But it was what rested on the platforms that gave Silverdun pause. Wrapped in bindings of iron were twelve giant bodies. They had the features of the old Thule Fae, the true elves, their ears long and swept to elegant points, their eyes large, their bodies tall and slender. They were all dressed the same, only in different colors and with different insignia on their long gowns. Six were male, six female.
Twelve figures in all.
"What is this place?" said Silverdun.
"You don't know?" shouted Hy Pezho. "You're meddling around in here and you don't know where you are?"
"Well, we will if you tell us," said Silverdun.
"I should think it was obvious," said Hy Pezho. "You got here the same way I did, I assume. Using a cynosure to direct a fold?"
"That's right," said Silverdun.
"A Chthonic artifact," said Hy Pezho. "Look around you; these are the Chthonic gods. The bound gods."
"You're kidding," said Ironfoot.
"You're in Prythme," said Hy Pezho. "The place where the gods were locked up millennia ago. And if you don't stop whatever it is you're doing," he said, pointing at the branches of gray that were even now spreading across the bindings that held the figures down, "you're going to let them out."
Hy Pezho glared at them. "And trust me when I say that you don't want that to happen."
"This is ludicrous," said Ironfoot. "Bound gods, Prythme. And I suppose that you're actually Uvenchaud and you just came from slaying the last of the dragons."
Hy Pezho gingerly landed on the ground. The silver armor flowed off of him, its individual pieces retracting to allow him to simply step out of it. He was dressed in a simple robe and was unarmed. The silver suit flitted up into the air and disappeared in the shadows among the arches on the ceiling, where Hy Pezho's witchlight did not penetrate.
"Trust me, this is all very real."
Faella and Sela stepped around the platform beyond which Silverdun and Ironfoot were standing. Hy Pezho looked curiously at Faella. "You're doing this, aren't you?" he asked. "The re coming from you. It's like that of the ... hell, you're her."
"Who am I?" said Faella.
"You're the one with the Thirteenth Gift. Faella. You think that Mab hasn't noticed you? You burn in Faerie like a bonfire in the night."
"I'm flattered," said Faella.
"Mab launched her invasion for two reasons," said Hy Pezho. "One was to grind Titania under her heel. The other was to kill you."
"And why do I merit such undue favor from your empress?" said Faella.
"Because you're capable of doing incredibly stupid things like what you're doing right now," said Hy Pezho. "If you don't stop and turn those bonds back into iron, we're all dead. Maybe worse than dead."
"Explain to me what this place is, and perhaps I shall."
Hy Pezho looked up at the platform next to them, which was growing more and more gray by the second, and sighed. For some reason the branches seemed to have a harder time crawling up the platforms. Were they somehow reinforced?
"It was during the Rauane Envedun-e," said Hy Pezho, "the era during which the vast majority of the most ridiculous and dangerous things in Fae history took place." He looked up again, licking his lips. "The Chthonic faithful had been around already for a thousand years, happily worshipping their twelve gods. Worshipping them with an astonishing fervency, in fact.
"Now, at the time, these gods didn't actually exist. They were the prehistoric Thule beliefs, inventions of superstitious natives to explain the rising of the sun and the fortunes of war. One sees such things in many worlds.
"But Faerie, of course, is not like other worlds. And during the Rauane, there was more free re than at any time before or since. Magic was everywhere, capable of just about anything. So the worshippers of the Thule gods inadvertently performed a staggering feat of thaumaturgy, perhaps the greatest ever accomplished.
"They channeled all of their vast essence into their faith, into their devout worship. They prayed for so hard and so long that they actually worshipped their gods into existence. "
"You're saying they created gods on the spot," said Silverdun.
Hy Pezho looked up at the ever-graying bonds and glared at Silverdun.
"Not just that. They did such an incredible job of manifesting them that the gods actually became what the faithful believed them to be. They truly were responsible for the rising sun, and the fortunes of war, and for who fell in love with whom. The believers wished their gods into existence from the beginning of time, so that they not only existed, but always had. They created immortal gods out of whole cloth."
"That seems a bit far-fetched," said Ironfoot.
"This was the generation of Fae who turned the rain to wine when they were too drunk to stand up for another bottle," said Hy Pezho. "They turned the sky orange for fun, drafted sea monsters from their imagination on a whim. One of them taught an entire forest of trees to talk as a practical joke. There was nothing they couldn't do."
"How did the gods end up here?" asked Sela, looking strangely sad.
"Well," said Hy Pezho, and now he was talking through clenched teeth, his anxiety growing by the moment. "It turned out that having their gods among them was far less fun than the original Chthonics had imagined it would be. The gods were created to be in charge, so they took charge. They were created to judge, and they judged. They had been set above the Fae, and they took to their assigned parts with relish.
"Unfortunately for them, however, not all of the Fae were believers. They did not care to be judged by gods that they, themselves, did not believe in. So a very large and powerful coterie of wizards crafted a very large and powerful binding, and went to war against them. There was a great battle, the gods lost, and the wizards locked them up down here for eternity."
"And that was that," said Silverdun.
"Not exactly," said Hy Pezho. "The Chthonics continued to worship their gods. They worshipped them even though they were powerless, trapped in this otherworldly prison. At the end of the Rauane one of their cleverest thaumaturges constructed the cynosures, whose sole purpose is to direct the faith of the Chthonic worshippers here, into Prythme."
"To keep them alive," said Sela.
"To keep them alive and to one day free them," said Hy Pezho. "These bodies are massive storehouses of pure undifferentiated re. Growing more full with every passing Chthonic service. Someday they would have been strong enough to break their bonds, I suppose, though it would have been long after we were dead. Of course, you've moved up their timetable quite a bit."
"So the power source for the Einswrath," said Ironfoot. "It comes from them."
"Each bomb contains a single drop of Ein's blood," said Hy Pezho. "That's him up there, by the way. Ein, I mean." Hy Pezho pointed up at the platform where he had minutes before been floating. "I was drilling out a few drops when you showed up."
Hy Pezho stepped toward Silverdun and looked him in the eye. "And now that I've explained to you in explicit detail exactly what you've stumbled into, would you please tell your pretty friend here to stop what she's doing before these gods wake up and decide to take back Faerie, drunk on five thousand years of stored vengeance?"
Faella frowned. "I don't know how," she said.
"What?" said Hy Pezho.
"It wasn't so hard to turn the iron into cobalt," she said, "if that's indeed what I did. But I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to make it go the other way. I was just pulling the iron apart, like shattering a glass. I can't put it back together."
"Then, my dear," said Hy Pezho, "the five of us are all dead, and Faerie is doomed." He smiled at Faella in cynical resignation. "And it's all your fault."