Where are the others now? he worried. Vansen, Cinnabar, all of them—are they still alive? Fighting for their lives down there? His hours in the Maze and beside the Sea in the Depths were never far from his memory, a foreboding he could not shake off, like a terrifying dream. How will I even know if they want me to go through with the plan? I suppose I could send down a message with Nitre’s gunflour, wait for them to send one back up the same way.
But what if they didn’t reply? What if they couldn’t? Who would make the decision then? Chert could not imagine making it himself. Chasing his adopted son through the Mysteries had been bad enough, but this was a responsibility that might horrify the Earth Elders themselves.
Ferras Vansen could no longer even guess at what day it was. Time itself had been smeared into a succession of hours with very little difference between them. They might have as many as three days before Midsummer’s Eve, but Vansen had no precise idea and was far too busy fighting for his life to find out.
The Metamorphic Brothers’ temple was only a distant memory now, far behind them and far above them: the autarch’s superior force had driven them downward along the twisting passages between Five Arches and the Cavern of Winds, then out of that vast cavern and all the way down to the beginning of the dark Maze, the place where the Funderlings took their initiates.
Vansen’s troops had slowed the autarch’s progress considerably, but they continued to pay a high price for their resistance: the Funderlings had numbered less than two thousand at their greatest strength, when they had first entered the tunnels near Five Arches, but now they were less than a thousand and had stacked their dead three and four deep in the side tunnels as they gave ground—too many bodies to give any of them more than a cursory death-blessing before leaving them behind.
It was the grimmest struggle Vansen had ever seen, his undersized defenders hungry, exhausted, slippery with sweat, and forced to fight for hours beside the unburied bodies of their friends and kin. But what made it worst of all was the knowledge that their ending was already assured. This defense, however heroic, could only end in death for all of them, and what followed might even be worse for the survivors they would leave behind—their families and their neighbors.
Exhausted though he was, Ferras Vansen was finding it nearly impossible to sleep. The war was always on his mind, and he stayed awake long past his comrades trying to puzzle out impossible chances because he already knew that none of the possible chances would allow them to survive. When he did manage to fall into a shallow, uneasy slumber, he would be startled awake again by the feeling that all the stones in the world were tumbling down on top of him.
He was near the bottom, and the bottom was growing closer by the hour.
“Gods, but your men have fought well, Magister,” he told Cinnabar. “I do not mean to sound surprised—I expected no less—but I am even more impressed by their bravery since you have no tradition of war.”
“War isn’t the only forge of bravery.” Cinnabar reached over and ran his hand through his son’s hair, but the boy didn’t look up. Young Calomel had been kept out of the worst of the fighting but had still seen more than any child his age should have to see. He had gone from being the mascot and delight of the makeshift army to only another silent, weary, terrified young Funderling whose stare made Vansen’s heart ache. “But make no mistake, Vansen, we Funderlings were warriors once upon a time.”
“I have never heard it.”
“Then you have never studied the history of Eion, sir.” Cinnabar spoke sharply, but Vansen thought it was more from fatigue than any real animosity. “We fought in the greatest war of all, just to name one—against our own kin, the Qar.”
“The Godwar?”
“Yes, but we fought in the wars of men, too. We were miners and sappers in all the great empires, Hierosol and the Kracian States and Syan and even here, in Anglin’s day. Who do you think secured these caverns again after the Qar invaded? That was Funderling work and almost as bloody as this. Say what you will against the Qar but they are fierce, fierce fighters—thousands of our folk died taking these caverns and tunnels back. We called that time the ‘Kinwar,’ and we still have an expression, ‘Lonely as a Kinwar maid,’ because there were so few men to be husbands.” He shook his head sadly. “If our people survive this, there will be far too many widows and unmarried girls again in the years ahead.”
“If only the Qar had stood with us.” That betrayal troubled him far more than any of his own wounds. He had misjudged the Twilight People badly, and now the whole Funderling tribe was paying for Ferras Vansen’s stupidity. “I still can’t believe ...!”
“Don’t torture yourself, Captain.” Sledge Jasper looked up from his whetstone. The Funderling sharpened his knife so frequently that the blade was growing hard to see. “The Earth Elders have a plan for us—no mortal can claim to know as much as the gods.”
“But this time it’s the gods we must fight, or so it seemed from what the Qar told us.”
Cinnabar snorted. “Me, I take nothing the Qar say on trust, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever the truth, this southern king, this autarch ... he thinks he can free the gods, and he’s battering his way into our holiest of holies. That’s reason enough to stand our lives on the balance. That you fight alongside us, Captain Vansen, is more than anyone could ask. Don’t waste your strength on regrets.”
Vansen wished it were so easy, that he could command his feelings like soldiers; but that army was far less obedient than these brave Funderlings.
25. Tooth and Bone
“Blind Aristas told the boy that his dreams had been given to him by the gods, and that the meaning of them was that an innocent must go to the house of the angry god Zmeos Whitefire and find the lost sun.”
He awakened slowly, as if swimming up from Erivor’s pounding depths.
“Why do you hide from the battle, Barrick Eddon?” One of the Trickster Qar grinned down at him like a fox. “There is still much to do.”
“Yes,” said another smiling nightmare. “You should not sleep so late.”
But even as they taunted him, these long-limbed Tricksters—three of them, as far as he could see, in different downy shades of gray or brown and with angular faces like laughing demons out of the Book of the Trigon—had been clearing away the dirt and stones that had engulfed him when the wall of the cave collapsed. He could still hear the sounds of strenuous fighting outside the cavern, but at least the cannons had fallen silent. Barrick wanted very much to get out in the open before they began firing again.
As he staggered to his feet and began to knock the worst of the clumped dirt from his armor, the first Trickster handed him his sword, hilt-first. “Perhaps you would like to go out and stick some other sunlanders with that,” the creature suggested.
“Perhaps I would.” He examined the strong, slim Qar blade, which was scratched and dented in a few places but not too badly damaged. “And since you helped dig me out, perhaps you would like to keep me company while I do so.”
“It would be a pleasure, Barrick Eddon,” said the creature, its gray face shiny as ancient leather. “Oh, yes, we all know your name. I am Longscratch. These are Riddletongue and Blackspine, my quarterling cousins. We came here to kill sunlanders, but if it is now the southern sort we kill instead of your sort ... well, let it be so.”