by Tad Williams
“I will not bore you with my every dreadful moment,” Chaven said, as if fearing the other man’s impatience, although that had faded now as Chert considered the horror of a child in such a situation, thought of Flint just days ago, alone in the depths, going through things he and Opal could never know. Chert shuddered.
“Enough to say that I heard screaming and shouting from the hillside overhead,” Chaven continued, “and thought they were trying to frighten me—and that it was succeeding. Then there was silence for so long that I at last stopped believing it was a trick. I became certain they had forgotten me in truth, or that they had fallen to their deaths, or been attacked by catamounts or bears. I cried and cried, as any child would, but at last the barrel was empty—I had no tears left.
“I do not remember much of what happened next. I must have found the hole at the back of the cave and wandered in, although I do not remember doing so. I dimly recall lights, or a dream of lights, and voices, but all that I can know for certain is that when my father and the servants came for me, bearing torches because it was hours after nightfall, they found me curled in a smaller, deeper cave whose entrance we had never found in all the times we had played there. My father subsequently had that inner cavern blocked and the ladder to the caves taken away. We never went there again—Niram could not have climbed down to them in any case.” Chaven ran his hands over his balding scalp. “I have had a horror of dark, narrow places ever since. It took all I had those three days past simply to come down into Funderling Town seeking you, although I knew I would die if I did not find help.”
It was hard to imagine feeling stone over your head as oppressive instead of sheltering—how much less secure to stand in some wide open space with no refuge, no place to hide from enemies or angry gods! But Chert did his best to understand. “Would you like to go back, then?”
“No.” Chaven stood, still trembling, but with a resolution on his face that looked a little like anger. “No, I cannot leave my house to the plundering of the Tollys without even knowing what they do there. I cannot. My things…valuable…” The physician dropped into a mumble Chert could not understand as he pushed himself off from the wall and began walking again, heading bravely into the long stretches of shadow between stonelights, shadows which Chert knew must seem darkness complete and hopeless to a man from aboveground.
As he paused to drop a fresh piece of coral stone into the saltwater of the lantern Chert could not help thinking of his last two journeys through these tunnels, passing this way with Flint when they took the strange piece of stone to Chaven, then the other direction with Gil on their march to the fairy-held city on the other side of the bay. How could his life, such an ordinary thing only a year before, full of orderly days and restful nights, have been turned inside out so quickly, like Opal readying shirts to dry on a hot rock?
“And the stone, Flint’s stone, was the thing that killed a prince…” Chert said half-aloud as he hurried to catch up to physician. Even after all the other things that had happened to him in the last days, he still found it hard to believe—found Chaven’s entire story nearly impossible to grasp. He, Chert Blue Quartz, had carried that stone in his own hand!
Chaven, walking grimly ahead, did not seem to have heard him.
“If I had put that what-was-it-called stone in my own mouth,” Chert said, louder this time, “would I have turned into a demon, too? Or did I have to say some magical words?”
“What?” Chaven seemed lost in a kind of dream, one that did not easily let go. “The kulikos stone? No, not unless you knew the spell that gave it life and power, and that would have needed more than words.”
“More than words?”
“Such old wisdom, that men call magic, does not work like a door lock that any man can open if he has the key. Those among your people who work crystals and gems, do they simply grab a stone and strike it and it falls into shape, or is there more to the skill than that?”
“More, of course. Years of training, and still often a stone shatters.”
“So it would be even if you held the kulikos in your hand right now and I told you the ancient words. You could say them a hundred times in a hundred ways and it would remain nothing but a lump of cold stone in your fingers. The old arts require training, learning, sacrifice—and even so, the cost is often greater than the reward…” He trailed off. When he spoke again his voice shook. “Sometimes the cost is terrible.”
Chert put a hand on his shoulder. “We are coming near to the bottom of your house. We should go quietly now. If they have not found the lower door they might still hear us through the walls and come looking for what makes the noise.”
Chaven nodded. He looked drawn and frightened, as though after telling the story of his childhood terror he had never managed to shake it off again.
Two more rough-hewn corridors and they stood in front of the door, which was as strange a sight as ever in this empty, untraveled place, its hardwoods and bronze fittings polished so that even the dim coral light raised a gleam. Chert suddenly wanted to ask whether Chaven had actually stepped out into the passage from time to time to clean the thing, since none of his servants had known of its existence, but he had to be quiet now until they learned who or what was on the other side.
Chert stared at the featureless door. It had no handle or latch or even keyhole on this side, nothing but the bellpull—and clearly they were not going to use that.
The physician tugged at his sleeve to get his attention, then made a strange gesture that the Funderling did not immediately understand. Chaven did it again, waving his bandaged fingers with increasing impatience until Chert realized that Chaven wanted him to turn around—that there was something the bigger man did not want him to see. It was impossible not to feel angered after all they had both been through, after he and Opal had given Chaven the sanctuary of their home and nursed him back to health, but now was not the time to argue. Chert turned his back on the door.
