by Tad Williams
And they did. “This will be no place for a young man trying to make a name for himself,” Tyne Aldritch declared angrily. “I beg Your Highness’ pardon, but I will not stand silently and see men and land put at risk so you can earn a reputation.”
Now Barrick was angry, too, but mostly at himself. What he couldn’t explain, what he could barely acknowledge himself, was that the lure of his idea wasn’t glory but resolution—that he would thrive in the simplicity of the battlefield, that he would not need to fear his own anger or even the madness growing inside him, and that if he died it would be a relief from the dreams and the great fear. “I know what kind of place it will be, Blueshore,” he told the new master of arms. “Or at least I can guess. And I certainly know my own failings. Would you rub my nose in them?”
Tyne’s mouth snapped shut but his eyes spoke for him.
“Prince Barrick and I must talk about this.” Briony had pushed down her own anger now, hidden it behind a mask of determined calm. She’s turning into Father, Barrick thought, but not the way that I am. It wasn’t a happy realization. She has inherited his grace. I have his curse.
“We will talk all you wish,” Barrick told his twin. “But I am going.” And he knew it was true. He was one of the reigning Eddons, after all, and at this moment there was a hard, cold thing inside him that none of them could match. He would have his way.
“Hoy, Chert, have you found that boy?” shouted a woman he only vaguely recognized. He thought she might be one of the Sandstones; the woman with whom she was gossiping on the front porch certainly seemed to have the huge Sedimentary Clan’s telltale chin.
“Not yet,” he called.
“Must tha boom like the wind in the chimneys?” complained Beetledown from his perch on Chert’s shoulder. “Fair collapsed my headbones, that did.”
“Sorry.” Chert was glad that he was far enough away from the women that they couldn’t see the little fellow. Better to have them think he was talking to his own shoulder than to have every child in Funderling Town, and half the grown ones, chasing him down Gypsum Way in hopes of seeing a live Rooftopper. “Are you sure you can’t ride in the pocket of my tunic where no one can see you?”
“And where I can’t smell nothing, neither?”
“Ah. True enough.”
Beetledown stirred and sniffed loud enough for even Chert to hear. “Turn . . . turn . . . chi’m’ook!” He drummed his tiny heels in frustration. “Where is the sun? Where is sunwise? How can I say the turning?”
“Left and right will have to do, because I don’t think you know where the Stonecutter’s Door or the Silk Door are. You do know left and right, don’t you?”
“ ’Course. But we call uns, ‘leef’ and ‘reck’ when we speak thy tongue. So go leef, left, what tha will. But there, turn.”
Chert couldn’t understand why the Rooftoppers would use different words than everyone else did in a language that wasn’t even their own, but it had long been clear that Beetledown had his own odd way of talking; of all that small people, only the queen could speak to Chert in a clear, civilized fashion. He wondered again why she spoke the language of the larger world better than her subjects did, but he didn’t waste much thought on it.
As they made a few more turns, Beetledown holding a lock of Chert’s hair so he could stand up without tumbling as he sniffed the air, the odd pair began to move farther and farther from the center of Funderling Town; in fact, it soon became clear that Beetledown’s nose was leading them toward the outermost reaches. If it was a true scent, the boy seemed to have gone by a rather circuitous route, but the overall direction was definitely outward and down. Thus, when they swung close enough to the Salt Pool, Chert turned and carried the little man into the great cavern.
“Going wrong way, th’art.”
“We’ll turn back, but we need something. We’ll be beyond the streetlights soon and, whatever you may have heard about us Funderlings, we can’t see in complete dark. Hoy, Boulder!”
The small Funderling came bounding toward them across the uneven stones, eyes widening at what was no doubt the first adult person smaller than himself he had ever seen. He grinned in surprise and delight. “What is this, Chert?”
“It’s not a this, it’s a who—Beetledown’s his name. He’s a Rooftopper. Yes, a real Rooftopper. You heard about Flint? Well, this fellow’s helping me look for him. I’ll explain it next time I come, but I’d appreciate if you’d keep quiet about it for now. Meantime, I’m going down Silk Door way and I’ll need light soon.”
