by Tad Williams
“But we hear that you hid yourself among a company of peasants and escaped—walking all the way from Southmarch! How clever! How brave!”
“In truth, it was a company of players . . . ma’am.” Briony had learned how to swallow an angry reply, but it did not taste good. “And I was not escaping the siege, but my own treacherous . . .”
“Yes, we have heard—quite a story!” Enander cut her off before she could say more. It was not an accident. “But we have had only the barest bones—of course, you must flesh them out for us soon. Ah-ah,” he said, lifting his hand when she might have spoken again. “But no more talk now, my dear—you must be exhausted after your ordeal. Time enough for everything when you are feeling stronger. We will see you tonight at supper.”
She thanked him and made another curtsy. So, she wondered, am I a guest? Or a prisoner? It wasn’t entirely clear.
As Lord Jino led her out of the King’s Cabinet, Briony fought against anger and unhappiness. Enander had received her kindly and courteously, and so far the Syannese had treated her as well as she could have hoped. Had she expected that the king would stand up, declare undying loyalty to the blood of Anglin’s line, and immediately equip her with an army to go back and overthrow the Tollys? Of course not. But she also had the distinct feeling from the king’s mien that such a thing wasn’t only to be delayed, it was never going to happen at all.
Briony was so immersed in her thoughts that she nearly walked into a tall man coming across the throne room, headed toward the chamber she had just left. As she started back he reached out a strong hand to keep her upright.
“Apologies, Mistress,” he said. “Are you well?”
“Your Royal Highness,” said Jino. “You are back before we looked for you.”
Briony straightened her clothes to cover her confusion. Royal Highness? Then this young man must be Eneas, the prince. She felt her breath getting a little short as she looked up. Was this truly the boy she had thought about so much during that year of her childhood? He was certainly as handsome as the prince she had imagined, tall and slender but wide-shouldered, with a tangled mass of black hair like a horse’s mane after a long, fast ride.
“There is much to tell,” the prince said. “I rode fast.” He looked at Briony, puzzled. “And who is this?”
“Highness, allow me to present Briony te Meriel te Krisanthe . . .” Jino began.
“Briony Eddon?” The prince interrupted him. “Are you truly Briony Eddon? Olin’s daughter? But what are you doing here?” Suddenly remembering his manners, he grabbed her hand and lifted it to his lips, but his eyes never left her face.
“I will explain all later, Highness,” Jino said. “But your father will want to hear your news about the southern armies. Did everything go well?”
“No,” Eneas said. “No, it did not.” He turned back to Briony. “Are you dining with us tonight? Say yes.”
“Y–yes, of course.”
“Good. We will speak more then. It is astounding to see you here. I was just thinking about your father—I admire him greatly, you know. Is he well?” He did not wait for an answer. “Jino is right, I should go. But I look forward to our conversation later.” He took her hand, kissed it again, a mere brush of his dry, wind-chapped lips, but looked at her as though he meant to memorize her every feature. “I told them you would grow up a beauty,” he said. “I am proved right.”
Briony watched Eneas go, staring after him for several moments before she realized her mouth must be hanging open like that of some Dalesman sheepherder getting his first view of a real city. “What did he mean by that?” she said, half to herself. “He couldn’t have even known I existed!”
Jino was frowning a little, but he did his best to turn it into a smile. “Oh, but the prince would never lie, Highness, and certainly he would not stoop to f lattery.” He gave a rueful laugh. “He means well, and he is of course a splendid young man, but in truth his courtly manners leave a bit to be desired.” He straightened and extended his arm. “Let me show you back to your rooms now, Princess. We all look forward to the honor of your company again at supper, but you really should rest after your terrifying journey.”
Briony’s own courtly manners might be a touch rustic by Syannese standards but she understood what Erasmias Jino was saying well enough: Please, child, get out from under my feet so I can see to more important business—the business of a true kingdom, not a backwater like yours.
It was another reminder that Briony was at best a distraction for these Syannese, and more likely an annoying problem. Either way, she had no power here, or any friends she could count on. She let herself be led back across the gleaming, echoing throne room, through groups of staring courtiers and more discreet but just as interested servants, already thinking about how that balance might be changed for the better.
2
A Road Beneath the Sea
“According to Rhantys and other scholars from the years before the Great Death, the fairies themselves claim they were not created by the gods, but that rather they ‘summoned’ the gods.”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
FLINT PICKED UP THE BROKEN, bone-white disk in his fingers and waved it at Chert. “What is this?” he demanded, but his adoptive father was several paces ahead and couldn’t see what the boy had found.
“Are we walking all the way to Silverside, old man? ” Opal asked as she came up from behind them, then she saw what Flint was holding. “What do you have there, boy?” She took it from him and carefully rubbed off the dust, then held the pale half-circle up to the light of her coral lamp. “Why, look, Chert, it’s part of a sea imperial. What’s it doing down here instead of on a beach? Did someone drop it, do you think?”
“Must have.” Chert carefully examined the rock above their heads but it looked reassuringly solid and dry. “Nothing dripping here. Besides, the sea doesn’t just dribble if it finds a way in. All that water, all that weight, it’d fill the place in a heartbeat.” He could not help remembering the terrible stories his father had told him about the tragedy on Quarrymen’s Bank, named after the guild that had been extending their living quarters there.
