by Tad Williams
Chert flinched a little under the volley of questions. “I don’t know, but he’s more than just one of the big folk.” Gil’s calm, empty stare had remained in his thoughts. “There’s something wrong with him, I think, but it’s hard to explain. He’s just…” Chert shook his head. That was his problem. He had spent much of the last days in places where words meant little or nothing, but Opal had not. It saddened him, felt like a breach between them. He hoped he would survive this strange time so that he could patch it up again. He missed his good wife even though she was standing right in front of him. “I must do this, Opal.”
“So you say. Then what are you doing here at all, you cruel, stubborn old blindmole? Do you think you’re doing me a kindness, coming back to tell me you’re off to risk your life again after you’ve just returned? Worrying me to death with these mad stories?”
“Yes,” he said. “Not a kindness, but I couldn’t go away again without telling you why.” He walked across the bedroom and picked up his pack. “And I wanted some tools, also. Just in case.” He didn’t tell her that what he really wanted was his chipping knife, sharp-honed and the closest thing to a weapon they had in the house other than Opal’s cookware. He couldn’t quite imagine asking her for her best carving knife—it seemed as though that might be the last blow on a quivery rockface.
Opal had stamped out to the front room, fighting tears again. Chert kneeled beside the boy. He felt his cool forehead and looked again to make sure Flints chest was still moving. He kissed him on the cheek and said quietly,”I love you, lad.” It was the first time he had said it aloud, or even admitted it.
He kissed Opal, too, although she could barely force herself to hold still for it, and quickly turned her face away, but not before he tasted her tears on his lips.
“I’ll come back, old girl.”
“Yes,” she said bitterly. “You probably will.”
But as he went out the door, he heard her add quietly, “You’d better.”
Chert made a few wrong turns on his way back, since this time he didn’t have the girl Willow to guide him. The big folk dashing here and there around the castle seemed even more distracted than might seem warranted with siege preparations still going on, and at first he thought it a little strange that no one bothered to question a lone Funderling wandering through the grounds. Then he remembered that today was Winter’s Eve, the day before Orphan’s Day, one of the most important holidays on the big folks’ calendar. Despite the fear of war they seemed to be preparing for a feast and other entertainments: Chert saw more than a few groups of courtiers in costumes even more elaborate than usual, and a trio of young girls that seemed to be dressed as geese or ducks.
The man named Gil was sitting as still as a statue in a patch of weak morning sunlight in the garden when Chert found the place at last. Chert couldn’t help wondering if the stranger had waited on that bench all the night long, ignoring winter chill and the soaking dew.
Gil looked at him as if hours had not passed, as if they had only left off their conversation moments earlier. “Now we will go,” he said, and stood, showing no stiffness. Indeed, he was weirdly graceful, displaying such economy of movement that what at first sight appeared slow and awkward soon began to seem more subtle, movement without wasted effort, so that even his most mundane acts might have been the carefully planned steps of an elaborate dance.
“Hold a moment.” Chert glanced around, but the garden seemed to be one of the few spots in the castle empty of people preparing for either siege or feast. “We can’t just walk out the Basilisk Gate, you know. The castle is at war. The guards won’t let us. Not to mention that the causeway is down. You say we must reach the city on the other side—we would have to find a boat and the bay is dangerous today. Some say a storm is coming.” Gil regarded him. “What does this mean?”
Chert let out a snort of exasperation. “It means you haven’t thought this part out very carefully, is what it means. We’ll have to find some other way. You can’t fly, can you? I didn’t think so. Then you’ll have to come back with me to Funderling Town. There are tunnels—old roads, secret roads— that lead under the bay. They’re not used much anymore even by us. We can go that way, or at least it’s worth a try.”
Gil continued to look at him, then sat down. “I cannot go down into Funderling Town, as you call it. It is too close to the deep places—to the thing you call the Shining Man. I… I cannot go there.”
