The Fifth Lantern "In former days the name 'drow' was given to all Funderlings by people of the northwest, especially those who lived near them in Settland. However, the name is generally used now only to mean those small, stoneworking peoples who live in the lands of the Qar behind the Shadowline." -from "A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand" FERRAS VANSEN KEPT HIS HAND on Jasper's shoulder as they stepped out of the tunnel, even though it forced him to lean at an uncomfortable angle. By the broadness of the echo, they must have reached the cavern called the Great Dancing Chamber, but of course he had no way of knowing for certain. Vansen felt like a child or a cripple-how could the Funderlings see in this blackness? And how could he hope even to fight alongside them, let alone lead them, when he was all but blind in places where both the Funderlings and their enemies could easily find their way? How he longed for the moment he could unshutter his lantern!
"The air feels loose here." Sledge Jasper's mouth was almost touching Vansen's ear. "But the far end's stubbed, so there must be an upthwart hole-but there isn't. It makes no sense to me."
It made no sense to Vansen either, but that was because he wasn't a Funderling-the chief warder might as well have been speaking ancient Ulosian. "Stubbed? Upthwart? What does any of that mean?"
"Quiet!" Jasper whispered.
Vansen had only an instant to wonder at that before Jasper grabbed his arm and yanked him forward and down onto his knees. A moment later metal clattered violently against stone behind them: something fast and sharp had flown past them and struck the wall where they had been standing an instant before.
"What is it?" he hissed as loudly as he dared. "What's…?"
"A trap!" He was jerked again, downward this time as Jasper dropped onto his belly. The Funderling's grip was astonishingly powerful considering he was no bigger than a child. "Keep your head down!"
"I'm going to uncover the lantern," Vansen said. "Get some idea of what's going on…"
"Not near your head!" growled Jasper. "In fact, don't do it near any of us." The other Funderlings in the little troop were just now crawling up from behind them. Vansen stretched out his arm and set the lantern down a little way above and to the side of where they lay on the uneven floor. What kind of room was this? They called it the Great Dancing Chamber, but it felt more like a gravel quarry than a ballroom. He flicked up the shield and the lantern's glow spilled out, suddenly giving form and depth to what had been an endless, frightening blackness.
He barely had time to draw his hand back before several arrows whined through the spot where his fingers had been. One struck the lantern a glancing blow; the cylinder of metal and hard sea-glass was knocked spinning onto its side but the light did not go out.
Vansen risked raising his head for a quick look. A handful of moving shapes, some holding short bows, were scrambling for cover at the far end of the chamber like rats surprised in a storeroom, their shadows gigantic and spidery in the light of the single, dim lamp.
Ferras Vansen had not planned on facing arrows-the narrow underground passages had seemed to make them an unlikely weapon-but here he sat in a classic infantryman's nightmare, pinned down by a force he could barely even see with no way to fight back other than a hopeless frontal assault. It was pure luck that he and the Funderlings had not been slaughtered where they stood: they had apparently caught the Qar by surprise. Now all they could do was wait and hope that Cinnabar and the rest of the Funderling Town reserves would come as they had promised. But how to keep them from walking into the same trap?
"Simple enough," said Sledge Jasper after hearing Vansen's whispered concerns. "If there's a vein of drumstone between here and the Brothers' temple we'll have no problems, Longshanks-that's how we talked in the mines and even sometimes farther, but those were the old days. Anyroad, we'll just keep hammering on it until someone hears us. But whatever you want to say likely ought to be short and sweet."
Drumstone. That was a new one. Vansen raised his head again and peered across the chamber to where the enemy crouched behind what looked like a forest of stony towers, most of which stretched no higher than a tall Funderling. One of the Qar saw his movement well enough to snap off a shot: the arrow hissed past him and shattered against stone; a broken piece caromed off and dug into his hand. Vansen grunted in pain and sucked at the blood. "How about two words? " he asked Jasper. " 'Help' and 'trap.' Short enough for you?"
