by Tad Williams
There were nods and a few grunts of agreement, but otherwise nobody said anything. There was no need.
Chert had been up and down the shore of the quicksilver sea a hundred times, it seemed, calling and calling until he was quite dizzy, with no reply except echoes. He had discovered no hint of a way across the liquid metal, no bridge, no mooring post, and—as best he could tell in the inconstant, flickering light—no boat on the shore at the far side. He had discovered one thing, though: somewhere in the blue-and-rose-shot darkness above his head some sort of cleft must open to the distant surface, a rock chimney of sorts where the fumes could disperse into the air above Brenn’s Bay. Chert knew enough about quicksilver to know that if this were the true stuff, unaired, he likely would be not just light-headed but dead or dying.
He wondered if that could be the answer to the puzzle—could the boy have somehow come down onto the island from above? But what had Beetledown been following if it hadn’t been Flint’s scent? And how could the boy have gotten down from such a height? The rock face on the side of the silver sea—the side Chert couldn’t reach—was distant from the island, at least as far from it as the side where he stood. He had a momentary, fanciful vision of the child somehow drifting down like a mote of dust or a bit of mushroom spore, but that was ridiculous. Flint might have come from behind the Shadowline, he might be a good climber, but he had given no sign whatsoever of being able to fly.
Still, Chert walked back to the slope below the jut of stone balcony where he himself had entered and stared up the jagged face, scouting with his eye up the deer track—the ghost-deer track as he now had to think of it—wondering if there was some other way across from near the Maze itself, some high path made invisible by a trick of the light. Sighing—a sigh that the thick, hot air quickly turned into a wheeze and then a cough—he clambered back up the slope.
He paused on the balcony of the Maze, peering out at the weird glow of the Shining Man that filled the great cavern without fully illuminating it, then took out his remaining chunk of lantern-coral to make his way back through the Maze. He was glad he had reclaimed it and did not have to traverse the labyrinth in darkness again—it had been too much like his age-ceremony, too much like that sense of helplessness when he had been forced to march without touching any of his peers, following the voice of an acolyte he could not see, a voice made strange and inhuman by the dark and the echoes. But this time he would have light. . . .
How did Flint get through the Maze, then? It was a question he should have asked before, and Chert was again angry with himself. Did Flint go to the Salt Pool first for a piece of Boulder’s wares? Somehow Chert didn’t believe it—the little man would have said something. But how could the child have made his way through the Maze in utter blackness otherwise?
For that matter, how did he find his way around down here at all? It was a mystery to rival the strangest parts of the tale of Kernios and his fabulous battles.
Chert paused for a short rest, wondering what time of day it was now, since even his Funderling sense of how time passed in the skyless depths had been compromised by this place, then slowly made his way back through the twisting Maze. He emerged into the soft, warm light of Emberstone Reach without having discovered a single hint of how the boy might have made his way across the Sea in the Depths, or even any sign of Flint’s passage at all. Chert turned and began to make his weary way through the Maze again, more and more certain he would never know what had happened to the boy, but this time, in his exhaustion, he took a wrong turning and found himself in a section of the labyrinth he had not entered before. He could tell because it felt different beneath his feet, and he realized for the first time that the route between the Reach and the feature called the Balcony had been worn low in the middle over the centuries by the shuffling passage of innumerable feet. He also abruptly understood at least one of the ways that the acolytes made their way through the Maze in darkness. Now he found himself in a part of it where the floor stones were smoothly level, as if no one had ever walked on them before.
He fought down a moment of panic. Even if he was lost, surely he would be no worse off here than wandering the shore of the quicksilver sea. The temple brothers, if they came, were the guardians of the Maze. They should know its every corner.
Still, he could not forget his own proverbial bad luck. They should, yes. But perhaps they don’t.
