Shadowheart Part 46

"I command the darkness not to hide you!

I command the light to seek you out and reveal you!

All Heaven is my hostage and the G.o.ds are my slaves. The hour is mine ... !"

Tinwright's gaze flicked helplessly back and forth between the ivory throat of the child and the flushed, pop-eyed face of Hendon Tolly, as apoplectically caught up in his own words as any wandering madman. A few yards away Elan M'Cory had slumped silently in a faint, but the remaining guards still held her tightly, their own faces gray with fear.

"Now!" Tolly shrieked. "Now, you wretch, lift the knife while I speak the final words! Then spill the blood and wash the mirror in it!"

Matt Tinwright's arm rose as if it was not attached to his own body any longer, and hung above the restless child. The flames of the torches were sucked first this way, then another. Shadows capered across the walls. The rustling all around him became loud cries and stamping sounds-were the dead rising all at once? Would the living all be pulled down into darkness this day?

He could not make his arm move. He knew Tolly would kill him if he didn't, but he just could not harm the child. Please, all you kind G.o.ds, help me ... ! Please, all you kind G.o.ds, help me ... !

Something struck Tinwright so hard that at first he thought Hendon Tolly had hit him with the heavy grimoire. He stumbled back a step and the knife slipped from his suddenly strengthless fingers and clattered to the stone flags.

Tinwright stared in horror at the arrow quivering in his own chest, so close to his face that only the feathers on the end told him what it was that had struck him. He could feel warm blood running down his belly and soaking into his foul, muddy garments. Then everything spun away and Matt Tinwright's world went dark.

37.

The Blood of a G.o.d ". . . By the time he reached Tessideme, with all the beasts of the field and the birds of the air in his train, the oak leaves had also burned away so that the weeping Orphan carried the sun's flame in his naked hands ..."

-from "A Child's Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven"

GREENJAY, leader of the Qar's Trickster tribe, climbed back out of the door in the stone flags with little of her usual grace. Fury sparked in her eyes. "A hundred paces below us the stairs are crammed with southern soldiers. This autarch has stolen a trick from the drows-we will have to win each yard forward with blood. We will not catch him this way, may the wind eat his name as well as his footprints!"

"He leaves us no choice," Saqri said to Barrick. "Come, manchild-the ropes must be ready now. They will have to be our way down. Haste!"

Barrick followed Saqri back through the Maze, its pa.s.sages still littered with rubble and the corpses of men and Funderlings. Saqri's soldiers had prepared ropes so her troops could quickly descend to the bottom of the cavern and the Sea in the Depths; those who were too heavy, or simply not built for climbing, would make their way down the narrow trails that crisscrossed the rocky cliff.

Aesi'uah was waiting for them, several rope-ends in her hand like a bouquet of silvery catkins. "Most of the southerners have already made their way out of the tunnels and up onto the surface of the island," she told them.

Barrick, whose vision was not as sharp as Saqri's, squinted into the distance, trying to make out the dark forms across the island in the middle of the silvery sea. Behind it loomed the silhouette of the colossal Shining Man.

"Some of the autarch's men are building boats," said Saqri. "They have brought what they needed with them." She frowned; it was strange to see even such a small show of emotion on her smooth face. "We have underestimated him-even Yasammez has. This Sulepis knows the ground as well as if he had scouted it himself."

"But why boats?" Barrick asked. "He and his soldiers are already on the island."

"Because he knows that with his men holding the tunnels he used to get past us, we will be forced to attack him from this side of the Sea in the Depths. He wants to send troops across to keep us at bay." Saqri made the gesture Unwilling Blindness Unwilling Blindness. "We can waste no more time in talk. Grab a rope, Barrick Eddon! Every heartbeat brings us closer to catastrophe."

And that catastrophe, he could not help understanding, would be nothing like the Great Defeat that Saqri and her kin had been awaiting all these centuries as a lover antic.i.p.ates the return of the beloved. This end would be something much different-dark, wild, and pointless.

