Shadowrise (47 page)

“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.”

—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”

 

 

F
ERRAS 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.