“Just brought up a basketful for the second shift,” Boulder said as he spilled out a selection of glowing coral. “Take your pick, and for free. I’m sure the story will be worth it.”
“Many thanks. And you’ve just reminded me of something. Is Rocksalt here today with his basket?”
“Just over there.” Boulder pointed to a group of Funderling men and women and even a few children who were sitting at the edge of the cavern near the great door, waiting for the afternoon shift leader to come for them. As he walked toward them, Chert finally convinced Beetledown to get into his pocket and hide.
He fished out a few copper chips from his pocket and bought bread and soft white cheese from Rocksalt, as well as a waterskin, which cost him a few more chips even though he would be bringing it back to the peddler again afterward. Chert didn’t like the expense, but it was becoming clear to him that he would not be back for the evening meal. This reminded him of something else.
“Jasper, is your boy staying with you or going home?” he asked a man he knew, one of the fellows waiting to start an afternoon shift.
“Home, of course. Earth Elders! He’d drive me mad in a hundred drips if he came along with me.”
“Good.” Chert turned to the boy. “Here . . . little Clay, isn’t it? Pay attention. I’m giving your father this shiny chip, and if you take a message to my wife, he’ll give that chip to you when he gets back from the pit tonight. Do you know my wife, Opal Blue Quartz? On Wedge Road?” The boy, eyes very big at all the attention, nodded solemnly. “Good. Tell her I said that I may be gone a while, searching, and not to hold supper for me. Not to worry if I’m not back by bedtime, even. Can you remember that? Say it back.”
His memory tested and approved, young Clay was dispatched and Chert gave the boy’s father the copper chip to hold in trust. “You’ve earned me a trip up to that fracturing big-folk market, you know,” Jasper said. “He’ll want to spend it up there.”
“Do you good to get some fresh air,” Chert said as he headed off across the uneven, rocky floor.
“Are you mad?” Jasper called after him. “Too much of that wind will suck the life out of a person’s innards!” This was not an uncommon feeling among the inhabitants of Funderling Town and although it might not completely explain why Chert was the first Funderling in centuries to meet a Rooftopper, he reflected, it did explain why there hadn’t been many other opportunities for such a thing to happen.
They went out through the Silk Door, Funderling Town’s back gate, a huge arch carved into a sandstone wall whose natural streaking of pink, ocher, purple, and orange made it look like exquisitely dyed fabric. Once through, they passed in a fairly short time from the careful delving and carving of the town into an area where no digging had been necessary because the underside of the mount was already hollowed out by the ocean and the drip of water from above into the limestone caverns, although the Funderlings had enlarged many of them and created a network of tunnel-roads to connect them all. What was not remembered, at least by anyone of Chert’s acquaintance, was whether the strangely regular caverns below Funderling Town that spiraled deep down into the bedrock of the mount, down below the bottom of the bay itself, had always existed, or had been created by even earlier hands. All that was known for certain by living Funderlings was that the Mysteries were there, hundreds of feet below the heart of the castle’s inner keep, and that the less the big folk knew about those secret depths, the better.
&nbs
p; Chert stood now far on the outskirts of Funderling Town, at the entrance to those very same Mysteries, looking down at a long, creamy slope gated by two rock walls. At the bottom was a scalloped fringe of pale-pink-and-amber stone that glowed like a translucent curtain in the light of the torches that burned before and behind it. “This way? Are you certain?” Chert asked the Rooftopper. Why would the boy have come so far into the earth, to a place he made it very clear he didn’t like? The Eddon family tombs were two levels up from here, but that was really only a few yards overhead.
“What my nose tells me be true,” Beetledown said. “Stronger here than anywhere past thy home roofs and rookeries.”
It took Chert a moment to realize that this very little man meant that he had not smelled Flint so strongly since they had left Chert’s own neighborhood back on Wedge Road. “Well, lead on, then.” He made his way down the stairs that crisscrossed the pale slope and led ultimately into the first antechamber of the caverns.