The ropes creaked, but despite their astounding slenderness, they held. Every now and then one or the other of Barrick's feet slipped and his body spun away from the cliff face, and in those perilous, nauseating intervals he could see boats pushing off from the island onto the odd, metallic sea. And each boat, he knew, was full of Xixian soldiers, men ready to paint over their own fear-which now, in this strange place, must be great indeed-with the blood of as many Qar and Funderlings as they could destroy.

He looked back up to the clifftop where Ferras Vansen and the Funderlings were finishing up their own slower, more cautious rigging, preparing to descend and join the Qar in what Barrick could not help feeling would be at best a glorious shared suicide.

"Remember Greatdeeps!" he shouted to Vansen, and his voice echoed from the cavern's distant walls. The guard captain raised one hand in a salute.

Barrick had surprised himself. Why should he do such a thing? There was n.o.body more human than Vansen, with his stolid goodwill and his unthinking loyalty, and there was no mortal less human than Barrick Eddon had become, the Fireflower smoldering in his heart and thoughts. What did he care for mortals and mortal things?

Pinimmon Vash had seen many strange places, from the secret water dungeons underneath the Orchard Palace to the infamous crypts of the Mihannid Blue Kings, and even the autarch's own family tomb, the legendary Aeyrie of the Bishakh which stood out against the sky as if it had grown from the very stone of Mount Gowkha . . . but he had never seen anything quite like this.

The cavern itself-well, it seemed foolish even to call it a cavern. This immense chamber deep in the earth appeared to Vash to be almost a quarter the size of the entire Orchard Palace in Xis with all its grounds. Veins of dimly shining stone and k.n.o.bs of glittering crystal in the cavern's arching walls made it seem some kind of celestial model built to grace a G.o.d's table, but in the middle, almost directly above Vash's head, stretched only darkness. Any roof to the great cavern was much higher above their heads than the feeble light of the Xixian torches could reach. The sensation, Vash thought, was that of looking up from the bottom of a deep well.

He stood, with the rest of the autarch's army, on the island at the center of the Sea in the Depths, but it was the Shining Man-the mountainous, man-shaped lump of dull stone at the heart of the island-that truly dumbfounded and oppressed Vash. It wasn't a statue. No hands, human or otherwise, had crafted it as a replica of some actual being. Instead, it had the look of something cruder, as if someone had poured molten gem-stones into the impression a man had made falling headlong into mud. But there was more to it than that. Although at the moment it glimmered only with the reflected, refracted light of the chamber itself, Vash had seen a stronger glow throb briefly within it, like a candle guttering behind old gla.s.s, and his hairs had stood up on his neck and arms. The paramount minister had no wish to see it again, that pulse like a huge, diseased heart beating.

All around him, the rocky island swarmed with Xixian soldiers doing their best to ignore the ominous surroundings as they finished tying together the reed boats. Vash noted that he and the antipolemarch seemed to have correctly planned how many bundles of reeds the men would have to carry down from the surface, and he felt a moment's relief before he realized how foolish that was: what difference did it make that Vash had done his duty, that the autarch could find no fault with his arrangements? In a moment, they might all be dead, or the autarch himself might gain the strength of Heaven. Either way, nothing would ever be the same again.

"Where is my trusted paramount minister?" the Golden One called. Vash felt his hackles rising again.

"Here, O Great Tent." He hobbled across the sliding, rounded stones until he reached the place where Sulepis stood tall and slender in his golden armor, a glorious vision even in this inconstant light. "How may I serve you, Master?"

"Are the boats finished?"

Vash took a breath but hid his frustration. It was plain to see that they were. The soldiers stood lined up along the sh.o.r.eline beside the completed boats, ma.s.sive rafts with the bundled reeds pulled together at each end to make a bow and stern. "Of course, Golden One," Vash said. It had been an immensely difficult task to transport so many river reeds from Hierosol on such short notice, to keep them dry and safe from mold, but there had been no way of knowing whether they would be able to find the proper materials in this G.o.dsforsaken northern wasteland, and the Golden One did not respond well to failure.