A quiet hiss as of something heavy sliding was followed by the chink of a lifting latch; a moment later he felt Chaven’s touch on his shoulder. The door was open, spilling a widening sliver of light out into their passageway. Chaven leaned close, urgency on his face—he looked like a starving man who smelled food but did not yet know what he must do to get it. Chert held his breath, listening.
At last Chaven straightened up and nodded, then slipped through the open doorway. Chert hurried down the stone corridor after him holding the fading coral lantern. The physician paused in front of a hanging so bleached by age and dotted with mildew that the scene embroidered on it had become invisible, a thing weirdly out of place in such a damp, windowless, almost unvisited spot. For a moment Chaven hesitated, his burned fingers hovering in midair as though he would once again ask Chert to turn around, but then impatience got the best of him and he pulled back the hanging and ducked beneath it, making a lump under the ancient fabric. A moment later the lump disappeared as if the physician had simply vanished.
Despite a superstitious chill at the back of his neck, Chert was about to investigate, but something else caught his attention. He made his way as silently as he could down the corridor and past the hanging to the base of the stairs. He muffled his lantern, dropping the passageway into near-darkness as he stood, listening.
Voices, coming from somewhere upstairs—were Chaven’s servants keeping the up house in his absence? Somehow Chaven did not think so.
A disembodied moan, quiet but still piercing, made Chert jump. He looked around wildly but the corridor was still empty. He hurried back to the hanging and pulled it aside to discover a hidden door, ajar. The noise came again, louder, the muffled wail of a lost soul, and Chert summoned up his courage and pushed the door open.
Chaven lay in the middle of the floor, writhing as though he had been stabbed, surrounded by rumpled lengths of cloth. Chert ran to him, turned him over, but could find no wound.
“Ruined…!” the physician groaned. Though his voice was quiet, it seemed loud
as a shout to Chert. “Ruined! They have taken it…!”
“Quiet,” the Funderling hissed at him. “There is someone upstairs!”
“They have it!” Chaven sat up, wild-eyed, and began to struggle in Chert’s grasp like a man who had seen his only child stolen from his arms. “We must stop them!”
“Shut your mouth or you will get us killed,” Chert whispered harshly clinging on to the much larger man as tightly as he could. “It might be the entire royal guard, looking for you.”
“But they have stolen it…I am destroyed…!” Chaven was actually weeping. Chert could not believe what he saw, the change that had turned this man he had long known and respected into a mad child.
“Stole what? What are you saying?”
“We must listen…. We must hear them.” Chaven managed to throw the Funderling off, but his look had changed from sheer madness to something more sly. He crawled across the room before Chert could get his legs under himself; a moment later he had snaked out under the faded hanging and into the corridor. Chert hurried after him.
The physician had stopped at the stairwell. He touched his lips to enjoin the Funderling to silence—an unnecessary gesture to someone as frightened as Chert was, both by the danger itself and Chaven’s seeming madness. The physician was shaking, but it seemed a tremble of rage, not anything more sensible like a fear of being caught, imprisoned, and almost inevitably executed.
And me? Chert could not help thinking. If they kill Chaven, the royal physician, what will they do with a mere Funderling who is his accomplice? The only question will be whether anyone ever learns of my death. Ah, my dear old Opal, you were right after all—I should have learned to stay at home and tend my own fungus.
He took a deep breath to try to slow his beating heart. Perhaps it was only Chaven’s own servants after all. Perhaps…
“I promise you, Lord Tolly, there is nothing else here of value at all.” The reedy voice wafted down the stairwell, close enough to keep Chert stock-still, holding the last breath he took as if it must last him forever. To his horror, he saw Chaven’s eyes go wide with that mindless, inexplicable rage he had shown earlier, even saw the physician make a twitching move toward the staircase itself. Chert shot out his hand and clung as if his fingers were curled on scaffolding while he dangled over a deadly drop.
The other’s voice was lazy, but with a suggestion somehow that it could turn cruel as quick as an adder’s strike. “Is that true, brother, or are there things here that you think might not be of value to me, but which you might quite like for yourself?”
Confused, Chert guessed that Hendon Tolly and his brother, the new Duke of Summerfield, stood in the hallway above them. He could not understand the expression of heedless fury on Chaven’s face. Earth Elders, didn’t he realize that the Tollys owned not just the castle now but had become the unquestioned rulers of all Southmarch? That with a word these men could have Chaven and Chert skinned in Market Square in front of a whooping, applauding crowd?
“I tell you, Lord, you already have the one piece of true value. I promise that eventually I will winkle out its secrets, but at the moment there is something missing, some element I have not discovered, and it is not in this house…” The man’s thin voice suddenly grew sharp, high-pitched. “Ah, keep that away from me!”
“It is only a cat,” said the one he had called Lord Tolly.
“I hate the things. They are tools of Zmeos. There, it runs away. Good.” When he spoke again his voice had regained its earlier calm. “As I said, there is nothing in this house that will solve the puzzle—I swear that to you, my lord.”
“But you will solve it,” the other said. “You will.”
Fear was in the first one’s voice again, not well hidden. “Of course, Lord. Have I not served you well and faithfully for years?”
