but too weak to move much. His staring eyes, which rolled from side to side, fixing on nothing, had the same weird hue as Ueni’ssoh’s—bluish-green as Xandian jade, with no trace of white. Faced with this monstrous reminder of Greatdeeps, it was all Barrick could do not to plunge his blade into the creature’s heart, but the tattered servant clearly felt differently: when Pick looked up at Barrick his eyes were red and his face wet with tears.

“The other servants ran away when Master was struck down. I could not tend to him and control the blemmies. Come with me. Help me! Together we can get him back to Sleep.”

“Us don’t want that!” squawked Skurn from the high stern of the boat, flapping his wings in agitation.

“Quiet, bird.” Barrick looked from scrawny servant to dying master. There had been a moment when he was fighting against the silkins and everything seemed clear: he was meant to do this. Like Hiliometes or Caylor he would find solutions to every difficulty. Here was one such solution—a boat to take him into Sleep and an adviser who would help him to pass unnoticed in that alien place. Perhaps the Sleepers had overestimated the dangers—perhaps these days there were many mortals like this Pick living among the Dreamless.

Still, the idea frightened him. It seemed too simple to be safe, like a scrubbed and shiny carrot sitting in the middle of a loop of string near a rabbit den—but perhaps that was what it felt like to be touched by destiny. He took one last look at the blemmy, shuddered a little, then nodded.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll come with you. For a little while anyway.”

The proper number of oars now clutched in its massive fists, the headless blemmy propelled them down the river. The moderate current did much of the job, but the strange creature proved to see better than Barrick would have guessed, guiding the long boat around obstacles with a nimbleness quite different from its helpless circling in the backwater. While Pick tended to the gray man, who had fallen into a more peaceful sleep, Skurn sulked on the tall stern of the boat or flapped along behind.

“You said your master was struck down,” Barrick asked the patchwork man. “What happened?”

“We were attacked by bandits in the Beggar lands.” He dabbed at his master’s gray skin with a wet rag. “Rope Men, they’re called. Looked ordinary enough at first, but they were starveling thin—like eels with legs—and never closed their mouths. Yellow teeth long as house nails.” The man in the colorful, ragged motley shivered. “One of the master’s guards was killed first, then another of them Rope Men sh–shot Master with an arrow. One of the other servants and I… w–we pulled it out… but then the arrows killed the other guard and the rest of the servants went overboard to get away from them, but they never came up again. It was terrible! The blemmies were rowing fast, though, and the Rope Men were on the bank, so we got away, but the other servant had been shot in the back with an arrow painted like a snake. He died. Master… M–Master got worse and worse…” Pick had to break off. Embarrassed by the man’s weepiness, Barrick turned away and watched the reedy shoreline sliding past until Pick could resume. “That was three sleeps ago by the master’s hour-box. Then we hit a rock and the other blemmy fell out into the water and drowned. You saw the rest.”

Barrick frowned a little. “How could one of them drown? They’ve got no mouths.”

“They do, down low on their bellies. They even make noises when they’re hurt or frightened—a sort of scratchy whistling…”

“Enough.” Barrick didn’t want to think about it—it was too unnatural. “And what will happen when we get to Sleep? Your master’s dying—we both know that. What will happen to you… and to me, for that matter? ”

“We will… be safe, I’m certain.” The man called Pick said this as though he had never actually thought of it before this moment. “Master was always good to me. And there are the wimmuai—he has always taken care of them as well. He lets them die of old age!”

“Wimmy-aye? What are those? Some kind of animal?”

Pick ducked his head. “They are… they are men like you and I. Bred and raised in Sleep, offspring of folk captured over the years at the Shadowline. Master usually has a dozen of them at one time.”

Slaves, in other words. Human slaves. But that was no real surprise—Barrick had never for an instant supposed that mortals would enjoy the same privileges in Sleep as the Dreamless themselves.

Qu’arus spoke in his sleep, a murmured gabble that had the sound of words in it but was no more intelligible to Barrick than the sighing of the wind.

“However did you come to serve such a creature?” Barrick asked.

Pick looked up, his face tight with suffering. “I was… I was lost. He found me. He showed me kindness and took me into his service.”

“Kindness? This… thing? I cannot believe that.”

The other gaped. “But he was… he is… !”

Barrick shrugged. “If you say it is so.” His memories of the other Dreamless, Ueni’ssoh, were of a heartless monster. Could this creature really be so different, or might the man named Pick simply be addled by his experiences behind the Shadowline?

“Hungry,” Skurn said suddenly. The raven launched himself from the stern of the boat, then flapped heavily away over the rushes lining the river and toward the forest.

What ails that bird? Barrick wondered. He has not said a word before that since I can’t remember when. On most days I cannot have a moment’s peace from his yammering.

It became clear as Barrick’s time on the river stretched into what must have been days that Skurn was not just being quiet but actively avoiding company: he spent much of his time in the air, but even when he returned from his solitary flights he tended to perch atop the stern, a curving piece of black-stained wood taller than Barrick, and silently watch the river and bank sliding past.

Perhaps it’s the blemmy that he doesn’t like, Barrick thought. The gods can testify it’s ugly enough to frighten anyone.

The blemmy was indeed ugly, but also very strong, accommodating sudden changes in the river current or avoiding rocks with little more than a flick of an oar. Barrick could only imagine the difference when two of the headless things were rowing together—it must be a very swift craft indeed.

In a rough part of the river, as the blemmy steered the boat between two large rocks visible only by the foam they made on the water’s surface, Barrick almost lost Gyir’s mirror. As he leaned with the boat’s sudden change of direction the leather pouch fell out of his shirt and bounced off the bench. His left hand, his once-crippled hand, shot out and snatched it from the air like a hawk taking a sparrow.

For long moments he stared at it, amazed by what his wounded arm could now do, but also chilled by the idea of what had almost happened. He was a fool to be so careless with the mirror—it was his purpose now. He scoured the boat until he found a spare loop of the surprisingly slender anchor cord and sawed off a piece with his broken spear. He poked a hole in the pouch big enough to accommodate the cord, pushed it through and knotted it, then looped it around his neck before hiding it in his shirt again.

Other boats soon began to appear on the river, mostly small fishing skiffs manned by one or two ragged Dreamless. Barrick saw a few houses and even some small settlements begin to appear along the banks, presumably owned by these same gray-skinned folk. But some craft were a good bit bigger than their own, barges with wide, bruise-purple sails or even long galleys rowed by half a dozen blemmies or more.

“Are we close to Sleep?” he asked Pick after one such craft had surged past them, leaving them rolling in its high wake.

“A day away—no, a little more,” the tattered man said distractedly. His master was still alive, but only barely, and Pick almost never left his side.

Later that long, gray afternoon Qu’arus swam up from his slumbers again, but this time once his gleaming eyes opened they stayed that way, watching everything, although his body remained limp.

“Here, Master, have some water,” the patchwork man said, squeezing his cloth over Qu’arus’ mouth.

“Pikkhh,” the gray man rasped, using the sunlander tongue for the first time; his harsh accent made him hard to understand. “I not see you… !”

“But I’m here, Master.”

“I feel… my home…”

“Yes. We are close, Master,” Beck told him. “We will reach your house soon. Stay strong!”

“The end comes soon now, little Pikkhh,” the Dreamless whispered, a fleck of pinkish spittle at each corner of his ashen mouth.

“Don’t fear, Master, you will survive to see your home.”

“Not the end… for me,” Qu’arus breathed, so quietly that even Barrick bent down to hear better. “I care… little that. The end for all things. I feel it… feel it comes closer. Like cold wind.” He sighed and his eyes fluttered shut, but he spoke one last time before sleep took him again. “Like wind from land of dead.”

Qu’arus woke several more times as the day passed, but Pick said his words were almost all nonsense. He did not move much of anything besides his mouth and his eyes: the dying Dreamless seemed to watch them both with a kind of frightened yearning, as though waiting for them to cure or kill him. Barrick could not help thinking of the head of the Trigonate oracle Brennas, which was said to have remained alive and speaking for three years in a box after the Xandians had executed him.

After a while Barrick made his way past the giant blemmy, who was grinding away at the oars with his usual silent determination, and clambered up into the front of the boat to look for Skurn. He hung onto the high prow to keep his balance as he scoured the distance for some sign of the raven. Something dark was indeed on the horizon, but it was far bigger than Skurn.

“What is that—a storm?” he asked Pick. It seemed to hang too close to the earth, a great blob of darkness spread across the river, thick and black at the bottom but growing fainter higher up until it blended into the twilight sky like a puddle of ink leaching into a blotter.

Pick shook his head. “That’s Sleep,” he said.

“The city? Truly? But it’s black—like thunderclouds!”

“Ah! Those are the darklights. The people of Sleep do not like the brightness of this twilight world under the Mantle. The darklights make a night for them to live in.”

Barrick stared at the blotch on the horizon, which seemed to wait for him like a spider squatting grimly in its web. “They make more darkness? This gods-cursed forever twilight isn’t gloomy enough for them?”

“The Dreamless love the dark,” Pick told him seriously. “They can never have enough.”

The raven finally returned. He landed on the railing of the small boat and stood silently, grooming his mottled pinfeathers in a disinterested way.

“Do you see that up ahead? ” Barrick asked him. “Pick says it’s Sleep.”

“Aye, us seed it.” The raven picked at something invisible. “Us flew there.”

“Is it a city or just a town? How big?”

“Oh, a city, it be. Fearful big. Fearful dark.” Skurn tipped his head sideways to stare at Barrick. “Didn’t listen to us, did you? Now you and us both goes there.” The raven let out a whistle of disgust, then hopped away down the rail toward the stern. “It be a bad place, that Night Man city,” he called back. “Good thing us has got wings. Too bad some others here hasn’t.”

23. Guild of the Underbridge Kallikans

“I have chosen what gifts seemed best.” Dawet still wore his traveling cloak, as though he had only clambered down from his horse a few moments ago. He and Briony had met in the River Garden this time, whose damp air made it one of Broadhall Palace’s less visited spots. “The wars to the north and south mean that many things are in short supply, especially for such unusual folk. I’m afraid it cost more than a few crabs, as the saying goes.”

“I hope I gave you enough.” Briony had now spent almost all the money Eneas had loaned her.

“It sufficed, but I have none left over to give back.”

She sighed. “I cannot thank you enough, Master dan-Faar. So many people owed me allegiance but failed me… or were taken from me. Now here I stand with only one friend left.” She smiled. “Who would ever have guessed it would be you?”

He smiled back, but it was not the most cheerful expression she had ever seen him wear. “Friend, yes, Princess—but your only one? I doubt that. You have many friends and allies in Southmarch who would speak for you—aye, and do more than speak—if you were there.”

She frowned. “They must know by now that I live. Word must have spread, at least a little. I have been living here openly for months.”

Dawet nodded. “Yes, Highness, but it is one thing to know your sovereign lives, another to risk your life for her in her absence. How can even your most loyal supporters know whether you are coming back? Distance makes things uncertain. Get yourself safely to Southmarch and I daresay you will find more than a few partisans.”

