Shadowplay

shoved the cart out onto the downslope.

As the cart picked up speed, bouncing down the track faster than a horse could run, the driver made no attempt to dismount. Instead he dropped the torch into the straw piled around his feet. The flames flared high around the barrels, so that within a few more moments a great billowing blaze surrounded the little man and filled the back of the wagon. At the base of the track the unheeding giant still tore blindly at the small shape on his back, the faceless gnat who so annoyingly refused to die.

Jikuyin finally yanked Gyir free, pulling the fairy’s arm loose in its socket so that it dangled helplessly and the spear dropped from his nerveless fingers. As Jikuyin bellowed in triumph, ignoring the wagon, Barrick realized what was in the barrels.

“I WILL EAT YOU, INSECT!” the demigod roared.

You will choke on me. The skin of Gyir’s outer face had been torn away, and his strange small mouth twisted in what might have been a bloody smile. Look.

For the merest instant Barrick saw Jikuyin’s face and the way it changed, then the blazing cart crashed into the demigod and the entire cavern vanished in a howling, crackling storm of fire. Barrick felt the Storm Lantern’s last thought, a joyous curse on his defeated enemy, then the prince was flung away up the slope, skidding and rolling, and he felt the fairy’s presence in his thoughts wink out like a snuffed candle.

Barrick came to a stop in the doorway amid the shrieking Drows who had brought the wagon, awakened by Gyir’s death into this incomprehensible chaos. The stupefying concussion of the gun-flour, still echoing, was followed a moment later by the cracking, scraping sound of the cavern’s stone roof collapsing. Solid rock jumped and boomed like Heaven’s own drums. Several of the creatures who had unwittingly engineered this monstrous event scrambled over Barrick like rats in their haste to flee the doomed cavern. The prince could only cover his head and hold his breath as the impacts lifted and dropped him.

A millionweight of stone came tumbling down, burying demigod and mortals alike, sealing the open gateway to the gods’ realm for the next thousand years and more.

38. Beneath the Burning Eye

Even the gods weep when they speak of the Theomachy, the war between the clan of the three heavenly brothers and the dark clan of Zmeos the Horned One. Many of the brightest fell, and their like will never be seen again, but their deeds live on, that men may understand honor and proper love of the gods.

—from The Beginnings of Things, The Book of the Trigon

Pelaya had never seen anything like it. Even in her worst childhood nightmares, chased by some hungry monster like Brabinayos Boots-of-Stone out of her nurse’s stories, she had not felt a terror and hopelessness like this.

The sky above Hierosol was black as if with a terrible storm, but it was smoke, not clouds, that had hidden the sun for three days now. On either side of the citadel much of the Crab Bay and Fountain districts were in flame. Pelaya could see the flames in particularly bright relief from the window of the family house near Landsman’s Market, a horrible and fascinating sight, as if beautiful, glowing flowers were sprouting all across the city. In the districts along the seawalls the sickly smoke of the sulfur rafts had crept over the houses in a poisonous yellow fog. She had heard her father telling one of the servants that the autarch’s burning sulfur had emptied most of the Nektarian Harbor district, that even the seaport end of the Lantern Broad was as silent as a tomb but for hurrying files of soldiers moving from one endangered part of the wall to another. Surely this must be the end of the world— the sort of thing the ragged would-be prophets in the smaller church squares were always shrieking about. Who could have guessed that those dirty, smelly men would be right after all?

“Come away from there, Pelaya!” her sister Teloni cried. “You will let in the poison smoke and kill us all!”

Startled, she let the window shutter go, almost losing her fingers as it crashed down. She turned in fury but the angry reply never came out of her mouth. Teloni looked helpless and terrified, her face was as white as one of the family’s ancestor masks.

“The smoke is far away, down by the sea walls,” Pelaya told her, “and the wind is pushing the other direction. We are in no danger from the poison.”

“Then why are you looking? Why do you want to see...that?” Her sister pointed at the shutter as though what lay beyond were nothing but some unfortunate person—a deformed tramp, perhaps, or some other grotesque who could be ignored until he gave up and went away again.

“Because we are at war!” Pelaya could not understand her sister or her mother. They both skulked about the house as though this astonishing, dreadful thing was not happening. At least little Kiril was waving his wooden sword, pretending to slaughter Xixian soldiers. “Do you not care?”

“Of course we care.” Teloni’s eyes filled with tears. “But there is nothing we can do about it. What good does it do to...to stare at it?”

Pelaya got her shoulder against the shutter and lifted it again, pushing so hard that she almost fell out as it began to open. Teloni gasped and Pelaya felt her own heart speed—the cobbled courtyard was three floors below, quite far enough to break her bones.

Her sister grabbed Pelaya’s arm. “Be careful!” “I’m fine, Teli. Look, come here, I’ll show you what Babba’s doing.”

“You don’t know. You’re just a girl—you’re younger than me!”

“Yes, but I pay attention when he talks.” She got the shutter all the way open and propped it with the thick wooden rod so she’d have her hand free to point. “There, by the Gate of the Fountain, do you see? That’s the place where the autarch’s cannons are trying to knock down the wall, but Babba is too clever. As soon as he realized what they were doing, he sent men to build a new wall behind it.”

“A new wall? But they’ll just knock that down too, won’t they?”

“Perhaps. But by the time they do, he’ll have built another... and another...and so on. He will not let them break through.”

“Truly?” Teloni looked a little relieved. “But won’t they dig under the wall? I heard Kiril say the autarch’s men would dig tunnels under the walls here by Memnos or Salamander where there’s no ocean—that they could come up in our garden if they wanted to!”

Pelaya rolled her eyes. “You don’t listen to me, but you listen to Kiril? By all the gods, Teli, he’s only seven years old.”

“But isn’t what he says true?”

“Do you see those?” She pointed to the strange shape by the nearest section of the citadel wall. “That’s a sling engine —a kind of stone-throwing machine. It throws stones almost as heavy as the ones that come out of the autarch’s big cannon. Whenever Babba and his men see someone digging a tunnel, they throw big stones at them and crush it.”

“With the autarch’s soldiers still inside?”

Pelaya snorted. Was she going to weep about the enemy who was trying to kill them? “Of course.”

“Good. I’m glad.” Teloni stared, eyes wide. “How do you know these things, Pelaya?”

“I told you—I listen. And speaking of listening, that’s how they find the tunnels if they ever come close to the walls. Or they use the peas.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dried peas. Papa and his men dig special drums into the ground all along the walls and put dried peas on the drum heads. That way, if anyone is digging deep down in the ground under them, the peas jump and rattle and we know. Then we can drop stones and burning oil down on them.”

“But they have so many soldiers!”

“It does not matter. We have our walls. Hierosol has never been conquered by force—that’s what Babba says. Even Ludis Drakava could never have taken the citadel if the old emperor had an heir. Everyone knows that. The Council of Twenty-Seven was afraid of the autarch, so they opened the gates to Drakava instead.”