The gust of hot wind and flame and the terrible screams of the Xixians drew cheers from the retreating Funderlings.
“Back to Pilgrim’s Reach,” Vansen called. “They won’t soon get past the Midsummer bonfire we’ve made for them here!”
“We haven’t even dug in,” said Jasper. “They struck so quickly they must have known we were here. But we should be able to hold them here for a long time.”
“We can’t afford to,” said Vansen. He pointed to the uppermost of Chert’s maps. “Look. If we choke off Pilgrim’s Reach here, then they will just go around us. They’ll likely find their way down by one of the spur tunnels. See, this laborer’s passage doesn’t even have a name, but it’s certainly wide enough for the Xixians to use.”
“Chert’s maps are more useful than I had thought,” said Cinnabar, breathing heavily as his son helped him take off his helmet. “I did not know there were so many unknown passages.”
“He studied the library in the temple, but he has also been down here himself, remember?” Vansen shuffled through the pile until he found the map of the level below them. “All the way to the island in the Sea in the Depths.”
Sledge Jasper, who had all but appointed himself Vansen’s personal bodyguard, let out a low whistle. “That Blue Quartz fellow was on the island? With the Shining Man himself?” He shook his head. “Never would have thought it of him.”
“Don’t underestimate him,” said Cinnabar, drinking water from a moleskin bag. “Chert is a rare and clever fellow. I hear more good sense spoken at his and his wife’s table than I do in the Highwardens’ chambers, and I don’t care who hears me say it.”
“But where is he?” asked Sledge. “I thought he stayed back in the temple with the priests and the others who can’t fight… or won’t fight.” His face told what he thought about those who would not take up weapons for Funderling Town.
“Don’t underestimate our allies, either, friend Jasper.” Vansen told him. “We have an entire platoon of monks standing bravely with us even though they have little training for it. By the gods, man, most of them have no better weapon than hoes and hammers and walking sticks!”
“Sorry, Captain. I meant no insult. I just wondered why he wasn’t here.”
“I know, Jasper. Chert Blue Quartz has a plan—an idea of his own, a big and desperate one—and we’ve told him to make what he can of it. It won’t help us, but if we fail it might at least help to save the rest of Funderling Town.”
“What’s he doing, Captain?”
Vansen shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t speak any more about it. The Guild seal is on it—is that spoken aright, Cinnabar?”
The magister nodded and sighed. “That’s it, exactly. It’s Guild business now, mad as it is.”
“You sound as though you think it will fail,” said Jasper.
“I do.” Cinnabar, with his young son Calomel’s help, lowered his armored back end onto a rock. “But I agreed to it, promised I would help, and I’ve done so. Now enough of this. We can do nothing more to help Chert, so let us think about what we can do here.”
Vansen pulled the map around. “As everyone knows, we’ll give ground as slowly as we can manage, but we will have to give ground. From the Counting Room and on down the tunnels. We’ll hold them for a long time in the Cavern of Winds, I hope, but our real stand will be in the Maze, I think. We’ll make then earn every inch there.”
“But they have their own miners, not to mention those weird little creatures covered in tortoiseshell.” Malachite Copper had joined them after seeing to his men. “Surely the southerners can find other ways around us?”
“Eventually, no doubt,” Vansen agreed. “But whenever they seem frustrated, we’re going to give a little. We’ll keep sentries in the other tunnels, so we’ll know if they find any of those routes. But if we fight as hard as we can and seem to give back only when we have to, then the autarch will keep his patience, and we’ll draw him downward as nicely as can be.”
“But that way we’ll lead him right into the Mysteries!” protested Sledge Jasper.
“We can’t beat them, Sledge. I know it sounds mad, but the fairies swear that what the autarch wants is to be there on the night of Midsummer’s Day to perform some black magic. That’s what we have to stop.”
“Well, you’re right, Captain.” Sledge Jasper nodded. “It does sound mad. But you’ve led us right so far, even in the beginning when I thought you’d have us all killed. Me and my men will do what you say.”
Vansen smiled. “We couldn’t manage it without you.” He turned to the others present, Cinnabar and Copper and the other Funderlings, some of them hereditary leaders of their own troops, some selected from the ranks of the warders by Vansen and Jasper. “This is a fight to the death… but it is also a dance. We must learn our partners’ movements and mood as well as we know our own.”
Jasper’s confidence disappeared in an instant. “A… dance? My men don’t dance, Captain.”
“Then think of it as a story being performed. Do you Funderlings have plays and players?”
Cinnabar frowned. “Of a sort. Some of the Metamorphic Brothers who conduct special rituals…” he hesitated for a moment,”… in the Mysteries, they are players of a sort.”
“Well and good,” said Vansen. “Think of it that way, then. It is up to us to put on a good show of resistance, but the only way we can do that is to fight and perhaps lose. And then, even if we manage to hold off a much greater force, when they begin to tire, we must give ground, however weary we are ourselves, and however good the position we must abandon.” Ferras Vansen spread his hands to show that he had nothing else to give. “That is our task, gentlemen. Perhaps the most difficult thing fighting men could be asked to do, and we must work this miracle with untrained troops and many new commanders. Could the odds be longer?” He turned to Jasper. “So don’t fear, friend Sledge. We may die in obscurity but there are many worse ways to do it—and many worse reasons.”
“It will be an honor to break my spade in obscurity with you, Captain.” Jasper sounded as though he was ready to run out and throw himself on a Xixian spear this very moment.
“Just the same,” Vansen said, “it is an honor I would have been happy to turn down.”
Pinimmon Vash was terrified by how much stone now lay above his head, of how far beneath the sky—and even beneath the sea!—he had come. It was all that he could do not to leap out of his litter this moment and force his way back past the soldiers in their strung-out camps until he had fought his way back to the surface. It wasn’t the knowledge of the permanent and fatal humiliation that would bring that kept him in place. Even the idea of losing face wasn’t enough to overcome the horror of these miles of stone weighing down upon his thoughts and feelings. Instead it was the face of the autarch himself, staring at him across the smoke of the ceremonial brazier, that kept Vash seated and smiling vapidly when he felt as though any moment his skin might yank itself free from his bones and run away without him.
Sulepis could go nowhere without the brazier, because it represented the fire of his godly ancestor, Nushash. It was the kind of thing Vash himself approved of: ancient, orderly, ceremonial, respectable—and exactly the sort of things his young master was emphatically not.
“Your face seems sour to me, Paramount Minister,” said Sulepis. “Has your keen eye spotted some weak spot in our assault?”
He hated it when the autarch made light of him in front of the soldiers, but even the polemarchs knew better than to show too much amusement. Whatever they might think of him in private, they all knew that Pinimmon Vash’s reach was second only to the Golden One’s. More officers than were gathered here today had incurred the paramount minister’s ire, and all of them were gone now, the luckiest in ignoble retirement.