She nodded, then offered him her gloved hand. “I have no money left to pay you, Master dan-Faar,” she said sadly. “How long can I keep relying on your friendship when I cannot repay it?”

He kissed the back of her hand, but kept his brown eyes fixed on her as he did so. “You may rely on the friendship no matter what, my lady, but do not assume that I am the worse for the current imbalance. Tell yourself that I am simply gambling—something I am well known for—by performing a task here, a small chore there, none at more than slight disadvantage to myself, but each carrying the possibility of great remuneration later on.” He let go of her hand and made a mocking bow. “Yes, I think that would be the best way to look at our admittedly… complicated… relationship.”

His smile had much of the tiger grin she remembered from the old days, and for a moment Briony found herself quite breathless.

“That said,” he continued as he straightened up, “you will find your tribute in a room above this tavern near Underbridge—“ he handed her a scrap of parchment—“along with two discreet men who will transport it for you.” He bowed. “I hope that serves your needs, my princess. To be honest, following your adventures is nearly payment enough. Can you tell me why the Kallikans?”

“It is the gods’ will.”

“If you truly do not wish to tell me…”

“That is not a polite evasion, Master dan-Faar. A goddess spoke to me in a dream—well, a demigoddess…” He was smiling at her. “You do not believe me.”

“On the contrary, my lady,” he said, “I believe that things are happening that are without precedent since the days of the gods. You and your family are clearly in the midst of them. Beyond that, I reserve my secret heart even from you, Lady.”

“That is fairly spoken.”

“And with that I must leave you.” He brushed a few flecks of night-dew off his breeches. His scabbard thumped against the bench. “I do not know when we will meet next, Highness. Other duties call me.”

“You are… you are leaving the city?” The moment of panic this brought caught her by surprise.

“I am afraid I am leaving Syan entirely, Princess.”

“But you… you are my only real ally, Dawet. Where are you going?”

“I cannot tell you,” he said. “I beg your pardon for my secrecy, but a lady’s good name is at stake. Still, be assured this is not the last time we will see each other, Princess. I do not need to believe in anything very strange to feel certain of that.” He took her hand as she stood, suddenly full of confusion and discomfort. “My thoughts will be with you, Briony Eddon. Never doubt yourself. You have a destiny and it is far from fulfilled. That you may trust when you can trust nothing else.”

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it for the second time; a moment later he had turned and slipped away into the shadows of the garden path.

“I still do not quite understand what you are doing, Princess Briony,” said Eneas as they made their way along a narrow road that ran parallel to Lantern Broad. So far they had attracted much less attention than they would have on the great thoroughfare, which was certainly what Briony wanted. Still, it was impossible to go out into Tessis with the heir to the throne, his guards, and a pair of oxcarts without drawing a crowd.

“Then you do me the greatest possible compliment by trusting me.” As soon as she had said it, Briony worried that she sounded like she was trying to charm him. He is a good man, after all—I owe him something more than just the ordinary round of courtly pleasantries. “In truth, I’ve told you all I can. If I say any more you’ll no longer fear I might be mad—you will be convinced of it!”

Eneas laughed. “I swear there is no such thing as a workaday conversation with you, Briony Eddon! Because of that alone I would have been happy to accompany you anywhere. As it is, I have only been asked to go to a part of my own city that I confess I do not know well. Underbridge has long had a name for its strange folk and stranger happenings.”

“The folk are strange if height is your only measurement,” she told. “But if they are anything like our Funderlings at home, Highness, I believe them to be honest citizens—as honest as any other men, that is.”

Eneas nodded. “An important qualification. But let us not curse them too quickly even with the crimes of bigger men—perhaps dishonesty, like the price of fish and meat, increases with greater weight.”

Briony could not help laughing.

As was his wont, Dawet dan-Faar had admirably prepared the ground for their visit: when they reached Underbridge the Kallikans immediately opened the gates of their guildhall and invited the company inside, oxcarts and all. Inside it was dark and the ceilings were low. A group of small grooms came forward and took the oxen off to the stable and began to unload the carts. In its own way the Kallikans’ hall was as much a world of its own as Broadhall Palace—although smaller in all ways, of course.

A group of armor-clad Kallikan guards now arrived to lead them into the hall itself, bearing what looked like ceremonial digging-sticks.

“Your pardon, lady… and sir,” said one of them, bowing. “Follow us, please.”

This courtly little fellow reminded her suddenly of the day of the wyvern hunt back in Southmarch and the Funderling man her horse had almost trampled. That had been the day when everything had first begun to go really wrong—the day they had come back to the message from their father’s captor asking for Briony’s hand in marriage. But what she remembered now about that day was something else… something about her lost twin.

Oh, Barrick, where are you? It hurt to think about him, although scarcely an hour of any day went by that she didn’t. The underground dreams had ended, but she still missed him as fiercely as ever.

On the day of that long-ago hunt Shaso had saved them from the Shadowline monster and Kendrick had been dragged out from beneath the carcass of his horse, miraculously unhurt but for a few scrapes and bruises. Many courtiers and huntsmen had run to attend to her older brother, but Briony had been more concerned about her twin and his crippled arm. Still, when she tried to help him Barrick had turned angrily away from her and Briony had demanded to know why he always fought against the people who loved him.

“When I’m fighting to be left alone it means my life is worth something to me,” he had told her. “When I stop fighting—when I don’t have the strength anymore to be angry—then you should worry for me.”

Oh, sweet and merciful Zoria, she prayed now, wherever he is, please let my brother still be fighting! Let him stay angry!

The Guild of the Underbridge Kallikans, as Dawet had named them, had already assembled in the main hall to wait. The little people watched with careful and mostly silent attention from rows of benches as Briony and the others entered, which only added to the sense that she and the prince were performers in some unusual masque. In keeping with the citizens of Underbridge, the room was small and the ceilings were low. In the center of the closest bench sat a very round little man with an enormous fuzzy beard and a tall hat. As the guards showed them where to stand, this imposing figure raised his hand.

“Welcome, Princess Briony of Southmarch,” he said in the same broadly understandable accent as ordinary-sized Syannese, which was a relief—she had feared the Kallikans might speak some language of their own. “I am Highwarden Dolomite.”

She made a careful curtsy. “Thank you, Highwarden. You are kind to give me an audience on such short notice.”

“And you are kind to bring us such splendid gifts.” He smiled as several of the guards came forward to give him the manifest. “Two dozen Yisti pick-heads,” he read, giving a little whistle of appreciation. “Those are the finest anywhere, sharp as glass, strong as the very bones of the earth! And fifty hundredweight of Ulosian marble.” He shook his head, impressed. “Rich gifts indeed—we have not had such fine stuff to work for over a year! We are impressed by your generosity, Princess.” He looked to the other Guildsmen on either side before turning his sharp eyes back to Briony. “But what, if we may wonder, is the cause of such kindness? Even our own folk outside Tessis do not come to see us in these days, let alone bring us fine gifts.”

“A favor, of course.” Briony had danced this little dance of teasing flattery and hard questions a hundred times before. “But such wise folk as you knew that already.”

“Indeed, we guessed.” Dolomite smiled carefully. “And we of course will be very interested to hear what necessity has brought such an important woman to our humble hall. But, first, here is something else we do not know.” The highwarden looked straight at Eneas, who still wore his traveling cloak. “Who is this man who stands beside you so silent and watchful? Why does he remain hooded under our roof like an outlaw?”

A couple of the prince’s guards made angry noises and would have drawn their weapons but Briony saw Eneas calm them with a whispered word.

“You… you mean… you don’t know… ?” Briony silently cursed her own stupidity. Dawet had not told the Kallikans about her companion, though she had explicitly asked him to do so. Accident—or a purposeful bit of meddling?

“No. Why should we?” Dolomite asked.

“Because he is your lord!” one of the prince’s guards shouted, his outrage overcoming even his master’s injunction to silence. A startled murmur ran through the watching Kallikans. “This is Prince Eneas—son and heir of your king, Enander!”

Zoria save me from my own stupidity! Briony was horrified by what she had done. She should have introduced Eneas first—no, she should never have brought him. She had let her own weakness drive her, inviting a strong man to accompany her instead of simply getting on with things herself. And now the gods alone knew what would happen.

Eneas pulled back his hood, prompting the Kallikans to more gasps and murmurs, loud as a covey of flushed birds. Several of them got down from their benches and prostrated themselves; even the highwarden removed his tall hat and began to clamber down from his chair to bow to the prince.

“Forgive us, Highness,” he cried. “We did not know! We meant no disrepect to you or your father!”

Briony was a little sickened to see the change that had come over people who only moments before had been calm, careful, and subtle. “This is my fault!” she said.

“No, it is mine,” countered Eneas. “I thought to stay out of this and let Princess Briony do what she needed to do. I should not have hidden my face from my father’s subjects. I ask your pardon.”

All of the Kallikans were relieved by the prince’s words. Some were even nodding and smiling as they made their way back to their seats, as if the whole thing had been an amusing, if slightly frightening, jest.

“You are very kind, Prince Eneas, very kind.” Dolomite looked anxiously between Briony and Eneas. “Of course, we will do whatever the princess asks of us, Highness.”

Now Briony felt heavy and sick in the pit of her stomach. By bringing Eneas she had forced the Kallikans into a position where they had no choice but to do her bidding. That was a way to get what one wanted, but not a way to make real allies.

“I tell you in all honesty,” she said to Dolomite and the other Kallikans, “I asked the prince to accompany me only because he is one of my few friends here in Syan and I could not leave the court without some kind of escort.”

“Surely the big folk in Broadhall palace do not think us a danger to noblewomen? ” piped up a particularly wizened little Kallikan sitting next to Dolomite. He almost sounded flattered by the thought.

“I am certain you would be dangerous to Syan’s enemies,” Briony said. “But it was not your people I feared. One of my countrymen was attacked in the streets of Tessis only a short time gone, so my friends here do not want me to travel without a companion even in the city.”

“And what better companion for a young woman than our famous prince?” said Dolomite. “We are ashamed not to have recognized you, Prince Eneas.”

“And I should have made myself known to you immediately, Highwarden Dolomite, but I am glad we have met at last. I have heard your name spoken well of before, and from men I trust.”

“Your highness is too kind.” Dolomite looked as though he might swell up and start booming with pride like a frog during the spring floods.

Briony let her breath out all the way for the first time in a while. Despite mistakes, they had crept past the first obstacle. “Let me waste no more of your time, Highwarden,” she said. “Here is what I’ve come to ask. Please, can you show me your oldest drum?”

“Drum? ” The smile on Dolomite’s face began fading—he looked genuinely surprised and confused. “Our oldest… drum?”

“That’s all I know. I was told by… by someone important to ask for it.”

The silence gave way to another series of murmured conversations, including several of the Kallikans in the front row around the highwarden, but the common tone seemed to be one of confoundment.