“Then we have hit bedrock with no tools.” Chert wished again that Chaven had not vanished. Cryptic strangers and magical mirrors! The Mysteries coming to life! The portly physician would have had something useful to say—he always did…”Ah,” Chert said.”Ah.Wait a moment.” He considered. “The girl told me you have been living in the castle stronghold. That is beneath the ground.”
Gil nodded his head slowly. “That is not so deep, I think. I feel it only a little.”
“I know a way that also does not go too deep, at least not at first. When we are far away from the Shining Man, if that is what you really fear, we can go deeper. Follow me.”
As he led the stranger across the inner keep, certain now for the first time of where he was going, he tried to plan what he would say to Chaven’s housekeeper or to the manservant—what was that suspicious old man’s name? Harry? Could he convince them of some errand so they would allow him to go through the house unsupervised? He didn’t think any of them knew about the tunnel and the door off the cellar hallway.
He was still scheming when they reached the stubby observatory-tower, but the tale he had cobbled together—an important sample of stone Chaven had been testing for him, but which Chert now urgently needed back—was to remain unused. Nobody answered to his knock. The door was bolted, although Chert jiggled it to make sure. A layer of dirt on the threshold had been damped by the mist and drizzle into a muddy film naked of footprints, as though nobody had gone in or out for several days. He shook the handle again but the door was latched tight. It seemed that in Chaven’s long absence the servants had closed up the house.
With sinking heart he began to explain to Gil, but realized that the odd man saw nothing that needed explaining. Chert looked up to the second-floor window and its wooden balcony. Perhaps the shutters there were less securely guarded.
“Can you climb?” he asked. Gil gave him that now-familiar, annoyingly expressionless gaze. “Never mind. I’ll do it.The Elders know I’ve been getting enough practice at it lately.”
It took him a while after he reached the balcony to catch his breath— half a night’s sleep had not been nearly enough and his muscles were quivering with the exertion—but he was pleased to discover that the end of his chipping knife could slide between the shutters and still give him enough leverage to lift the bar on the inside. He went through as quietly as he could, considering he was still wheezing, and paused for a moment in the cluttered room to listen. All around him were the signs of Chaven’s interests and obsessions, books and containers on every surface, caskets and sacks spilling their contents, apothecary chests with the drawers left open as though the physician had made one last hurried search of his belongings before rushing out the door Nothing was too dusty, though, Chert decided that the housekeeper must have given it a good cleaning before she left Still, he stood silent for a long time, feeling like a thief, until he was certain that nothing was stirring anywhere around him. He wondered briefly about the chunk of stone that Flint had brought back—such a long time ago it seemed now’—but to find anything in this hodgepodge would be the work of hours if not days. He hurried down the winding stairs and let Gil in through the front door.
“Follow me,” he told him he couldn’t assume anything was obvious to this strange, fish-eyed fellow Chert led him down through several floors to the bottommost corridor and its featureless hallway, where he was startled almost into a scream by a furry shape that scuttled out of the shadows in front of his feet, but it was only a spotted black-and-gray cat who stopped and gave him a stare as arro
gant as Gil’s. It seemed healthy and well-fed. He wondered if it had found the larder and was making a home of the Observatory now that the house was empty.
“Well met,” Gil said as they all stood poised on the stairway. It certainly seemed that he was talking to the cat. The creature did not appear impressed, she showed the two of them her tail as she trotted past them up the stairs.
In the featureless corridor at the bottom of the house Chert heard a noise from behind a small and otherwise unexceptional door that made him stop and snatch at his companion’s arm to halt him as well. In other circumstances Chert would have said someone in that room was moaning, although the voice did not sound much like anything human, but in the deserted house of a man with many arcane interests he was less certain. In fact, he was only sure that he didn’t want anything to do with it, even if it was only the sound of some odd mechanical device of Chaven’s, some tangle of leather hoses and bellows and glass pipes. After a heart-stuttering moment he pulled Gil past the spot and down to the door at the end with the bell hanging beside it. It was a relief to close that door behind them, to be out of the empty house and into the clean but crude Funderling tunnels he knew so well.