They sent a pair of men back to the seam of drumstone that crossed the road they had followed to the Dancing Chamber. The warning worked. Cinnabar and his troop of two dozen men came swiftly but carefully into the great cavern, carrying slings and other long distance weapons, and despite the inexperience of these new fighters, many of whom did not even have the rudimentary exposure to violence the warders had, they managed to help Vansen and Jasper chase the dozen or so armed Qar back out of the Great Dancing Chamber. The victory cost them: two Funderlings were killed, one of them a warder named Feldspar, so it was a somber group that headed back toward the Metamorphic Brothers' temple.
Vansen and Cinnabar walked behind the men carrying the bodies. Ferras Vansen was doing his best to divide his attention between complicated thoughts about the day's losses and lessons and the need to watch for low ceilings. He had been living with the Funderlings long enough that they sometimes forgot he was twice their height and couldn't see as well as they could, and thus didn't warn him when a low threshold was coming.
"I wish I had known of this drumstone before," he said.
"There are only a few small veins connecting parts of Funderling Town," Cinnabar said. "It was pure luck Jasper had seen that seam. The greatest use of drumstone was over longer distances, but we almost entirely stopped using it over the last hundred years or so as we lost touch with other towns and cities."
"Still, what a wonderful thing, if I understand Jasper correctly-to be able to signal over a distance underground! Have the… the Big Folk, as you call us, ever known of this?"
Cinnabar laughed. "I can assure you they did not. You'll forgive me if I say we thought it more likely to be something we needed to protect ourselves against your people than to aid them."
"Fair enough. And I promise I will keep the secret-the gods know I owe you and your folk that much and more. But it seems to me another example that you Funderlings have misplaced your trust when you ask me to lead you. Even were I as veteran a commander as you suppose-which, I assure you, I am not-I still know too little about this underground world in which we fight. The Qar reaching that chamber before us caught me completely by surprise. How did they do it?"
Cinnabar's amiable, weathered face showed surprise even in the thin light of Vansen's lantern. "But Jasper says he told you. The road should have been stubbed there, but he knew by the smell of the air that a second opening had been made, so that means there must be a new tunnel upthwart the stub-end at the far side of the Great Dancing Chamber…"
"There, you see? I still don't understand." He raised his hand. "No, do not explain it to me now, Magister-there is too much to do. But when we return and have our council, I need you and Chert and the others to help me learn. We must find a way to remedy my ignorance before I get us all killed."
The Funderlings and the two Big Folk were grouped around one of the large tables in the refectory of the Metamorphic Brothers' temple, a place that had become the seat of the Funderling War Council, as Vansen had come to think of it-mostly because only the refectory and the chapel were large enough for many to sit down together.
In the previous days Ferras Vansen had sometimes viewed his involvement with these little men and women as almost amusing, as if he had been asked to lead an army of children, but that had ended long ago with the first assault by the Qar. Anyone who still doubted the seriousness of their situation need only descend to the deep, cold room beneath the main altar where the bodies of the two fallen Funderlings, Feldspar and Schist, lay waiting for their burial cairns to be built.
Vansen looked across the table at Jasper, Magister Cinnabar, and Brother Nickel. Nickel's power within the Brotherhood seemed to grow stronger by the day: there had been no confirmation yet that he would be the next abbot, but the other monks seemed to take it as a given. Chaven was also at the table-the only other person Vansen's size-but the physician seemed fretful and preoccupied. Beside him sat Malachite Copper, another important Guildsman, tall and slender for a Funderling, who had brought a contingent of volunteers down from the town to help defend the lower tunnels. Although the cavern-dwellers had no lords as such, Copper was the closest thing Vansen had seen down here to what he would have called a noble. Judging by his clothes, he was certainly the richest of them all. Young Brother Antimony rounded out the group: Vansen had been told that Chert Blue Quartz and his strange adopted son were off on some private errand and could not be present.
"I must beg your pardon," Vansen told the others. "I simply cannot accustom myself to the way you talk-upwise, thwart, sluiced, scarped, stubbed-I cannot understand it, not swiftly enough to lead men into battle. I am used to fighting on solid ground that spreads like a blanket before me, but here I find the blanket is wrapped around my head. I think you should give this task of leadership to someone like Cinnabar or Copper."