The little wrinkled fellow next to the highwarden suddenly began wiggling his fingers in agitation. “Ooh, scarp me, I’ve just had a thought,” he began, then frowned so hard that his face almost curled away into his beard and vanished. “But no, that’s foolish!… it wouldn’t… would it… ?”

“By the Earth’s Eldest!” sputtered Dolomite, “Would you be good enough to share your idea with us, Whitelead?”

“Just… I thought…” The old Kallikan waggled his fingers even faster beside his face, so that he looked like a river mudfish; at last he noticed what he was doing and stopped. “That… perhaps what she means… this drum… could it be… the drumstones? ”

At these words even the last few whispers trailed off and the hall fell completely silent. All eyes turned toward Briony in astonishment.

I must make the very gods despair, she thought. What have I done now?

The days were getting long, Theron Pilgrimer noted with satisfaction: even hours past the evening meal the sun settling into the hills beyond the river was still high enough to turn the whole length of the Pellos bright copper. That boded well for his desire to reach Onsilpia’s Veil, the most important pilgrimage site in the north, well before the Midsummer Penance Festival began—and that would mean satisfied customers. He had been leading these pilgrim caravans since he was a young man, but for all Theron’s experience things could still catch him by surprise. For that reason, he had guided this caravan far to the south of Brenn’s Bay. He wanted nothing to do with the mad things he had heard about Southmarch, besieged by fairy armies, its royal family scattered to the winds.

He had just finished discussing food supplies with Avidel, his apprentice, when the cripple’s boy appeared. “He wants to talk to you,” the boy told him.

Theron cursed quietly under his breath and looked around for the tattered, ill-omened figure of the beggar. But no, Theron reminded himself, he should call the man by a different name: you couldn’t very well name someone a beggar who was paying you an entire gold dolphin to join your pilgrimage for a fraction of its journey.

Theron followed the boy to the low hill where the cripple stood waiting, well away from the rest of the caravaners. The hooded man, whose blackened, bandaged face Theron had never seen properly, didn’t show the least signs of interest in his fellow travelers except to share their fire and the meals they ate out of the communal pot. He spoke only through the boy, and that seldomly, so it was surprising he should ask to speak with Theron now.

The cripple seemed to be gazing out across the rolling land toward the broad sweep of the Pellos. Distant as an ant on a branch, an ox towed a barge from a path along the bank and several small rowboats bobbed in the backwater at the bend of the river as Silverside fishermen cast out their nets.

“Lovely evening, eh?” Theron said as he approached. He was looking forward to getting into his bedroll and paying his respects to the flask of wine hidden in his travel chest. It was not that the other pilgrims would disapprove, but rather that as long as it was hidden he didn’t have to share it. He would not be able to fill it again until they reached Onsipia’s Veil, which was still days away.

The hooded man waved his bandaged hand and his child servant stood on tiptoe to hear his muttered words. “How far away is Southmarch?” the boy asked.

“Southmarch?” Theron frowned. “At least a tennight, riding most of the day. For a group like ours, closer to a month. But of course we aren’t going anywhere near it.”

The bent man murmured again and the boy listened. “He wants you to take him there.”

“What?” Theron laughed. “I thought your master was just crippled in his body, not simple-minded, but it seems I was wrong! We talked of this when he first joined us back at Onir Plessos. This caravan is not going to Southmarch nor anywhere near it. In fact, this is the closest we shall come.” He waved his hands. “If your master wants to strike out on his own I will not stop him, of course. I will even pray for him, and all the gods know he will need it, and so will you, child. The lands between here and there are said to be full of not just the usual cutpurses and bandits, but worse things—far worse.” He leaned toward the boy. “Goblins, they say. Elves and boggles. Things that will steal not just your money but your very soul.” Theron straightened up. “So if he has sense to go with his money, he will stay with us until we reach the Veil. I know he keeps what’s wrong with him a secret, but I have my guesses. Tell him there’s a leper house there that treats its wards with true kindness.”

The boy listened to another flow of whispers from the hooded depths, then turned to Theron again. “He says he doesn’t have any leppersy. He was dead. The gods brought him back. That is no illness, he says.”

Theron made the sign of the pass-evil, then remembered his position and changed it into the sign of the Three. “He talks nonsense. The dead do not come back. Only the Orphan, and he was the gods’ favorite.”

Both Theron and the child waited for some reply from the hooded man but he stayed silent, looking out across the darkening valley and the murky silver ribbon of the Pellos.

“Well, I can’t stand here forever,” the caravan master said at last. “Nice to talk with you and all,” he added, remembering the exorbitant fee the man was paying. “If you haven’t had any of the turnip stew, I recommend it. Few pieces of mutton in there, down at the bottom—don’t make a fuss and nobody’ll notice. But I should be on my way. Still a great deal to be done.” Including, he suddenly remembered, exhuming his wine flask from his travel chest. The thought gave him a warm feeling. He might not be as devout as he had once been, but he was still doing the gods’ work. Surely they looked on him with favor—surely they wanted only good things for Theron the pilgrimer, son of Lukos the potmaker. Look how high they had already raised him!

The cripple pulled something from his robe and held it out, waggling his clublike, bandaged hand until the boy took it from him. After a whispered instruction the child brought it to Theron.

“He says it is all he has left. You may have it all.”

Theron stared at the dirty-faced boy for an uncomprehending moment, then took the sack. It was heavy, and by the time he tipped its contents into his palm Theron’s hand was shaking, not from the weight but from his sudden realization of what he would see.

Gold coins. At least a dozen. And silver and copper to the amount of another two or three dolphins. He looked up in astonishment, but the crippled man was staring silently out across the valley again, as if he had not just put a sum great enough to turn someone like Theron from a comfortable but hardworking caravan master into a gentleman of leisure with a house, land, livestock, and several servants.

“What is this for? Why does he show it to me?”

“He says he must go to Southmarch,” the boy said after a short, whispered convocation. “That is why the gods have brought him back. But he cannot go without someone who knows the way—he cannot find the way, even… even with me.” The boy scowled as he said it; clearly the words stung. “His eyes are still seeing the world of the dead as much as the world of the living. He fears he’ll get lost and arrive too late.”

Theron realized his mouth was hanging open, like a door someone had forgotten to close. He shut it, then immediately opened it again. “Late?”

“After Midsummer. Then he will be too late. On Midsummer’s Night all the sleepers will awake. He heard this when he was in the gods’ lands.”

The caravan master could only shake his head. When he spoke his words bumped against each other. “L–let me… understand, boy.” He had never imagined holding so much money in his hands and doubted any of the other pilgrims had, either. They were all good, gods-fearing folk as far as he knew, but he didn’t want to test their honesty too harshly. “Your master wishes to pay all this money… for what, exactly?”

After a short conversation with the hooded shape, the boy said, “To get to Southmarch. To be led there, and protected along the way. To be fed and to have a horse to ride.” He turned back at some urgent murmuring from the crippled man. “Not just Southmarch, the country, but Southmarch Castle. In the middle of the bay.”

Even with this incredible bounty in his hands, Theron still hesitated—not at the idea of deserting the pilgrims, but at the prospect of crossing the lands to the north, full of unknown dangers, and traveling right into the midst of what was said to be a war between the Marchfolk and the fairies out of legend. The weight of the gold in his hand, though, made a powerful argument.

“Avidel!” he called. “Come here!”

Theron slid the coins back into the sack and tied it to his belt with an extra knot, just to be sure. His apprentice was about to become a caravan master.

The procession that moved down the corridors behind the Guild Hall was a large one. Briony, Eneas, and the prince’s guards were led by Highwarden Dolomite and several other guildsfolk—including, Briony was pleased to see, at least one Guildswoman—and wrinkled little Whitelead, who it turned out was a sort of priest. Whitelead was accompanied by two huge acolytes—huge by Kallikan standards, in any case—who walked behind him carrying an object made of pots and sagging leather pipes, the whole thing steaming gently. When Briony asked politely what it was, Whitelead cheerfully told her it was a ceremonial replica of the Sacred Bellows.

“Sacred Bellows?”

“Ah, yes.” Whitelead nodded vigorously. “The god used it to create all earthly life.”

“Which god?”

He looked at her gravely for a moment, then smiled and winked. “I’m not allowed to say it out loud, Highness… but the Syannese celebrate him every year during the Kerneia.” He winked again, even more broadly, just to make certain she understood.

The strange parade wound its way down what seemed at first to be only a series of corridors behind the Guild Hall, but Briony soon noticed that the bends and turns were not tight enough to be confined within the space of a normal sized building, even a large one. Also, in many places the passage sloped down at a distinct angle.

Eneas had noticed also. “How far does this go, I wonder? ” he said quietly to Briony. “Some of my ancestors tried to prevent the Kallikans from digging in the stone underneath Tessis, but it seems they did not do a very good job of stopping them. They must have been at this for years!”

Indeed, it was clear that the walls, which near the Guild Hall had been paneled in dark wood, were now naked stone, beautifully polished and carved, sometimes inlaid with many different types of rock, work Briony could tell even by lamplight was exceptional.

“By the Three Brothers,” Eneas said wonderingly after they had walked even farther, “have they burrowed all the way to Esterian?”

“Don’t say anything to them!” Briony pleaded, then felt ashamed. “I’m sorry—I have no right to tell you how to treat your subjects, but it was me who forced them to take us here. I would hate to think I’ve repaid them with trouble.”

Eneas laughed, but he did not seem happy. “Fear not, Princess. I will not make myself a troublesome guest, but it does set me wondering. If the mild Kallikans can flout us so, right under our noses, what other surprises will I find on the day it becomes my task to put Syan’s house in order?”

Staring at his face, so sharp and intent in the lamplight, Briony was taken again by a strange, contradictory impulse.

Ferras Vansen. Were you real? Did I see what I thought I saw—did I see your feelings as clearly as I felt I did? What if it was only a phantom of my own mind? And even if not, she asked herself, what about this man, Eneas, this good man struggling to be fair? He cared for her—he’d said so—and he was exactly what Southmarch needed just now… It was too much to think about. Her feelings were as confused as the bubbles in a boiling kettle, first this one rising, then that one, then both at once and a dozen more.

At last, after long walking and many turns, and after descending what Briony guessed must be at least a dozen fathoms beneath the Guild Hall, the procession reached a place where the corridor widened out into a sort of broad staircase with shallow steps clearly cut for Kallikan feet that led to a door in the far wall decorated with carved designs that stretched weirdly in the flickering lamplight. Briony could see an image of a man riding a fish and another tying a vast serpent into a complicated knot, but most of the carvings were harder to make out.

Several of the Underbridge folk sprang forward and banged on the metal of the door with sticks. After a long wait, the great portal swung open, revealing more lamplight inside. Highwarden Dolomite stepped forward and led them all through the doorway.

Even as the last of them stepped through into a room only slightly smaller than the great hall outside, and the door clanked shut behind them, a group of Kallikans in black robes like Whitelead’s appeared from a passage at the back of the room, scuttling and slipping on the polished stone floors as they hurried forward, as though on an icy lake. They prostrated themselves before the highwarden and the priest, and then one rose and made a series of ritual gestures, although with a certain anxious haste. He was almost as small as Whitelead but a great deal younger, very thin, and his eyes bulged in his face as though he was terrified.

