Because I fear thatfikuyin intends to use me in some way to open Immon's Gate into the palace of the Earthfather. If that happens, if I am lost while I still carry the Glass, then all is lost with me.
But why me? Barrick shook his head. / can barely stand up! I'm full of mad thoughts-I'm sick! Give it to Vansen. He'll get it where you need it to go. He's a
soldier. He's… honorable, lie looked over to the guard captain and realized that he meant it-despite everything he had said about the guard captain, every petty dislike he had expressed, Barrick admired the man and envied his strength and determination. In another world, another Barrick would have given much to have such a person as a friend.
/ intended to, said Gyir, but I have been thinking. There was a brief silence in Barrick's head as the fairy spoke only to Vansen, then he turned his scar¬let stare back onto Barrick. Ferras Vansen is brave, but he does not carry Lady Porcupine's touch. My lady singled you out, Barrick Eddon and gave you an errand of your own to the House of the People-one that even I do not know. Her com¬mand will carry you on when all else would fail. But it will not keep you alive if Fate intends otherwise, the fairy could not help adding, so do not be foolhardy! Ferras Vansen can go with you, but you must be the one to carry it.
So you want me to do a kindness for the woman who wants to kill all my people?
Must I have this argument with every sunlander who can draw breath? Gyir
shook his head. Have you not listened? If this does not reach King Ynnir, then
Yasammez will destroy all in her way to recapture Godsfall-your home-for our
folk. If the Pact of the Glass is fulfilled there is at least a faint hope she will hold
back, but only if the glass reaches the king's hand.
Barrick swallowed. He had spent most of his young life trying to avoid just such situations-a chance to fail, to prove that he was less than those around him, those with healthy limbs and unshadowed hearts-but what else could he do?
Very well, if we must. He thought of the brown-eyed girl, of what she would think of him. Yes, then! Give it to me.
Do not look into it, Gyir warned. You are not strong enough. It is a powerful, perilous thing.
I don't want to look into it. Barrick tucked the ragged bundle into his shirt, trying to make sure it went into the one pocket that did not have a hole.
Ah, blessings. May Red Stag keep you ever safe on your path. The relief in the Storm Lantern's thoughts was clear, and for the first time Barrick realized that Gyir, too, might have been carrying a painful, unwanted burden. Then Gyir abruptly stiffened, becoming as still as a small animal under the shadow of a hawk. Quickly, he said, what day is this? He turned his burning red eyes from Barrick to Ferras Vansen, who both stared back helplessly. Of course, how would you know? Let me think. Gyir laid one hand over the other and then brought them both up to cover his eyes, and for the space of perhaps two dozen heartbeats he sat that way, silent and blind to the world, We hare a day, perhaps two, he said abruptly, dropping bis hands away from the smooth mask of flesh.
A day until what? Barrick asked. Why?
Until the ceremony of the Earthfather begins, Gyir said. The sacrifice days of the one you call Kernios. Surely you still mark them.
It took Barrick a moment, but then as it dawned on him he turned to Vansen, who had also understood."The Kerneia," he said aloud."Of course. By all the gods, is it Dimene already? How long have we been locked in this stinking place?"
Long enough to see your world and mine end if I have the day wrong, said Gyir. They will come for us when the sacrifice days begin, and I am not yet ready.
He would not say any more, but fell back into silence, shutting his two fellow prisoners out as thoroughly as if he had slammed a heavy door.
It was bad enough to suppose that the Kerneia marked the day of your doom, Ferras Vansen kept thinking, but it was made far worse by being trapped deep beneath the earth with no certain way of knowing what day it was in the world outside. This must be what it had been like to be tied to a tree and left for the wolves, as he had heard some of the old tribes of the March Kingdoms had done to prisoners, stopping the condemned's ears with mud and blindfolding their eyes so that they could only suffer in darkness, never knowing when the end would come.
Vansen slept only fitfully following Gyir's announcement, startled out of his thin slumbers every time Prince Barrick twitched in his sleep or some other prisoner growled or whimpered in the crowded cell outside.
