Mayflies "Some scholars believe that the Elementals may be some other kind of creature entirely, less natural even than the fairies themselves." -from "A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand" FOR LONG MOMENTS Ferras Vansen could only sit and stare into the near-darkness trying to understand what had happened. He was weak and queasy and his head was ringing like a bell, a single continuous chime. Chert Blue Quartz stood over him, mouth working broadly, but Vansen could hear no sound.
Deaf, he thought. I'm deaf. And then he remembered the thunderclap that had knocked him from his feet, a crash louder than anything he had heard since the blasting in the pits of Greatdeeps.
He pushed that nightmare memory from his mind and closed his eyes once more. Dizziness picked him up like a boat on a rough current and swirled him around and around. He was suddenly aware for the first time in days that he was really, truly underground-deep in a hole beneath the world, with an unimaginable weight of stone between him and the sun. If only someone would take a giant stick and poke a hole through it so he could see the light again, instead of being lost beneath it… lost, confused, baff led…
"… Throw it farther," someone whispered. "… Didn't know…"
Vansen opened his eyes again. Chert was still talking but now he could hear him, although the small man sounded as if he were a hundred paces away. Still, it meant that his hearing was coming back.
The cavern was full of other Funderlings as well, living Funderlings, none of whom Vansen recognized until Cinnabar himself appeared beside him, dressed in armor of a type he had never seen before: the small man was covered with round plates so that he looked a cross between a turtle and a pile of discarded dishes.
"How is he?" the Funderling magister asked Chert. Where had Cinnabar come from? All Vansen could remember was that he hadn't expected to see him anytime soon. For that matter, it seemed strange to him that Chert Blue Quartz was here as well.
"I think he was deafened by the burst." Chert's voice still sounded muffled.
"I'm not deaf," Vansen said, but the Funderlings showed no sign of having heard him. He repeated it, trying to be louder. It seemed to work because both of them turned toward him at the same time. "My hearing is returning," he explained. "What happened?"
"It was all my fault," said Chert, his face creased in worry. "I found some of our blasting powder beetles in the storage hall-we use them to crack rock-and thought, well, I didn't have a weapon, and it might scare the Qar away, so I brought one. When I got here I saw they were all over you, so I lit it, came up behind, and threw the beetle as far as I could." He looked chagrined. "My arm is not as strong as it once was…"
"Nonsense!" said Cinnabar. "My men and I would never have arrived in time. Because of you, Master Blue Quartz, the fairies were reeling and confused when we arrived and they couldn't retreat fast enough. You saved Captain Vansen and quite possibly the temple as well!"
Chert looked surprised. "Really…?"
Vansen suddenly remembered the last moments. "Where is Sledge Jasper? Is he…?"
"Alive," Cinnabar assured him. "Ears ringing like yours, but he is not complaining-oh, no. Too weak to complain, in any case. Some of my men are bandaging him-he leaked a lot of blood, but he'll live. There is a fighter who would make the Elders proud!"
Vansen could not quite shake the feeling that he was buried beneath a millionweight of heavy stone. He could move, but every part of him seemed misshapen, unfamiliar, and his thoughts were sluggish. "You said this… beetle… was full of rock-cracking powder. Is it the stuff called serpentine or gunflour-the same black powder we use for cannons? Is there more of it?"
"Yes, there's more," Chert said. "Nearly another dozen shells in the storeroom, and probably more blasting powder as well. But we have no cannons down here, nor room to shoot them…"
A young Funderling in armor hurried up. "Magister Cinnabar, one of the enemy that was smashed up by the blasting powder… one of those drows…!"
"What, man? Chip it loose and let's have it."
"He's alive."
Strangely, Vansen recognized the captive. The dirty little man staring resentfully up at him was the one who had tried to stab him, and whose wrist he had snapped. Indeed, the shaggy creature was cradling that arm, which was swollen and bruised.
"Can we speak to him?" Vansen asked.
Cinnabar shrugged. "My men have been trying to. He refuses to answer. We know nothing of what tongue he speaks-he may not even understand us."
"Then kill him," Vansen said loudly. "He's useless to us. Cut off his head."
"What?" Chert was shocked. Even Cinnabar looked taken aback.
Vansen had been watching the prisoner carefully: the little man had not flinched, had not even looked up. "I do not mean it. I was just curious whether he was only pretending not to understand. We must think of a way to make him tell us what he knows about his mistress' plans."
Chert still looked suspicious. "What does that mean? Torture?"