His eyes only grew wider as he finished his ritual and looked up from Dolomite and Whitelead to the others who stood watching. He goggled at Briony, Eneas, and the prince’s guards, all towering over the Kallikans like ogres; for a moment Briony thought the little man might faint dead away. “Oh, Great Anvil,” he said at last to Dolomite, “Great Anvil of the Lord, how did you know? How did you know?”

The highwarden stared at him for a long moment, then snorted in annoyance. “How did I know what, Chalk? What in the name of the Pit are you babbling about? We’re here to use the drumstones. The prince of Syan himself has commanded it!”

Chalk looked at him in surprise, then back at the imposing visitors before suddenly bursting into tears.

When Chalk had composed himself he led them all back into the inner recesses of what was clearly some kind of temple, although the Kallikans were very reluctant to talk about it.

“It’s just… well, we haven’t had a message through the stones for decades—not since my father’s day,” Chalk explained, “and that was when he was nearly a boy! So you can imagine, Great Anvil, that when we heard… well, I was just on my way to tell you and the others!”

“Hold your tongue a moment, man, you are making my head ring,” said the highwarden. “Are you saying that someone else has been using the drumstones?”

“Who could do that without authority? ” demanded Whitelead, his little beard bristling like the ruff of an angry rooster. “We will have him in front of the Guild immediately!”

“No, no, my lords!” said Chalk so miserably Briony feared the little fellow would start weeping again. “The drumstones spoke! They spoke to us! For the first time since my father’s day!”

“What? What do you say?” demanded Dolomite, truly surprised for the first time. The revelation sent a flurry of whispers and gasps through all the other assembled Kallikans. “Who speaks to us?”

Chalk pushed open the door to a final chamber, darker than any of the others. A great circle of smooth but otherwise unworked stone dominated the high wall before them, the space around it filled with other kinds of stone cut in fantastic shapes. “The folk of Lord’s House—our kin in Southmarch.”

Briony could not stay silent any longer. “Are you saying that you’ve had a message from the Funderlings in Southmarch? For the love of the gods, what did they say?” A kind of giddy excitement almost but did not quite overcome the chill that swept over her. As Dawet had reminded her, strange things were happening—more of them every moment. She had dreamed a demigoddess and her dream was taking shape in the waking world.

Chalk looked to his masters for approval before speaking. “The others… the ones in Southmarch said… it is hard to put it exactly in ordinary speech, because the drumstones speak in a tongue of their own—our old tongue, but shorter of speech.” He furrowed his pale forehead, staring at his hands as he did his best to remember correctly. “The message was, ‘A Highwarden of the Big Folk has come back alive from the Old, Dark Lands. He leads us now. Outside the walls, the Old Ones oppress us and we cannot hold out long. We call on you to honor our shared blood and our shared tale. Send help to us.’ ” He looked up, blinking his large eyes. “That was more or less the whole of it.”

Briony shook her head. “But what does it mean? ‘Highwarden of the Big Folk’—Big Folk is us, yes? That’s what you call us. But we have no Highwarden, only a king.” Her heart suddenly beat faster. “Do they mean my father? Has my father come back? Where are the Old Lands?” Her pulse was racing, but Dolomite was shaking his head.

“I do not think it means your father, Princess—everyone knows he is held in the south, in Hierosol. The Old Lands are what we call the country that lies behind the Shadowline. The lands of those you call the fairy folk. The Qar.”

For a moment she felt only disappointment, then it came to her suddenly, startling as a sudden blare of trumpets. “A Highwarden of the Big Folk has come back from the lands ruled by the fairies?” Her heart began speeding again. “My brother—it can only mean my brother, Barrick! He has come back to Southmarch! He has come back! Oh, praise Zoria!” And to the tiny man’s surprise and terror, she suddenly bent and kissed little Chalk on the head. Prince Eneas laughed, but the rest of the Funderlings were quite astonished. “Quickly, quickly!” she said to Dolomite and Whitelead, “Can we send a message back? Tell them I am here—tell them I must speak with my brother!”

With the permission of their leaders, Chalk and his comrades got out ladders and long striking-wands, objects that had obviously been used only for ceremonial purposes for some time (and not even that very frequently as suggested by how hard it was to find some of them—Chalk started sniffling again, this time in mortification, as the temple was ransacked for the last ladder, which had been used to refill a ceiling lantern and not returned). At last everything was in place. Chalk sat by Briony’s feet with a tablet of clay and a stone stylus as he wrote down her message and did his best to translate it into words the drumstones could carry.

Underbridge to Lord’s House, Hail! We hear your words and praise them! Our Highwarden and Hierophant attend. Also a Highwarden Mother of the Big Folk of Lord’s House, who comes here but seeks her brother there. Please drum to us his words. We greet you, brothers, and will try to help you, but must know more.

“Highwarden Mother?” asked Briony as Chalk relayed these words to his underlings, who then began to beat at the circle of stone set into the wall as though it were a true drum, their stone-headed, wooden wands plinking and plunking a strange, arrhythmic music. “It seems a touch confusing.”

“They have no word for ‘princess,’ it seems,” said Eneas, amused. “I wince to think what they would call me.”

When the message had been drummed and then drummed a second time, they waited, but although they stood—and then, after a long while, sat down where they could find places to do so—no message came back.

“Either they are gone,” said the hierophant, “which seems strange when they had just sent a message to us, or something has broken the chain of drumstones. We will try to drum to them again tonight, and send word to you in the castle if we hear anything.”

“You are very kind,” said Briony, but the dizzying happiness of only a little earlier was fading. Perhaps she had been wrong about what the message meant. Perhaps the Kallikans themselves were wrong somehow about receiving it at all.

“Come, Princess,” Eneas told her. “It’s time to go back now.”

She allowed herself to be led back through the maze of corridors toward the real world and the late afternoon sun.

24. The Failure of a Thousand Poets

“They’ve broken through! The Twilightfolk have broken through!” One of Sledge Jasper’s warders fell through the doorway of the drumstone chamber, bleeding and staggering like a drunk.

Ferras Vansen leaped to his feet so quickly he almost knocked over the monk beside him. Luckily, the Funderling had just finished pounding on the drumstone wall with what looked like the ramrod for a cannon and Vansen’s message had been sent out into the earth—and more important, he hoped, to the Funderlings of Tessis. “Where have they broken through?” Vansen demanded. “And how many of them?”

Two of the other temple brothers were now holding up the bleeding guard. “Just above the Festival Halls,” gasped the wounded man, “but they’re almost to the temple cavern. Wardthane Jasper and the others have fallen back to the narrows in front of the Curtainfall, but they… will not last long… you must… must send…” The man wobbled and his head sank.

“Leave him with the older Brothers to be cared for,” Vansen said, “and if he is well, let him rest a while and then send him back—we need every hand. Where is Magister Cinnabar?”

“Cinnabar took a troop of warders to look at a suspicious cave-in below Five Arches,” said Brother Nickel. “He will not be back for hours.”

“Then I need someone else. I need men to go with me to the Festival Halls. I cannot find my way around without a Funderling guide.” He had learned from harsh experience that any tracking skills he possessed meant nothing in these lightless tunnels. He turned and surveyed the drumstone chamber. “In fact, we need all these men, Brother Nickel. Half our guards or more are out of the temple, as well as Copper and most of the men he brought. If the Qar break through, we shall be separated from them and under siege.”

“These are religious men, not fighters,” said Nickel angrily, waving his hands at the half-dozen fearful-looking Brothers listening to the argument. “In any case, it is their task to listen for the drumstones—especially now, when we have just sent messages! What if our kin in Underbridge or Westcliff reply to us?”

“Then leave one, preferably someone too lame to fight. Send me all the rest and tell them to bring any weapon they can find—hoes and shovels from the gardens if there is nothing else. They must meet me in front of the temple as quickly as they can—we have no time to lose.”

It was a ragged crew, there was little doubt of that: Ferras Vansen had only a dozen men, most too old or too young, and none of them looked as if he had ever raised a hand to fight before. Vansen had the armor the Funderlings had made for him, but none of his volunteers had anything to protect themselves but the mica goggles, leather helmets, and thick blousy jackets they wore for digging in the wet and dangerous depths.

“Nothing to be done about it,” he told himself, but his heart was heavy. When had troops like these ever won a battle? They were sacrifices, not soldiers. “Where is Chert Blue Quartz?”

“Here,” the Funderling said from the doorway of the temple. The small man hurried down the stairs. “What do you need, Captain?”

Vansen leaned close so only Chert could hear him. “Someone must hurry to Cinnabar below Five Arches. Tell him that if he and his men don’t come quickly we are lost—the Qar have broken through above the Festival Halls. But do not go yourself, do you understand? I need you to stay and make sure Copper and any others who come back are also sent to help us as quickly as possible. It must be you, Chert—I do not trust these priests to understand the danger.”

Chert frowned, considering. “I’ll send someone after Cinnabar right now, Captain, I promise. But it will be hours before he can reach you at the Stair, even if he starts when the messenger finds him.”

“Can’t be helped.” Vansen shook his head. “Ah, I almost forgot. Go to Chaven and ask him… no, lean closer, I must whisper it to you.”

When Vansen had finished Chert looked at him with wide eyes. “Truly? Poison?”

“Quiet, I beg you! I am afraid so.”

“Then we must pray that the Earth Elders are sleeping no longer—that they will wake and help us.”

On an impulse, Vansen thrust out his hand for the small man to clasp, surprising Chert more than a little. “Farewell, Master Blue Quartz. I hope I will see you again, but if the gods wish otherwise, take care of your family—and watch out for that boy of yours, especially. I wager he will play an important part before this is all over.”

Chert nodded. “And be thrifty with your own life, Captain Vansen. We need you. Don’t sell yourself for the first nuggets out of the seam.”

Ferras Vansen had no idea what that meant, but he squeezed Chert’s hand once more, then turned and motioned for his ragtag troop to follow him.

“The Earth Elders protect you!” Chert called after him, and several of the older brothers gathered on the steps echoed him, their voices dry and whispery as mice scuttling in a hay barn.

Chert found one young acolyte who seemed to have more sense than some of his fellows. “Go find Magister Cinnabar down below Five Arches,” he said to the youth. “Tell him the fairies have broken through near the Festival Halls and Vansen needs every man he can get. Go, lad, and hurry.”

A furious Brother Nickel was waiting as Chert passed the chapter house on his way to find Chaven.

“What do you think you are doing?” Nickel demanded. “You cannot give orders to my acolytes. I was given the authority during this crisis. I act for the abbot, not you!”

“Captain Vansen is in charge of defending this place and all of Funderling Town,” snapped Chert. “Cinnabar and the guild told you so. The Qar have broken through and Vansen needed a message sent. There wasn’t time to find you and ask your approval.”

