“But what else can we do, Highness?”
Barrick laughed, a harsh, wild sound. “I saw you look at the boats, Vansen. You were already thinking it! Come, while Saqri and the others can yet hold the center and distract them. She has told me that in a moment she will stage her play!”
Vansen had no idea what Barrick meant by that, but the prince was right. They had thought of the same thing. They could not fight their way through the Xixian defense by strength alone, but if someone reached the autarch and put a blade or an arrow in him the day might still be saved.
“Which one, Highness? The one on the end?” Vansen knew that they had to stay as far from the center of the fight as possible. If the riflemen on the far side noticed them floating unprotected, they would never reach the other shore. “I’ll go—but for the love of the gods, put your helmet back on!”
Vansen and the prince hurried down the sloping shore in a prolonged and painful series of crouches—painful for Vansen, anyway. To his astonishment, Barrick Eddon had not only grown in size, he had grown in strength and grace as well, and even seemed to be freely using the arm Vansen had been told was forever crippled. What had happened to that sulking, red-faced child of a few months ago after Vansen himself had fallen into the dark in Greatdeeps?
He hunched as low as he could while a volley of arrows snapped overhead, the sound of their passing made almost inaudible by the clamor of voices and crash of guns in the great cavern. As he did so, a strange, unexpected thought came to him. Despite the terrible danger all around them, Barrick Eddon was alive and well and had returned to Southmarch. Which meant that Ferras Vansen had not failed Barrick’s sister, Princess Briony, after all. He might not have carried the prince to Southmarch all by himself, but he had helped to keep him alive. If Vansen lived, unlikely as that was, one day she might release him from her scorn.
Suddenly his heart felt as light as the poets often claimed, light as a bit of down caught on the puff of someone’s lips. He had not failed, although so many times he had been certain he had done so. However little Briony Eddon’s curses and scorn of him might have meant to her, they had meant the world to Ferras Vansen, had lain upon him as heavily as stone. Now that weight was gone.
“Hurry,” Barrick shouted. “Saqri has begun!”
A sound rose behind them, a weird and beautiful moan like the howl of a wolf given words. The queen of the fairies had climbed over the backs of her own soldiers to engage the enemy, her sword sparkling and darting like a hummingbird in a pool of sunlight. It was her voice that rose above the clamor of battle. Saqri had become the focus of nearly all eyes. Her long, slender blade struck and struck again. She danced through the Xixians like smoke, and for that moment they fell back from her in astonishment. Through it all, Saqri kept singing.
Vansen heard a noise and dragged his attention back to his own situation. Two Xixian soldiers left to guard the farthest boat were hurrying forward to intercept Vansen and the prince. He ducked a swipe from one guard’s sword, stumbled and rolled, then came up to find the man coming back at him again. At that same moment Barrick Eddon dodged past his own man, snatched the rifle from the man’s hands just as the Xixian was lowering it to shoot, and then whirled and hit him from behind with the gun hard enough that the man’s chin snapped down against his chest. Before that man had even fallen to the ground, Barrick turned and threw the gun at the other guard like a short spear. It hit the southerner in the head and knocked him onto his back, bloodied and dying. Vansen gaped at the men Barrick Eddon had so effortlessly bested as the prince made his way to the grounded reed boat.
“Gods, it’s big.” Barrick lowered his shoulder against the bow and began to push. The boat gave a squishy creak but did not move. Vansen came up beside him and began to help him, but it felt like trying to slide a basket of wet clothes the size of a house; Vansen was certain that his own blood was going to burst from his ears before the thing moved even a fingernail’s breadth.
At last the boat scraped forward, skidding a few heavy inches. Vansen clenched his teeth until they felt as if they might shatter and pushed harder; beside him he heard Barrick talking quietly to himself. The reed boat shuddered and began to slide, faster and faster until Vansen stumbled trying to keep up with it and found he was already knee high in the silver sea.
“Push a little farther to get it moving,” Barrick said quietly. “And when you get in, stay low.”
Vansen pushed, walking on his tiptoes, trying not to splash. He was chest high in the silvery liquid now. It was thicker than water but more slippery, shiny and heavy, but less so than actual metal. It was also disturbingly warm. “We’re in it—the silver stuff!” It was all he could do to whisper, so strange did the substance feel where it touched his skin, almost… alive.
Barrick scrambled up into the boat, then turned and reached a hand down to help Vansen climb up also. Vansen threw himself down in the bottom of the boat, gasping for breath, and watched the silvery liquid run off him, slithering away into the crevices between the bundled reeds. “What is it? What is this lake made of?”
Barrick Eddon had stretched out, too, lying on his side near the far side of the boat. His eyes were half-open and fixed on nothing, as though he could see through the bundled reeds of the gunwales, and perhaps even through the stone of the cavern itself. “You ask, what is the sea made of, Captain? The very last remains of my oldest ancestor.” He smiled a little, but it only made Vansen feel cold. “You’ve been splashing in the blood of a god.”
38. A Visitor to Death’s Estate
“By the time the Orphan reached the house of Aristas the piece of the sun had burned his hands away to ash. He gave the piece of sun to his friend and then fell down dead at his feet.”
Everything happened with astonishing swiftness.
Briony, the Temple Dog soldier, and the Syannese knight Stephanas were making their way silently across the hilly temple yard with nothing but the light of the three-quarter moon, which was just strong enough that Briony didn’t notice the lesser light, a dim glow on the overhang at the front of the Eddon family tomb, until they were almost on top of it.
Both fear and fury surged through her. What was Hendon doing in her family’s vault?
As she signaled to the Syannese to stay quiet, two soldiers in dark cloaks came up the steps of the tomb together locked in some kind of struggle.
“The dead… !” one of them gasped to the other even as he fought with him, so frightened he could barely speak. “He’s trying to bring back… !” The terrified soldier at last broke free from the other, who seemed to have been trying to restrain him, and sprinted off across the cemetery grounds to disappear into darkness. The other soldier watched him go for a moment with wide eyes, but he must have heard something closer to hand. He lowered his spear and began inching toward the spot where Briony and Eneas’ soldiers crouched behind a stone vault.
“Who is that?” he demanded in a quavering voice. “Step out, in the name of the lord protector… !”
One of Tolly’s men, then. Briony nodded to the soldier with a bow, who stood up and loosed his arrow more or less in one motion. Hendon Tolly’s sentry looked down at the slender wooden shaft shivering in his gut as though it were the most puzzling thing in the world, then he folded over and dropped noiselessly to the ground.