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.
After traveling for so long by dark, narrow ways that Barrick fell into a waking dream, Saqri at last signaled that it was time to make camp. For a while now they had been following a ledge around the lip of a great, nearly circular chasm that seemed only a little less wide than the old inner walls of Southmarch, and which fell away far beyond the light of any torches.
“This is the wound,” Saqri said as she stood watching her householders preparing the camp. “This is the scar of Crooked’s last struggle.”
“This? This hole?” It did not match with the Fireflower memories that drifted up through his thoughts like bubbles. “We are there… ?”
“No.” She moved closer to the edge. “If you dropped a stone, it would drop for long, long moments still before it rattled to the bottom. But far down, past many twists and turns of this great rift, that low place waits—the Last Hour of the Ancestor. So this is the beginning of the last part of our journey. When we have prepared, we will begin the climb down.”