"I do not like to fill my head with details." Malachite Copper spoke lazily, as though it was almost too much effort to finish what he was saying. "I will have enough to do with leading my own scrapesmen. No, not me."
Cinnabar also shook his head. "As for me, I have not the knowledge of fighting, Captain Vansen, but I will do my best to help you to think as we think."
"But how can I learn all your people know? These drumstones, Stormstone's tunnels-I do not have time to become a scholar, even had I the wit for it!"
"Likely none of us is fit to perform the job entire," Chaven said. "If we want to survive we must work together and try to forge a single martial leader from among our disparate parts-a patchwork soldier, as in the old tale of King Kreas."
"Still," said Copper, "even if the mighty Stone Lord himself were to come out of the deeps to lead us, we would need more men than we have. Cinnabar, my dear, you must send a message to the Guild telling them to send every able-bodied fellow who can be spared to fight-sadly, we cannot pull the workers from the few jobs Hendon Tolly has given us without causing suspicion. That may bring us as many as a thousand. Until then we have less than two hundred all told, four pentecount at the outside, and only a few of those capable fighters. How many Qar wait on the far side of the bay?"
Vansen shook his head. "We never knew when we fought them-that was part of the hardship, that they could make their numbers and positions so confusing. But judging by what I saw of them marching, long ago, I guess they still muster several times our numbers."
"And from what you say, we could not hope to outfight them even if we matched them man for man," Cinnabar said.
"The March Kingdoms could not defeat them with many thousands, including hundreds of veteran fighters, cannon, and armored cavalry. But we were overconfident." He smiled sadly. "We will never be so again."
"Is there any chance the upgrounders-I mean your people, Captain Vansen-might help us? Surely Hendon Tolly does not want the Qar roaming free beneath his castle!"
"No, but first you would have to convince him," Vansen said thoughtfully. "That might be done… but then even if he agreed to help you he would never simply give you back Funderling Town afterward. Once he knew of the Stormstone tunnels and everything else belowground, he and his soldiers would be here to stay."
Malachite Copper broke the long, morose silence. "But the fairy creatures must fight us down here," he pointed out. "Surely that should be to our advantage, if we can only improve our numbers."
"Don't forget they have Funderlings of a sort among them," said Cinnabar. "And other creatures of the deeps as well, like ettins, some of which we only know from old stories…"
"So it is hopeless. Is that what you are saying?" Nickel stood up. "Then we must all prepare to meet our maker. The Lord of the Hot Wet Stone will save us if he sees fit-if we have pleased him-but if not, then he will do with us as he wishes. All this warlike posturing is for nothing. The Nine Cities of the Funderlings will be emptied but for dust and shadows."
"We do not need that kind of talk," Cinnabar said angrily. "Would you terrify our people into recklessness? At the very least, Nickel, think of our wives and children. Ah, but I forgot-you Metamorphic Brothers do not have time for such trivialities!"
"We do holy work!" Nickel shouted and the argument began in earnest, even Copper joining in, but Ferras Vansen was no longer listening.
"Enough," he said. When they did not heed him, he raised his voice, deeper and stronger than any of theirs. "Enough! Shut your mouths, all of you!" Everyone in the room turned to stare at him in surprise. "For the sake of the wives and children you mentioned-for all of our sakes-stop this squabbling. Brother Nickel, I heard you say 'the Nine Cities of the Funderlings'-what does that mean?"
Nickel waved a dismissive hand. "It is only an expression-it means all the Funderlings together, not just those here in Funderling Town."
"So there are other Funderlings? Where? Magister Cinnabar, you said something to me earlier about towns and cities, but I thought you meant ordinary towns, Firstford and Oscastle and the like."
Cinnabar shook his head. "I understand your interest, Captain Vansen, but if you are envisioning thousands of Funderlings sweeping in to save us from all over Eion, I'm afraid I must disappoint you. Some of the so-called cities are long gone, and little remains of most of the others-those that are in reach, that is. Two of them are behind the Shadowline and one is on the southern continent Xand."