“Go leef,” announced Beetledown. “No, loft, that is what I mean.”
“Left.”
“Aye, that be un.”
They stepped out of the antechamber and beneath a low archway into the first of what Chert had known since childhood as the Festival Halls, a massive set of linked caverns full of columns and flowstone canopies that had begun as natural formations but then been carved and decorated over the centuries until almost every piece had been extensively shaped. Only one extended section of grottoes had been left untouched. Its name was a consonantal grumble in the old Funderling language that roughly translated as “The Lord of the Hot Wet Stone’s Garden of Earth Shapes.” The carvings in the rest of the Festival Halls were as meticulous as anything in the wonderful roof of Funderling Town, but where the town’s famous roof portrayed a riot of natural greenery, of leaves and branches and fruit, and also birds and small treetop animals, to a people who hadn’t lived among such things in time out of memory, the Festival Halls were something altogether different, a collection of mysterious, endlessly repetitive shapes that made a person’s eyes blur if he or she looked at any one spot too long. These had been done so long ago that nobody remembered whether earlier Funderlings had carved them or why, and it was easy to see almost anything in the odd shapes—animals, demons, portraits of the gods themselves.
“I do not understand this place,” said Beetledown in a voice so quiet and nervous that Chert could barely hear him, despite the immense silence of the caverns.
“We are approaching some of the most sacred spots of the Funderling People,” Chert said. “Very few others ever see them. It is one reason I wanted to hide you from others at the Salt Pool, to avoid someone making a stink if they found out where we were going.”
“Ah, yes.” Beetledown’s voice sounded a little strained. “Laws against it, then? Forbidden, eh? Like us with the Great Gable or the Holy Wainscoting. ’Course with the Holy Wainscoting, none but the rats be small enough to follow us in.”
Chert couldn’t help smiling. “I can see that would work in your favor. Hmm, I suppose most of the big folk would have trouble making their way through some of the tight places down here, too. But you won’t.” He began walking again. “And it’s not really forbidden for you to be in these places, but it’s certainly unusual.”
“Just don’t leave me here,” Beetledown begged him, and Chert suddenly recognized that the undertone he had been hearing in the Rooftopper’s voice was pure fear. For the first time he considered what it must feel like for his minuscule companion to come so far beneath the ground, away from the open roofs and sky. “Not even Beetledown the brave bowman can live long by himself in such a place,” the tiny man said, “—not with the air so tight and close and even un’s breathing’s so unnatural loud.”
“I won’t leave you here.”
They crossed down through the Festival Halls and toward the cavern called the Curtainfall, which was a side doorway to the great honeycomb of caves known as the Temple. But when first seen, it didn’t look like the doorway to anything: at one end of the small cave a broad sheet of water drizzled from a lip of jutting rock, down into a pool. The waterfall shimmered blackly in the weak light of the cavern’s single bracketed torch although, as Chert moved closer to the curtain of water, he could also see the pale reflection of his coral lamp move like a firefly across its surface.
“Who comes down here so far to light torches?” Beetledown asked, distractedly sniffing.
“You’ll see.” Chert stepped out into the pool on a bridge of submerged stones near the edge of the cataract and headed straight for the falling water.
“Tha’ll drown us!” Beetledown chirped in alarm.
“Don’t fear. There is space between the water and the stone—and look!” There was more than space between water and wall—there was a hole in the great slab of stone, a hole that from most angles was hidden behind the waterfall. Chert stepped through, taking more care than he normally would to avoid the edge of the waterfall so that Beetledown would not accidentally be washed off his shoulder. On the far side of the water they entered a single chamber the size of an entire Funderling Town neighborhood, whose walls were lined with bracketed torches and whose high ceiling was covered with the same kind of strange carvings that filled the Garden of Earth Shapes. At the far side of this massive chamber stood the pillared front of the Temple of the Metamorphic Elders, cut directly into the living rock.