Nickel scowled, but seemed unable to find a response. “Just don’t get too big and shiny, Townsman Blue Quartz,” he said at last. “It was you and your mongrel son who started all this trouble—little people, fairies, outsiders in our Mysteries. Some others may have forgotten that but I haven’t. And now I’m told your monstrous child has caused even more trouble for me.” Nickel stuck a bony finger in Chert’s face. “If it is as bad as I suspect, I will see him sent back to Funderling Town—and you, too, no matter what the guild and your Captain Vansen say.” The monk stamped off like a man intent on crushing every insect in his path.

Chert was in a hurry to find Chaven the physician, but it sounded as though the boy had got himself onto some kind of scree slope again. Could the errand to Chaven wait? He did not want to leave the boy to be bullied or worse by Nickel—the monk was clearly developing a grudge against him. And what if the monk frightened the boy off somewhere? What if Flint fled the temple entirely? It was too dangerous now for the child to be outside on his own.

“Fracture and fissure!” Chert smacked his hands together in frustration: Vansen’s errand would have to wait, at least for a while. He set off after Brother Nickel.

The loud voices seemed to be coming from the library and they sounded angry indeed. As Chert crossed the front hall he had a sudden premonition of what he would find there.

To his sorrow, he turned out to be right: Flint stood in the middle of a crowd of furious, dark-robed monks, half a head taller than most of them and as serene as a tall stone in the middle of a rushing river. The boy’s eyes met Chert’s for a moment and then continued roaming the walls as though he were sizing up the stone before carving a stringcourse.

“What’s going on here?” Chert had to struggle to keep his temper. He knew the boy was unusual—it made his stomach churn sometimes just to think of how carelessly he and Opal had brought the child into their lives—but had never seen a scrape of harm in him. The Metamorphic Brothers were acting as though they had caught a thief or murderer.

Brother Nickel turned toward him, face flushed. “This is beyond all bounds, even for you, Blue Quartz,” the monk said. “This child walked into the library—the greatest library of our people left in the world!—and began to put his hands on the texts! His filthy hands!”

Despite his own rage, Chert was shaken: trespassing in the library was no simple prank. It was worse even than entering the Mysteries, because the books in the library—some of them ancient prayers scratched into fragile slate in letters so shallow that they had become almost entirely unreadable, or etched on parchment-thin sheets of mica—were rare and easily damaged. The great Funderling library in Stonebeneath, a settlement that for centuries had lain beneath ancient Hierosol, had been destroyed along with most of the city in the floods of four centuries earlier, along with almost half of the lower city’s inhabitants, and the library had been lost completely. The dreadful toll of the Stonebeneath Floods had been taught to Chert since he had been big enough to walk—the single greatest tragedy of Funderling history. No wonder the monks were so upset.

“Flint,” he said as calmly as he could. “Did you go into the library? Did you handle the books?”

The pale-haired boy looked as if Chert had asked whether it was good to eat when you were hungry. “Yes.”

“Do you see?” Nickel cried. “He feels no shame! He breaks into the Mysteries like an invader and then, not content with that outrage, comes to play his wicked tricks in the very heart of our people’s memory.”

Chert struggled for composure. “I’m sure with all those clever words you truly will be abbot one day, Nickel, but let’s not completely lose our heads. Flint, why did you do it?”

The boy now looked at him as though he were actually a bit surprised, something Chert had scarcely ever seen from him. “I needed to learn something. I went to look at the oldest books. It’s important.”

“What? What did you want to learn?”

“I can’t tell you.” He said it with such clarity that Chert knew arguing would be useless. The assembled brothers were no longer just murmuring, but crowding forward as though they meant to lay hands on the boy and administer punishment. Chert stepped in front of Flint and held up his hands.

“He didn’t understand. He doesn’t mean harm, but he… he’s different.” He was ashamed to capitulate to the monks so easily, but there was no time to waste. “I’ll take him with me. You won’t have any more trouble with him—I promise that on my honor as a Guildsman. Just… just go about your business.”

“How can we trust you?” Nickel demanded. “You have let him run wild, let him meddle in the affairs of holy men…”

“This temple and Funderling Town are under attack,” Chert said loudly. “And you know it as well as I do, Brother Nickel. We all have far more to fear than this boy—you should be organizing these men to defend the temple, not to attack a child. Now, will you let me go? I am very sorry Flint touched the books but it looks like no harm was done. I’ll take him with me and he’ll get into no further mischief. Please, let us all remember what’s important now.”

Nickel was scowling, but one of the other monks said, “Antimony told me that Chert Blue Quartz is a good man.”

“He’s right about defending the temple, that’s certain,” said another. “If Chert gives his word, perhaps we should allow him this one chance.”

“Thank you.” Chert looked around. The anger on the faces of the other monks had begun to fade like the disappearing sheen of water as it dried on a rock face: talk of an attack had reminded them of the true danger. Nickel, though, did not look satisfied. “Come along, Flint,” Chert told the boy. “Say you’re sorry and we’ll be going—I have important errands for Captain Vansen.” He grabbed the boy’s hand and pulled him away from the library.

Flint did not say sorry, of course, but Chert hoped that in the racket of the monks beginning to argue among themselves they hadn’t noticed the boy’s silence.

He found the physician upstairs in his small dormitory cell and told him what Vansen had asked. Chaven thought about it for a moment before saying, “I think that the best solution in the short run would simply be to tie a cloth soaked in water across their faces. Anything more complicated will take me some time.”

Chert stood, amazed at his own stupidity. “Cloth—water! By the Elders, I have been so preoccupied it is like I did not even hear Vansen. If there is one thing we Funderlings have, it is dust masks! With a little stuffing around the edges they should keep out the fumes of the Qar’s poison dust.” He began to pace. “In fact, the craftsmen who do the near-work, as we call it, the sanding and polishing, even wear hoods with mica over the eyes. What a fool I am!”

“Do not condemn yourself,” Chaven told him. “We are all much distracted. Is there anything else I can do for you? If not, I have a few matters of my own…”

“Yes, yes, I’m afraid there is.” Chert grabbed the boy. “Keep an eye on this young scamp for me—I must try to find some dust masks for Vansen. Even now he and Jasper’s men are trying to keep the Qar out of the Festival Halls, if you haven’t heard. But don’t let this fellow out of your sight! He has been up to all kinds of outrage and mischief according to Brother Nickel. And especially keep him away from the library.”

Chaven seemed to notice the boy for the first time. His round face relaxed into a smile, but Chert fancied he saw something else there, too, something more… calculating? “Ah, Master Flint, I hear you have been up to all kinds of interesting things since I saw you last. A visit to the Skimmers, was it? And now the library. Perhaps you can tell me about all of it while we keep each other company.”

Flint was persuaded into the room with the bad grace of a cat being coaxed down off a high place.

“Remember,” Chert said as he went out, “you can’t let him out of your sight!” The physician waved a hand in acknowledgment.

Chert’s search of the small forge where the temple smith repaired tools and other simple household objects turned up two fire-hoods, one of which the temple smith himself was wearing, pushed back on his bald, sweating head. The large-armed monk objected angrily to giving up either of them, but Chert asserted Vansen’s guild-given authority and grabbed the unused hood, then scampered out before the smith lost his temper entirely.

In the temple undercroft he found some heavy cloth dust masks, the remains of an old rebuilding project. There were only a dozen, but he thought they might at least keep those in the front safe against the fairy poisons. He was about to go when he saw something else, a stone chest with a heavy wooden lid. Chert opened it and stared for a while at the wedge-shaped iron objects carefully stacked inside.

Why not? he thought to himself, and carefully lifted one out and tucked it into his belt. It was heavy and it dug into his belly, but Chert tightened his belt and decided it would have to do. He replaced the lid on the stone box, then cut some cord from a loop hanging from a peg on the wall before closing the storeroom door.

He put water in a bucket for the dust masks and hurried back across the temple and out the front hall, pleased to see that the monks seemed finally to have understood the danger: half a dozen of them were dragging the most valuable statuary inside, and the temple’s ancient iron siege doors were being swung into place. Chert doubted the temple had ever been besieged—certainly it hadn’t happened within his memory—but the Funderlings’ native dislike of windows and other such upground fripperies would serve them in good stead now. As with most large Funderling buildings, the temple’s air and water came in by ducts from other parts of the great limestone labyrinth beneath Southmarch and its storerooms were kept full of food even in lean times. An enemy would find it hard to drive them out quickly.

Chert met two of Sledge Jasper’s warders on the far side of the Curtainfall. One was all but senseless and being dragged by his comrade, who was bleeding in a half-dozen places.

“Go back!” the upright warder said, gasping. He shook blood out of his eyes. “The wardthane and the big man, the upgrounder, are surrounded. The fairies made a cloud of blindness around them. They’ll reach the temple any moment—they’ll kill us all!”

Chert could get nothing else of use from the man and let him drag his wounded fellow toward the temple. Terrified by the thought of what lay ahead, he wondered for long moments whether he should not follow them back, but the sloshing bucket in his hand, carried so wearyingly far already, helped him make up his mind. Captain Vansen was in trouble. Only Chert could help him, at least until Cinnabar showed up with more men.

By the time he had gone another few hundred steps he could hear shrieks of pain and anger in the distance and his heart was pounding faster than a craftsman’s hammer.

Forgive me, Opal, he thought. In that moment he missed his wife so fiercely that it felt like a hole, like cold wind blowing right through him. Forgive me, my old darling, I’m doing it again.

Ferras Vansen was in the middle of a waking nightmare—strange shapes, guttural cries, and mad shadows cast by the flickering light of torches. Vansen, Sledge Jasper, and five of the remaining warders had barricaded themselves as best they could in the narrow hallway between the last two of the Festival Halls in an effort to keep the attackers from breaking through—at least two or three dozen Qar, he felt sure, although it was hard to tell in the darkened passages. He doubted the fairies had expected so little resistance or they would have sent more than this scouting party. But the number of invaders wasn’t important: if Vansen and the others failed, nothing would remain between the Qar army aboveground and the temple caverns.

And then they will be through into Funderling Town, Vansen thought, wiping at his stinging eyes. Innocents—women and children. And from there the fairy folk would find it easy enough to break through into the castle above.

Five of us. And even if we somehow stop them for a while, there’s no guarantee they won’t send reinforcements pouring down from above. Vansen did his best to catch his breath, squatting behind the barrier of rocks Jasper and his men had thrown across the narrow passage to give them protection from the occasional arrow that came hissing out of the hall beyond. But why so much effort to take the underground part of the castle? They’ve lost near a hundred of their fighters here in the past days. The battle had gone on for hours today, but the Funderlings and Vansen had the advantage of defending narrow tunnels: they had killed far more than they had lost. The Qar must know that the gates of Funderling Town can be shut on the castle side, sealing it off from the rest of Southmarch. Did they honestly think they could sneak through without resistance? It made no sense.

He wiped at his eyes again. The invaders, primarily the ugly little imitations, the drows, had almost filled the far chamber with the choking dust they blew out of tubes, a weaker mixture than they had used on the acolytes in the Boreholes, but still enough to make it hard for Vansen and the others to fight. Even in small amounts it not only filled their eyes with tears but made their heads reel and their chests hurt with every breath. Vansen prayed that Chaven could come up with something, although there was scant chance it would do them any good now. The Qar were too close to breaking through.