Vansen laughed sadly. "I would not hesitate if I thought it would save your family and my people aboveground, but the answers given by a man under torture are seldom useful, especially if we cannot speak his tongue well. But if you think of any other ways, let me know. Otherwise, I may begin to change my mind."
Magister Cinnabar gave directions for the prisoner to be taken back to the temple, then hurried off to supervise the other tasks he had assigned. Those of his reinforcements not gathering up bodies or helping the wounded had already been sent to repair the breach the Qar had made into the Festival Halls.
Vansen rubbed his aching head. He wanted nothing so much as to lie down and sleep. He had been exhausted long before Chert's bursting shell had nearly deafened him, and although his wounds had been washed and bandaged while he was senseless he ached mightily all over. He wanted a drink of something strong and at least an hour in bed, but he was the commander here, more or less, so it would have to wait.
"You said you had a dozen more of the gunflour beetles and more powder," Vansen said to Chert.
"That's what we have at the temple. We have more in Funderling Town, much more. We use it to break up stone when we must work fast-when we are not given time to do things in the old, proper ways…"
Vansen had learned more than he really wanted to in the past month about the good old days of wet-wedging and sand-polishing. "Let us talk to Cinnabar about it, then," he said hurriedly. "Perhaps we can prepare a welcome for next time that will make the dark lady and her soldiers think twice about coming into our home uninvited."
Chert did his best to get Vansen to rest-the captain was ribboned with cuts and still clearly not hearing very well-but the big man would not be dragged away from the battlefield, so Chert returned to the temple alone. The Metamorphic Brothers had already heard news of the battle and almost all of them wanted to ask Chert about it, including many who seemed to think of him as a kind of hero. In another time he might have enjoyed the attention but now he was too frightened and weary to want anything but to get back to his room. He had seen some of the Qar forces, however briefly, and he knew there were thousands more of them besieging Southmarch aboveground. He had caught a very small number of these attackers by surprise with a blasting beetle, but next time there would be no surprise. The drows might even have rock-cracking powder of their own.
Chert was almost back to his room when he remembered Flint, whom he had left with the physician. Wearily he turned back up the corridor, but when he got to Chaven's room and rapped on the heavy door nobody answered. When he tried it, the door was not locked or even latched. He pushed it open, suddenly fearful.
Chaven lay stretched full-length on the floor as if he had been stunned with a club; there was no sign of Flint. For a terrible moment Chert thought the physician was dead, but when he kneeled beside him he could hear Chaven moaning quietly. Chert found a basin of cold water and a cloth and splashed water across the physician's broad, pale forehead.
"Wake up!" He did his best to shake Chaven, who was twice his size. "Where is my boy? Where is Flint?"
Chaven groaned and rolled over, then struggled until he could sit by himself. "What?" The physician looked around his room as if he had not seen it before. "Flint?"
"Yes, Flint! I left him with you. Where is he? What happened?"
Chaven looked blank. "Happened? Nothing happened. Flint, you say? He was here?" He shook his head slowly, like a weary horse trying to dislodge a biting fly. "No, wait-he was here, of course he was. But… but I do not remember what happened. Is he gone?"
Chert almost threw the wet rag at him in exasperation. He quickly searched the small chamber to make sure the boy was not hiding somewhere. He did not find him, but in one corner of the room he discovered a small hand mirror and a stump of candle lying on the floor. He smelled the wick. It had only recently been extinguished.
"What is this?" he demanded of the confused physician. "Did you get up to some of your mirror tricks with him? Did you frighten him into running away?"
Chaven looked both affronted and anxious. "I can't remember, to tell the truth. But I would never hurt or frighten a child, Chert-you should know that."
Chert remembered the boy's cries of terror the last time the fat physician had tried out his mirror-magics. "Pfah! He's gone, that's all I know. Have you no idea at all where he might be? How long he's been gone?"
But Chaven was mystified-and useless. He could only look from one corner of the room to another, rubbing his eyes as though the light in the dark room was too bright.
Chert was hurrying through the halls when he suddenly remembered the library. Flint had already got them both into trouble for going there once. What more likely place for him to end up this time?
To his immense relief he found the boy slumped in what seemed like ordinary childish sleep at one of the ancient tables, his head cradled on an irreplaceable book, a centuries-old collection of shallow carvings on sheets of mica thinner than parchment. As Chert lifted the boy's head to slide the pages from beneath him he glanced at the antique writing. He could not read it-it was too old, too strange-but it reminded him of the scratchings he had seen on the walls deep in the Mysteries. What was the boy doing with it? Did he have any sense of what he was up to? Flint acted sometimes as if he was ten times his true age, but at others he seemed nothing more than the child he was.