Chert did his best to retrace his steps, but he had been distracted when he chose the wrong path and couldn’t remember how long he had walked or how many times he had turned before realizing his mistake. Chert held his glowing chunk of coral up to the slate walls, seeking some sort of clue, but although they were covered with the same indecipherable carvings as the Maze’s more familiar reaches—vast, wall-wide figures with huge eyes and contorted limbs, as well as curls and dots of what looked like writing but in no script he had seen anywhere else—it was all too much the same from wall to wall and room to room to help him find his way.
Still, I’ve seen what not many other than the Metamorphic Brothers can have seen, he thought, recalling his journey through blackness in his coming-of-age ceremony. What does it all mean? Can the brothers read it?
The face and words of Brother Nickel came back to him suddenly—the odd look in the man’s eyes as he told of their elder, Grandfather Sulphur, and his dreams that “. . . An hour is coming when Old Night will reach out . . . that our days of freedom are over.” Chert shivered despite the thick heat of the place. Here in the depths, wandering beneath the eyes of these supernatural beings, it was easy to feel the breath of Old Night on the back of his neck.
He turned sharply, suddenly convinced that something was following him, but the corridor behind him was empty. I am making it worse, he thought. I should stop and wait until the temple brothers come.
And if the light from his coral finally died while he waited? Darkness had never frightened Chert before, but now it was a dreadful thought.
He turned another corner and found himself in a dead-end facing three stone walls. Vast faces carved on those walls stared down at him so that he felt like a child surrounded by angry parents. He let out a little gasp of surprise and heard it echo and fade, but before he stopped walking he could hear something else as well, a hollowness in his footfalls, an echo that had not been there before. It confused him—for a moment he thought someone else was in the Maze with him—but then he crouched down and held the gleaming coral close. He stared at the scratches on the stone flags, then rapped on them with his knuckle. The sound was unquestionably different.
Chert pried at the edge of one of the stones and to his astonishment it rose a little in his hands, shuddering as it slid out of its collar of ancient mortar. Then, as he strained and heaved, it was not just one that rose, but four stones together. He got the fingers of both hands under it and, growling and moaning with the strain, lifted the whole mass like the cover of a cistern and slid it rasping to one side. The conjoined stones made a rough square less than a big-one’s yard across and were no thicker than the width of Chert’s closed fist. Beneath the spot where they had lain was darkness.
A little heat and a stronger smell of the quicksilver sea floated up from the opening. Chert leaned over and poked the coral light into it. Stairs, steep stairs, wound down and away before vanishing in the depths. He sat up, rubbing his head. Was this what the boy had found? Or was it merely some other part of the Mysteries, a path that would lead him to a worse fate even than being stranded in darkness in the Maze?
It’s not like I’ve anything better to do, he told himself. And if the Elders are angry with me . . . well, surely this won’t make it any worse.
He had heard better arguments, but he carefully let himself down through the opening, then squatted on one of the lower steps to look as far down the crude little stairwell as he could, just in case the whole thing might come to a sudden end a few yards deeper and fall away beneath his feet, pitching him down into some abyss. Although the tunnel looked far les
s carefully finished in its construction than the rest of the Maze, it still seemed solid Funderling work and there were no sudden drops in view. As he cautiously inched down a few more steps, he looked up and saw that a slot had been cut into the bottom of one of the four stones that covered the hole, a handhold to drag the cover back into place from below.
Not very likely I’ll be doing that, he thought, but he wondered how Flint could have managed to do it if he had descended these stairs. The boy was wiry, but was he that strong?
All this thinking gave Chert another idea and he crawled back out of the hole. He untied the shirt he had been wearing around his waist since he had got it back from Beetledown—it was far too hot down here for him to have felt any need of it—and tossed it out to the mouth of the dead-end so that someone in the passage would be able to see it without turning the corner.
With the stone cover off the opening, I couldn’t give the temple brothers a better idea of where I’ve gone if I wrote them a letter.
Feeling a little heartened despite his worries over what might be waiting in this narrow place, Chert Blue Quartz began to make his way down the stairs.
Either the quicksilver vapors were truly much stronger here or something else about the downward passage was . . . strange ... because Chert was finding it hard to keep his mind on the very important task of not falling down the narrow steps.
