The Qar had already made clear how they felt about his people; Barrick was undaunted. “Very well, then, you feathered bandits,” he said. “Show me what you can do.”
They dashed out of the cavern. The sun had mostly set, though a bit of it was still spread on the horizon like melted butter, and the sky had begun to show its first stars. It would be full dark soon, which would help the Qar, but even so, what chance could they have against the autarch’s vastly larger force?
Barrick was surprised to see that the cannons facing the hillside had been abandoned, but only when a flight of a dozen or so birds swept past him and the shrill voices of their riders floated to him on the wind did he begin to understand some of what had happened. Birds were swooping down without warning all over the near side of the beach and at the edge of the picket around the Xixian camp, but attacking only southerners. That was because little men were riding on the birds—Queen Upsteeplebat’s Rooftoppers, he realized. Thick leather and Mihanni plate didn’t protect the soldiers’ eyes and throats from the tiny darts the little men were firing at them. All around him, Xixians were running madly, hands clapped over their faces; many more lay unmoving on the sand, a-bristle with miniature arrows.
Barrick looked back to the cavern they had just quitted, but there was no sign of more troops coming. “Where is the queen?” he asked the Tricksters. “Where are the rest of our troops?”
“We are the end of the line,” Longscratch said. “Our army is all in the field.”
The flying Rooftoppers had only managed to drive the nearest Xixians back toward camp, but the attack from the air had given the rest of the Qar a chance to escape the hill caves without being blown to pieces by the autarch’s cannons. But the Xixians were hardened fighters and had discovered that, as astonishing as little men on birds might be, they were not impossible to fight; some of the southerners had grabbed burning brands from their campfires and swung them through the air like rippling banners of flame.
Longscratch and his cousins finished scavenging up loose arrows, stuffing as many as they could find into their quivers, which, other than their arm-shields, seemed the only thing they wore.
“We must find Saqri and the others,” Barrick called. “Follow me!”
He sprinted across the sand and then leaped over the ring-pit the southerners had dug around their camp. Some of the wooden barricade still lay on the ground, smoldering. A great knot of men and horses were caught up in a whirlpool of battle a few hundred paces away along the broken fence. Hundreds more of the autarch’s men were running across the camp to join the struggle, some of them covering their heads with tent cloth against the claws and arrows of the bird-men. The Xixians were clearly beginning to regroup.
Barrick and the three Tricksters reached the rest of the Qar, who were trying to hold their newly won position against an ever-widening force of Xixian soldiers, but every time a southerner fell, another stepped up into his place. The rest of the autarch’s troops, just arriving from the farther parts of the camp, were organizing themselves for a counterattack; in moments they would swoop down and wipe the few hundred Qar away like a storm wind threshing sea foam to oblivion.
Barrick could not pause to think about the worsening odds. The fighting was all around him now, spears leaping out at him like striking serpents, the bearded Xixians yelping and growling like dogs around a midden. His Qar armor was so light he hardly felt as if he was wearing it, but it was becoming cruelly hard work simply to stay alive on the ground, and now even more enemies were rushing toward them, many of them mounted. As if awakened by all this chaos, the Fireflower voices were threatening to overwhelm his thoughts.
Crying Hill, and the Gray Ones advancing ...
Ah! My queen, my sister, take the children and flee...!
Stand and face us, soul-drinker ...
Moments Barrick Eddon had never himself experienced washed over him and he found himself slowing, stunned by so many new ideas. A Xixian spear slipped past his shield and dug into the joint between his sword arm and the shoulder of his armor. He stumbled and almost dropped his blade as a line of fire burned across his skin and sinew. One of the Tricksters—the darkest one, Riddletongue—jumped forward into the breach and caught a second Xixian stab on his arm-shield, little more than a padded tube of bone too large to come from any creature Barrick knew. The Trickster then jabbed at the attacker with his own spear, an ivory-white needle only a few handspans longer than a sword.
Rasha, something in his memories whispered. The tooth.
The Trickster flung his arm up and let another attack scrape off his arm-shield. Omuro-nah, the Fireflower voices murmured. The bone.
Rasha-sha, omuro-nah, rasha-sha, omuro-nah! chanted ghosts from a hundred different battlefields in a hundred different centuries. Tooth and bone, tooth and bone! They had sung it in victory many times, but they had sung it even more frequently as their allies had died beside them and as they themselves had formed the ring in which they would postpone defeat as long as possible.
You will not see us because we hide in the night. You will not feel us until it is too late. You will not defeat us because we will die with our fangs in your throat—tooth and bone, tooth and bone ...!
Barrick scrambled forward to fight beside these anciently familiar yet barely known allies, trying to remember all that Shaso had taught him. Each moment that unfolded was so full of sharp blades and screaming faces that for a while even the singing of the Fireflower rolled off him, as unremarked as a light rain.
He stopped at last to rest, lungs burning, sweat stinging his eyes, dozens of small and large cuts stinging him too. He was amazed by his own strength and stamina; even the Tricksters could not keep up with him.
They woke your blood, a voice sighed in words he could just separate from the din around him.
Ynnir? Speak to me! Dizzily, he looked around. The southerners were giving ground, but Xixian arrows still fell all around him, appearing suddenly and quivering in the churned ground of the city’s bayside commons like some odd crop. They are so many, Lord! What can I do to help Saqri?
You can make haste, the voice told him. Midsummer comes with the morning. If the southern king can keep you here until tomorrow, he has won—he has already nearly reached his prize.
Make haste? How?
Tell my sister-wife that you and the rest of the People have served your purpose here. You must find a way down into the depths before it is too late ... too late ...! The king’s voice, already faint, trailed into silence.
Barrick could not find Saqri. The sun had set behind the hills, but that was not the reason. He could see much better than he should have been able to, so that the night seemed no darker than late afternoon. Catlike, his eyes made use of light he had never noticed before, light which gave edges and colors to things that ordinarily would have been obscure and gray. And his muscles and sinews seemed already to have recovered enough to begin fighting again. It was as though the power and experience of all the kings inside him were plaited like the fibers of a rope, strengthening all that he was, making him a newer, stronger thing.