"Wake up, boy," he said gently. He could forgive almost anything as long as he didn't have to tell Opal he'd lost their child. "Come, now."
Flint lifted his head and looked around, then closed his eyes again as if to go back to sleep. He was far too big for Chert to carry-he was taller than his foster father, now-so Chert had to pull on his arm until the boy got to his feet and reluctantly allowed himself to be led out of the library and back across the temple to the room they shared. For once they seemed to be in luck: Vansen was apparently keeping Brother Nickel and the other monks busy with the temple's defense. Flint's return to the library had apparently gone undetected.
"Why did you do that, boy?" he demanded. "The brothers said to stay out of there-what were you doing? And what happened in Chaven's room?"
Flint shook his head sleepily. "I don't know." He walked on in silence for several paces, then suddenly said, "Sometimes… sometimes I think I know things. Sometimes I do know things-important things! And then… and then I don't." To Chert's astonishment, the boy abruptly burst into tears, something Chert had never, ever seen him do. "I just don't know, Father! I don't understand!"
Chert wrapped his arms around Flint, hugging this strange creature, this alien child, feeling the boy shake with helpless sorrow. There was nothing else he could do.
He had just got Flint settled in bed when someone rapped at the door. Wearily, Chert got up and opened it to reveal Chaven, wide-eyed in the dark hallway.
"Did you find the boy?" he asked.
"Yes. He is well. He went to the library. I have just put him to bed." He stepped back, beckoned the physician to enter. "Come in and I'll see if I can find us some mossbrew. Do you remember what happened?"
"I cannot," said Chaven. "In truth, I came to bring you a message. Ferras Vansen has sent to say that they have learned how to speak with the Funderling they captured."
Chert lifted an eyebrow. "I am a Funderling. That murderous creature is a drow."
Chaven waved his hand. "Of course, of course. Your pardon. In any case, will you come? Captain Vansen asked for you."
He shook his head. "No. I must stay with my boy. Too many things have called me away from him. Besides, there is nothing I can do there to help Vansen. If he truly needs me I will come to him tomorrow." He smiled sourly. "Unless the Qar murder us all before then, of course."
The physician didn't know quite how to take this. "Of course."
When Chaven had left Chert went to look in on the boy. Flint's face was slack in sleep, mouth open, his tousled hair lighter even than citron quartz. What did all that mean? Chert wondered. He knows, but he doesn't know?
As always, Chert could only wonder at the strange thing he and Opal had brought into their lives, this changeling boy… this walking mystery.
Utta pulled at the older woman's arm, trying to hold her back, but her efforts had little effect. Together they slid and slipped in the mud of the main street. Kayyin made a languid move to help them, but they regained their balance.
"I will not be stopped, Sister." Merolanna was breathing hard from the exertion and the cold. Before the Bridge of Thorns had begun to grow the days had actually turned warm, but since the beginning of the monstrous project the entirety of the coastline around Southmarch had been shrouded in chill wet mist, as if summer had entirely passed them by and they had tumbled straight into Dekamene or even later.
"Kayyin, help me," Utta begged. "The dark lady will kill her."
"Perhaps," the Qar said. "But, see-we are all still alive. My mother seems to have lost a bit of her bloodlust in these sad, late days."
"Are you mad, Halfling?" Merolanna said. "Lost her bloodlust! She is killing our people this moment! I can hear the screams!"
Kayyin shrugged. "I did not say she had become a different person entirely."
Merolanna strode on, determined, smacking away Utta's hand when the Zorian sister tried to slow her. "No! She will hear me. I will not be stopped!"
"If Snout and his fellow guards had not been called to the siege," Kayyin said cheerfully, "you would not have gotten out the front door."
Merolanna only showed her teeth in an expression that on someone other than a respectable dowager might have been called a snarl.
The collection of docks and harbor buildings facing the castle's drowned causeway had become a scene of nightmarish chaos. Creatures of dozens of different shapes and sizes hurried back and forth through the fog as the vast, creaking, treelike branches of the Bridge of Thorns loomed over all like the deformed bones of a collapsing temple. Merolanna, mud now spattered halfway up her skirt, did not flinch from even the most grotesque creatures that appeared out of the murk, but stamped along like a determined soldier, headed for the black and gold tent standing by itself at the center of things.
She is brave, Utta thought, I cannot take that away from her. But the one she seeks is not some ordinary mortal to be cowed by an irate old woman. If what Kayyin said was true, the dark lady herself is older than we can imagine-the child of a god. And sweet Zoria knows that she is angry and vengeful beyond our understanding as well.