Sulepis will become a G.o.d while I will probably die and receive a makeshift grave here in this wet northern h.e.l.lhole, Vash thought, without even a priest left behind to pray for me. But there stand the boats. I have again done what is mine to do. without even a priest left behind to pray for me. But there stand the boats. I have again done what is mine to do. Out loud, he said, "All the boats are ready. What else does the Golden One desire?" Out loud, he said, "All the boats are ready. What else does the Golden One desire?"

"The prisoners, of course. All of them."

Vash blinked. "All of them?"

Sulepis stared at Vash as though from a huge height, as though he himself were the Shining Man. "Yes. The king, the Hive girl, and the northern children. Does that suit you, Minister Vash? Or should I ask someone who has nothing better to do?"

Vash felt a cold shock down his spine. "Forgive my stupidity, Golden One, I did not understand. Of course they are all being brought. Panhyssir's priests are getting the children, and the others are there." He pointed to a small procession of soldiers coming forward from the tunnel they had followed under the silver sea and onto the island, surrounding the prisoners, King Olin and the girl with their hands tied behind their backs. The priest A'lat capered at the front of the procession, walking backward with a smoking bowl in each hand, wreathing the prisoners in fumes. When he turned, Vash saw with a twist in his stomach that the desert priest wore a mask that appeared to be made from the skin of someone else's face.

"Good, good." Sulepis peeled the gold stalls off his fingertips and dropped them to the carpet. One of the slaves stared for a moment, then quickly gathered them. "I must feel this with my own skin. Look, Vash." His long arm swept up, indicating the cavern, the Shining Man, and perhaps other things that only Sulepis himself could see. "Be aware of everything around you-smells, sounds, sights-for within the next hour the world changes forever."

"Of course, Golden One. Of course." Vash was desperate for the whole sordid horror to end so that he could find some way of accommodating whatever followed, if such were even possible. "You haven't told me what else I can do to aid your . . . ritual. Do you need an altar . . . ?"

"An altar?" Sulepis found this very amusing. "Don't you understand, Vash? This entire place is an altar, a place where the heavens were once made to shake-and will be again! This spot is sanctified by the blood and screams of the G.o.ds themselves!" The autarch's voice had grown so loud that soldiers and functionaries all across the island stopped, trembling in fear because they thought the autarch had lost his temper. "No, my altar is the earth itself, this silver sea and the scar that Habbili left when he sealed the way back to this world with his own dying spirit." He waved at the Shining Man, which loomed above them like the spire of a great temple. "Do you not know what that thing truly is? That is where Habbili the Crooked tore open the very flesh of the world so that he could banish the G.o.ds! Then, mortally injured himself, he closed the hole with his own being to keep them prisoned-and it has remained that way ever since, hiding here in the earth for thousands of years, worshiped by primitives as though it were a living thing." He bent toward Vash as if to share a secret. "But now Habbili's wounds have killed him at last. The priests and prophets have felt it. They have told me! Habbili's strength will no longer hold shut that wound in the world. Anyone who has the power or knowledge can reach out across the great void . . . or reach in in." He straightened up to his full height, leaving Vash to stare up at him like a man watching an approaching thunderstorm. "So bring on the children! Let their blood open the door and then let the G.o.ds themselves beware! Sulepis will be the master even of the immortals themselves!"

Barrick had only just alighted on the cavern's rocky floor when he saw Yasammez standing nearby looking out across the cavern toward the dark, distant shape of the Shining Man. She was alone for once, wrapped in a vast black cloak, her eyes half-closed so that she seemed as calm and remote as a cat lying in the sun. Her hair had pulled loose from its elaborate knots during her descent and hung around her head like th.o.r.n.y branches.

