by Tad Williams
“No!” she shouted. “Never!” She turned to Kendrick, suddenly understanding his chilled, miserable mask. “I will never do it!”
“It is not your turn to speak, Briony,” he rasped. Something moved behind his eyes—despair? Anger? Surrender? “And this is not the place to discuss this matter.”
“She can’t!” Barrick shouted. The courtiers were talking loudly now, surprised and titillated. Some echoed Briony’s own refusal, but not many. “I won’t let you!”
“You are not the prince regent,” Kendrick declared. “Father is gone. Until he comes back, I am your father. Both of you.”
He meant to do it. Briony was certain. He was going to sell her to the bandit prince, the cruel mercenary Ludis, to reduce the ransom and keep the nobles happy. The ceiling of the great throne room and its tiled pictures of the gods seemed to swirl and drop down upon her in a cloud of dizzying colors. She turned and staggered through the murmuring, leering crowd, ignoring Barrick’s worried cries and Kendrick’s shouts, then slapped away Shaso’s restraining hand and shoved her way out the great doors, already weeping so hard that the sky and the castle stones ran together and blurred.
5. Songs of the Moon and Stars
THE LOUD VOICE:
In a snail shell house
Beneath a root, where the sapphire lies
The clouds lean close, listening
—from The Bonefall Oracles
Young Flint didn’t seem very taken with the turnip porridge, even though it was sweetened with honey. Well, Chert thought, perhaps it’s a mistake to expect one of the big folk to feel the same way about root vegetables as we do. Since Opal had gone off to the vent of warm subterranean air behind Old Quarry Square to dry the clothes she had washed, he took pity on the lad and removed the bowl.
“You don’t need to finish,” he said. “We’re going out, you and I.” The boy looked at him, neither interested nor disinterested. “Where?” “The castle—the inner keep.”
A strange expression flitted across the child’s face but he only rose easily from the low stool and trotted out the door before Chert had gathered up his own things. Although he had only come down Wedge Road for the first time the night before, the boy turned unhesitatingly to the left. Chert was impressed with his memory. “You’d be right if we were going up, lad, but we’re not. We’re taking Funderling roads.” The boy looked at him questioningly. “Going through the tunnels. It’s faster for the way we’re going. Besides, last night I wanted to show you a bit of what was above ground—now you get to see a bit more of what’s down here.”
They strolled down to the bottom of Wedge Road, then along Beetle Way to Ore Street, which was wide and busy, full of carts and teams of diggers and cutters on their way to various tasks, many leaving on long journeys to distant cities that would keep them away for half a year or more, since the work of the Funderlings of Southmarch was held in high regard nearly everywhere in Eion. There was much to watch in the orderly spoked wheel of streets at the center of Funderling Town, peddlers bringing produce down from the markets in the city above, honers and polishers crying their trades, and tribes of children on their way to guild schools, and Flint was wide-eyed. The day-lanterns were lit everywhere, and in a few places raw autumn sunlight streamed down through holes in the great roof, turning the streets golden, although all in all the day outside looked mostly dark.
Chert saw many folk he knew, and most called out greetings. A few saluted young Flint as well, even by name, although others looked at the boy with suspicion or barely-masked dislike. At first, Chert was astonished that anyone knew the boy’s new name, but then realized Opal had been talking with the other women. News traveled fast in the close confines of Funderling Town.
“Most times we’d turn here,” he said, gesturing at the place near the Gravelers Meeting Hall where the ordered ring of roads began to become a little less ordered and Ore Street forked into two thoroughfares, one level, one slanting downward, “but the way we’re going all the tunnels aren’t finished yet, so we’re making a stop at the Salt Pool first. When we get there you have to be quiet and you can’t cut up.”
The boy was busy looking at the chiseled facades of the houses, each one portraying a complicated web of family history (not all of the histories strictly true) and did not ask what the Salt Pool might be. They walked for a quarter of an hour down Lower Ore Street until they reached the rough, largely undecorated rock that marked the edge of town. Chert led the boy past men and a few women idling by the roadside—most waiting by the entrances to the Pool in hopes of catching a day’s work somewhere—and through a surprisingly modest door set in a wall of raw stone, into the glowing cavern.
The Pool itself was a sort of lake beneath the ground; it filled the greater part of the immense natural cave. It was salt water, an arm of the ocean that reached all the way into the stone on which the castle stood, and was the reason that even in the dimmest recesses of their hidden town the Funderlings always knew when the tides were high or low. The run of the lake was rough, the stones sharp and spiky, and the dozens of other Funderlings who were already there moved carefully. It would have been the work of a few weeks at the most to make the cavern and its rocky shore as orderly as the middle of town, but even the most improvement-mad of Chert’s people had never seriously considered it. The Salt Pool was one of the centers of earliest Funderling legend—one of their oldest stories told how the god the big folk called Kernios, who the Funderlings in their own secret language named “Lord of the Hot Wet Stone,” created their race right there on the Salt Pool’s shores in the Days of Cooling.
Chert did not explain any of this to the boy. He was not certain how long the child would stay with them and the Funderlings were cautious with outsiders; it was far too early even to consider teaching him any of the Mysteries.