If it had not been for the strangeness of the last year, the mad things she herself had seen, Utta would have dismissed the Qar's talk of gods and Fireflowers and immortal siblings as nonsense… but no other answers fit what she had seen and what was all around her this moment! For Utta Fornsdodir, who thought of herself as an educated woman, one who despite her calling could glean the difference between the important truths in the old stories and the superstition and silliness of some of the tales themselves, it had been a shocking and even disheartening time.
Yasammez stood before her tent like a statue of Nightmare, all in spiked black armor, an ivory-white sword hanging naked and unsheathed at her belt. She was watching something Utta could not see in the clouded heights of the thorns and did not turn even when Duchess Merolanna stumbled to a halt in front of her and slowly, painfully, lowered herself to her knees. A thin shrieking that might have been the wind wafted over the silent tableau, but Utta knew it was not the wind. Inside the walls of Southmarch castle, the fairies were killing men, women, and children.
"I cannot take this cruelty any longer!" Merolanna's voice, so firm only moments ago, now had a hitch that was more than fear, Utta sensed: something about dark Yasammez was enough to make the words stumble in anyone's throat. "Why are you murdering my people? What have they done to you? Two hundred years since the last war with your kind-we had all but forgotten you even existed!"
The face of Yasammez turned slowly toward her-an emotionless mask, pale and weirdly beautiful despite the inhuman angles of its bones. "Two hundred years? " the fairy-woman said in her harshly musical voice. "Mere moments. When you have seen the centuries flutter past as I have, then you may talk of time as if it meant something. Your people have doomed mine and now I am returning the favor. You may watch the ending or you may hide yourself away, but do not waste my time."
"Kill me, then," said Merolanna. The hitch in her throat was gone.
"No, Duchess!" Utta cried, but her legs suddenly felt wobbly as spring rushes and she could not move closer.
"Quiet, Sister Utta." The duchess turned back to the angular shadow that was Yasammez. "I cannot simply watch my people die-my nieces and nephews and friends-but I cannot hide from it, either. If you understand suffering as you say you do, end mine." She bowed her head. "Take my life, you cold thing. Torture does not befit a great lady."
Yasammez looked at Merolanna and something like a cold smile played across her face. For a long moment they stood like characters in a play, by appearance a terrifying conqueror and a helpless victim or an executioner and condemned prisoner-but it was nothing quite so simple, Utta realized.
"You should not speak to me of suffering," Yasammez said at last. Her voice was still rough and strange, but lower, softer. "Never. Were I to bring your loved ones here one by one and execute them in front of you, still you should not speak that word to me."
"I don't know what…" Merolanna began.
"Silence." The word hissed like a red-hot blade thrust into cold water. "Do you know what you and your wretched kind have done to my people? Hunted us, murdered us, poisoned us like vermin. Those who survived driven into exile in the cold lands to the north, forced to draw the mantle of twilight over themselves like a child hiding beneath a blanket. Yes, you even stole the sun from us! But, cruelest jest of all, you pushed our race to the brink of destruction and then also snatched away our last chance at survival." The pale face tilted forward, black eyes slitted. "Torture? If I could, I would torture every one of you soft mortal slugs, then burn the fat from your bodies while you screamed. Mounds of your charred bones would be your only monument."
The dark woman's hatred was like an icy blast of wind down a mountainside. Utta could not help herself-she let out a little noise of terror.
Yasammez turned on her as if she had noticed her for the first time. "You. You call yourself a servant of Zoria. What beside sentimental nonsense do you know of the white dove-of the true Dawnflower? What do you know of the way her father and his clan tormented her, killed her beloved, then handed her over to one of the victorious brothers as if the goddess of the first light was nothing but a spoil of war? What do you know of the way they tortured her son Crooked, the one you mayflies call Kupilas, until he was willing to give up his own life to rid the world of them? For thousands of years he has suffered to keep the world safe, agonies you and even I cannot imagine. Then think of this-you call him a god… but I call him Father." Her face, the mask of rage, suddenly went as slack as the features of a corpse. "And now he is dying. My father is dying, my family is dying, my entire race is dying-and you talk to me of suffering."
Utta's legs buckled at last and she sank down into the mud beside Merolanna. In the moment's hush she could again hear the cries of Yasammez' victims across the bay, a chorus of terror that sounded like nothing so much as the screeching of distant seabirds.
The dark lady turned her back on them. "Kayyin, take these things away from me, these… insects. I have a war to fight. Tell them the story of how their kind stole the Fireflower and murdered my family. After that, if they still want to die, I will be happy to accommodate them."