Vansen took a breath and coughed, his throat stinging. “Could we get more of your people here to wall off this passage completely?” he whispered to Sledge Jasper.

Jasper started to speak, then ducked his bald head as an arrow snapped past overhead and rattled away behind them. “Can’t do it, Captain. Anything we could throw up that fast they could pull down. Those are drows—likely they know near as much about stone as we do.”

“Perin’s Hammer,” Vansen swore bitterly. “What a place to die!”

Jasper laughed, a harsh bark that turned into a cough. “None better, Captain. With the earth herself beneath you and around you.”

“Ho, Thane.” One of the Warders was peering over the makeshift barrier, taking advantage of the lull between arrows. He turned to Jasper, eyes wide and white in his dust-smeared face. “I think they’re coming at us again.”

“Out of arrows,” said Jasper, rising to a crouch. “Now they’re going to try to finish the job. Up and show them, boys—if we die, we die like stonecutters!”

Vansen put off standing as long as possible. The corridors were low for him anyway, and the thin cloud of the poison dust still hovering in the air was less overwhelming behind the barricade.

He climbed to his knees and peered through the angle where the makeshift barrier met the corridor wall. Not all the Qar could see as well in the dark as the drows and Funderlings, and he was grateful for that: some of the attackers carried torches, which allowed Vansen to make out what was going on. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to fight for his life in total blackness.

The torches were bobbing and fluttering now, but their light was mostly blocked by the dark shadows of advancing Qar. They knew Vansen and his defenders had no arrows: they were not afraid of making themselves targets.

They’re just going to rush us and rely on numbers, he realized. All or nothing.

“Fight for your homes!” he bellowed, rising himself until he filled the passage almost to the top. “For your people and your city!” Then the enemy came rushing toward them, howling and shouting, and Vansen could not think anymore.

Ferras Vansen stood gasping, his eyes stinging not from the Qar’s poisons but from his own blood, which streamed from a cut on his forehead. Their enemies’ first rush had failed—the attackers had dislodged several rocks from the makeshift wall, but Vansen and the warders had killed several of them and their bloody corpses now fouled the Qar side of the barricade, making it harder for the attackers to keep their footing. However, when the bodies got high enough—if Vansen and his men lived long enough to pile more bodies—the invaders would simply climb over the stone wall on a ramp of their own dead.

“They’re coming again, Captain.” Sledge Jasper’s face was covered with cuts and dirt, an ugly mask that made him look even more grotesque, like a wicked troll out of some old myth. “I can hear them getting nearer.”

Vansen wiped his eyes and lifted his warding-ax again. He wished he had a short sword or a stabbing-spear. The ax was useful for keeping the enemy at arm’s length, but its weight was wearing him down. The Funderlings must be stronger than they looked: two of the warders were still using theirs, although Jasper was carrying a pair of sharp rock picks instead, one in each hand.

“I’m ready.” Vansen wiped blood from his face and flicked it away. “Let them come.”

“You’re a good man, Captain,” Jasper said abruptly, eyes on the darkness beyond the barrier. “I had you wrong, I confess. You’re nearly a Funderling yourself, if a scrape on the tall side. I don’t mind dying with you at all.”

“Nor I you, Wardthane.” Vansen wished he had something to drink. They had finished the last of their water skins an hour before and his mouth was dry as the Xandian desert. “But first let’s take a few more of these unnatural things with us…”

Jasper’s reply was lost in the roar of the attack. A small, dark shape leaped up onto the top of the barrier, then quickly fell away again, howling, guts spilling from a blow of one of the warders’ axes. Two or three more figures swarmed up to take its place, one of them thrusting a blazing torch into Sledge Jasper’s face so that he had to lean back to avoid being burned. Vansen slammed the blade of his weapon into the torch-bearer, piercing what felt like leather armor and skin, although it was impossible to tell if the blow was mortal or not. A moment later he and one of the other warders were wrestling with another of the shapes which had come scrambling over the top, a drow with a long, pointed knife that sliced Vansen’s forearm below his chain mail and almost reached his face before he tightened his hands on the attacker’s arm. He squeezed as hard as he could and heard a thin shriek above the tumult as the drow’s wrist broke in his grip. The creature dropped the knife, but before Vansen could pull it to him and snap its neck the drow fought its way free and fell to the ground on the defenders’ side of the barrier.

Something large now loomed up before him, blocking the torchlight. Jasper bent and clubbed the drow beneath their feet with one of his picks. Vansen felt it go limp, but his attention was almost entirely taken by the thing before him, one of the huge ettins. The creature’s rumbling growl shook his bones. Vansen brought his ax down hard on its head even as it reached for Jasper, but the ax bounced off the plated skull without doing any discernible damage. Ignoring him, the ettin closed one of its huge, bearlike paws around Jasper, lifting the small man off the ground and bringing him toward its maw. Vansen grabbed at its heavy arms but it knocked him away, flinging him against the corridor wall like a child throwing a doll. He slid to the floor. He was struggling to get back onto his feet to help Jasper when a flash of lightning and booming crack of thunder turned the entire passage into skull-shattering day—a second of the brightest bright light and a piercing, painful thump of sound that felt like two giant hands clapped over his ears, and then Ferras Vansen knew no more.

A thousand artists could never paint such horror, Matt Tinwright thought as he cowered in a doorway. A thousand poets, all of them a thousand times greater than himself, could never tell it all. Southmarch was under attack. Many of the buildings around Market Square were aflame, but no one was trying to put them out. At least a dozen bodies lay within Tinwright’s view, arrows jutting from their backs. The air was full of smoke but he could smell something else as well, an unfamiliar odor, sweet yet nauseating as decaying flesh. It made his eyes burn and his throat and chest ache.

Dozens of strange armored shapes continued to fire arrows down into the square from atop the huge thorny black trunks that had grown across the water and over the wall. Other invaders had already clambered down on ropes and had slaughtered dozens of other hapless Southmarchers before Durstin Crowel and his guards had managed to push them back. Small knots of fighting had spread all over the square, men and monsters hacking each other in a strange near-silence: even the screams of the wounded and dying seemed muted, as though the smoke hanging in the air somehow muffled the cries.

Hendon Tolly was here in Market Square, too, and fighting fiercely, his black surcoat with the red boar clearly visible across the square, the black plume in his helmet waving like another puff of smoke. The castle’s lord protector stood high in the stirrups of a great warhorse, swinging a sword and shouting to his companions as they milled around him in the chaos of the fight. They had driven most of the attackers back into the shadows of the giant thorns, shadows that grew larger as the sun dropped down behind the western walls, but they could not make the Qar retreat and more of the fairy-warriors were now swarming across from the mainland on the thorn bridges.

Another thin shout went up from the castle folk who were struggling, like Tinwright, to get away from the fighting. A vast shape on a heavy battle charger had just come clanking into the square with another troop of soldiers, these armored and caparisoned in the crimson and gold of Landsend. It was Avin Brone, up and fighting despite his age and illness, looking a little like a teapot in his rounded cuirass, his beard halfway down his chest. The old man swung an ancient two-handed sword as he rode into the knot of fairies around Hendon Tolly with his men close behind, forcing the enemy to break and scatter. A few of the Southmarch folk cheered to see it.

Still, it seemed all but hopeless. Tinwright knew he should be fighting, but he had no weapon and no knowledge of how to use one. In any case, he was terrified.

I’m a poet! And a coward—I know nothing of war! I should never have come back! But Elan M’Cory and Tinwright’s mother had left everything behind here when they fled to the safety of the inner keep, including the money he had given them—money Matt Tinwright could not afford to lose. But now I shall be dead for the sake of a couple of starfish. Why wasn’t I born rich… ?

More Twilight People were dropping from the huge black trunks like beetles tumbling out of a rotten log. For a moment it seemed the newcomers might overwhelm the couple of hundred Southmarch soldiers, but whatever else his faults, Hendon Tolly was no coward: he and several of his men held the attackers off as Berkan Hood, the lord constable, rounded the rest of the defenders into some kind of order and began to back them away across the square in slow retreat, shields raised so that the fairy arrows bounced harmlessly away.

“Fall back!” came Brone’s muted voice. “Fall back to Raven’s Gate!”

Some of the noncombatants had realized what was happening and were running along the arcades at the edge of Market Square, urging all who were hiding there to flee over Market Road Bridge to the inner keep before the guards closed and secured the gate.

Can it be? Tinwright’s heart felt as heavy as lead. They are surrendering the outer keep entirely?

A moment later he realized that if he didn’t move quickly he would be part of what was surrendered. The colonnade along his side of the square was blocked with abandoned carts and other rubbish left behind by the terrified residents when the attack began; Tinwright had no choice but to wrap his arms over his head and run across the open cobbles as fast as he could, positive that any moment he would feel the horrible pain of the arrow that would take his life.

A few missed shots skittered across the stones beside him, but he reached the crowd on the bridge and ducked past a wagon some fool was trying to bring across as soldiers screamed and tried to shove the creaking cart back off the bridge. Protected for a moment by the bulk of the thing, Matt Tinwright joined the panicky crowd as they struggled over Market Road Bridge and up the hill toward the gate to the inner keep, packed so close together that he could smell the sharp, ugly stink of other people’s fear.

25. Into Sleep

The cloud of darkness covered a sizeable portion of the sky above the river by the time Barrick began to see the first bridges across the Fade, signs of the approaching city. At first he didn’t even realize the asymmetrical shapes were bridges because they seemed to be jagged slabs of natural stone eroded by wind and water. As he saw more of Sleep he came to realize that this was the way of the Dreamless: their most careful constructions looked like preposterous accidents, with scarcely a straight line to be found anywhere.

The Fade itself was becoming busier, too, although all the boats and ships they saw, small or large, rowed by gray-skinned Dreamless or headless blemmies like the one laboring in their own craft, seemed to pass in funereal silence. There was no question, however, that the occupants of the other boats noticed Barrick and Pick: even the humblest Dreamless fisherman stared at the Sunlanders as though they had never seen anything so odd and so unpleasant in their long lives.

“Why do they look at us like that?” Barrick whispered. “Like they hate us?”

Pick shrugged, then lifted his bowl over the side to get more water for his master. “They do not love our kind, of course.”

“But you said there were many of us kept here as servants.”

“Oh, yes, Master keeps many. Not all are wimmuai, either. Some came from the Sunlands like you and I.”

“Then why are the Dreamless staring at us?

Pick paused as he was crawling back under the tent on the deck. “I’m sure they are only staring at our boat because it belongs to Qu’arus. Perhaps they wonder why they do not see him—he is well known to many in Sleep.”

After that the man in the patchwork clothes returned his attention to his dying lord and would not answer anymore questions.

