“I don’t know, Highness!” The physician shook his head violently. “No, I do know—of course I know! The Skimmers brought it to me. Some of their oyster divers found it and… and they thought I might tell them if it was worth anything. I bought it from them.” He looked up at Barrick, his face full of calculation but also something deeper and stranger, a kind of animal terror. “I had never seen anything like it—an image of Kernios Olognothas, the all-seeing Earth Lord. I… I wanted it so very much.”
“You wanted this heavy statue of the dour god of death so much that you carry it around with you through these depths? What are you doing here under the castle at all, man? What are you hiding?”
Chaven cringed a little. “My prince, you are frightening me. I will tell you everything, I promise! Answer all your questions, yes. Just take me into your camp and give me some water to drink. I find that I am very dry. I’m not certain how long I’ve been lost in these lonely tunnels ...”
“You will do more than come back to the camp,” Barrick said. “You will meet Saqri, the queen of the fairies, and answer her questions as well. And if you are very unlucky you will also meet Yasammez. Some of them call her Lady Porcupine. She will likely make you wet yourself.”
Barrick stared hard at the physician for a moment, then thanked the goblin sentries and dismissed them. When they had scuttled away, he turned back to Chaven. “But first ...”
The physician’s mouth was hanging open. “You spoke to them—but you did not say a word that I could hear. How did you do that?”
“That doesn’t matter.” Barrick waved his hand. “First, before we go back to the camp, you will leave the statue in my tent for now. I don’t think I want Saqri and the others to know about it just yet.” He took Chaven by the elbow and directed him back along the rocky path that circled the great hole at the center of the cavern.
“I… I don’t understand, Highness,” said Chaven.
“No, you don’t.” Barrick gave him a little push to speed him up. “That’s because you don’t have the blood of gods and monsters running in your veins like some of us do.”
30. Slipping on Blood
“The moment he made his way inside the castle, the Orphan was discovered by the goddess Zuriyal, the sister of Zmeos the Horned Serpent. She felt pity for the child because of his youth and innocent kindness ...”
“The last hours are truly upon us now,”said Malachite Copper. The high-ranking Funderling was looking less handsome every hour, his armor dented and dusty, his hair wild and scorched short on one side where a flare of Xixian war fire had burned him. “When the southerners dig through all that rock we dropped in the middle of the Maze, we’ll have to make a stand. We’ve slowed them badly these last days, but once they push through here, there’ll be nowhere else we can hope to stop them.”
Vansen took a tiny sip from his waterskin. The blasting powder the Funderlings had used to block the autarch’s march as they slowly gave ground through the Maze had also cracked the stone of the ancient building’s aqueduct; they no longer had fresh water or any notion of when they would get some again. “How much longer do we need to hold them?”
“Not long” Copper said. “I looked in on the monks carrying the hour-candle a short while ago to learn the time. Midsummer’s Eve is over now, Captain. Upground, Midsummer’s Day has already dawned. Today, we will live or die, succeed or fail.”
“I wish it were such an even thing—a toss of the coin, live or die.” Vansen frowned; it made his jaw hurt where one of the Xixians had knocked his helmet off his head with a spear thrust, but he had been fortunate not to lose his eye. “But I think the chances we live to see the day after today are much smaller than that, friend Copper.”
A short distance away Cinnabar Quicksilver was tossing and murmuring in shallow sleep. He had been felled by one of the Xixians’ powder blasts in the Initiation Hall at the center of the Maze. A dozen other Funderlings had died but Vansen and Sledge Jasper had reached the wounded magister in time to drag him and a handful of other survivors out alive. The fever that had come with Cinnabar’s wounds had been the greatest danger but it seemed finally to have broken. Now he lay on a makeshift litter here in Revelation Hall, the last roofed section of the Maze. Only the open Balcony lay behind them, then below it and beyond stretched the great open spaces of the cavern that contained the Sea in the Depths and the island of the Shining Man.
Wardthane Sledge Jasper limped over and lowered himself to the floor beside them. His face was a mask of dried blood and dirt, his hairless head crisscrossed with cuts and dappled with bruises: Vansen thought that he looked like he had been trying to knock down walls using nothing but his own hard skull.
“It’s a short walk to the end of the road,” Jasper said matter-of-factly. “I just came back.”
“The Balcony?” Vansen asked. “I know, I’ve seen it ...”
“We’ll be able to hold them less than an hour or two after they break through into this hall… and our spies say they’re coming soon. Hundreds and hundreds.” Jasper looked to where a group of weary Funderlings was piling stones for the last of the defensive barriers they were building across Revelation Hall. “At least we won’t have to go far when we do retreat again.”
“Vansen… ?” Cinnabar was awake on his litter and stretching out his hand. “Captain Vansen… ?”
“I’m here.” He crouched down beside the Funderling magister. One of Cinnabar’s legs was badly broken. Vansen thought that even if some miracle saved him from death at the hands of the Xixies, there was little chance the Funderling would keep the damaged limb.
“Where is… my boy?” Cinnabar asked.
“Calomel is well.” Vansen leaned forward and took his small, rough hand. “We just made him get some rest and something to eat. He’s been at your side all day.”
“Truly? Truly he is well?” Cinnabar’s eyes swam with tears. “You are not telling me this only to keep a dying man happy?”
Vansen shook his head. “You’re not dying, Magister. The fever has broken and the worst is behind you. And I swear on my soldier’s honor that Calomel is in good health—well, as good as any of us on short rations and short rest. He’s a fine, brave little lad and he will be angry we sent him away just before you woke up again.”
Cinnabar at last let himself be convinced. He lay back; soon he was sleeping again.
“And what will happen at the end?” asked Malachite Copper suddenly. “I have never thought much of such things before. Will we lie in darkness for a thousand years, as some say, or will we immediately be raised up again to stand before the throne of the Lord himself?”
Vansen could only shake his head, angry again. If the stinking Qar had held to their bargain, it might never have come to this. He felt a scalding surge of hatred toward the fairies—that creature Aesi’uah, for all her seeming kindness, had looked him straight in the eye and told him that the Qar would not desert their allies!
But I suppose in a way she told the truth, Ferras Vansen decided. After all, how can you desert what you never truly joined?
“I’m going to put my head down now,” he said heavily. “Grab a few moments’ sleep. One of you be good enough to wake me if some of the autarch’s men happen by, will you?”