As they went out, the castellan, Tirnan Havemore, who had once been Avin Brone’s factor, slipped into the library. “It is here, my lord,” he said, handing Tolly a parchment chopped with a seal Tinwright had never seen. As his master read the letter, Havemore looked Tinwright up and down with unhidden dislike. None of the inner circle could understand why Tolly kept Matt Tinwright around, but that was unsurprising since Tinwright wasn’t certain himself.
“I was wondering when we would hear from them,” the lord protector said when he had finished. He called for paper and ink to write a reply. “You’re the poet,” he told Tinwright. “Take my answer down and write it in a fair hand.”
He proceeded to dictate a message so full of strange, almost meaningless phrases that Tinwright could only gape and do the best he could to get the wording correct. Still, a few things were clear. The astonishing missive was a letter to the Autarch of Xis, and promised that Tolly would meet with the southern king just after dark that very evening, then named the place.
“M’Helan’s Rock?” Tinwright asked, surprised. “The island out in the bay?”
“Yes, you insufferable idiot,” Tolly said. “Do you question my choice?”
“No, my lord! I just wanted to make sure I had the name straight.”
As if he were a child copying out texts in his best hand to avoid a thrashing, Matt Tinwright did his best to keep the writing clean and graceful. As if the Monster of Xis is going to notice my penmanship! he mocked himself. “Oh, no, we won’t kill that one when we conquer Southmarch—he writes too fair a hand!” Tolly’s right—I’m a fool. Still, it was an interesting situation, in a dreadful sort of way: who would have guessed a year and something past that Matt Tinwright would be here today, writing messages for the lord of all Southmarch to an actual god-king… whatever a god-king might be.…
“Good.” Tolly finished reading, then added his own jagged signature and sealed the letter closed with wax and his signet ring. “Send it back immediately,” he instructed Tirnan Havemore. “And if any man tries to open that, I will make sure he chokes on his own severed fingers.”
The castellan hurried off with the letter held out as though it were a deadly serpent.
“So now the endgame begins,” said Tolly as he turned to Matt Tinwright. “Our lives and our destinies are in our own hands, poet. Who could ask for better than that? If we succeed, we win all. If we lose—well, history will not remember our names and future generations will not find our graves.” He grinned, his expression still as shiny and brittle as cracked glass. “Splendid, eh?”
Tinwright only bowed and said, “My lord.” Tolly’s ranting did not seem to require an answer and he was too terrified to try to invent one.
Not all the Qar who had met in the small cavern near Sandsilver’s Dancing Room had their minds on the new enemy, the thousands of Xixian soldiers and their master, the autarch. Hammerfoot, lord of the Ettins, who like all his kind was slow to build to wrath but even slower to cool, sat in the darkness fuming like one of the forges of Firstdeeps.
“They humiliate us,” he rumbled. “These sunlanders. A thousand years of wretched treatment, hundreds of years of exile, and we are expected to forgive them ... just so.” He flicked his massive, blunt fingers in a gesture of disgusted finality. “As I sat looking at their unformed faces, soft as pink mud, it was all I could do not to crush them. I should have crushed them ...”
“Then you would be a fool,” Yasammez told him. “We need them all.”
“Need them?” Hammerfoot looked up; in the small place, he seemed to grow even larger. “We could have ground them all beneath our hooves if you had not held us back, Lady.”
Yasammez stood, and her dozen lieutenants fell silent. “Do you see this?” she said, touching the Seal of War. “It means you have sworn yourself to me. Do you see this sword?” She slapped Whitefire’s sheath. “In the very place my kin were murdered I forswore my oath and sheathed it. And you tell me now that you would become twice an oathbreaker? Where is the honor of the Deep Born, Hammerfoot? Where is the brave heart that has shared so many troubles with me—and whose father and grandfather fought beside me as well?” She shook her head and the thoughts that carried her words were as chill as a blast of wintry wind. “I am disappointed.”
For a moment it seemed the anger might make the great Ettin do something beyond madness, for the oaths of the Deep Born were among the most powerful things that any of those gathered there knew. Even Lord Hammerfoot, though, could not stand long in Lady Porcupine’s cold regard.
“I… I spoke rashly,” he said. “But I do not understand what we are doing, my mistress. We came here to fight the creatures who have done evil to us… not to help them.”
“We cannot beat this southern king by ourselves,” said Yasammez. “I told you, this autarch has twenty soldiers for every one of ours, and other weapons beside—those are odds that even the People cannot overcome… unless all we seek here is a noble death.” She spread her hands in the gesture Complications Unsought as she seated herself again. “But though we need the sunlanders as allies, that does not mean they are friends. Ultimately, we must keep the doorway to the gods from falling under the power of any mortals, even our momentary allies, so if we defeat the southerner but still cannot regain control here ...” She shrugged. “Then it will be time for the other measures.”
Aesi’uah, her chief eremite, seemed unsettled by this idea. “Other measures? Do you mean the Fever Egg… ?”
“Yes,” said the dark lady, silencing her. “Stone of the Unwilling, which of your people has been tasked with protecting the Egg?”
He flickered as if surprised. “Shadow’s Cauldron, great lady.”
“Call her.”
“Of course. She will step to us now.”
A moment later another of the Guard of Elementals joined their presence, smelling freshly of the Void. “I have come ...” she began.
“Produce it,” commanded Yasammez.
Shadow’s Cauldron did not need to ask what she was expected to produce; only half an instant passed before it was in her hand, a translucent stone the size of a human child’s head. In its depths some brown murkiness so dark it was almost black swirled like a tiny thundercloud. Inside that cloud something shone a sickly yellow, like lightning struggling to be born.
“The Egg is strong.” Shadow’s Cauldron was young and less used to forming words than Stone of the Unwilling; her speech buzzed like wasps in the thoughts of those listening. “It will not break unless thrown from a great height, or struck by something heavy and strong. But when it is broken, the fever seed will be released and it will spread like smoke. Everything in its path will die.”
“Even a god?” Yasammez looked at the thing with interest and a little distaste.
Again the buzzing words; those who had skin felt it crawl in response. “Any earthly form that a god wears will die—nothing that draws breath or sinks roots can live when this fever burns it.”
“But what will stop it?” demanded Greenjay’s son, Flightless. “Shall we kill everything that runs beneath the sun or moon? That will be a miserable epitaph for the People.”
“It stops of its own accord, like the ripples in a large pond,” Shadow’s Cauldron told him with something like anger in her voice. “As the Lady Yasammez wishes, it will not spread far beyond the borders of this mortal land before its potency dies.” Her flicker grew stronger. “Although many believe that none of the sunlanders deserve to survive ...”