“If I have wronged you, Lady, then I ask your forgiveness.” He bowed and turned away.
Saqri was waiting for him, her hair strayed from its diadem and fluttering in the strange winds of this deep place like black spidersilk. “Here is the bearer of the Fireflower,” she said and the Qar around her stirred and turned away from their enemies on the far side of the cavern. “Now our strength is complete.” She looked from Barrick back to Yasammez, who still stood by the base of the cliff. “Did she have a word for you?”
“Yes. Several.” He pulled on his helmet. “Lead us, Saqri. I need to smell blood in the air. That will make me stop thinking.”
Unexpectedly, she laughed. “Come, then!” she called to the surrounding Qar, who banged spears and swords against their shields or threw back their heads and bayed up at the cavern’s ceiling and the moon hidden so far above it, the moon that was in their blood as the Fireflower was in Barrick’s. “The hour is upon us! The last of the old years begins to die tonight! Let us show this presumptuous mortal king how the People dance at Midsummer!”
With a shout the Qar leaped forward and raced across the cavern toward the southerners stepping off their boats along the near shore, soldiers as numerous as ants. The Xixians were already nocking arrows and bending bows, waiting for the Qar to come in range.
“Midsummer!” cried Barrick, and the voices within him wept and exulted.
Ferras Vansen had been in battles both fierce and frightening. He had stood with his master Donal Murroy against both bandits and rebels. While scouting he had hidden in a tree for half an agonizing day, knowing that even the slightest noise or movement could bring death because a troop of mercenaries had camped almost directly beneath him. He had disarmed a maddened Southmarch guardsman who had killed his own wife and their four children, wrestling with the man in the smeared blood of his dead family. He had fought the Qar themselves on battlefields as strange as nightmares—but nothing had prepared him for this final deadly struggle deep beneath Southmarch.
By the time Vansen and those Funderlings still able to fight made their way down the cliff, the Qar and their small, silent queen had already flung themselves at the first of the autarch’s men to land on the shore. Vansen could not see well enough to guess who was getting the best of things because the light in the monstrous chamber had begun to flicker and gleam as colors he could scarcely recognize pulsed in the depths of the Shining Man the way red heat rippled in the embers of a fire.
“Double-fast, men!” Vansen shouted. “Otherwise the fairies may not leave us any!”
“Ha!” Malachite Copper was gasping along beside him. “I knew the Old Ones to be uncanny—I didn’t know they were greedy, too!” Copper’s leg had been injured in the final melee in the Initiation Hall but he was limping along gamely, doing his best to keep up. He had cursed when Vansen suggested he stay behind and tend his wound. “Well, Captain, we will just have to take what they leave us.”
Vansen looked back. The Funderlings following were wide-eyed with something more than fright, a look that seemed to search beyond the moment and perhaps even beyond their own short mortal lives. Weighted down with weapons and armor, none of them much more than half Ferras Vansen’s size, they still hurried to keep up with him, as if after all they had suffered they remained intent on proving themselves. “Sledge Jasper would be proud of you,” he called to them now. “He is watching!”
“Make your Wardthane proud, boys!” gasped Malachite Copper, stumbling for a moment in his weariness. They had reached the outskirts of the fighting, a twilight world of unsteady shapes locked in struggle as the stones overhead glowed and then darkened, glowed and then darkened.
“At them!” Vansen’s heart was strangely full here at the end, despite all that he had lost, all that he had never had. “At them, my brave men!”
To Beetledown’s astonishment, the queen of the Rooftoppers herself was waiting for him when he reached the stables in the ruins of Wolfstooth Spire. His favorite mount Muckle Brown had been saddled and was scratching impatiently—a fine, strong young female flittermouse, dark as sweet ale and almost as large as a pigeon—but Beetledown had eyes only for his mistress.
“Majesty.” He bowed as low as he could. “You do us too thickish an honor.”
“Nonsense.” Upsteeplebat smiled. “You are the best of my scouts, Beetledown. Still, we must not waste time in talk. If the Funderling Chert Blue Quartz says that the hour grows short, then you must fly now into the depths to find this man Cinnabar. Are you ready?”
“Directly, Ma’am,” he said. “I had but my oilcloth to fasten tight—some of the ways lie through curtains of water tall as one of the castle doors!”
“I wish I had seen it as you have, brave Beetledown.”
“If… if all goes well,” he said, “perhaps Your Majesty would do me the honor of letting me be your guide. I wot well that my friend Chert and un’s kind would be only too proud to show you the great caverns.”
The queen’s pretty face grew solemn. “And I would love to be shown them. It is a promise, then. If all goes well, you will show me some of these places you have seen, my brave scout.”
He feared he would burst out singing at the honor. “Too kind you are, Exquisite Majesty.” He finished lashing the oilcloth cloak close around him—it would not do to have anything dangling when he flew through those tight, dark spaces—and then moved toward Muckle Brown, who hunched between her folded wings and stared at the Rooftopper with the cross, bleary expression of a child awakened too early from a nap. Beetledown climbed onto her lushly furred back and sat patiently as the grooms tied him into the saddle and put the rein-rings in his hand.
“Ah!” said Queen Upsteeplebat suddenly. “Do not forget your blade, brave Beetledown!”
“Blade?” He shook his head. “I fear you mistake me for another, Majesty. I have never ...”
“Never until now. But you have shown yourself not just a brave Gutter-Scout but a queen’s paladin as well, and the traditional gift is… a sword.” She clapped her hands and a small page came forward, carrying the sword as if it were made of precious jewels—which, in a way, it was. The silver thing was as slender as a cat’s whisker and sharper than a bee’s curved barb, its hilt wrapped in golden thread. “This is the needle of Queen Sanasu herself, dropped beneath her chair in the Long Ago. Take it, Beetledown. Serve your friend Chert well, and you will serve us all well.”
He knew if he spoke much more he would say something foolish. He leaned down and took the sword from her dainty hand, then thrust it through the strap over his shoulder so that the hilt bobbed near his head and the pointy end did not trouble the flittermouse. “Thank you, Majesty.” He signaled to the grooms who undid the bat’s fetters and stepped away sharply to avoid being nipped. The big mounts were notoriously ill-tempered when kept from flying at night, and sundown had passed hours ago. Feeling her freedom, Muckle Brown leaped out through the arched window of the belfry and into the black sky.
Beetledown prodded his mount with his heels; the bat turned up her wing and swept toward the wall of the inner keep, then over it, swimming through the air in brisk strokes followed by long, gliding moments where nothing moved but the air rushing past. He gave the bat a little more heel and then pulled on the rein. She swung high up into the air, banked so that for a moment it seemed even the moon was below them, then dropped down like a stone, spreading her wings only as the ground rushed so close that Beetledown held his breath.