The Lady of Weeping, the voices whispered inside him in a kind of superst.i.tious awe. The Scourge. Exile of Wanderwind. The Scourge. Exile of Wanderwind.

Barrick approached her but did not kneel or bow. "My lady, will you not fight beside us? This is the last day, the last hour-the moment when we write the final page in the Book of Regret Book of Regret."

Her eyes slowly turned toward him. "That page was written long ago, before your kind had even entered the world."

He felt the sting of that but would not be drawn. "But I am also your kind now, Lady Yasammez, whether you or I wish it to be so . . . and you are our greatest warrior. If you do not fight for us now, when will you take the field? When the rest of the People lie dead?" For a moment, the shocked clamor of his Fireflower ghosts, their outrage at his disrespect, filled him with anger. "Is that your form of self-slaughter, Lady? To wait until there is no one left to see your fall so you spare yourself the shame of defeat?"

"The shame of defeat?" In cold anger she threw back her cloak to show her black armor and the naked blade of Whitefire that she leaned on like a cane; its gleam leaped to his eye like a tongue of lightning. "Child of men, I am am the defeat of our people in the breathing flesh. I have lived with the foreknowledge of my own death since your people gnawed uncooked bones in the forest. I will not survive this day and I know it, but I will not have such as the defeat of our people in the breathing flesh. I have lived with the foreknowledge of my own death since your people gnawed uncooked bones in the forest. I will not survive this day and I know it, but I will not have such as you you questioning me. Begone, child of a stolen heritage, and do what you will with the end of your own life." questioning me. Begone, child of a stolen heritage, and do what you will with the end of your own life."

The black murk of her cloak and the dark spikiness of her armor framed her pale, fierce face like storm clouds around the moon. For a moment Barrick saw things in her bottomless eyes he had never seen before, or perhaps in that strange place and time he merely dreamed them, but to his utter astonishment he felt a tear overspill his lid and trickle down his cheek.

"If I have wronged you, Lady, then I ask your forgiveness." He bowed and turned away.

Saqri was waiting for him, her hair strayed from its diadem and fluttering in the strange winds of this deep place like black spidersilk. "Here is the bearer of the Fireflower," she said and the Qar around her stirred and turned away from their enemies on the far side of the cavern. "Now our strength is complete." She looked from Barrick back to Yasammez, who still stood by the base of the cliff. "Did she have a word for you?"

"Yes. Several." He pulled on his helmet. "Lead us, Saqri. I need to smell blood in the air. That will make me stop thinking."

Unexpectedly, she laughed. "Come, then!" she called to the surrounding Qar, who banged spears and swords against their shields or threw back their heads and bayed up at the cavern's ceiling and the moon hidden so far above it, the moon that was in their blood as the Fireflower was in Barrick's. "The hour is upon us! The last of the old years begins to die tonight! Let us show this presumptuous mortal king how the People dance at Midsummer!"

With a shout the Qar leaped forward and raced across the cavern toward the southerners stepping off their boats along the near sh.o.r.e, soldiers as numerous as ants. The Xixians were already nocking arrows and bending bows, waiting for the Qar to come in range.

"Midsummer!" cried Barrick, and the voices within him wept and exulted.

Ferras Vansen had been in battles both fierce and frightening. He had stood with his master Donal Murroy against both bandits and rebels. While scouting he had hidden in a tree for half an agonizing day, knowing that even the slightest noise or movement could bring death because a troop of mercenaries had camped almost directly beneath him. He had disarmed a maddened Southmarch guardsman who had killed his own wife and their four children, wrestling with the man in the smeared blood of his dead family. He had fought the Qar themselves on battlefields as strange as nightmares-but nothing had prepared him for this final deadly struggle deep beneath Southmarch.

By the time Vansen and those Funderlings still able to fight made their way down the cliff, the Qar and their small, silent queen had already flung themselves at the first of the autarch's men to land on the sh.o.r.e. Vansen could not see well enough to guess who was getting the best of things because the light in the monstrous chamber had begun to flicker and gleam as colors he could scarcely recognize pulsed in the depths of the Shining Man the way red heat rippled in the embers of a fire.