“We should be no deeper than the stronghold here,” he whispered to his companion. “Can you stand it?" Gil nodded.
“Good. Follow on, then. We’ve got a long distance to walk.”
Chert did not have either the time or inclination to visit Boulder for any of the glowing coral, so it was with a conventional and very smoky oil lamp throwing huge shadows on the pale, sweating walls of the limestone cavern that he led Gil through the deep places underneath Brenn’s Bay. At other times, Chert thought, it would have been interesting to take this old route from a time when Funderlings had less trust of their larger brethren (for good reason) and wished an escape to be available at all times. The old Exodus Road was largely unused these days, untended in many crumbling places and navigable only with the help of a long rhyme Chert’s father had taught him that marked off the turnings as it wound from the outer reaches of Funderling Town, through dripping caverns beneath the bay and at last to the mainland. The current circumstances robbed the trip of any pleasure for Chert, not to mention his recent memories of having made his way beneath the silvery Sea in the Depths, plagued by nightmare visions every step of the way. This journey was not nearly so difficult, though it was much longer. Only the behavior of his companion made the experience anywhere near as frightening.
Gil, in fact, seemed to be suffering as Chert himself had suffered deep in the Mysteries, beset by things invisible to the Funderling—muttering, even once or twice speaking in an unfamiliar language. It was only after the lean stranger experienced his third or fourth such seizure that Chert finally realized he had seen something like this before.
Flint, down in the Eddon family tomb. The crack in the earth there. Something suddenly occurred to him, something he should have thought of before. Did Flint know —was that why he acted so crosswise in the tomb? Did he know he must one day go down there? Or did it frighten him because it called to him, and it was only a few days ago that the call finally became too strong to resist… ?
As they reached the far side where the paths turned upward again, his odd companion went through yet another change, this time as though a layer of his strangeness had actually been scrubbed away. Gil began to ask questions about where they were and how long it would take them to get to the surface that seemed as though they could have come from the mouth of an ordinary man. Chert couldn’t compass it and didn’t try: far too much of what had happened in these last days he not only didn’t understand, but felt sure he never would.
The underground way reached the surface at last on the mainland, in a bank of seaside cliffs half a mile or so north of where the causeway had stretched. As they made their way out into the daylight, or as much of it as there was on this bleak, misty afternoon, Chert saw the castle they had left behind looming just across the strait, like a toy decorously carved by a giant and set down in the water to wait his return. From this distance Chert couldn’t even see the sentries on the wall. The keep looked deserted, its windows empty as the cliff holes above his head where the shorebirds nested in spring. It was hard to believe there were any living souls at all inside that castle or beneath it.
He tried to shrug off the bleak thought. “We’re on the other side of the water. Where do we go now?” “Into the city. Those tunnels—have I ever been in them before?”
“I don’t know,” said Chert, surprised.”I shouldn’t think so.”
“Very much they remind me of… something. Some place I once knew well.” For the first time Chert could see actual emotion written on the man’s features, in his troubled eyes. “But I cannot summon it to my thoughts.”
Chert could only shrug and start down the beach. Soon the seawalls of the city were looming above them. Only the base of the causeway remained where Market Road reached the shoreline, and the sea was empty into the distance, but a few tethered boats still floated along the quay—their owners taking their chances in the keep, no doubt, hoping one day soon to reclaim them. Otherwise the docks and the waterfront taverns and warehouses were deserted. It was stunningly empty and Chert could not help staring; it looked as though some great wind had come and blown all the people away. Fear stabbed at him anew. It wasn’t just his own life: all the world had turned topside-down.
It was Gil who now took the lead, the Funderling who followed with increasing reluctance. A mist had crept down out of the hills and covered the city so that they could see only a few dozen paces ahead of them even on wide Market Road, the empty buildings on either side seemed more like the silent wrecks of ships lying on the sea bottom than anything whole-some.The damp walls and guttered roofs dripped like the deepest limestone caverns, so that their footsteps seemed to echo away multifold on all sides in a thousand tiny pattering sounds.
