All around him, the rocky island swarmed with Xixian soldiers doing their best to ignore the ominous surroundings as they finished tying together the reed boats. Vash noted that he and the antipolemarch seemed to have correctly planned how many bundles of reeds the men would have to carry down from the surface, and he felt a moment’s relief before he realized how foolish that was: what difference did it make that Vash had done his duty, that the autarch could find no fault with his arrangements? In a moment, they might all be dead, or the autarch himself might gain the strength of Heaven. Either way, nothing would ever be the same again.
“Where is my trusted paramount minister?” the Golden One called. Vash felt his hackles rising again.
“Here, O Great Tent.” He hobbled across the sliding, rounded stones until he reached the place where Sulepis stood tall and slender in his golden armor, a glorious vision even in this inconstant light. “How may I serve you, Master?”
“Are the boats finished?”
Vash took a breath but hid his frustration. It was plain to see that they were. The soldiers stood lined up along the shoreline beside the completed boats, massive rafts with the bundled reeds pulled together at each end to make a bow and stern. “Of course, Golden One,” Vash said. It had been an immensely difficult task to transport so many river reeds from Hierosol on such short notice, to keep them dry and safe from mold, but there had been no way of knowing whether they would be able to find the proper materials in this godsforsaken northern wasteland, and the Golden One did not respond well to failure.
Sulepis will become a god while I will probably die and receive a makeshift grave here in this wet northern hellhole, Vash thought, without even a priest left behind to pray for me. But there stand the boats. I have again done what is mine to do. Out loud, he said, “All the boats are ready. What else does the Golden One desire?”
“The prisoners, of course. All of them.”
Vash blinked. “All of them?”
Sulepis stared at Vash as though from a huge height, as though he himself were the Shining Man. “Yes. The king, the Hive girl, and the northern children. Does that suit you, Minister Vash? Or should I ask someone who has nothing better to do?”
Vash felt a cold shock down his spine. “Forgive my stupidity, Golden One, I did not understand. Of course they are all being brought. Panhyssir’s priests are getting the children, and the others are there.” He pointed to a small procession of soldiers coming forward from the tunnel they had followed under the silver sea and onto the island, surrounding the prisoners, King Olin and the girl with their hands tied behind their backs. The priest A’lat capered at the front of the procession, walking backward with a smoking bowl in each hand, wreathing the prisoners in fumes. When he turned, Vash saw with a twist in his stomach that the desert priest wore a mask that appeared to be made from the skin of someone else’s face.
“Good, good.” Sulepis peeled the gold stalls off his fingertips and dropped them to the carpet. One of the slaves stared for a moment, then quickly gathered them. “I must feel this with my own skin. Look, Vash.” His long arm swept up, indicating the cavern, the Shining Man, and perhaps other things that only Sulepis himself could see. “Be aware of everything around you—smells, sounds, sights—for within the next hour the world changes forever.”
“Of course, Golden One. Of course.” Vash was desperate for the whole sordid horror to end so that he could find some way of accommodating whatever followed, if such were even possible. “You haven’t told me what else I can do to aid your… ritual. Do you need an altar… ?”
“An altar?” Sulepis found this very amusing. “Don’t you understand, Vash? This entire place is an altar, a place where the heavens were once made to shake—and will be again! This spot is sanctified by the blood and screams of the gods themselves!” The autarch’s voice had grown so loud that soldiers and functionaries all across the island stopped, trembling in fear because they thought the autarch had lost his temper. “No, my altar is the earth itself, this silver sea and the scar that Habbili left when he sealed the way back to this world with his own dying spirit.” He waved at the Shining Man, which loomed above them like the spire of a great temple. “Do you not know what that thing truly is? That is where Habbili the Crooked tore open the very flesh of the world so that he could banish the gods! Then, mortally injured himself, he closed the hole with his own being to keep them prisoned—and it has remained that way ever since, hiding here in the earth for thousands of years, worshiped by primitives as though it were a living thing.” He bent toward Vash as if to share a secret. “But now Habbili’s wounds have killed him at last. The priests and prophets have felt it. They have told me! Habbili’s strength will no longer hold shut that wound in the world. Anyone who has the power or knowledge can reach out across the great void… or reach in.” He straightened up to his full height, leaving Vash to stare up at him like a man watching an approaching thunderstorm. “So bring on the children! Let their blood open the door and then let the gods themselves beware! Sulepis will be the master even of the immortals themselves!”
Barrick had only just alighted on the cavern’s rocky floor when he saw Yasammez standing nearby looking out across the cavern toward the dark, distant shape of the Shining Man. She was alone for once, wrapped in a vast black cloak, her eyes half-closed so that she seemed as calm and remote as a cat lying in the sun. Her hair had pulled loose from its elaborate knots during her descent and hung around her head like thorny branches.
The Lady of Weeping, the voices whispered inside him in a kind of superstitious awe. The Scourge. Exile of Wanderwind.
Barrick approached her but did not kneel or bow. “My lady, will you not fight beside us? This is the last day, the last hour—the moment when we write the final page in the Book of Regret.”
Her eyes slowly turned toward him. “That page was written long ago, before your kind had even entered the world.”
He felt the sting of that but would not be drawn. “But I am also your kind now, Lady Yasammez, whether you or I wish it to be so… and you are our greatest warrior. If you do not fight for us now, when will you take the field? When the rest of the People lie dead?” For a moment, the shocked clamor of his Fireflower ghosts, their outrage at his disrespect, filled him with anger. “Is that your form of self-slaughter, Lady? To wait until there is no one left to see your fall so you spare yourself the shame of defeat?”
“The shame of defeat?” In cold anger she threw back her cloak to show her black armor and the naked blade of Whitefire that she leaned on like a cane; its gleam leaped to his eye like a tongue of lightning. “Child of men, I am the defeat of our people in the breathing flesh. I have lived with the foreknowledge of my own death since your people gnawed uncooked bones in the forest. I will not survive this day and I know it, but I will not have such as you questioning me. Begone, child of a stolen heritage, and do what you will with the end of your own life.”
The black murk of her cloak and the dark spikiness of her armor framed her pale, fierce face like storm clouds around the moon. For a moment Barrick saw things in her bottomless eyes he had never seen before, or perhaps in that strange place and time he merely dreamed them, but to his utter astonishment he felt a tear overspill his lid and trickle down his cheek.