“By the Peak!” the little man said in wonder. “Un goes on and on! Have tha Funderling folk truly dug all the way down in the dark earth and out through the bottom?”
“Not quite,” Chert told him, looking at the intricately worked stone facade—only the unevenness of some of the shapes showed that it had been natural cavern once. “But we have found many of the deep places of the earth that water dug, then carved them even more to make them our own.”
Beetledown made a face, sniffed. “But for the first time I do not scent the boy strongly. Un’s track runs weaker here, behind the water-wall.”
Chert sighed. “I will ask the temple brothers, anyway,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to wait here.”
“Art coming back for me?”
“I won’t go out of your sight. Just sit here on this stone.” He placed Beetledown atop a relatively flat bit of carved wall, high off the cavern floor. He was glad he didn’t have to go far: he felt a responsibility for the little man he had not expected. He remembered the tiny fellow’s worry about cats and the joke he had made about it and was again struck by shame. It’s true there aren’t too many cats down here, he thought, but I don’t think I remembered to tell him that many here keep snakes against rats and voles and other vermin. I doubt Beetledown likes snakes any better than cats.
He hurried across the wide floor of the temple chamber. It was here that the people of Funderling Town made pilgrimage, gathering on the nights when the Mysteries themselves were celebrated and for other important holiday observances. Chert was relieved to see a dark-robed acolyte standing just inside the doorway of the temple proper, so that he didn’t have to break his word to stay within Beetledown’s sight. “Your pardon, Brother.”
The acolyte came out into the full glow of the torches. The Metamorphic Brothers did not use stonelights, considering them to be dangerously modern, even though the glowing lamps had been used in the streets of Funderling Town for at least two centuries. “What do you seek, Child of the Elders?” he asked. He was dressed in the temple’s costume of archaic, loose-fitting clothes and was younger than Chert would have expected. He looked like he might be from one of the Bismuth families.
“I am Chert Blue Quartz. My foster son is lost.” He took a breath. Here was where the trouble might really begin. “He is one of the big folk. Has he come past here?”
The acolyte raised an eyebrow but only shook his head. “Do not go away just yet, though. One of the brothers came back from the market and said he saw a Gha’jaz child.” Chert was not surprised to hear the man use the old Funde
rling word—he had spoken the Common Tongue of big folk and Funderlings awkwardly, as though he didn’t use it very often. The Temple had always disliked change. “I will bring him out.”
Chert waited impatiently. When the other acolyte at last emerged, he confirmed that he had seen a boy much like Flint hours earlier, fair-haired and small but clearly not a Funderling, in one of the outer Festival Halls, but heading away from the Temple rather than toward it. Just as Chert was absorbing the implications, he heard a clamor from behind him. Three more acolytes, apparently returning from some errand, had stopped and clustered around the bit of wall where he’d left Beetledown.
“Nickel!” one of them shouted to the first acolyte. “Look, it is a real, living Gha’sun’nk!”
Chert cursed under his breath.
Several more of the Metamorphic Brothers spilled out of the temple, some bare-chested and sweaty as though they had just come from forges, kilns, or ovens; within moments a dozen or so had surrounded the Rooftopper. They seemed even more curious than he would have expected. Chert waded through them and lifted the little man up onto his shoulder; Beetledown was looking a bit panicky.
“Is he really Gha’sun’nk?” asked an acolyte, again using the old Funderling name for the Rooftoppers—the little, little people.
“Yes. He is helping me hunt for my foster son.”
As the other acolytes whispered to each other, Nickel approached, a strange gleam in his eyes. “Ah! This is a terrible day,” he said and laid both fists on his chest in a gesture of surrender to the Earth Elders.
“What do you mean?” Chert asked, startled.
“We had hoped that Grandfather Sulphur’s dreams spoke of a time still to come,” said the acolyte. “He is the oldest among us, our master, and the Elders speak to him. Lately he has dreamed that the hour is coming when Old Night will reach out and claim all the di-G’zehnah’nk, “—he used an old word that meant something like “left-behinds”—“and that our days of freedom are over.”