Everything was so gloomy and unnatural that when a half dozen dark figures stepped out of the shadows before them it seemed so much like the inevitable ending to a terrible dream that Chert did little more than gasp and stop in his tracks, blood thumping. One of the lean figures stepped forward, leveling a long black spear. His armor was the color of lead, and nothing showed of his face but a bit of bone-white skin and the catlike yellow gleam of the eyes in the slot of his helmet. The point of the spear moved from Chert to Gil and settled there. The apparition said something in a voice full of harshly musical clicking and hissing.
To Chert’s dull astonishment, Gil responded after a moment in a slower version of the same incomprehensible tongue. The gray-armored figure answered back and the exchange went on. Water dripped. The sentries moved up behind their leader, nothing much of them visible but tall shadows and a half circle of burning yellow eyes.
“It seems… we are to be killed,” Gil said at last. He sounded a little sad about this—wistful, perhaps. “I told them we bear an important thing for their mistress, but they do not seem to care. They are victorious, they say. There are no bargains left to be made.”
Chert fought against panic that threatened to clamp his throat, choke him. “What… what does that mean? You said they would want what we have! Why do they want to kill us?”
“You?” Gil actually smiled, a sad twitch at the corners of his mouth. “They say because you are a sunlander, you must die. As for me, it seems I am a deserter and thus also to be executed. She who has conquered—she was my mistress once.” He shook his head slowly. “I did not know that. Given time, it might have helped me understand other things. But it seems that time is what we do not have.” And indeed, as Gil spoke, the semicircle tightened around them. Spear points hovered in front of their bellies, an ample supply for both of them. The only choice was to die standing up or running away.
“Farewell, Chert of Blue Quartz,” his companion said. “I am sorry I brought you here to die instead of leaving you in your tunnels to find your own time and place.”
38. Silent
> IN THE DARK GREEN:
Whisper, now see the blink.
And flicker of something swift.
It is alive, it is alive!
—from The Bonefall Oracles
Qinnitan stood in the corridor outside Luian’s chambers like someone blasted by a demon’s spell, amazed and defeated, waiting for death to come and take her.
When a dozen or so heartbeats had passed, her hopeless terror ebbed, if only a little. She didn’t want to give up, she realized. What if darkness was like sleep, and that huge, terrible… something was waiting for her there as well? Except in death there would be no waking, no escape from that black and gaping mouth…
She slowly shook her head, then slapped at her own cheeks, trying to make herself feel again. If she wanted to live, she would have to escape from the autarch’s own palace, an impossible task under the eyes of all his guards—and not just the guards: soon every servant would be watching for her, too, and everyone else in the Seclusion, royal wives and gardeners and hairdressers and kitchen slaves…
A glimmer of an idea came to her.
She forced herself to move, lurching back down the corridor to step through the hanging into Luian’s chamber. Even knowing what she would find, it was impossible to suppress a groan of horror when she saw the sprawled body in the center of the floor, although the purple face was turned away from her. The strangling cord was so deeply embedded in the Favored’s wattled neck that most of it was invisible. Luian’s murderer had found that thick throat hard going: a muddy bootprint stood out starkly on the middle of the back of Luian’s white nightdress like a religious insignia on the robe of a penitent.
Qinnitan was fighting her roiling stomach when a huge, fresh wave of misery washed through her. “Oh, Luian…!” She had to turn away. If she looked any longer, she would start weeping again and never move until they came for her.
She was rummaging furiously through Luian’s baskets and chests of belongings when she heard a sound behind her. Her hands flew up to protect her neck as she turned, certain she would confront the grinning, dead-eyed face of Tanyssa, but the rustling noise had been made by the mute slave boy, the Silent Favored who had brought her Luian’s message, as he tried to hide himself deeper into the room’s naked corner. She had walked right past him.