“I suppose you have. Come, let us lock this place up and you can go back to your necromancy.”
“I think it would be more accurate to call it captromancy, my lord.” The speaker had recovered his nerve a bit. Chert was beginning to think he had guessed wrong—that one of these was a Tolly, but not both. “Necromancers raise the dead. It is captromancers who use mirrors in their art.”
“Perhaps a little of both, then, eh?” said his master jauntily as their voices dwindled. “Ah, what a fascinating world we are making…!”
When the two were gone and the house was silent Chert could finally breathe freely, and found he was trembling all over, as if he had narrowly avoided a fatal tumble. “Who were those two men?”
“Hendon Tolly, to give one of the dogs a name,” the physician snarled. “The other is the vilest traitor who ever lived—an even filthier cur than Hendon—a man who I thought was my friend, but who has been the Tollys’ lapdog all along, it seems. If I had his throat in my hands…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Talking about? He has stolen my dearest possession!” Chaven’s eyes were still wide, and it occurred to Chert it was not too late for the royal physician to go dashing out into Southmarch Keep and get them both killed. He grabbed Chaven’s robe again.
“What? What did he steal? Who was that?”
Chaven shook his head, tears welling in his eyes again. “No. I cannot tell you. I am shamed by my weakness.” He turned to stare at Chert, desperate, imploring. “Tolly called him brother because the man who helped him pillage my secrets is one of the brothers of the Eastmarch Academy. Okros, Brother Okros—a man who I have trusted as if he were my own family.”
Chert had never seen the physician so helpless, so defeated, so…empty.
Chaven put his head on his arms, sagged as if he would never rise again. “Oh, by all the gods, I should have known! Growing to manhood in a family like mine, I should have known that trust is for fools and weaklings.”
“Are you mad?” Teloni could not have been more astonished if her younger sister had suggested jumping off the harbor wall into the ocean. “He is a prisoner! And he is a man!”
“But look at him—he is always here and he seems so sad.” Pelaya Akuanis had seen the prisoner a half-dozen times, and always the older man sat on the stone bench as quietly as if he listened to music, but of course there was no music, only the noises of birds and the distant boom and shush of the sea. “I am going to talk to him.”
“The guards won’t let you,” one of the other girls warned, but Pelaya ignored her. She got up and smoothed her dress before walking across the garden toward the bench. Two of the guards stood, but after looking at her carefully one guard leaned back against the wall again; the other moved exactly one step closer to the bearded man they were guarding, which was apparently the solution to some odd little inner mechanics of responsibility. Then the two guards resumed their whispered conversation. Pelaya wished she looked more like the dangerous type who might free a prisoner, but the guards had judged her correctly—talking to him with her friends and the man’s guards around her on all sides was quite enough of an adventure, however she might like to act otherwise.
As she reached him the man looked up at her, his face so empty of emotion that she was positive she could have been a beetle or a leaf for all he cared. She suddenly realized she had nothing to say. Pelaya would have turned and walked away again except that she could not bear to see Teloni give her one of those amused, superior looks.
She swayed a little, trying to think of how to begin, and he only watched her. For a moment the garden seemed very silent. He was at least her father’s age, perhaps older, with long reddish-brown hair and beard, both shot with gray and a few curling wisps of pure white. Even as she examined him he was surveying her in turn, and his calm gaze unnerved her. “Who are you?” she said, blurting it out so that it sounded like a challenge. She could feel the blood rising in her cheeks and had to fight hard once more against the urge to flee.
“Ah, my good young mistress, but it is you who approached me,” he said sternly. He sounded serious, and his face looked serious too, but something
in the way he spoke made her think he might be mocking her. “You must name yourself. Have you never been told any stories, have you read no books on polite discourse? Names are important, you see. However, once given, they can never be taken back.” He spoke the Hierosoline tongue with a strange accent, harsh but somehow musical.
“But I think I know yours,” she said. “You are King Olin of Southmarch.”
“Ah, you are only half right.” He frowned, as though thinking hard about his words, then nodded slowly. “It seems that, in fairness, you must tell me half of your name.”
“Pelaya!” her sister called, a strangled moan of embarrassment.
“Ah,” said the prisoner. “And now I have received my due, will you, nill you.”
“That wasn’t fair. She told you.”
“I was not aware we were involved in a contest. Hmmm—interesting.” Something moved across his lips, fleeting as a shadow—a smile? “As I said, names are very important things. Very well, I will do my best to guess the other name without help from any of the bystanders. Pelaya, are you? A fair name. It means ‘ocean.’”
“I know.” She took a step back. “You are playing for time. You cannot guess.”
“Ah, but I can. Let me consider what I know already.” He stroked his beard, the very picture of a philosopher from the Sacred Trigon Academy. “You are here, that is the first thing to be pondered. Not everyone is allowed into this inner garden—I myself have only recently been granted the privilege. You are well dressed, in silk and a fine lace collar, so I feel rather certain you are not one of the pastry-makers gathering mint or a chambermaid on your way to air the linens. If you are either of those you are shirking your chores most unconscionably, but to me you do not have the face of a true idler.”