The boy scrambled across the uneven, rocky floor like a spider, and he was already waiting, watchful features turned yellow-green by the light from the pool, when Chert reached the shore. Chert had only just taken off his pack and set it down by the boy’s feet when a tiny, crooked-legged figure appeared from a jumble of large stones, wiping its beard as it swallowed the last bite of something.
“Is that you, Chert? My eyes are tired today.” The little man who stood before them only reached Chert’s waist. The boy stared down at the newcomer with unhidden surprise.
“It is me, indeed, Boulder.” Now the boy looked at Chert, as surprised by the name as by the stranger’s size. “And this is Flint. He’s staying with us.” He shrugged. “That was Opal’s idea.”
The little fellow peered up at the boy and laughed. “I suppose there’s a tale there. Are you in too much of a hurry to tell it to me today?”
“Afraid so, but I’ll owe it to you.” “Two, then?”
“Yes, thank you.” He took a copper chip out of his pocket and gave it to the tiny man, who put it in the pouch of his wet breeches.
“Back in three drips,” said Boulder, then scampered back down the rocky beach toward the water, almost as nimble as the boy despite his bent legs and his many years.
Chert saw Flint staring after him.”That’s the first thing you have to learn about our folk, boy. We’re not dwarfs. We are meant to be this size. There are big folk who are small—not children like you, but just small—and those are dwarfs. And there are Funderlings who are small compared to their fellows, too, and Boulder is one of those.”
“Boulder… ?”
“His parents named him that, hoping it would make him grow. Some tweak him about it, but seldom more than once. He is a good man but he has a sharp tongue.”
“Where did he go?”
“He is diving. There’s a kind of stone that grows in the Salt Pool, a stone that is made by a little animal, like a snail makes a shell for itself, called coral. The coral that grows in the Salt Pool makes its own light . .
Before he could finish explaining, Boulder was standing before them, holding a chunk of the glowing stuff in each hand;
even though it was starting to darken after having been taken from the water, the light was still so bright that Chert could see the veins in the little man’s fingers. “These have just kindled,” he said with satisfaction. “They should last you all day, maybe even longer.”
“We won’t need them such a time, but my thanks.” Chert took out two pieces of hollow horn from his pack, both polished to glassy thinness, and dropped a piece of coral into each, then rilled them with a bit of salt water from Boulder’s bucket to wake the light and keep the little animals inside the coral alive. Submerged in the water, the stony clumps began to glow again.
“Don’t you want reflecting bowls?” asked Boulder.
Chert shook his head. “We won’t be working, only traveling. I just want us to be able to see each other.” He capped both hollow horns with bone plugs, then took a fitted leather hood out of his bag, tied it onto Flint’s head, and put one of the glowing cups of seawater and coral into the little harness on the front of the hood above the boy’s eyes. He did the same for himself, then they bade Boulder farewell and made their way back across the cavern of the Salt Pool. The boy moved in erratic circles, watching the light from his brow cast odd shadows as he scrambled from stone to stone.
Although the road had been braced and paved, it was so far out along the network of tunnels that it had no name yet. The boy, only named himself the night before, did not seem to mind.
“Where are we?”
“Now? Even with the gate to Funderling Town, more or less, but it’s a good way back over there. We’re passing away from it and along the line of the inner keep wall. I think the last new road we crossed, Greenstone or whatever they’re calling it now, climbs back up and lets out quite close to the gate.”
“Then we’re going past… past…” The boy thought for a moment. “Past the bottom of the tower with the golden feather on top of it.”
Chert stopped, surprised. The boy had not only remembered a small detail on the tower’s roof from the previous afternoon’s walk, but had calculated the distances and directions, too. “How can you know that?”
Little Flint shrugged, the keen intelligence suddenly hidden behind the gray eyes again like a deer moving from a patch of sunlight into shadow.
Chert shook his head. “You’re right, though, we’re passing underneath the Tower of Spring—although not right under it. Once we come up out of the deepest parts of Funderling Town, we don’t go directly under the inner keep. None of the high Funderling roads do. It’s… forbidden.”
The boy sucked on his lip, thinking again. “By the king?”
Chert was certainly not going to delve straight into the deep end of the Mysteries, but something in him did not want to lie to the child. “Yes, certainly, the king is part of it. They do not want us to tunnel under the heart of the castle in case the outer keep, and Funderling Town, should be overrun in a siege.”
“But there’s another reason “ It was not a question but a disconcertingly calm assertion. Chert could only shrug. “There is seldom only one reason for anything in this world.”
He led the boy upward through a series of increasingly haphazard diggings Their ultimate destination was inside the inner keep, and the fact that they could actually reach it from the tunnels of Funderling Town was a secret that only Chert of all his people knew—or at least he believed that was the case. His own knowledge was the result of a favor done long ago, and although it was conceivable someone could use this route as a way of going under the wall of the inner keep and attacking the castle itself, he couldn’t imagine anyone not of Funderling blood and upbringing finding their way through the maze of half-finished tunnels and raw scrapes.