"Double-fast, men!" Vansen shouted. "Otherwise the fairies may not leave us any!"

"Ha!" Malachite Copper was gasping along beside him. "I knew the Old Ones to be uncanny-I didn't know they were greedy, too!" Copper's leg had been injured in the final melee in the Initiation Hall but he was limping along gamely, doing his best to keep up. He had cursed when Vansen suggested he stay behind and tend his wound. "Well, Captain, we will just have to take what they leave us."

Vansen looked back. The Funderlings following were wide-eyed with something more than fright, a look that seemed to search beyond the moment and perhaps even beyond their own short mortal lives. Weighted down with weapons and armor, none of them much more than half Ferras Vansen's size, they still hurried to keep up with him, as if after all they had suffered they remained intent on proving themselves. "Sledge Jasper would be proud of you," he called to them now. "He is watching!"

"Make your Wardthane proud, boys!" gasped Malachite Copper, stumbling for a moment in his weariness. They had reached the outskirts of the fighting, a twilight world of unsteady shapes locked in struggle as the stones overhead glowed and then darkened, glowed and then darkened.

"At them!" Vansen's heart was strangely full here at the end, despite all that he had lost, all that he had never had. "At them, my brave men!"

To Beetledown's astonishment, the queen of the Rooftoppers herself was waiting for him when he reached the stables in the ruins of Wolfstooth Spire. His favorite mount Muckle Brown had been saddled and was scratching impatiently-a fine, strong young female flittermouse, dark as sweet ale and almost as large as a pigeon-but Beetledown had eyes only for his mistress.

"Majesty." He bowed as low as he could. "You do us too thickish an honor."

"Nonsense." Upsteeplebat smiled. "You are the best of my scouts, Beetledown. Still, we must not waste time in talk. If the Funderling Chert Blue Quartz says that the hour grows short, then you must fly now into the depths to find this man Cinnabar. Are you ready?"

"Directly, Ma'am," he said. "I had but my oilcloth to fasten tight-some of the ways lie through curtains of water tall as one of the castle doors!"

"I wish I had seen it as you have, brave Beetledown."

"If . . . if all goes well," he said, "perhaps Your Majesty would do me the honor of letting me be your guide. I wot well that my friend Chert and un's kind would be only too proud to show you the great caverns."

The queen's pretty face grew solemn. "And I would love to be shown them. It is a promise, then. If all goes well, you will show me some of these places you have seen, my brave scout."

He feared he would burst out singing at the honor. "Too kind you are, Exquisite Majesty." He finished lashing the oilcloth cloak close around him-it would not do to have anything dangling when he flew through those tight, dark s.p.a.ces-and then moved toward Muckle Brown, who hunched between her folded wings and stared at the Rooftopper with the cross, bleary expression of a child awakened too early from a nap. Beetledown climbed onto her lushly furred back and sat patiently as the grooms tied him into the saddle and put the rein-rings in his hand.

"Ah!" said Queen Upsteeplebat suddenly. "Do not forget your blade, brave Beetledown!"

"Blade?" He shook his head. "I fear you mistake me for another, Majesty. I have never ..."

"Never until now. But you have shown yourself not just a brave Gutter-Scout but a queen's paladin as well, and the traditional gift is . . . a sword." She clapped her hands and a small page came forward, carrying the sword as if it were made of precious jewels-which, in a way, it was. The silver thing was as slender as a cat's whisker and sharper than a bee's curved barb, its hilt wrapped in golden thread. "This is the needle of Queen Sanasu herself, dropped beneath her chair in the Long Ago. Take it, Beetledown. Serve your friend Chert well, and you will serve us all well."