Kerneia. Even during his childhood in Daler's Troth it had been a grim holiday. A small skull had to be carved for each family grave, where it would be set, nestled in flowers, on the first light of dawn as homage to the Earth-father who would take them all someday. Vansen's own father had never stopped complaining about the laziness of his adopted folk in Daler's Troth, who made their skull carvings out of soft wood. Back home in the Vuttish Isles, he would declare at least once each year, only stone was acceptable to the Lord of the Black Earth. Still, Ferras Vansen didn't doubt that with three of his own children gone to their graves and also the resting places of his
wife's parents and grandparents to be adorned, I'edar Vansen must have se-cretly been grateful he could make his death-tokens in yielding pine in¬stead of the hard granite of the dales.
Skulls, skulls. Vansen could not get them out of his thoughts. As he had discovered when he came to the city, people in Southmarch purchased their festival skulls in the Street of Carvers, replicated in either stone or wood, depending on how much they wanted to spend. In the weeks before Kerneia you could even buy skulls baked of special pale bread in Market Square, the eye-sockets glazed dark brown. Vansen had never known what to think of that: eating the offerings that should go to Kernios himself seemed to trifle with that which should be respected-no, feared.
But then, they always said I was a bumpkin. Collum used to make up stories to amuse the other men about me thinking thunder meant the world was ending. As if a country boy wouldn't know about thunder!
Thinking about poor, dead Collum Dyer, remembering Kerneia and the black candles in the temple, the mantises in their owl masks and the crowds singing the story of the god of death and deep places, Vansen wandered in and out of something that was not quite sleep and that was certainly not restful, until at last he woke up to the tramp of many feet in the corridor outside.
The gray man Ueni'ssoh drifted across the floor as though he rode on a carpet of mist. His eyes smoldered in the dull, stony stillness of his face and even the prisoners in the large outer cell shrank back against the walls. Vansen could barely stand to look at him-he was a corpse-faced night¬mare come to life.
"It is time" he said, his words angular as a pile of sharp sticks. The brutish guards in their ill-fitting armor spread out on either side of Vansen and his two companions.
"For what, curse you?" Vansen raised himself to a crouch, although he knew that any move toward the gray man would earn him nothing except death at the ends of the guard's sharp pikes.
"Your final hour belongs to Jikuyin-it is not for me to instruct you." Ueni'ssoh nodded. Haifa dozen guards sprang forward to shackle Gyir and loop a cord around his neck like a leash on a boarhound. When Barrick and Vansen had also been shackled the gray man looked at them all for a moment, then silently turned and walked out of the cell. As the guards
prodded Vansen and the others after him, the prisoners in the outer cell turned their faces away, as if the three were already dead.
Do not despair-some hope still exists. Gyir's thoughts seemed as faint to Ferras Vansen as a voice heard from the top of a windy hillside. Watch me. Do not let anything steal your wits or your heart. And if Ueni'ssoh speaks to you, do not listen!
Hope? Vansen knew where they were going and hope was not a very likely guest.
The brute guards drove them deep into the earth, through tunnels and down stairs. For much of the journey the slap of the guards' leathery bare feet was the only sound, stark as drums beating a condemned man's march to the gallows. Since Vansen had only seen these passages through the eyes of the creatures Gyir had bespelled, it was strangely dreamlike now to travel them in his own body. They were not the featureless stone burrows he had thought them, but carved with intricate patterns, swirls and concentric cir¬cles and shapes that might have represented people or animals. He could recognize some of the shapes on the tunnel walls, and some of them were hard to look at-great, lowering owls with eyes like stars, and manlike crea¬tures with heads and limbs divided from their torsos and the body parts piled before the birds as though in tribute. Other ominous shapes and sym¬bols lined the passages as well, skulls and eyeless tortoises, both symbols of the Earthfather that Vansen knew well, along with some he did not recog¬nize, knotted ropes and a squat cup shape with stubby legs that he thought might be a bowl or cauldron. And of course there were images of pigs, the animal most sacred to Immon, Kernios' grim servant.