If I survive, I will tell her, Vansen decided suddenly. I will have to leave Southmarch—if they do not have my head first for my presumption. But it will be worth it. I’ll be an empty man, hollowed out and ready for something else to be poured in. Or at least prepared for an empty life afterward. “Nothing much to tell about,” he said out loud. “What’s the hour?”
“The timekeeper puts it about an hour until midday,” Jasper told him.
“Ah.” Vansen nodded. “So Midsummer’s Day is still young.” It was a bleak piece of news, since they needed to hold off the Xixians until past midnight. “As to ladies, how about you, friend Jasper? An accomplished fellow like yourself, a Wardthane, you must have someone waiting.”
Sledge Jasper made a face. “A wife. Does that count?”
Dolomite grinned. “Your Pebble would have your knackers for that, Sledge.”
“And you, Dolomite?” Vansen asked, grasping at anything that might lead the men to think of something other than what lay ahead. “Have you a dearie-dove, as Jasper calls it?”
The little man frowned. “None of the town girls understand me, Captain, to be frank. They don’t see a man like me can have ideas beyond knocking heads. In truth, I’d like to start a tavern. Save up a few copper chips for a nest egg and then go to the next Guild Market when they start having them again, find myself a girl who hasn’t already made her mind up about me. Maybe a Westcliff lass. They’re not so handsome, the Settland Funderlings, but I’ve heard they’re sensible ...”
Jasper and Dolomite went back to their men as Brother Flowstone returned and crouched beside Vansen.
“I am afraid, Captain,” the young monk admitted. “I thought I would be honored, even exalted, when the Elders called for me, but I am only frightened. I don’t want to die.”
“You would be a strange young man in the prime of your life if you did.”
“I had many… I thought things would be… different ...”
Vansen reached over and patted the monk’s shoulder. “Don’t despair—you may yet live! But whether today or fifty years from now, we will all stand before Immon’s Gate ...”
“We call him Nozh-la,” Flowstone told him.
“… We will all stand before Nozh-la’s gate,” Vansen continued, “waiting for the kind attentions of his master, the lord of death.”
“You are a poet, Captain.” The monk seemed amused despite the quaver in his voice.
Vansen, however, had been seized even as he spoke by a sudden vision, a memory so powerful that it shook him like a rat in a terrier’s jaws, and for a long moment he could barely breathe. Immon’s Gate. He had been there, or at least he could see it in his mind’s eye as clearly as if he had, the great ornate portal of black stone, tall as a mountain, part of the featureless stone of the House of the Lord of the Underworld. And all around it lay the sullen, red lights and tall, deep shadows of the City of Death. Could it be? Had he actually seen it? But when? This phantom of his mind seemed so real!
It doesn’t matter when. Or even if it was a dream. I’ve seen it. I know it. I have been to the very gates of Death’s own castle and returned. If the gods were trying to speak to him, Ferras Vansen was listening. He could almost hear rising voices like a temple choir, something bigger than himself lifting him, and for a moment he no longer feared anything.
No matter what happens to me now or later, I have not had a small life!
Something thumped at the far end of the great hall, a muffled crash that nearly extinguished the torches and sent stones rolling from the pile of rubble blocking the far entrance. Another thump, louder this time, forceful enough to slap both Ferras Vansen’s ears and deafen him for a moment, shattered his thoughts into pieces. The far end of the chamber was full of dust and skittering stone. Shapes moved where only moments earlier a thousandweight and more of rubble had been piled.
Vansen could see immediately that the autarch had not sent his ordinary foot soldiers, the Naked; instead, behind the swirl of dust and smoke, the cleared entrance was full of tall, pale shields, wedged together like the scales of a snake, an armored mass that bristled with spears like a hedgehog’s quills as it advanced slowly into the room. The men were huge and their shields were painted with the ugly, snarling head of a dog—the autarch’s most feared killers were leading the attack.
With a roar that to Vansen’s damaged hearing seemed scarcely more than a loud moan, the White Hounds surged forward into the Initiation Hall.
The afternoon went by like a thunderstorm that lasted years. Vansen and his men held the first barricade of skillfully piled stone as long as they could, but despite the protection of the high wall at least a dozen Funderlings fell. In lulls between skirmishes the bodies were dragged away and their armor and weapons redistributed. Vansen noted with grim amusement that finally, from sheer attrition, nearly all of his men were properly armed. At last, when the warders holding the far right side of the barricade had been so badly overwhelmed that the Xixians were clambering over the wall in numbers, Vansen called the retreat and the Funderlings dropped back to the second barrier.
“Now hold them here!” he shouted. “Spears up, Guildsmen, spears up!”
They held the second wall as long as they could. Time passed in a blur and the shouting became a smear of noise like the roaring ocean somewhere above their heads.
Sky and sea, thought Vansen—oh, to see them both once more! And Briony Eddon’s face! If you could love a god or goddess who would never know you, why not a princess? Was the love any the less because it couldn’t come back to you?
More Funderlings fell, even brave little Dolomite, Jasper’s sergeant; more sprang forward to fill the places of the fallen, including monks who had only ministered to the wounded. Three Metamorphic Brothers, freshly come to the front line, were set on fire by an oil lamp the autarch’s men shoved over the top of a barrier. As they ran screaming past their fellows, Vansen could feel despair welling up in the Funderling troops like a poisonous venom, stealing their strength; he knew that any instant they might all break and run for the great balcony and the whole force would be overwhelmed and slaughtered. Vansen leaned out and grabbed one of the blazing monks as he went past, burning his hand, and then threw himself on top of the shrieking man, doing his best to smother the flames with dirt and his own body. Vansen sat up to see the other Funderlings watching him in numb surprise.
“Stop staring!” he bellowed. “Help these men! Call the healers. And protect your barricades!”
Startled back to something like sense, the Funderlings dug in afresh. Others caught the burning monks and wrestled them to the ground to extinguish the flames, then dragged them to the back of the hall. When the Funderlings did give way some time later and fell back to the third barricade, it was under discipline and at Vansen’s command.
They could not hold the third barricade for long, nor the smaller fourth. The Xixians continued to swarm into the huge chamber, and as they cleared the stones from between the columns, they were able to bring more and more soldiers against the Funderling positions. The southerners could use arrows now, too, and although these did little damage against those who crouched behind the barricades, it was different for the Funderlings at the rear of the chamber. Young Calomel, Cinnabar’s son, was shot in the back as he tried to drag his father’s litter to a safer spot. As the monks carried off the wounded youth, Vansen and the others could only tell the sick and fretful Cinnabar over and over again that his boy would be well, though none of them truly believed it.