“Where Durstin Crowel and many of Tolly’s other murderous followers are preparing a last stand? Why would I want to do such a thing? Are you saying that we cannot get to my father and brother and the Qar going this way?” She turned on him. “Did you lie to me?”
“No, Mistress, no.” Chert shook his head. He saw more than a little of Opal in this young woman (though it seemed presumptuous to say so.) Both of them had iron in their spines and neither of them seemed to expect much good out of him. “But every moment that passes brings us closer to some sort of disaster.” Now that the moment had come, he did not want to tell her. Such a terrible decision—and the reigning monarch had to hear of it from the simple Guildsman who had made it in her place! “Will you simply trust me when I say we should go no farther? That the danger is too great?”
She still stared at him. He saw no softening at all. “Will I trust you, Chert Blue Quartz? Are you mad? What does that have to do with anything? Almost all who remain of my family are deep in the earth below me, fighting for their lives. Why under Heaven should I stop here?”
Chert saw that she would not budge, let alone turn back, and as he had learned from his life with another stern-minded woman, he also knew he had run out of choices.
“Stay just a few moments, then, Highness, and I will tell you why we should go no farther ...”
When he had finished, the princess stared. Chert could not even count all the different humors on her face—fear, surprise, and anger were only the most obvious.
“Is this true?” she demanded. “You Funderlings will bring it down? Collapse the very stones beneath my family’s home? With all who live in it still here? And my family down below at the heart of it all?” Her eyes narrowed. “And you say this was your plan?”
“Yes—but it was to happen only if there was no other hope, Princess. And it was more complicated than that—more subtle, I promise… !” He did not want to tell her that he thought it was too late for anything now anyway—too late to defeat the autarch, certainly, but too late for his own desperate idea as well. The strength was running out of him like a seam of dry sand. What did any of it matter? He had thought about and dreaded so many things for so long, but had never imagined he might find himself too far from all those he loved in this final hour even to die with them. Folly. It had all been folly.
Princess Briony blinked, nodded once, then turned and resumed walking down the path that wound around the Pit. Chert stirred. “Princess? Where are you going?”
“Where do you think I’m going, Funderling?” she called back over her shoulder. She did not sound as if she thought much of Chert Blue Quartz at this moment. “I’m going to die with my family. You may die as you choose.”
“But, Highness, if the gunflour works and the rocks fall… !”
She turned on him, her face contorted with fury. For the first time Chert saw that more than just Princess Briony’s clothes had changed since the first time they’d met. She had grown not just older, but… deeper, somehow. Stronger. And something he could see in her now but not recognize frightened him more than a little. “You have taken a risk that was not yours to take, Funderling,” she said. “Now let me do what I must do.”
“But it must already be too late… !”
“Quiet, you!” She took a step in his direction, and for a moment Chert was actually frightened she might harm him. “Until my father takes the throne again, I am the princess regent of this kingdom. All who live above and below, your folk and my folk, are mine to protect—but you and your fellow stonecutters have taken that from me. Now leave me alone… or if you will not do me that courtesy, at least be silent.” She turned again and stalked off down the uneven trail into the dark, a knife clutched in each hand. Chert hesitated for a long moment, then hurried after her.
Aesi’uah waited for her mistress to return from the dreamlands. The daughter of ancient Sleep had waited patiently as Saqri and the others had sacrificed themselves, as the autarch’s ritual had gone forward, even as the screams of terror echoed through the cavern when the strange, gleaming shape on the island began to grow, as if the Shining Man had taken on monstrous, immortal flesh. Aesi’uah did not mind waiting: she could do little else. She was not a warrior but an eremite and could only wait until her mistress should ask her for her help.
Yasammez’s eyes flicked open, black and deep, but she remained where she was a long time, sitting cross-legged on the rocky ground at the foot of the cliff beneath the Maze. At last she rose.
“I am going to die now,” she announced. “Take any others of the People you can find who still can walk. Tell them to carry my sweet Saqri and the other wounded and retreat toward the surface as swiftly as they can.”
Aesi’uah felt quite sure that Saqri was beyond help, but she bowed to her mistress’ request. “What of the Guard of Elementals? I can feel them pressing you for an answer.”
Yasammez shook her head. “I have given them my answer, which is no—I will not use the Fever Egg. The mortal Barrick Eddon has taught me something.”
“Truly, Mistress?”
Yasammez’s smile was like a knife slash. In the distance Xixian soldiers were dying in flames at the hands of a jubilant god, their screeching like the far-off cries of birds. “Truly,” she said. “Their short lives seem to mean as much to them as the endless spans of the gods themselves—more perhaps. What right do I have, after my own long, Heaven-granted span, to take that away? Perhaps they will even make some accommodation with the returning gods and write an ending I cannot foresee. Our folk have suffered the Great Defeat, but perhaps their story will be different.”
Yasammez slid Whitefire from her belt. It glinted like white jade, like a fallen shard of the moon. She held it out and looked it up and down. “Long ago, this mighty blade was wielded by the sun god. It killed other gods.” She nodded. “Longbeard himself fell to this blade, and he was said to be the Heaven’s greatest warrior. We shall see if it has one last fight in it—if it can spill the blood of one more immortal. A pity that I do not have the sun god’s strength as well.”
She turned to Aesi’uah. “Approach me.” Yasammez then bent and, to the eremite’s amazement, gently kissed her brow. “You have been a good servant, Aesi’uah—one of the best I have ever known in all my uncounted years. I hope that when you find your death, it is a kind one. If my many-times-great-granddaughter lives beyond this hour, tell her the People died nobly today. I could have hoped for nothing better.” Yasammez turned and began to walk away down the rocky slope toward the silver sea, which was beginning to steam with the Trickster god’s spreading flames; after a few steps she stopped and turned. “If the manchild yet lives and you meet him, tell him that I remember his words. I have decided to let his people as well as my own find their ends in their own ways. I hope he understands the burden he must now carry.”
And then Crooked’s daughter went striding away once more, down to the misty, silvered sea, toward the god she had already faced once and had said she hoped never to see again. Her aspect grew around her as she went, swirling, spreading, dark and fierce as a thundercloud, a small, inky blot set against mounting fires.
Beetledown plummeted through the air tumbling end over end, and in that hurtling instant knew that he had failed: even if he miraculously fell onto the narrow path instead of down into the abyss, even should he survive the cracked bones, he would never be able to make the trip all the way up to the Funderling camp on foot.