He knew if he spoke much more he would say something foolish. He leaned down and took the sword from her dainty hand, then thrust it through the strap over his shoulder so that the hilt bobbed near his head and the pointy end did not trouble the flittermouse. "Thank you, Majesty." He signaled to the grooms who undid the bat's fetters and stepped away sharply to avoid being nipped. The big mounts were notoriously ill-tempered when kept from flying at night, and sundown had pa.s.sed hours ago. Feeling her freedom, Muckle Brown leaped out through the arched window of the belfry and into the black sky.

Beetledown prodded his mount with his heels; the bat turned up her wing and swept toward the wall of the inner keep, then over it, swimming through the air in brisk strokes followed by long, gliding moments where nothing moved but the air rushing past. He gave the bat a little more heel and then pulled on the rein. She swung high up into the air, banked so that for a moment it seemed even the moon was below them, then dropped down like a stone, spreading her wings only as the ground rushed so close that Beetledown held his breath.

A moment later they were through the gates of Funderling Town and skimming beneath the carved ceiling that was as lively as an upside-down world. Beetledown only knew one route into the Mysteries, the long and dangerous one Chert had shown him. He could only pray to the Lord of the Peak that he could do what had been asked of him in time.

Ferras Vansen felt as though he were nothing but an eye-as if none of his own sinew and bone remained except that organ of sight. Even the sounds of combat had become so unrelenting that they dulled almost to silence; faces slid past him like the faces of ghosts in a dream, angry, frightened, some even familiar, but he had no time for ordinary thought. He was in the middle of a storm of injury and death and could consider little beyond survival.

The Xixians on the far side of the Sea in the Depths had lined up their archers, and as the first of their manufactured boats reached the sh.o.r.e where Ferras Vansen, the Funderlings, and the Qar hurried forward, arrows hissed through the air, nearly invisible in the unsteady light. One of the Funderlings just in front of Vansen dropped with a shaft in his neck; another went down with one in the meaty part of his thigh. The first man was dead already, but Vansen dropped to the rocky cavern floor beside the second man and removed the arrow as carefully as he could, then tied the man's belt around his leg to stop the bleeding before hurrying forward to rejoin the charge.

With his longer legs, Vansen caught up to the vanguard just as they reached the first wave of Xixian irregulars, many of whom were still clambering out of their boats, doing their best to avoid touching the strange silver liquid of the underground ocean or lake. Some of them looked almost like children trying to keep their feet dry as they leaped from the prows of the unsteady boats to the stony beach. It gave Vansen an idea.

"Shove those nearest to the shiny sea back into it!" he shouted. "They are afraid of it!" It only occurred to him a moment later that the Funderlings might be just as frightened. After all, wasn't this the heart of their religious mysteries?

The Xixian soldiers seemed to be endless, as if the autarch possessed the harvest G.o.d Erilo's magic sack and could simply pour out whatever he wanted. Vansen, Malachite Copper, and half a dozen more Funderlings cut their way into the center of a group of Sanian infantrymen, each of whom carried two spears and small arm-shields that were little more than oversized gauntlets of metal and leather. These nearly unenc.u.mbered desert fighters were fast and a difficult match for the Funderlings, who got no particular advantage from being close to the ground. One of the little warriors died when a Saniaman threw one of his spears before the groups had even clashed; moments later a belch of fire on the far side of the Sea in the Depths was followed by a vast eruption of dirt and stone as the cannonball struck the ground near Malachite Copper. Two Funderlings were flung through the air, broken and bleeding; Copper himself was lucky to get away with a dozen new cuts made by flying shards of stone.

The Funderlings had been fighting for hours, first in the Initiation Hall, now here in the glittering semidark. Vansen was exhausted, and he knew his troops were, too. Most of the Xixian soldiers here hadn't even taken part in the battle for the hall. Not only were there ten times as many of them, they were all rested.

