For a moment Vansen’s stomach threatened to crawl up his throat and leap out of his mouth. Then he realized that although the things in Antimony’s bag did look like fleshy, shriveled ears, they were in fact some kind of mushroom. Still, they smelled very strange, dark and damp and musty; Vansen found it difficult to muster much enthusiasm. “Yes. Splendid.”
“I still don’t think this is a good idea, Captain,” Cinnabar told him. “Let us at least send a dozen men with you. Jasper is up and around.”
“Yes, take me, Captain.” Sledge Jasper’s bald head was so cut and bruised it looked like it had been carved from marble. “I’ll do for some of those meadow-dancers. Yes, I wouldn’t mind killing a few more at all.”
“Which is why this isn’t the mission for you,” Vansen said. “I wouldn’t waste our best fighter when I don’t want a fight. They need you more here.”
“But we need you here, Vansen,” said Malachite Copper. “That is the most important truth.”
“You must trust me, gentlemen—I can do more good this way. Would you rather have me here waiting to defend against another attack, or out making sure there are no more attacks?”
Cinnabar shook his head. “That is chop-logic—those are not the only two possible outcomes. You might be killed without any bargain made. Then we have neither a defender nor a peacemaker.”
“Not a very cheerful thought, Magister, but I must chance the odds. I am the only person who can do this, you must believe me. And if I take too many men with me, I will not only leave your defenses compromised, but increase the chance my mission will be seen as an attack. My only hope is to speak to their leader, face to face.” He turned to Antimony. “I admire the rope around the prisoner, Brother—we must certainly keep him tied to us—but I would rather see it around his ankle than his waist. If he tries to get away I want to be able to jerk him off his feet.” He looked sternly at the drow, who, although he could not understand Vansen’s words, could certainly understand his tone. The bearded little man cringed in fear, baring his snaggy yellow teeth.
They did not linger in the leavetaking: Vansen knew Cinnabar and the others did not agree with him, and he felt bad himself that he had to take Antimony, a very well-liked fellow. It was possible another of the Funderling monks might be able to translate, but he trusted young Antimony to keep his head in a crisis, and despite his own show of confidence he knew he had only a very small chance of achieving his goal without something going wrong.
The drow, who still seemed to fear some kind of treachery by his captors, trudged ahead on his short length of rope, leading them up into the Festival Halls, back to the spot where the Qar had broken through. Cinnabar’s men had almost finished filling the space where the Qar had dug their way in, stacking rock so expertly that it was impossible to get past. Vansen was taken aback—he had forgotten that the breach was being repaired. How would they get to the Qar? Not by any surface route, that was certain: if the confused bits of news that had trickled down to Funderling Town and thence to the temple were true, aboveground the siege had turned into a full-bore invasion. He and Antimony would never survive an attempt to reach the Qar that way.
It would take hours to shift the stone again here—hours these Funderlings should be spending improving the defenses elsewhere instead of undoing and redoing their work. Ferras Vansen leaned against the wall, suddenly weary beyond words. Commander? General? He wasn’t even fit for his old post as guard captain.
The drow looked the repairs up and down, then looked at Vansen. He said something in his harsh, gulping tongue.
“He says… I think he says there is another way to reach his camp from here,” Antimony told Vansen.
“Another way? The Qar have another way into our caverns?” He stared at the little bearded man. “Why would he surrender that secret to us?”
“He is afraid if we turn back now the rest of my people will lose patience with him and kill him. He says the hairless one—Jasper, of course—was… making gestures.” Antimony suppressed a smile. “Making it clear that he would be happy to wring this one’s neck… or worse.”
“I’ll wager he was.” Vansen nodded. “Yes, tell him we will let him show us the way.”
“He asks only one thing. He begs you not to tell Lady Porcupine that he showed you a path you did not already know. He says that would mean an ending for him more terrible than anything even the hairless one could imagine.”
33. Caged Children
“Rhantys, who claimed to speak with fairies himself, says that the Qar queen is known as the First Flower because she is the mother of the entire race. Rhantys even suggests her name, Sakuri, comes from a Qar word meaning ‘Endlessly Fertile,’ but the absence of a Qar grammar means this is hard to prove or disprove.”
It was not that Pinimmon Vash disliked children. He had always kept dozens of them as slaves, especially for his closest needs. All boys, of course—he found girls unsatisfying and inadequate. Still, he had young female slaves among his household as well. No one could claim he had anything against children. But it was the strange pointlessness of these particular children he found disconcerting.
Not to mention all the work it had caused him. It was one thing to deal with the autarch’s ordinary moods, his sudden urges to eat bizarre foods or to hear some exotic style of music or experiment with some ancient, near-forgotten form of interrogation. That was well within the ordinary scope of Vash’s job; he had performed such services for other autarchs before this one. In fact, he prided himself on his skill at foreseeing such requests and having at least the beginnings of fulfilling them at all times. But Sulepis made even his grandfather Parak, a man of wild appetites and fancies, seem as staid as the oldest and most constipated priest in the great temple. And now…
“Go ashore with a troop of soldiers,” the autarch had told him when they made land at Orms, a city in the marshy Helobine country south of Brenland, and began trading with the locals to refresh the ship’s supplies of fresh food and water. “Go some miles outside the walls—I do not wish to waste my time fighting with these people, and if I set my men on the city I will have to let them off the leash and then we will be here days and days. So take your men out to the countryside and bring me back children. Alive. A hundred should do ...”
There had been no further explanation, of course, nor instruction: there seldom was with this autarch.
Seize one hundred children from their homes. Bring them back to the ship. House them, feed them—keep them alive and more or less well. But am I told why? No, of course not. Ask no questions, Vash. You may be the autarch’s oldest and must trusted adviser, but you deserve no courtesies, he told himself sourly. Just do as you are told.
The paramount minister walked one last time around the section of the hold that had been boxed in with lashed staves to make a cage for the young prisoners. A dozen were housed here, the rest scattered out over several other ships. Feeding them was not the problem, Vash thought as he examined their pale faces, so confused, sullen, or blankly terrified. But keeping them alive—how was he supposed to do that? Already several of them were running at the nose and coughing. A cage in the hold was not a very warm place to house a dozen half-naked children, but would the autarch understand that if a sudden fever ran them through them and took them all? He would not.