Shadowheart (70 page)

“These are long stories,” Eneas said. “And my men will need food and drink and a place to sleep.”

“Of course, Prince Eneas ...” the leader began, but then Briony stepped out of the shadow of the wall and into the torchlight.

“I will not enter my own home in secret,” she said. “You men have done more than open the gates for the Syannese—you’ve let the Eddons back in as well.” She pulled off her helmet and hoped they could still recognize her with her hair cut short.

The men around her heard a woman’s voice and turned, staring. The leader, the man with the limp, lowered himself to one knee. “Praise the Three,” he said. “It’s King Olin’s daughter.”

Murmuring, the other men, who had been gathering around her, began to get down on their knees.

“Do not bow,” she said. “Look at me—please don’t bow! I don’t want to make my presence known yet. Not until we learn how things fare here and decide what to do next.” She would have preferred that they had remembered her name as well as her father’s, but the hope and even happiness on the faces of most of the men she could see was reward enough. “All of you who can hear me, come now. Let no one leave. Set some men to watch the gate again while you others follow Prince Eneas and me.”

“The inner keep is Hendon Tolly’s armed camp, Highness,” one of the guards said. “You’re safe here in the outer keep, but most of Tolly’s supporters are with him in the residence. They have at least as many men as your Syannese, Princess, and they also hold many of our women and children.”

“All the more reason that we should move slowly and not make a great parade,” Briony said. “Take us to a place where our soldiers can rest.”

Several of the Southmarch guards let out a cheer, but the others silenced them. The limping man who had welcomed them looked up at Briony.

“Is it truly you, Princess?” he asked.

“It is. And my father is alive, too. The Eddons have not given up their throne—or their people.”

“And will it all be well, then? Things will be well again?”

She looked at him and suddenly the weight of who she was, and what she still had to do pressed against her like a great stone on her chest, so that for a moment she could not speak. “That is beyond my power to say,” she managed at last. “But I will do everything I can to make it so.”

Something about seeing his sister still troubled Barrick, although he could not say exactly what that something was. It was not emotion—at least not the sort of confused, ill-defined feelings that had been so common in him before the gift of the Fireflower—but it made it hard to concentrate on what Saqri was saying about Lady Yasammez.

“. . . So she will meet us in the Great Delve.”

“But I don’t understand. Why didn’t Yasammez come up with us to fight the Xixians? She lives for war!”

Saqri’s thoughts had something of both unhappiness and anger in them, but those she chose to express were straightforward. “I imagine she wished to see what I would do with the command and the Seal. Perhaps she had matters of her own to deal with as well.”

“Like what?” A swirl of Fireflower memories tantalized him but he was learning how to do what Ynnir had taught him; to simply
be
and let them swim around him like fish.

“Dissension among her close advisers, I suspect. You know about the disagreement between Yasammez and my husband. What you may not know, or may not have been able to sift from what the Fireflower has given you, is that the distinctions are not so simple as to be divided into two camps only.”

“Tell me.” But what he said was closer to
“Bring me to your thought.”
He found that in his own head he was now using Qar ideas nearly as frequently as his native tongue.

“From the first, great Yasammez warned that we should sweep the mortals from the land before it was too late. But her great age and long experience have changed her, and her hatred of your kind is no longer as deadly as it once was. However, there are still many others of our people, some of the wilder folk, Tricksters and Elementals, who would happily see your kind vanish from the earth forever. ...”

“But then why did Yasammez send me to King Ynnir?” Barrick asked. “Does that mean she’s changed her mind about my people somehow? Or that she thought keeping me alive could . . . could help the Qar?”

Saqri let him feel a blank, cloudy thought, another kind of shrug. “I do not know. I have tried to sense her mind on this but she keeps it hidden, even from me.” And now she let him feel a little of the pain that caused her. “So much has changed. Once Yasammez was more to me than my own mother ...”

She did not finish the thought, and Barrick did not press for it. Too much hurt and confusion was there, things he could not understand, feelings so naked and private in a being of such immense composure that he did not want to go farther.

“So we face our final hours, Barrick,” Saqri finished at last, “and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.”

 

The dark lady met them in a place the Funderlings called the Old Baryte Span, her vanguard carrying torches that made the veins of quartz in the walls flash like lightning. Barrick could not help wondering if this great show of light was for him, since most of the Qar saw as well in dark passages as the little people who usually walked here.

As Yasammez stepped down from the crude rock stairway onto the cavern floor, Saqri raised her hands in greeting. “We are together again.”

“Yes. We are together again.” Yasammez turned her somber face toward Barrick. “You have had to fight against your own people now. Do you still wish to stand with us?”

“My own people?” It took him a moment to understand she was talking about the Xixians, the autarch’s soldiers. “They are nothing to me—invaders. Intruders. If I could kill them all with one swing of my sword, I would.”

Yasammez looked at him for a long moment, silent and calculating. “Time is short,” was all she said.