Soon they reached the first of the darklights, a beacon atop a high-backed bridge that appeared to be a cauldron steaming out pure blackness—not a cloud, like smoke, but something thinner and less tangible, a stain that spread across the gray day. It stretched across them like a shadow as they neared the bridge and then slid past it. Barrick felt a chill seize his heart.

As the labyrinth of the city began to grow around them the gloom grew deeper. They passed more and more darklights, perched atop bridges or leaking from sconces on rough walls. The world became darker and darker, as though night had finally fallen over the shadowlands, but it was a curious sort of night that stretched in pools from the darklights instead of arising everywhere and equally: for a long time twilight still hung over their heads, gray sky glaring through the spaces between the somber darklights as distinctly as bright noon. Soon enough, though, there were no more spaces: the twilight had vanished altogether, hidden behind a curtain of inky darkness.

And with full dark came the Dreamless themselves, spilling out like termites from a split log, although at first Barrick could barely make out anything more than dim shapes moving through the streets of Sleep on either side of the river and crossing the bridges overhead, figures gray and indistinct as ghosts. As his eyes became more used to the darklights he could see them better. The color of their skin seemed always the same, but the Dreamless themselves were as different as the Qar he had seen at Kalkan’s Field: some of them could have easily passed for human, but others were so disturbingly formed that Barrick could only thank the gods for the robes they wore. He also could not help but feel every single one of the Dreamless was watching him.

The River Fade became a wide, stone-sided canal, its edges entirely covered with docks and buildings, some of them so tall that Barrick could not see their tops above the murk of the darklights. As they slid deeper into the city, the blemmy still tirelessly plying the oars, Barrick felt as though he was being swallowed by something.

The Fade soon began to split into a series of lesser waterways. The blemmy steered down first one, then another, as if it knew exactly where it was going. The smaller the canals, the fewer passersby, until at last Barrick could see nothing else moving in this part of the bleak stone city except their own boat.

They had reached an area of silent marble buildings that were almost impossible to see clearly through the darkness. Huge willows lined the canal bank, long limbs swaying in the breeze, but the entire neighborhood seemed otherwise as lifeless as a mausoleum. The blemmy slowed the boat and then brought it to a stop at an ornate dock jutting several yards out into the water. While Barrick crouched in the stern, surprised by the sudden end to their journey, a crowd of shadowy figures drifted toward them out of the darkness, filling the dock while making no more noise than cats—almost a dozen Dreamless men and women dressed in black. Then one last figure came down the dock and the others made room for her. When she reached the end of the pier she stopped, her hands extended before her as though she walked in her sleep. Pick had folded back the tent. She stared down at Qu’arus where he lay in the bottom of the boat. Barrick thought at first that the Dreamless woman wore some kind of cowl, but then realized that the top of her hairless head was covered in plate, like the shell of a beetle. Her features were slender and mobile—her face looked nearly human but for her corpselike pallor—but much of her exposed skin was covered in bony carapace. He could not be certain because of her strange, Dreamless eyes, but he thought she had been crying.

When she spoke her voice was soft, though the language itself was harsh. The brief words could have been either a blessing or a curse for all that Barrick could understand them.

Pick looked up at her with a strange sort of satisfaction on his face. “I have brought him home, Lady.”

She stood silently for a moment, then turned and moved back up the dock, her filmy black garment billowing around her ankles like mist. Several of the others lifted Qu’arus from the boat with Pick’s help, then carried him along the dock after her, then up the steps toward what Barrick now saw was a great, dark house.

“Come inside quickly,” Pick whispered. “It will be Repose soon—the skrikers will be out.” After this incomprehensible warning he hurried up the dock after his master’s body. Another servant, whose gray skin was as wrinkled as a wasp’s nest, had tied a rope around the blemmy’s waist and led it off through the willows and around the side of the squat, stony house. Barrick looked down at the place where Qu’arus had lain and saw for the first time that a gray wool cloak had been folded beneath him, no doubt by Pick to protect his master from the hard boards of the deck. Barrick lifted it and something fell out of the cloak and back into the boat with a clatter, making him look around in fear, but he was alone on the dock. The thing that had fallen was a short sword in an unadorned black scabbard. When he drew it Barrick saw with approval that its edges were sharp as a shaving razor, the kind of weapon he had not had since he had fought the Qar with Tyne Aldredge. He wrapped it back up in the cloak, then looked around for a place to hide them both. Something rustled beside him and he jumped, so startled that he almost dropped both objects into the river.

“Not going in, us hopes,” croaked Skurn, tucking his wings. “Not into a Night Man house.”

“What else am I going to do? At least I might learn something about where Crooked’s Hall might be. Maybe I’ll even get something to eat that won’t have too many legs.”

“As you wishes, then.” The raven leaped up onto the rail of the slowly rocking boat and turned his back on Barrick. “Stay out here, us will. Not for us, a nasty mazy place like that.”

Like much of what Barrick had seen of the city of Sleep, the house of Qu’arus was as intricate as the interior of a seashell, a succession of mostly windowless hallways, the stone walls sometimes rough, sometimes smooth, but always damp. Moss grew on the gray stone and in certain corners water dripped to the floor to be carried away down shallow sluices, but the moss also grew on white marble statues of incredible delicacy, and the water gurgled down hallways next to sumptuous carpets that bore tangled yet beautiful designs in stark black and white. He could see all of this only because of the small, pearlescent green hemispheres set low in the walls and along some of the passageway floors, which Barrick assumed at first were some kind of luminous stones, but soon realized were actually mushrooms.

He caught up with the servants carrying Qu’arus’ body in the main hallway. The house was unpleasant, the near-silence disturbing, and the darkness oppressive. Had it not been for the changes the Sleepers had somehow made in him he would have been beside himself with unease—nothing could make him like this house: after only moments inside it he wanted badly to get out again. Still, he knew almost nothing of the city outside, let alone where he needed to go. What was it the Sleepers had told him?

“There is only one way you can reach the House of the People and the blind king before it is too late—you must find Crooked’s roads, which will fold your path before you so that you may step between the world’s walls. You must find the hall in Sleep that bears his name.”

Pick had not heard of a place called Crooked’s Hall, but perhaps some of the other servants might know of it. He hoped so—Barrick couldn’t imagine interrupting the mourning of the stony-faced lady of the house to ask directions.

In the past he might have despaired, but now he felt the new strength in his crippled arm, the way it moved without pain. He thought, Anything is possible. I am a story now, like Anglin the Islander, and no one can say what the ending will be—not even these unsleeping monstrosities…

“Come with me!” Pick had turned away from the others and was tugging on Barrick’s arm. “We’ll go to the servant quarters. You will be less obvious there.”

“Less obvious? I thought they were used to Sunlanders.”

Pick hurried him down a spiraling hallway. “Things are… strange here. Different than I expected.”

“The master of the house is dead. What did you think to find, a celebration? ”

They coiled around and down, passing through a garden of pale fronds, dozens of plants that looked as though they should grow at the bottom of a stream. It might have been the light of the mushrooms, but nothing in the house seemed to have any color.

“In here,” said Pick, opening a heavy wooden door and hurrying Barrick through into a huge, low-ceilinged room. The air had a curious, sour stench, but for the first time in Sleep he found himself in something like natural light—the red and yellow flicker of a large fire burning at the center of a wide stone expanse surrounded by what looked like an empty moat. Confined by this stone ditch, draped over logs and perched on piles of stones, were a dozen or more huge black lizards, each the size of a hunting hound.

“By the Three, I thought you said servants’ quarters!”

Pick pulled at his arm again. “We share the fire. The Dreamless do not care for too much warmth and light. See?”

At the far side of the wide chamber something close to a dozen man-shaped figures sat huddled together in the shadows. Like his guide, they all wore clothes made of rags and patches, and for the first time Barrick realized that Pick did not dress that way by choice: the human servants had clearly been given household rags and had made their own clothes from them. Despite the stinking heat of the room he felt a chill. “I thought you said Qu’arus valued his Sunlanders.”

“He did! No other Dreamless will even have them.”

Barrick whirled on the tattered man. “You told me our kind were common here.”

Pick looked frightened. “In the house of Qu’arus, we are.”

“You lied to me.”

“I… I did not tell you all the truth. I was afraid to return alone.” He lowered his voice. “Please, don’t be angry with me, friend.”

Barrick could only stare at the man in astonishment. He wanted to strike the miserable creature, but reminded himself that things could have been much worse: at least he had happened onto perhaps the one house in all Sleep where he could enter without being murdered.

One of the figures along the wall stirred. “Who’s that with you, Beck? ”

Barrick raised an eyebrow. “Beck? So you did not even tell me your true name?”

“ ‘Pick’ is how Master says it—that is what he calls me. I did not lie.”

“Who have you brought?” the man in the corner asked again. “Come where we can see you.”

The man apparently called Beck made his way over to the others. As they whispered among themselves, Barrick shook his head and followed. The other sunlanders sat on loose straw, which they had piled together in one place to make a sort of nest. Except for the one who was talking with Beck, the rest looked as though they were half asleep, their eyes empty, their faces slack; a few looked up incuriously as Barrick approached but the rest did not even raise their eyes.

“Ah, the water flows thinner now, I see,” said the bearded man beside Beck. He looked Barrick up and down from beneath long, straggling brows. “And the birds fly farther.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Barrick demanded, settling down into the straw. The stranger had a long, wispy gray beard and the lines in his face looked as deep as if they had been carved with a knife in soft wood.

“That the gods see all.” The old man nodded briskly. “All they see will be.”

“Finlae used to be a priest,” Beck said. “He knows a lot of things.”

“I know too much,” Finlae said. “That is why the gods shot an arrow into my brain to set my thoughts on fire. Because I saw their tricks and sang the stories for the people. I warned them. But they laughed and threw stones and bones. Stones and bones!”

Barrick shook his head. Small wonder that Beck had lied to bring him back—the company of this old madman must become rather unfulfilling after a while. He looked at the other servants—or slaves, to put the right name on it—and saw little in the way of intelligence in their staring eyes. If they had been bred like cattle, as Beck had suggested, then the breeder had done his work well. They seemed as stupidly placid as any barn full of milkers.

“Where is Marwin?” Beck asked.

Finlae shook his head. “Carrying jugs and jars up from the cellar. All day the lady was weeping, but only I could hear it. And now they prepare the feast. To send the master’s soul to the other side on tears and smoke.” He turned and fixed Barrick with his weirdly bright eyes. “You have traveled sleeping to the between. He will travel sleepless to the beyond.”

Barrick let his head ease back against the wall and closed his eyes. All he wanted to do was rest, perhaps sleep for a few hours, and then leave this den of madmen behind. Nothing here would help him—certainly not Beck or the demented old creature named Finlae.

He came struggling up out of the darkness when he felt a touch on his face—his hand, his injured hand, shot up and grabbed. Somebody—Beck, he realized, it was Beck—whimpered with pain.

“Don’t… hurt me.”

“Why did you touch me?”

“I… I know you.”

He opened his eyes wide. Beck was cowering down on the straw. Old Finlae had fallen asleep. “What are you talking about? Of course you know me—I came here with you.”

