The remaining Longskulls hurried the last prisoners along. Vansen had to trot, no easy feat with heavy shackles on his wrists, and also to help the prince when the boy stumbled, which was often. The pain in the prince’s withered arm from the restraints must be great, Vansen knew, although Barrick refused to mention it: it took no physician’s eye to see the boy’s pale skin, his creased, wincing eyes, or to interpret the silence that had fallen over him in the last hour.
They reached a wide place in the corridor where several other passages branched out. The guards forced them down one of those branches, and within just a few more paces they emerged into a large open space where they stopped before another massive doorway, this one guarded by lowering apelike things that might have been Followers, but grown to the size of men and dressed in dusty, mismatched bits of armor. The Longskulls gabbled at these sentries, then stepped forward and used their spears to tap on the door, which despite their deferential touch made a hollow, brazen clang with each knock. The door slowly swung open and the quietly honking guards shoved the prisoners inside.
Behind the door lay the most demented place Vansen had ever seen, a cavern as large as the interior of the Trigon Temple in Southmarch, but furnished by a madman. Broken bits and pieces of the statues that had once lined the valley stood all around the immense space—here half a warrior crouching in the middle of the cracked floor, there a single granite hand the size of a donkey-cart. Moss and little threadlike vines grew patchily on the sculptures, and in many places on the rough-hewn walls and floor as well, and the air was damp with mist from an actual waterfall that poured from a hole high on one side of the cavern and followed a splashing course downward over stone blocks to fill a great pool that took up half of the vast room.
Across the pool from the doorway stood another huge statue of a headless, seated warrior, tall as a castle wall. Enthroned on this stone warrior’s lap, with various creatures kneeling or lying at his feet like a living carpet, sat the biggest man—the biggest living thing—Vansen had ever seen. Two, no, three times the height of a normal man he loomed, massive and muscular as a blacksmith, and if it had not been so absolutely clear that this monstrosity was alive, Vansen would never for an instant have believed him anything but a statue. His hair was curly and hung to his shoulders, his beard to his waist, and he was as beautiful as any of the stone gods’ statues, as if he too had been carved by some master sculptor, except that one side of his gigantic face was a crumpled ruin, one eye gone and the skin of cheek and forehead a puckered crater in which his disarranged teeth could be seen like loose pearls in a jewelry box.
Somewhere deep beneath them, something boomed like a monstrous drumbeat, a concussion that punched at Vansen’s ears and made the entire rocky chamber shudder ever so briefly, but no one in the room even seemed to notice.
Chains of all sizes and thicknesses hung around the terrible god-thing’s waist and dangled from his neck and shoulders, so that if he wore some other garment it could not be seen at all. Hundreds of strange, round objects hung from the chains. As his eyes became used to the light, Vansen realized that every one of the hanging things was a severed head, some only naked skulls or mummified leather, some fresh, with ragged necks still dripping—heads of men, of fairies, even animals, heads of all descriptions.
The full childhood memory came back to Vansen suddenly, the taunt of older boys to scare the younger ones—“Jackin-Irons! Jack-in-Irons be coming from the great deeps to catch you! He’ll take your head!”
Jack in Irons. Jack Chain. He was real.
The apparition raised an arm big as a tree trunk, chains swaying and clanking, the heads dangling like charms on a lady’s bracelet. The bastard god grinned and his beautiful face seemed almost to split open as he displayed teeth as large as plates, as cracked and broken as the ruined stones.
“I AM JIKUYIN!” he roared, his voice so loud and so painful that Vansen fell to his knees and then slumped down to his belly with his hands over his ears in a fruitless attempt to protect himself from the deafening noise. It was not until the giant spoke again that Ferras Vansen realized he was hearing the words not with his ears, but echoing inside his mind.
All ordinary thought disappeared in the skull-thunder that followed.
“WELCOME, MORTALS—AH, AND ONE OF THE HIGH ONES, TOO, I SEE. WELCOME TO THE UNDERWORLD. I PROMISE I WILL GIVE YOU A USEFUL DEATH, AND AFTERWARD I MAY EVEN SHOW YOU THE MATCHLESS HONOR OF WEARING YOUR SMALL BUT SHAPELY HEADS!”
18. Questions with No Answers
So then in that great battle matchless Nushash at last pulled the sun itself down from the sky and hurled it full into the face of Zhafaris, the old Emperor Twilight, whose beard caught fire. He was burned into ashes, and that, my children, was the end of his evil rule.
Nushash and his brother Xosh scattered the ashes in the desert of Night. Then, in his generosity, Nushash invited his three half brothers to join him in building a new city of the gods on Mount Xandos. Argal the Thunderer and the others thanked him and swore fealty, but already they were planning to betray him and take the throne of the gods for themselves.
Although she could not have said exactly why, Pelaya found herself spending more time in the garden than had been her habit, even on days like today when the weather was less than ideal, with heavy gray skies and a biting wind from the sea. It was partly because her father Count Perivos had been so busy lately, busier than she’d ever seen him, with no time at all to give to his children. Sometimes he stayed so late examining the city’s defenses that he even slept in the Documents Chamber and only came home to change his clothes. But much of her interest in the garden was simply her interest in the prisoner Olin— King Olin, however he might mockingly disclaim his title. On the occasions that he and Pelaya met each other she always enjoyed talking to him, although it was never quite as strange and exciting as it had been the first time, when he had been a complete stranger and her companions had watched with horror as she introduced herself to him, as though she had decided to leap off the city walls and swim to Xand.
Still, she enjoyed the grown-up way their conversations made her feel, and he seemed to enjoy them too, although he was always disappointed by how little news she could give him about his homeland. She knew that one of his sons had died, and his daughter and other son were missing, and that his country was in some kind of war. Sometimes when Olin spoke about his children he seemed to be hiding feelings so strong that it seemed he would burst into tears, but then only moments later he would be so coldly composed she wondered if she had imagined it. He was a strange man even for a king, very changeable, unfailingly polite but sometimes a little frightening to a girl like Pelaya, whose own father was, for all his intelligence, a simpler sort of man. She sometimes thought Olin Eddon’s true feelings were as painfully imprisoned as he was himself.
He was not allowed into the garden very often, only a few days in every tennight. Pelaya thought that unkind of the Lord Protector. She wondered if she dared speak to her father about it—he was steward of the entire stronghold, after all—but although there was nothing illicit in the friendship with the northern king, she didn’t want to draw attention to it. Count Perivos was a serious man; he didn’t think much of things that had no purpose and she doubted he’d ever understand the harmless attraction Olin’s company held for her. Her father had doubtless heard something about the odd friendship, but so far he hadn’t said anything to her about it, perhaps reassured by Teloni, who had decided the whole thing was a boring lark of Pelaya’s and had stopped fussing at her about it. It was probably best to leave things that way, Pelaya decided, and not tempt the gods.