Ferras Vansen could only stare as the room exploded into confusion. He had worked so hard to bring both sides together and now the Qar leader's arrogance was going to smash the alliance to pieces before it even started.

"Stop!" He did not realize he had stood until he had already begun to speak. "Funderlings, you are fools to argue with these people, whose suffering is so much greater than any of us can even imagine." He turned to the other side of the table. "But you, Lady, you are a fool if you think you can make peace while you still treat us as your enemies and inferiors."

"Make peace?" asked Yassamez in a voice like a cold wind. "I did not come here to make peace, Captain Vansen, I came here to make common cause. The wounds run too deep for peace between my race and yours."

Vansen pitched his reply above the tumult of unhappy voices. "Then let's speak of common cause, Lady Yasammez. Enough of the past-for now."

She stared at him, still and silent as a statue. At last the noise began to subside as the others waited to see what she would say.

"But it is always the past, Captain Vansen," she said at last. "This room is crowded with the ghosts of those who have gone before, even if you cannot see them. But, of course, your delver allies know-they know very well, which is one of the reasons they did not want this council to happen."

"What are you talking about?" Cinnabar did not sound as confident as his words suggested: he sounded like a man prepared to flinch. "What do the Funderlings know?"

"That the blame for the destruction of the Qar is not on the sunlanders alone. Yes, Vansen's people captured my many-times-great-granddaughter Sanasu and killed her brother, Janniya-but we had been coming back to this place for a thousand years and more to perform the Fireflower ceremonies, always secret except to you delvers, and were never troubled before that day. How did Kellick of the Eddon know we were coming?"