But what about the boy? he thought suddenly. He’s already shown he has a fine memory. But surely even those clever, hooded eyes could not remember every twist and turn, the dozens of switchbacks, the crossings honeycombed with dozens of false trails that would lead anyone but Chert down endless empty passages and, if they were lucky enough not to be lost in the maze forever, eventually funnel them back into the main roads of Funderling Town.
Still, could he really risk the secret route with this child, of whom he knew so little?
He stared at the boy laboring along beside him in the sickly coral-light, putting one foot in front of the other without a word of complaint. Despite the child’s weird origins Chert could sense nothing bad in him, and it was hard to believe anyone could choose one so young as a spy, not to mention plan with such skill that the one person who knew these tunnels would wind up taking the child into his home. It was all too farfetched. Besides, he reminded himself, if he changed his mind now, he would not only have wasted much of the day, he would have to present himself at the Raven’s Gate and try to talk his way past the guards and into the inner keep that way. He didn’t think they were likely to let him in, even if he told them who he was going to see. And if he told them the substance of his errand, it would be all over the castle by nightfall, causing fear and wild stories No, he would have to go forward and trust his own good sense, his luck.
It was only as they turned down the last passage and into the final tunnel that he remembered that “Chert’s luck”—at least within his own Blue Quartz family—was another way of saying “no luck at all.”
The boy stared at the door. It was a rather surprising thing to find at the end of half a league of tunnels that were little more than hasty burrows, the kind of crude excavations that Funderling children got up to before they were old enough to be apprenticed to one of the guilds. But this door was a beautiful thing, if such could be said of a mere door, hewn of dark hardwoods that gleamed in the light of the coral stones, its hinges of heavy iron overlaid with filigree patterns in bronze. All that trouble, and for whom? Chert knew of no one else beside himself who ever used it, and this was only his third time in ten years.
It didn’t even have a latch or a handle, at least on the outside Chert reached up and pulled at a braided cord that hung through a hole in the door. It was a heavy pull, and whatever bell it rang was much too far away to hear, so Chert pulled it again just to make certain They had what seemed a long wait—Chert was just about to tug the cord a third time— before the door swung inward.
“Ah, is it Master Blue Quartz?” The round man’s eyebrows rose. “And a friend, I see.”
“Sorry to trouble you, sir.” Chert was suddenly uncomfortable—why had he thought it would be a good idea to bring the boy with him? Surely he could simply have described him. “This boy is… well, he’s staying with us. And he’s… he’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about. Something important.” He was uncomfortable now, not because Chaven’s expression was unkind, but because he had forgotten how sharp the physician’s eyes were—like the boy’s but with nothing hidden, a fierce, fierce cleverness that was always watching.
“Well, then we must step inside where we can talk comfortably. I am sorry to have kept you waiting, but I had to send away the lad who works for me before I came. I do not share the secret of these tunnels lightly.” Chaven smiled, but Chert wondered if what the physician was politely not saying was, Even if some others do.
He led them down a series of empty corridors, damp and windowless because they were below the ground-floor chambers, passages set directly into the rocky hill beneath the observatory.
“I told you the truth,” Chert whispered to the boy. “About not digging under the inner keep, that is. You see, we’ve just crossed under its walls, but not until we were inside this man’s house, as it were. Our end of the tunnel stops outside the keep.”
The boy looked at him as though the Funderling had claimed he could juggle fish while whistling, and even Chert was not sure why he felt compelled to point out this distinction. What loyalty could the boy have to the royal family? Or to Chert himself, for that matter, except for the kindness of a bed and a few meals?
Chaven led them up several flights of stairs until they reached a small, carpeted room. Jars and wooden chests were stacked a
long the walls and on shelves, as though the room was as much a pantry as a retiring room. The small windows were covered with tapestries whose night-sky colors were livened by winking gems in the shapes of constellations.
The physician was more fit than he appeared: of the three of them, Chert alone was winded by the climb. “Can I offer you something to eat or drink?” asked Chaven. “It might take me a moment to fetch. I’ve sent Toby off on an errand and I’d just as soon not tell any of the servants there’s a guest here who didn’t come in through any of the doors—at least any of the doors they know about…”
Chert waved away the offer. “I would love to drink with you in a civilized way, sir, but I think I had better get right to the seam, as it were. Is the boy all right, looking around?”
Flint was moving slowly around the room, observing but not handling the various articles standing against the wall, mostly lidded vessels of glass and polished brass.
“I think so,” Chaven said, “but perhaps I should withold my judgment until you tell me what exactly brings you here—and him with you.”
Chert described what he had seen the day before in the hills north of the castle. The physician listened, asking few questions, and when the little man had finished, he didn’t speak for a long time. Flint was done examining the room and now sat on the floor, looking up at the tapestries and their twining patterns of stars.
“I am not surprised,” Chaven said at last. “I had… heard things. Seen things. But it is still fearful news.” “What does it mean?”
The physician shook his head. “I can’t say. But the Shadowline is something whose art seems far beyond ours, and whose mystery we have never solved. Scarcely anyone who passes it returns, and those who have done so are no longer in their right minds. Our only solace has been that it has not moved in centuries—but now it is moving again. I have to think that it will keep moving unless something stops it, and what would that be?” He rose, rubbing his hands together.