Unless we can find another way, we've lost, Vansen thought desperately as he gave ground against a tall, grinning Saniaman whose face was a ma.s.s of dark tattoos and who used his twin spears so cleverly that it was like fighting two men. Vansen had to make certain there was no one behind him while he concentrated on this nimble enemy, so he backed away from Copper and the others, trying to find an open spot. Even if we are in the last hours of Midsummer, it doesn't matter-the autarch must already be on that island and he's almost certainly begun whatever he means to do. Even if we are in the last hours of Midsummer, it doesn't matter-the autarch must already be on that island and he's almost certainly begun whatever he means to do. The thought spread through him like a poison, distracting him so that a sudden lunge by the half-naked Sanian soldier nearly caught him in the belly. He quickly brought up his shield and gave a little more ground. The thought spread through him like a poison, distracting him so that a sudden lunge by the half-naked Sanian soldier nearly caught him in the belly. He quickly brought up his shield and gave a little more ground.

Vansen saw that he was being forced too far from his fellows: even if he managed to kill his man, he would have a hard time finding his way back to the relative safety of numbers. The man lunged again, but it was a feint; a moment later, he swiped with his other short, flexible spear, trying to rattle Vansen's helmet or even knock it to the side a little to blind him, but Vansen managed to get the edge of his shield up and deflect it, then spun back out of the way of a second, more serious thrust.

The tattooed spearman laughed, a shrill, disturbing sound. Drunk, perhaps, or drugged. They said the Xixian priests gave their men potions to make them fearless. Some opponents found it terrifying, no doubt, but Vansen found it made him burn with anger. Was he a peasant, to be cowed by some giggling foreign savage while defending his own home?

An arrow snapped past the Saniaman and Vansen both, and in the instant's distraction, Vansen leaped forward, swinging his shield into the man's face while turning sideways to avoid the inevitable thrust of at least one of the spears. The spearhead darted out at him like a serpent, but he sucked in his belly and threw his weight behind the shield, bearing the man backward so that it was all the southerner could do to keep his feet, his arms helplessly flying out to either side for balance. In that moment Vansen kicked out and swept the man's nearest foot off the ground, then put his knee into the man's groin and fell on top of him, staying inside the circle of the reach of the two spears. Before the Saniaman could do more than try to grapple with the weight on top of him, Vansen let go of his shield and pulled his dagger from his belt. By the time the Sanian fighter had shoved the shield aside, Vansen had already struck him twice in the guts with the knife. The man's eyes widened and his mouth stretched as though he would scream, but Vansen kept pounding the blade into his middle and the man vomited blood instead.

Vansen climbed to his feet as the man still lay sc.r.a.ping with his fingers at the stony ground as though he might dig his way to safety. He stepped on the fellow's head and pressed down until he heard the man's jaw snap, then stood up and looked around.

A squad of the autarch's Leopards had set up on the far side of the silver sea and were beginning to fire their long rifles, each shot accompanied by a clot of smoke, so that within moments the men seemed to crouch beneath a tiny thunderstorm. The rifle b.a.l.l.s traveled far too fast to be seen, but their handiwork was all too apparent: nearly every shot threw a Funderling to the ground or ripped into one of the Qar. Vansen even saw one of the few remaining Ettins fall back with half his head shot away. Had there been more Leopards, or had they been able to load their filigreed rifles faster, the battle would have ended quickly. Even so, the Leopards and their guns were keeping the Funderlings and Qar from outflanking the Xixian irregulars so that the allies would have to continue taking on the autarch's strength face-to-face.

Vansen had just begun to form an idea about how to attack this hopeless situation when Barrick Eddon came running to him across the uneven stones, the prince's pale face smeared with blood from some small wound, his helmet in his hand and his curly red hair flying, so that for a moment he looked to Vansen like some freakish, supernatural creature, an armored demon with his entire head on fire. It still startled Vansen how tall the boy had grown, how he seemed to have aged years in the matter of a single season.

"We are trapped here, Captain-the hour is almost on us!" Barrick shouted. Arrows sped past him but he did not seem to notice. "If we remain, we have lost!"

"But what else can we do, Highness?"