The stairwell was largely featureless: every few dozen steps he passed a string of symbols that might have been a single, enlarged word, rendered in the same stylized writing he had seen above, but there were no faces on these walls, no figures. Still, he couldn’t escape the idea that things were moving around him, and that the failing light of his coral was being reflected back at him somehow from the bare walls as though it bounced off something less opaque than mere stone, as though the stairwell burrowed down not through the castle’s well-known limestone, but some huge, murky crystal. The dimensions of the place seemed to change, too, swelling and contracting even as he continued his trudge downward. For a time he couldn’t make sense anymore of how he had found his way here, and he became gripped by the dreadful certainty that he was descending the living stone throat of the Shining Man, being swallowed down into the heart of the Mysteries. Then the sensation passed, replaced by flickers of light all around him like the sparks that danced on the inside of closed eyelids. Wordless whispers swam up the stairwell, a dull and distant rush like waves crashing on a shore, and superstitious terror gripped him again.
This is not my place. Only the temple brothers should be here, and perhaps even they do not know about this tunnel . . . !
Flint, he reminded himself, trying to fight off the panic that had him huddling on a step, hugging himself in exhausted terror. Remember the boy. That small, fiercely solemn face, the arms thin as Opal’s broom handle, the white-gold hair that would never lie flat, and stood up like iron-flower crystals despite Opal’s best work with the brush. And Opal herself, of course—if Chert couldn’t bring the boy back to her, she would be crushed. Something inside her would die.
He forced himself to his feet and began descending again. One step. It all starts with one step, then another. Then another . . .
No, the Shadowline, he thought blearily, it all started that day beside the Shadowline . . . But even as the memory came into his head with a sudden bizarre clarity—the forested hillside, the noise of hooves, the smell of the damp soil under his nose—as if a door had been opened and the past had crashed in, like a noisy guest into a quiet room, he put his foot down onto the next step and discovered something was very wrong. Chert stumbled, flailed, and shrieked; then, with his heart pounding so hard it seemed it might cannon through the cage of his ribs, he realized that the wrong thing was not a deadly chasm beneath his feet but the opposite, a floor—not too much distance but too little. He had reached an end to what had seemed an endless downward spiral of steps.
He raised the chunk of coral and peered around, but if the world had suddenly gone from vertical to horizontal, it had not changed in many other ways: before him lay more corridor hewed through the same featureless stone. He was having trouble seeing clearly, but the passage extended as far as the light reached and probably much farther than that.
Beneath even the Sea in the Depths? If so, there might be an end to the journey at some point—he had half feared that he might simply continue down into the earth for days and weeks, perhaps at last to arrive at the black tourmaline doors of Kernios’ own subterranean palace, doors that were famously guarded by Immon the Gatekeeper. It was a place Chert definitely did not wish to see while still alive, even if much of the original tale had been distorted by the big folk. The Funderling version was even more frightening. He tried to remember the distance across the quicksilver sea but the unstable light had confused him. Never having been any closer, he could only guess now in the most formless kind of way. He shrugged and took a deep breath. The hot, sour air did not seem to clear his thoughts. He staggered down the corridor.
“The deeps are no more like the town than the sky is like the ground, lad.”
It was his father’s voice in his head now, strangely. Big Nodule (unlike his firstborn son, Chert’s brother, who was the current magister, his father would never have let himself be called anything so pretentious as “Nodule the Elder”) had been lamed by a rockfall in the early part of Olin’s reign, and had spent the last years of his life moving between his bed and his chair before the fire, but during Chert’s boyhood he had still been vigorous. Of all his sons, Chert had been the one most like him—“the boy loves stone for stone’s sake,” Big Nodule had often proclaimed to his cronies at the guildhall—and he had taken Chert for long walks through the unfinished works outside Funderling Town, and even a few times to some of the hills aboveground or along the edge of Brenn’s Bay, pointing out the way limestone came to light where the rainwater washed away the earth, or the trapped centuries that were pressed in a sandstone bank above the waves like dried flowers in a noble lady’s book.