The council was surprisingly brief. Barrick had grown used to the Qar taking days to decide or do anything, but it seemed the passing of the Seal of War to Saqri had brought a great change: Yasammez offered little in the way of advice and objected to almost nothing, letting Saqri make the decisions and give the orders.

“We must try to beat the southerners to the Last Hour of the Ancestor in the uttermost deeps,” Saqri said when she had heard from all her lieutenants. “But they are too many for us to stop them by main strength. Even if Vansen and his drows are still alive and we could attack the southerners from both sides, the autarch has too many soldiers. Fighting is beside the point, anyway.
Time
is what is important now, and they are already deep below us, at the doorway to the depths.”

Fireflower thoughts and memories swirled in Barrick’s head, but the silent presence that had been Ynnir led him to those that mattered, each as delicately precise as a note picked out on a lute. He began to understand. “But Crooked . . . is dead.” He shook a little at the storm that realization raised inside him—all the meanings, the memories, the ancient hopes and miseries. It was hard even to say it. The god whose blood ran in him and in Saqri was dead. The god who had fathered Yasammez, and whose own parentage had started the Godwar . . . Barrick ignored a cold wind of irritation from Yasammez and some of the others. “He pushed the old gods through and then sealed the way behind them. But the autarch wants to release them again!”

Saqri nodded. “And like most mortals, he has no idea of how dire many of these . . . beings are, how long they have waited outside the walls of nightmare ...”

“And how fiercely and greedily they are watching for their chance.” Yasammez stood, her black armor covering her like a shadow, so that for a moment it seemed her face rose in darkness like the moon. “Whatever sins mortal men have committed, I would not wish such horrors on the earth itself, which is blameless. It is time. We can wait no longer. What is your wish, granddaughter?”

Saqri paused as if the Porcupine’s abruptness had caught her by surprise. “We need a better way.” She turned to the Ettins. “Singscrape, you and others have been working here while the rest of us fought the southerners. What have you found?”

Hammerfoot’s son spoke in a rumbling voice like a slow avalanche. “Tunnels that will lead us down to the naked wound of Crooked’s last and greatest effort, and from there to the ultimate depths, Mistress. Some of the way must still be cleared, and we will have to fight when our way crosses the autarch’s line of descent, but if we strike swiftly and work tirelessly, we may yet beat the humans to the Last Hour of the Ancestor.”

“Let it be so, then.” Saqri let out a breath, the closest thing to a sigh Barrick had ever heard from her. “Tomorrow is the last day—perhaps the last day that ever will be. Let none of us say that he or she could have given more.”

Daikonas Vo watched the parade of monsters with dull fascination. He had been stumbling in darkness for so long that the glare of their torches made him blink and shy away. What did they want? Were these truly
pariki
as the Xixians called them—the fairies of his own mother tongue? What were they doing here beneath the castle? He had thought the autarch had driven them all away . . .

Vo shook his head to clear away some of the confusion. Did it matter? He had been wandering in darkness for so long he could scarcely remember who he was. Only the hot pain that had spread from his gut and now ran through his entire body like poison reminded him of what had happened to him, why he still breathed and walked when everything inside him urged him to lie down and accept the sweet relief of death.

If even death would be a relief, that was. Because in the dark, lost hours Vo had begun to hear his mother’s voice again, whispering the stories of the gods to him, warning him of the serpents and other shadowy demons that would hunt him after he died and keep him from the bosom of Grandfather Nushash, the sun.

And weren’t these grotesques marching below him through the underground caverns proof that such things could and did exist even in life? Bat-winged, hyena-headed, some covered with rough scales like the lowest desert snake . . . and their eyes! Glittering, glowing eyes that burned like coals. Surely they could see him even in his stony hiding place high on the cavern wall where the narrow trail he had been following had suddenly ended, a hundred feet above the cavern floor. So many times he had almost fallen to his death in this dark, ancient hell—there must be a reason he still lived! The gods existed and had taken pity on Daikonas Vo. There could be no other explanation. And when he completed his task they would honor him. No beasts would hunt him in the dark lands of death. No serpents would devour him.

The things below had been still for a long while, immersed in some silent ritual. At last, though, they roused themselves and began to make their way farther into the depths, toward what must be the same ultimate goal as Daikonas Vo’s. He would follow them, he decided. To one who had been wandering so long in darkness even the distant light of their torches would be enough to lead him, their stealthy passage loud enough to guide him without his coming too close and being discovered.

As if to remind him what the penalty for such clumsiness would be, a burning pain made him grimace and bend himself double so that he almost tumbled from the ledge. The agony did not pass for long moments.

The girl with the red streak in her hair, the girl who had tried to murder him, was waiting in the depths. Great Sulepis was waiting there, too. Even the gods were waiting there for Daikonas Vo. He could not disappoint them.

As the pain ebbed and the last of the immortal monsters passed out of the cavern he began to climb carefully and quietly down from his high place.