Chert sighed and settled back, taking out the bit of bread and fungus he’d packed for himself. Tha must be waiting, Blue Quartz, he told himself, mimicking the little man’s calm words. Tha must. After all, we wouldn’t want to hurry just ourselves because it’s the end of the world, now would we?
33. Spearpoint
“When the god was snoring the Orphan stole a little piece of the sun, but it was too hot for his mortal hands to hold… He hid it in one of the eggshells from Zmeos’ plate ... and escaped the great castle.”
“We cannot waste time fighting the autarch’s troops from behind,” Yasammez declared. Her thoughts were weighty, hard and cold as metal. “Time is short. This is no ordinary siege. We have already broken their chain of supply, but the southern emperor does not care.”
“Then our only hope is to continue downward as we have planned.” Saqri spread her fingers. “With good luck we might slip past to the Last Hour of the Ancestor before them.”
“Where we’ll still be outnumbered,” Barrick pointed out.
Yasammez barely glanced at him. “We do not fear mortals in any numbers.”
“Still, speed is our only hope now,” said Saqri. “And our way down requires us to cross the Xixians’ main path of descent below the Cavern of Winds. If the defenders are still holding back the southerners farther down, then that main tunnel will be full of Xixian soldiers and we will have to fight our way through the junction. It is a wide space, less than ideal for our purposes, but if we can cut our way through them we can make our way to the great pit itself where we can descend much more quickly.”
“We will slice through them, never fear,” Yasammez said. “We will be hard as a spear’s point. The Fire of the Book has tempered us.”
Even as the Fireflower filled his head with memories of the Book of the Fire in Void and ideas about the Always Fire that had caused it to be written, as well as a thousand other things as dear to the Qar as their own names, Barrick realized that Yasammez had reminded him again of his old tutor Shaso dan-Heza. What she had said about making their army into a spear’s point was almost exactly the same as something Shaso had told him more than once.
“An army is a tool, boy. A good army is a very useful tool indeed. It can be hard and heavy where it needs to be, as difficult to breach as a piece of well-made armor. But it can make itself sharp as a spear’s sharpened tip so that it can pierce another army just as a spear can pierce a breastplate, no matter how strong. When you narrow the force, you make the force greater where it strikes, you see ...”
It was an odd thing to find Shaso looking back at him from the chilling, ageless eyes of Yasammez, but that did not make it any less true. Both warriors would have died before they would do something they considered dishonorable, but both could make mistakes because they were so certain of their own truths.
Which meant that Shaso had probably been innocent of Kendrick’s death all along, and he, Barrick, had been wrong. It had been just as Briony had said after all. For the first time he wished he had spoken to his sister, really spoken to her. A pang of something he didn’t recognize at first bloomed inside him, an ache of loss so sudden and powerful that it took his breath away.
Homesickness. Barrick was astonished. At this late hour? After he had changed so much? This place was not his home, nor had it ever truly been so, he was certain of that. The castle, the people—he felt nothing for them. So where did this strange yearning come from?
“We should stop talking and go,” he said out loud, earning a look of chilly annoyance from Yasammez. “Time is short. Nothing would be worse than looking back on wasted time and mistakes we didn’t need to make.”
“Ah, friend Chert,” called the tiny man on the white rat as he appeared over the crest of the roof. “Told Her Majesty, I did, ‘Not seen the last of ’un, I haven’t.’ And here tha be.”
“Beetledown.” Chert couldn’t help smiling. “You look well. That’s a very handsome rat.”
“Un’s from the queen’s own stable,” he said proudly. “A reward, like.”
“I’m glad to see you’ve been treated as you deserve. Would the queen let you do one more thing for me?”
The little fellow tilted his head. The rat began to groom. “Tell me what tha needst. I will go to my queen and ask.” He straightened a little. “We Rooftoppers fight alongside of the Old Ones for the first time in many hundred years, you know. After all this time!” He began to explain some of his recent deeds of heroism, but Chert cut him off.
“It’s good to hear the Qar have finally decided to take a stand, but what I’m asking of you may be the most important task of all.” He quickly explained his need to Beetledown, who seemed less than enthused. “And then bring the Astion back to me at the place I’ve drawn on this map, quick as you can.” He handed the little slip of parchment to Beetledown. “If I’m not there yet, give it to Brother Antimony.”
“So important, truly?”
“Truly.”
Beetledown did not look entirely convinced, but was polite enough not to say so. “Then so will it be, friend Chert. I can do nothing without queen’s permission, so let us go.”
“Of course. Lead the way. Just remember that I’m not a very good climber.”
“Not very good?” Beetledown laughed. “Like a dog with one leg, to put truth to it.”
A man who needs a favor, Chert reminded himself as he inched his way across the treacherous tiles, should under no circumstances squeeze the little fellow who will do that favor into a jelly, no matter the provocation.
The Qar’s attack took the Xixian soldiers by surprise, fairies pouring without warning out of what must have seemed just one more side tunnel out of the hundreds the southerners had passed on their way down into the depths, a crevice scarcely large enough for the bulky Ettins to squeeze through. In fact, it was Hammerfoot and his cousins who burst out first, roaring and waving their weapons, inspiring such fright that some of the startled southerners fell down with stopped hearts. After that it was blade on blade as the Qar fought to keep the much larger Xixian force split so the fairies could forge a path through to the other side of the large passage and the cross-tunnel waiting there.
For a time the blood flowed like rainwater in gutters as the desert warriors and the most warlike of the fairies, the Ettins, the Unforgiven, and the Changing tribe, hacked and ripped at each other in near-darkness. Although a few of the Ettins fell, swarmed by soldiers as a beetle might fall to attacking ants, the giants still dealt terrible casualties among the southerners until a Xixian commander, or at least the highest ranking of their soldiers in that cavern, pulled most of his men back to the far side of the passage. He had brought up archers and now they sent flights of arrows hissing toward the Qar, who fell back behind the gigantic shields and rocky hides of the Ettins, still unable to cross the broad passage.
Barrick, still trapped in the side tunnel but close enough now to see what was happening, wondered how they could possibly survive this. Unless they fought their way through to the other side, the Qar were trapped between the Xixians who had already passed this spot and those above who were on their way down. No matter how many of the southerners Saqri’s fighters killed more would just flow back into this place until the Qar were finally overwhelmed and destroyed.