“I know you… from before. What is your name?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Why should I tell you?”

“I know you! I have seen you before. We have… I think we have met. In… in the before…”

He realized he was still squeezing Beck’s fingers in his own, hard enough that the other man was grimacing in pain. He let go. “In the before? You mean before you came here?” It was possible, he supposed. It was not as though he had been unknown in the world on the other side of the Shadowline. And what harm was there in admitting it now? “My name is Barrick. Barrick Eddon. Do you still think you know me?”

A look of nothing less than gratitude swept across the other man’s face. “By the gods, yes! I remember! You are… you are the prince! By the Three, yes, you are the prince!”

“Not so loud! Yes, I am.” But it was strange—he did not feel much like it. In the past, for all his unhappiness, he had never doubted that he was the son of a king. Now it seemed to be someone else’s life, a story he had heard but never lived himself.

“You and your sister…” Beck flapped his hands in excitement. “You spoke to me. You asked me questions. After the first time…” His face fell. “After the first time I saw the Twilight folk.”

“If you say so.” Barrick had no recollection of the man.

“Do you truly not remember? My name…” he paused, squinting. Clearly he had not summoned the memory in some time. “My name is Raemon Beck.”

The name meant nothing to him, but Barrick liked it better that way: he wanted no more reminders of the past. He could remember quite a bit from what Beck called “the before”—names, faces—but the memories were distant and curiously flat, with little feeling attached to them, like the diminished ache of a very old wound. Even thoughts of his sister, which seemed as though they should mean more, seemed instead to be something that had been stored so long it had lost all savor. And Barrick was more than content to leave things that way.

“What are those creatures?” he asked suddenly, pointing at the black lizards, which lay clustered around the flames in the center of their pit like Kernios’ slaves in the underworld. “Why are they here?”

“Salamanders—fire lizards. They are Master’s pets. He likes… he liked to feed them.”

Better than he fed you, I’ll wager, Barrick thought but did not say.

Raemon Beck had more questions about how the prince had crossed the Shadowline, but Barrick would not be drawn into idle talk and eventually Beck gave up; soon the only sound was the crackling of the fire and old Finlae’s thin snoring.

In his dream—for it must be a dream, he realized, even though he did not remember falling asleep—the lizard’s eyes were as bright as the flames around it. The black-armored creature sat not beside the fire but in it, crouched in a split log that burned and blackened in the depths of the blaze.

“Who are you that comes here without Tile or Pool?” it asked him in a voice like music.

“I am a prince, son of a king,” he told the creature.

“No, you are an ant, son of another ant,” the salamander lazily informed him. “An insect with the gift of a little power coursing in your veins, but still an insect for all that. Hurrying here and there, soon to die. Perhaps you will see my return. That will be a glory that might lend your small life some meaning.”

He wanted to curse this cruel, arrogant creature, but the lizard’s stare held him prisoner, as helpless as if he truly were the small, creeping thing it had named him. His heart felt cold in his chest. “What are you?”

“I am and I always was. Names do not matter to my kind. We know who we are. It is only your kind, with blinkered senses and swift lives, who insist on the tyranny of names. But no matter what your wise ones believe, you cannot command something simply by naming it.”

“If we matter so little, why are you talking to me?”

“Because you are a curiosity, and although I do not have long to wait now, I have been forced to remain idle for longer than I would like. I am bored, and even a crawling ant can provide amusement.” Its tail whipped a little from side to side, knocking up a spray of sparks. The crackling of the fire seemed to be getting louder—Barrick could barely hear the last of the salamander’s words.

“I would kill you if I could,” he told the creature.

The laugh was as beautiful as the voice, singing and silvery. “Can you kill the darkness? Can you destroy the solid earth or murder a flame? Ah, you entertain me most graciously…”

But now the noise of the blaze had become as loud as someone else speaking—no, more than one person. The fire spoke with several voices, the tongues of reddish light leaping up and enveloping the black lizard completely.

“… When a poor man is trying to sleep,” one of the voices said. “Burbling and bubbling.”

“Shut your mouth, Finlae,” Beck said.

“But why would they want to do that?” said a voice Barrick hadn’t heard before. “They do no harm…”

Barrick opened his eyes. Raemon Beck and ancient Finlae were talking to a third man, a large fellow with his hair chopped in uneven swathes like hastily-cut hay.

“You misheard,” Beck told the newcomer, then saw Barrick sitting up. “This is Marwin.”

“I knew someone named Marwin,” the big man said slowly. He had an accent a little like what Barrick had heard of Qu’arus. “That’s all I said. Could be it was me, but I can’t remember.”

“Exactly,” Beck said. “Your memory is bad and your ears aren’t much better, so you must have been mistaken about what you heard just now.”

The new man turned to Barrick. “I’m not. Mistook, that is. They were talking about them lizards—Master’s sons and Master’s brother, they were talking to the mistress. ‘Then get rid of them,’ she says. ‘I can’t stand the way they smell or the way they talk.’ Then the menfolk went to get clubs and spears.”

“See?” said Beck. “Marwin is a dullard and he gets everything wrong. Why would she say that? Lizards can’t talk.”

For an instant Barrick remembered something about a talking lizard—had it been a dream?—then the hairs on the back of his neck began to tingle. “You heard them say ‘lizards’?” he asked.

Marwin shrugged his wide, sloping shoulders. “They said, ‘o hasyaak k’rin sanfarshen’—that means ‘animals in the cellar.’ ” He looked around the broad, firelit chamber, frowning. “And this is the cellar.”

“You fools.” Barrick scrambled to his feet, his heart suddenly thumping in his chest. “They are not talking about some filthy lizards—they’re talking about us.”

“They would not hurt us!” Beck’s dirty face had gone quite pale. “Master loved us!”

“Even if he did, your master is dead.”

“When I came out of the trees he sang to me with his eyes,” Finlae said.

“I don’t doubt it—but I don’t care,” Barrick said. “Help me out of here, Beck. The rest of you may stay and die if you wish.”

“But I’m so tired,” said Marwin like a cross child. “I’ve been a-working all the day. I want to sleep.”

“Tired, yes.” Finlae scratched his bearded chin. “The days are long since Zmeos was banished…”

Barrick did not have the time or strength to waste. He grabbed Raemon Beck by the collar and dragged him to his feet. “Then enjoy your sleep. I fear it will be a long one.”

Beck still looked befogged as Barrick dragged him toward the door, as though he couldn’t quite understand what was happening, but Barrick did not bother to explain it to him again. The huge black lizards did not even stir as they went by, but Barrick suddenly remembered the fiery gaze of something he had seen in a dream and hurried Beck past them as quickly as he could.

“Can you kill the darkness… ?” the thing had asked him.

“Which way?” he whispered when they were in the corridor. Beck didn’t answer immediately, but Barrick heard what he thought might be soft footsteps coming toward them down the passage so he pulled the tattered man in the opposite direction. “The boat!” he said into Beck’s ear. “Take me to the boat.”

Raemon Beck finally seemed to understand the situation. He shook off Barrick’s hand and began to lead him through the house’s underground corridors. As they hastened down a long hall lined with closed doors, each one marked with a different symbol, a dreadful, raw shriek echoed past them, a sound of terror and pain. Beck stopped as though he had been stabbed to the heart. Barrick shoved him forward.

“That’s your loving master’s family at work behind us,” he said. “Faster! Or we will be next.”

Whimpering quietly now, Beck led them out of an unmarked door and into a wide wooden building that was dark but for a single row of the glowing mushrooms. For a moment Barrick was badly startled by what looked like a man waiting on the walkway in front of them, but it was only one of the blemmies. The creature, which had been shackled to a post with a heavy chain and left standing, turned to watch them go by but made no move to stop them. Its wide, dull eyes glinted in the mushroom light; the little round mouth low on its belly puckered and stretched as though the monstrosity were trying to talk. For all Barrick could tell it might have been the same creature that had rowed them to the house of Qu’arus in the first place.

“This… this is the boathouse,” Beck told him. “But I do not know how to open the river door.”

Barrick remembered the cloak and sword he had left in the front of the house. “Is the other boat still out there? The one that brought us?”

“Master’s skiff? It could be.” Beck was clearly terrified, but doing his best to think. “With everything else that’s happening they might have left it to sit there until morning.”

“Then let’s go look. Can we get there from here?”

For once Raemon Beck didn’t waste any time arguing. He led Barrick out of the boathouse and into the greater darkness outside the house, into the darklighted copse of willows that grew along the riverfront. As they rounded the side of the house and sprinted for the dock Barrick thanked whatever gods had chosen to bless him for once that the Dreamless made their houses without windows. He and Beck had a chance to escape before Qu’arus’ kin could guess where they’d gone.

It was not to be. Just as he found the cloak and sword Barrick heard voices from around the side of the house: somehow, the Dreamless had found their trail. He hurried out onto the dock, Beck now running right behind him. The black boat still floated there.

“Thank the gods, thank the gods, thank the gods,” Barrick murmured. He untied the boat and slid the oars into the oarlocks as quickly and quietly as he could. A faint green glow was bobbing through the willows toward them—most likely a lantern being held by the searchers. Now two more joined it.

“It’s the middle of Repose,” Beck said frantically. “The skrikers… !”

“Curse you, shut your mouth and get in if you’re coming!” When the man still hesitated Barrick began to shove the boat away from the dock with his hands. This helped Raemon Beck make up his mind. He jumped awkwardly into the skiff, setting it pitching so badly Barrick cuffed him on the head in anger even as he struggled to keep the man from tumbling overboard.

“Get down, you fool!” he hissed. With Beck huddled near his feet, Barrick dipped the oars into the water and began rowing as quietly as he could. The shadowy mass of the house of Qu’arus and the flickering lights of their pursuers slid away behind them.

Barrick didn’t stop or even slow until they had followed a series of branching canals far enough that even the darklights began to fade and the twilight to reassert itself. As he leaned on the oars catching his breath, exhausted but marveling at the new strength of his formerly crippled arm, he saw that Raemon Beck was weeping.

“By the Three, man, you can’t be sorry to leave those people,” he snapped. “They would have killed you! They’ve probably already done for your friends.” He himself felt almost nothing in the way of regret. He would never have been able to herd Finlae and slow-witted Marwin out of the house in time. They would have all been caught and Barrick’s own mission would have failed. A simple choice. “Beck? Why the tears? We’re out.”

The man looked up, his thin, dusty face streaked by tears. “Don’t you understand? That’s what frightens me! We’re out!”

Barrick shook his head. “You make no sense.”

“It’s Repose. The time when all the Dreamless shut themselves inside their houses.”

“All the better. How long does it last? We might find Crooked’s Hall before they come out again…”

“You fool!” The man’s eyes filled with tears again. “The skrikers are out—they’re a thousand times worse than any Dreamless!” He reached out and grabbed Barrick’s arm. “Don’t you understand? It would be better if we were back in Qu’arus’ house, beaten to death by his sons, than for the Lonely Ones to find us.” He stared out over the water. “It would be better if we had never been born.”