“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
“Rhantys wrote, ‘Far larger than a man is the Ettyn, a murderous ogre with thick clawed hands like a mole who makes his home in the earth.’ It is known that during the second war against the Qar ettins undermined the defensive walls of Northmarch castle, which led to the defeat and destruction of that city, now lost behind the Shadowline.”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
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 he
r 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.