And at the center of the cavern lay the shining, still surface of the Sea in the Depths—“the Silver,” as he had sometimes heard the Qar name it. Veins of glowing stone threading through the walls of the massive chamber gave a faint but steady light, so that even from the Balcony, Vansen could see the thing that the autarch apparently sought and had already killed so many to reach, the gleaming crystalline monument called the Shining Man, standing on its island in the middle of the silvery underground sea.
“Look out, Captain—here they come!” shouted Malachite Copper. Vansen sighed and turned his back to the stone railing, then stepped forward so he couldn’t easily be pushed over. Some of his men would probably choose that way out by the end, he knew, rather than die on a Xixian spear. He couldn’t blame them, but that way would not be his.
Smoke billowed from the doorway of the Revelation Hall onto the balcony. For a few moments, Vansen thought it was dust again, that the Xixians had knocked over the entire barrier, but even so it seemed too big a cloud. Several figures stepped out of the rolling murk, their dark silhouettes somehow magnified by the smoke so that they seemed monsters, not men.
But it was a monster, he saw a moment later with sinking heart, or at least it was no longer anything human. Big and getting bigger every instant, the thing was a writhing shadow, uneven and unstable.
It growled out something that almost sounded like words, a horrid deep rasp. Two more just as terrifying stepped up beside it, one of them still with a hand to its mouth as though it were eating something. All three seemed man-shaped whirlwinds, as if the dust and debris of the chamber were being drawn up to spin through the air and circle them, covering the creatures like moss growing on a stone but a thousand times more swift. The shapes grew wider and even taller. As Vansen stared, dumbfounded, he heard Funderlings shrieking in terror behind him.
“Curse their Xixian devilry!” Vansen groaned. “Copper? Where are you? I need your men and their spears!”
He did not wait, but hurled his own ward-ax at the nearest of the creatures. The weapon only bounced off the swirling, shadowy mass, as ineffectual as a snowball against a siege tower. Vansen tore a spear from the hand of a staring, dumbfounded Funderling and advanced toward the things, jabbing at them as at an angry boar, but the demons did not give ground. The three shapes had grown huge now, bulky and irregular, but they still walked on two legs as they waded forward, swiping at the defenders with clawed hands big as serving platters. They moved surprisingly quickly, too—the first nearly beheaded Vansen with one swipe.
“Help the captain, you sons of the Guild!” called out Malachite Copper. “The Elders are watching you—don’t let him fight alone!”
And then other Funderlings began to push their way in beside him, jabbing bravely at the things and ducking blows from the stony talons if they were lucky; but several were sliced in half as they stood, and another was thrown into Ferras Vansen by a backhanded swipe of a malformed hand with such violence that it knocked him spinning. Vansen struck his head against the base of the Balcony’s stone railing and when he tried to sit up so he could rise and fight, all around him seemed to waver as if seen through fathoms of water.
A tiny white shape dropped down from out of the darkness above, but Vansen could make nothing of it, any more than he could of the weird, liquid roar of the devil creatures as they mowed through the shrieking Funderlings. An instant later, he realized he was staring at a small, slender woman dressed all in white armor who stood just in front of him, the rope down which she had climbed still dangling beside her.
“We of the People have served you poorly, Ferras Vansen,” she said in a voice so sweetly calm he was half-certain he must be dreaming it all. “Now we will try to make up for that, at least in some measure.”
She was Qar, that was obvious, but he had never seen her before. He wondered again if he might be dreaming… or dying. “Who… who are you?”
“My name is Saqri. I must go now.”
Other shapes were falling down out of the darkness all around him, many figures sliding down on ropes and jumping to the Balcony before swiftly springing forward to attack the clawed demons. Vansen tried to get up, but the world spun so briskly that he fell back and did not try again to rise; it was all he could do just to lie on the stone and listen to the weirdly musical sounds of desperate battle, the clang of stony claws on smooth Qar armor. Flashes of light made the carved walls of the Maze jump out in sharp relief and revealed dozens—no, hundreds!—more Qar as they dropped down onto the Balcony like graceful spiders.
One of the demon creatures died with a Qar arrow in its eye all the way to the feathers. It thrashed and gurgled wetly for a long time until the life finally leaked out of it. Another stumbled as it charged and was then jabbed with fairy-spears until it went mad and tumbled over the railing—it roared like receding thunder all the way down. The last, as far as Vansen could tell, was set on fire somehow from within and died in a smoking mass in the middle of the balcony, leaving a corpse that looked like a chimney hit by lightning.
Vansen sat up, his arm and leg throbbing horribly, trying to make sense out of what was happening. Where were the rest of the autarch’s soldiers? Why had they stopped attacking? Had his Funderlings actually defeated the Xixians with the last-moment help of the Qar?
A tall warrior in gray Qar armor came toward him across the balcony. “Ferras Vansen,” this newcomer said, crouching at his side. “By the gods, I never thought I’d see you again. Never.” The stranger took off his helmet and for a moment Ferras Vansen could only stare at the shock of red hair in aching bemusement.
“Barrick… ?” he said at last. “Prince Barrick? Is it really you?”
The prince gave him a cold, serious gaze. He looked ten years older. “Yes, it’s me, Captain. How are your wounds? Will you survive?”
“I… I expect so ...” Vansen shook his head in amazement. “But how do you come here? How did you escape from the shadowlands?”
A human expression, a little smile, twisted Barrick Eddon’s lips. “I’m sure we both have many stories to tell ...” he began, then another Qar woman hastened up, one Vansen recognized. It was Yasammez’ gray-skinned adviser, Aesi’uah.
“Captain Vansen,” she said. “It is good to find you alive.” She turned to Barrick. “Saqri says we cannot delay. It is a feint, as she feared. They are already gone.”
“What?” Vansen struggled to get up. He hated this feeling of weakness. “Who is already gone?”
“The southerners,” Aesi’uah said. “This last attack by the autarch’s Stone Swallowers was meant to destroy you and your men, but he was not waiting for you to die. There are long stairways back in the Maze which lead far down, then cross under the Sea in the Depths to the island where gods fought and died—the place where the Shining Man stands. The autarch and his priests and soldiers stealthily went that way while we fought. They have slipped past beneath us.
“Despite all your bravery and all our haste, Captain Vansen, we have lost.”
36. When the Knife Falls
“The poor Orphan had to wrap the piece of the sun in oak leaves, but at last these also burned away and he had no other choice but to carry it in his soft hands.”