Despite his earlier admission, Antimony seemed more fascinated than frightened. “Look at that one—he glows like a hot coal! He looks to be nothing but a fire burning inside a suit of armor—or is that suit of armor a part of him, like the shell of a crab?”
“I could not say, but I believe it is one of the Guard of Elementals.”
“How do you know?” asked the monk, impressed.
Chaven shrugged. “Only because Vansen told me—he said they were some of those most likely to cause trouble. Just as not all of our friends are happy with the idea of yoking our fortunes to the Qar, so they have their own disagreements, and apparently these Elementals are among the most… disagreeable.” He fought off a shudder. “Still, all the questions of refraction such a thing raises are fascinating at the very least… !”
They stood and watched as a parade of strange shapes filled the great chamber, some far smaller than any Funderling, others that could only be called giants. The Qar had so many forms and sizes that it was often hard to tell which creatures were soldiers and which were beasts of burden. Chaven recognized a few from descriptions in Phayallos or from Ximander; others he could only guess at. Occasionally, a confusing citation in an old book would suddenly march past him in the flesh, even pause to cast a mistrustful eye in the physician’s direction. He explained what little he knew about them to Antimony, talking more than was his usual wont, in part because of the pleasure of an intelligent audience (so much more satisfactory than talking to that boob Toby, his so-called assistant, who really had been little more than a particularly useless servant) and partly because he did not want to have to listen to his own troubled thoughts.
Chaven fell silent at last, not because the newest arrivals were any less odd and interesting, but because the emptiness of his own knowledge had begun to grieve him. Here he was in the midst of the most fascinating thing a lover of the physical world could imagine, and yet the chances were good that neither he nor these wonderful and frightening Qar would survive the slaughter that was coming.
So I shall play a part in this war that any fool could play while a chance for true scholarship is wasted…
And the violent fate hurrying toward them even now was not his only worry. Chaven had been long troubled by the loss of what seemed an entire day of his recollections, perhaps more. He had been in Funderling Town on a Skyday, he knew, then had set out for the temple on a Winds-day, but had not reached the temple until Firesday—an entire day and more missing. In truth, he remembered only a little of his time in Funderling Town well, and could no longer recall even the errand that had taken him there. Chaven knew that it had seemed important when he decided to go, so it was more than strange he should not remember it now. It frightened him.
This was not the first time he had lost track in such a way. For several days before Winter’s Eve, the night Princess Briony had fled Southmarch with Shaso, he had been gone from the castle, or at least from his house in the outer keep, but he couldn’t remember where he had gone that time, either.
Looking again at the cavern before him, at the vast sprawl of huddled, mostly silent shapes, eyes glowing in the shadows like foxfire, he quietly asked Antimony, “If all we are is in our thoughts, how can a man know if he is going mad?”
The young monk was silent for a long time. He was large for one of his folk, but the top of his head was still a hand’s breadth below Chaven’s shoulder; when he spoke, his voice seemed to rise up from the stony floor, as if the cavern itself was speaking.
“He cannot know. Nor can a king, I suppose… which is what they say of this autarch, that he is a madman. In fact, as I think on it, Chaven, even a god might not know whether he had lost his wits, if he lost ’em.”
“And thank you, Antimony,” the physician said. “You have given me even more to worry on.” He hoped he sounded more amused than he felt.
“I do not mean to be rude,” Ferras Vansen began, “but Funderlings—and taller men, too—are not as patient as your people. Your mistress set an hour for the council to take place, and yet not only has she not come, she has not sent word as to why. Hours are passing. People grow worried.”
Aesi’uah folded her hands before her mouth, as though to blow life into a tiny flame shielded there. “Please, Captain Vansen, you do not understand…”
“No, your mistress does not understand.” He did not like arguing with her. The chief eremite was quiet and graceful, and in her own way, kind; disagreeing with her made him feel clumsy and cruel. “My allies have made a brave concession. They have opened their gates to your people, although only days ago you Qar were killing Funderlings on the doorstep of their own city. Not only that, but they have even given you a place for your army to camp—a place between themselves and their most holy place ...”
“That is because of our shared mortal enemy, the Autarch of Xis,” she began, but Vansen was still angry.
“Yes, but we were not in immediate danger from the autarch. The people of Southmarch were safe inside our castle walls, the Funderlings down here in the rock. It was your people in their camp above who were most at risk.”
She paused, but with the air of someone listening to something he couldn’t hear. He suspected she conversed with Yasammez in her head, just as he had once heard the words of Gyir Storm Lantern in the same, silent way, but knowing that did not make him feel any better. It happened to her several times an hour and had been a constant reminder that no matter how courteously she seemed to listen to Vansen, nothing would be done without her mistress’ consent.
“Please, Captain,” she said at last. “One thousand years or more of hatred and distrust do not vanish with a wave of the hand.”
“Oh, trust me, my lady, I know that very well.”
“Look there,” Aesi’uah said, gesturing with a slender hand toward the crowd of strange shapes that surrounded them, filling the natural stone gallery to the walls—perhaps a thousand Qar in this chamber alone. “Already we have done something here unseen since the earth was young. Understand that my mistress must deal with problems of her own, many of them of a subtlety that I cannot explain to someone who will live only a century.”
Vansen was surprised to feel pain at her words, although she only told the truth—he was not like her, not at all. The pain was from what it brought back to his thoughts, the equally unknowable distance between himself and the woman he loved. It was becoming clearer to Vansen every day that it had been madness even to suppose he and the princess lived in the same world.
“Just give your lady to know,” he said, “that my people are losing patience. That everybody is losing patience. And they are frightened, too.”
“As you said yourself, Captain, trust me.” Aesi’uah smiled—at least, he had always assumed it was a smile, since it seemed in many ways to serve the same function as it would have in an ordinary woman, although not always. “My mistress already knows this.”
“But, Opal… !”
She fixed him with a stare that could have split granite like a wedge. All the Leekstone women had that eye. “Don’t you dare. There should be women there and there will be women there. By the Elders, their general is a woman.”