“A man who knows stone and its ways is as good as any man, big ’un or Funderling, prince or kern, and he’ll never lack for things to do and think about.” That had been another of the old fellow’s favorite sayings.
Chert was astonished to find that he was walking blind, not because his coral lamp had finally died, but because he was weeping.
Hold on, you, he told himself. That man strapped you raw with his tie-rope for stealing a few sugarcap mushrooms out of Widow Rocksalt’s garden. When he finally died, your mother didn’t last even a year after, not because she missed him so much but because he’d worked her so in those last years that she was just bone-tired and couldn’t go on any longer.
Still, the tears wouldn’t stop. He found it hard to walk. His mother’s face was before him now, too, the heavy-lidded eyes that could seem either beautifully dignified or painfully distant, the mouth that turned down at any hint of what she deemed an unnecessary fuss. He remembered Lapis Blue Quartz’s nimble, work-gnarled hands as she made a yarn doll for one of her grandchildren, her fingers always busy, always doing something. He couldn’t think of a time when she had been awake and those hands were not occupied.
“And what is this now?” He could hear her as clearly as if she stood beside him, her voice sour but not without humor. “What noise is this? Fissure and fracture, it sounds like someone’s skinning a live mole in here!”
Chert had to stop for a while to get his breath, and when he started again, it was hard just to keep walking. The walls, unbroken now even by the occasional glyph, featureless as a rabbit scrape, squeezed in on him as though they meant to catch him and hold him until the world changed. He could again imagine himself in the belly of the Shining Man, being digested and changed, becoming something hard like crystal, immobile and eternal, but with his thoughts still alive in the center of it, battering hopelessly to get out like a fly beneath an overturned cup.
And now, as though the deep places that contained him suddenly we
nt through some sort of paroxysm, he could feel the sensation of power, the presence that he thought was the Shining Man, shift and grow less diffuse, more localized: it was something he sensed as powerfully as he could know down from up with his eyes closed—the presence was no longer smotheringly all around him, but instead had taken on a very definite location, up and ahead of him. Instead of giving him a goal, the power of it became something that pushed against him like a strong, constant wind, as though he and it were two chunks of lodestone repelling each other. Chert put his head down, eyes still prismed with weeping, and forced himself to take step after agonizing step.
What is this place? What does it all mean? He tried to remember the words of the temple brothers at his coming-of-age ceremony, the ritual tale of the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone, but it came back only as a jumble of sonorous words that buzzed in his head almost without meaning, in pictures that were smeared like wet paint. The earth was a broken thing, the voices murmured and roared, a new thing, the lights in the sky so bright and the face of the world yet so dark, the battle to take this place away from older, crueler gods a thing not of days or weeks but of aeons, throwing mountains up where no mountains had stood, tearing the face of creation so that the water rushed in and made great, steaming seas.
“In the Days when there were no Days,” the oldest of the temple brothers had chanted, beginning the initiation ceremony, and Chert and the other celebrants had only moaned, their heads full of waking dreams that painted the dark around them, their stomachs sour from the k’hamao they had been given to drink after fasting and purifying themselves for two days before the being taken down into the Mysteries. In the Days when there were no Days.
But what now? What was this? The tunnel had somehow been yanked upright like a length of string. It rose above him into the shadowy distance. Somehow Chert found himself on stairs again, but this time he was climbing, not descending, his head chaotic with ideas, with visions that were not quite visible, with the endless roar of The Lord of the Hot Wet Stone battling his foes, a roar that made the very roots of the world quiver. Chert felt that roar in his bones now, felt it beginning to rattle him to pieces, to crumble him like the sandstone cliffs his father had shown him, falling to the relentless waves. Soon there would be no more Chert, only fragments, crumbled smaller and smaller until they became dust, then the dust would scatter and waft away and spread into all the dark places even the stars had never reached. . . .