The first law of Funderling Town was, and always had been, that no serious digging of any kind should ever be undertaken beneath the waterline, since one mistake would be enough to bring the sea flooding into the depths, destroying the district of the Mysteries and the temple of the Metamorphic Brotherhood, as well as everything else in the lower caverns. But on that morning sixty or seventy years earlier the Quarrymen’s Guild crew had lost track of how deep they’d dug. It was discovered later that they had also cut too far out toward the edge of the great stony island of Midlan’s Mount on which Southmarch stood.
That day, a rumble of dislodged stone had been followed by a shocking spear thrust of chilly seawater that knocked Funderling diggers head over heels. Within moments the tremendous flow of water began widening the crevice; the thin spurt quickly became a barrel-wide gush. The quarrymen labored fruitlessly to close the hole, fighting the overwhelming power of the sea god himself, but the excavated rooms were already beginning to fill. One of the workers defied his foreman and fled to an upper level to let people there know what was happening. Such members of the guilds as were available hurried to the spot and a decision was made by the Highwardens to seal off the entire bank. A dozen Funderlings were pulled out of the flooded level, but almost twice that number had been cut off in other side passages by the rising water and there was no time to search for them. It had been a choice, Chert’s father had told him with a kind of sour satisfaction, between twenty-three men doomed by an idiot foreman or the hundreds more below sea level in all the rest of Funderling Town.
It was fortunate, in a terrible way, that the Stone-Cutter’s Guild had recently allowed the judicious use of black powder in some particularly difficult diggings: if folk had needed to shift the stone by hand, Chert’s father had said, there would have been no saving the l
ower depths at all. The trapped men must have heard a single loud thump like the very hammer of the Lord of Endless Skies as the black powder brought down the roof of the chamber next to the bank diggings. After that they would have heard nothing but their own terrified voices and the water rising to cover them.
The thought of their dying moments had given Chert nightmares throughout his young life, and even today Funderling children talked in hushed whispers about the haunted, hidden depths of Quarrymen’s Bank.
“No–no, there is no hole here,” Chert told his family, shaking his head at childhood memories that still made his heart flutter in his chest. He summoned a smile. “And a good thing, since we are well beneath the water and I prefer not to get damp.”
“Still, that is a sea imperial the boy’s found, without doubt.” Opal handed it back to Flint and tousled the boy’s hair. Opal knew her shells. She had always enjoyed going up to the surface during the cold season with the other Funderling women to gather mussels in the tidepools along the edge of Brenn’s Bay, then bringing them home and boiling them with a hot rock. Chert loved them—they were even sweeter than the many-legged korabi, the crevice-crawlers that scuttled over the damp rocks along the Salt Pool—and Opal loved them too, but she hadn’t gone out to gather any for a long time. Not since they’d had Flint to care for.
“Imperial . . . ?” the boy said, squinting at the disk.
“That’s right—because it looks like a coin, see? But it’s a shell, the skeleton of a little sea beast.” Chert tugged gently at the boy’s elbow. “Come along and I’ll tell you something about this place.”
“I hope you’re going to tell us that we’re almost done walking,” said Opal. “Who would make such a track so deep and so long? Mad folk is my guess.”
Chert laughed. “Yes, we’re almost done, my old darling—almost.” He reached around and patted the bundle on his back. “And remember, I’m carrying the pack.”
Opal scowled. “I hope you’re not saying that this sack I’m carrying is light. Because it isn’t.”
“Of course not.” He had told her not to bring half of what she’d put in it, of course, but that was like telling a cat to leave its tail and whiskers behind. How could Opal go anywhere without at least a few pots? And her good spoons, a wedding present from her mother? “Never mind,” he said, as much to himself as to his family. “Just walk and I’ll tell you about this track—why it’s here and who made it.
“Now, back in the days of the second King Kellick, if my grandfather told me the tale rightly, there was a great Funderling named Azurite of the Copper clan, but in those days the more common name for azurite crystals was ‘Stormstone,’ and that’s what everyone called him. Now, as I said, Stormstone Copper was a great man—a rare man—and that was good, because he was born into difficult times.”
“How long ago?” Flint asked.
Chert frowned. “Well before my grandfather’s day—over a century. The first King Kellick had been good to the Funderlings, honoring them in all his dealings with them, treating them no worse than any other member of his kingdom, and sometimes better, because he valued their craftiness.”
“You mean craftsmanship,” said Opal, puffing a little.
“I mean craftiness, which means more than just the laying of chisel to stone. It has to do with knowing. The first Kellick had been one of the few kings that valued what our folk knew. He was the only king that fought against the fairy folk but didn’t treat our people like goblins escaped from behind the Shadowline.” Chert shook his head. “But you’re getting me distracted, woman. I’m trying to explain about these passages we’re in.”
“Oh! The cheek of me for interrupting you, Master Blue Quartz! Speak on.” But he heard a hint of a smile in her voice. They had been walking a good part of the morning and they were all tired: the distraction was very welcome.
“So after the first Kellick died everyone thought that things would go well under his son, Barin, who seemed much like his father. And so he was, except in one way—he hated fairies and he didn’t much like Funderlings, either. During his reign most of the Eight Gates of Funderling Town were sealed, leaving us only one way to go up to the surface and back—the same one we use today. And there were king’s guards who stood there at that gate, day after day, searching our people’s wagons and troubling them for no reason except to remind them that they were not as important as the Big Folk. It was a great shock to all the Funderlings, especially after the long and happy partnership we’d enjoyed with Barin’s father.
“Well, as it turned out, Barin reigned even longer than the first Kellick, almost forty years, and although we were still given work in Southmarch, they were not happy years. Many of our people left and spread out to other cities and countries, especially here in the north where the Qar armies had burned and broken so much.
“When Barin finally died and his son came to the throne—the second Kellick, named after his grandfather—wise old Stormstone Copper met with the other leading Guildsmen and asked them, ‘Do you know how the Big Folk kill rabbits? They stop up all their burrow entrances but one, then they put ferrets down the one entrance left and let them run every member of the warren to ground—does and kittens and all.’
“When the other Funderlings asked him why he was taxing them with questions about rabbits when there was a new king being crowned and much to be discussed, Stormstone laughed a scornful laugh. ‘Why do you think King Barin stopped up the entrances to all our burrows?’ he said. ‘Because that way, if they ever want to rid themselves of us they have only to send down soldiers with spears and torches, just like they send ferrets down the rabbit holes, and that will be the end of Funderling Town. We were fools to let them do it and we are fools if we do not do something about it as soon as we can.’
“Needless to say, there was a great deal of argument—many of the others in the Guild could not believe that the Big Folk would ever harm them. But Stormstone said, ‘This Kellick is not like the first Kellick, just as his father Barin was not, either. Have you not seen the way the Big Folk look at us now, the way they whisper about us? They think us little different from the fairies who are besieging the city. If they grow any more frightened, who knows what the Big Folk may do in their fright and anger?’
“ ‘But what can we do?’ one of the guildsfolk asked. ‘Do we beg the new king to change the law and allow us to reopen the other seven gates?’
“Stormstone laughed again. ‘What, does the fox ask the hound for permission to run away? No. We will do what we need to do and tell no one.’ And so they did what he suggested.”
Chert cleared his throat. “See, we are starting to climb up again. That means we will be there soon. I admit it was a roundabout way to go, but a safe one.” He put his arm on Flint’s shoulder, felt his heart go a little cold when the boy quickly pulled away. “If you like, I will tell you the rest. Do you want to hear the rest?”
At first he thought the boy was ignoring him again, but then he saw a just perceptible nod.
“The Stone-Cutter’s Guild did as wise Stormstone told them. They took money from the treasury and over the next dozen years found a few of the Big Folk who liked gold more than questions, and so secretly bought a number of houses in the poorest neighborhoods on the edges of Southmarch. Then they began to dig tunnels down from just beneath these properties and connect them to passages on the outer reaches of Funderling Town, out at the far ends of certain nameless roads which the Big Folk knew nothing about, and that they could not have found if they did, even with a map. At last the roads were ready. A group of our people who had permission from King Kellick the Second to be aboveground after sunset because they were working in a royal granary that was in use during the day brought an extra-large crew to work, mainly by confusing the uplander guards with much coming and going. After nightfall half of them left the granary and made their way by back alleys to the houses the Guild had secretly bought and there broke through the last cubits of earth and stone to the tunnels
below. When they were finished they covered the holes in the earth with flagstone floors, each with a stone that could be lifted to reveal a doorway to distant Funderling Town.
“Not all these new passages ended in the outer keep, although that is where many were located. Some even led directly under the water to houses and other places on the mainland.” He could have mentioned that he himself had traveled such a road to the Qar camp when he had taken Flint’s mirror to the Twilight folk, but didn’t for fear of upsetting Opal. “In fact,” he went on, “it is said Stormstone even had one tunnel built that came up somewhere in the inner keep—on the grounds of the Throne hall itself!
“By the end of a few months, when our folk were finished with rebuilding the granary, they had also finished all the entrances to these New Gates, as the Guild elders called them in whispers. And ever since there have always been secret ways in and out of Funderling Town. The fairy folk stayed quiet for a hundred years or more after that, so many of the hidden passages fell into disrepair, but I’m told we have kept the houses and other places aboveground that hide them.”
“You had better not be telling us this because you plan to make us walk all the way upground from here,” Opal warned him.
“No. We’re almost there, my love. The reason I’m telling you all this is that we’re in one of those passages right now.”
“Almost where?” asked Flint.
“The place we’re going—the Metamorphic Brothers’ temple.”
“But why did we walk so far? ” Flint didn’t sound like he minded much: he was just curious.
“Because soldiers from upground are waiting at the regular gate and on some of the main roads of Funderling Town itself,” Chert explained. “And they’re all looking for a fellow called Chert and his wife Opal, as well as a big boy named Flint who stays with them.”
“Those are our names,” said Flint seriously.