"But are there still Funderlings who live outside of Southmarch?"
"Some, of course. Even long after our days of glory there have been Funderlings living in most of the biggest cities, working in stone and forging metal for the Big Folk, but their numbers have grown smaller and smaller. Here too. Just a hundred years back we were nearly twice as many as now." Cinnabar shrugged. "There is still a good-sized settlement in Tessis and another in the quarry mountains of Syan-between them they might have as many Funderlings as here. And I've heard some still live in our old city of Westcliff in Settland, although it is scarcely more than a village now. Perhaps another thousand of us are scattered around the other cities of Eion. At year's end we usually come together for the great festival called the Guild Market, but I do not think we will survive here long enough to be able recruit any help at market." He shrugged. "Have I anticipated your idea incorrectly, Captain?"
"No, you have hit it squarely, Magister." Vansen frowned. "But I would still like to know if these drumstones will speak as far as Syan."
"They used to," said Malachite Copper. "But the stones have long since fallen silent between here and there."
"You said there are as many Funderlings in Syan as here," Vansen said to Cinnabar. "Perhaps they will help us. Doubling our numbers would certainly keep us alive a good deal longer."
Cinnabar nodded slowly. "I suppose we can't afford to overlook even so unlikely a chance. In the old days there was a train of drumstones between here and what the Big Folk call Underbridge, the Funderling settlement in Syan. Unless the ground has shifted badly I see no reason they shouldn't still suffice."
"Forgive me," said Malachite Copper, "but I really must ask a question. What good is it if we could even bring five times the numbers we have now from somewhere else? We still would have too few to defeat the Qar, if everything I've heard today is true. What then is the point? It will take weeks for help to come from Underbridge-until Midsummer at least, even if they choose to send it, which I doubt. But even if they come, what real difference could it make?"
"You're right," Vansen told him. He had been thinking, in his slow, careful way, and he could see no other road forward. "It is true-we cannot defeat the Qar. They are fierce fighters, but they also have a terror and madness on their side like nothing I have ever seen or felt. But I do not intend to beat them."
Brother Nickel snorted in disgust. "Then why do we not simply surrender now? At least then we will be choosing the manner of our deaths."
Copper scowled at him. "Be quiet, you burrowing, slithering priest! I for one would gladly choose to die with a war hammer in my hand, not slapping my head and begging the Earth Elders for forgiveness!"
"Gentlemen… brothers," said Cinnabar, spreading his arms. "This is not right…"
"Stop. You did not let me finish, Brother Nickel," Vansen said loudly. He wished that convincing the others, as difficult as it would be, was the hardest part of what he envisioned. "I do not intend to defeat the Qar because, as I said, we cannot defeat them. We cannot even hope to hold them back for very long. But I know a little of what they want here, and I may know some things even their leader does not yet know-important things." Still, even the mere thought of the Qar's dark lady made him weak with fear-he had seen her in so many of his nightmares, visions left in his head by Gyir's thoughts like shadows cast on the wall of a cave. He was terrified to face her, but what else could he do? He was a soldier, and he had given his loyalty to these folk as completely as he had to the Eddon family and their throne when he first became a royal guard. "Here is my plan," he announced as the others at last fell silent. "I intend to make peace."
"Peace!" barked Copper. "With the Twilight People? With ettins and skinshifters? That is madness."
Vansen's smile was grim. "If so, then madness is the only thing that can save us."
An isolated sliver of moon hung in the sky as they crept out the side door of Chaven's observatory beside the old walls. Chert had not smelled open air for weeks and for a moment the sharpness of it was almost overwhelming. He took a couple of reeling steps, light-headed, before finding his balance. The night seemed… so big!
Flint did not seem to notice. He looked briefly to either side and then trotted down the steps. At the bottom of the stairwell he turned to follow the road beside the wall, headed directly toward Skimmer's Lagoon as though he could see it. Chert could not suppress a shiver of fear. How did the boy know things like this? It made no sense-in fact, it refuted good sense entirely.
Still, sensible or not, if Chert lost the boy he would catch the rough side of Opal's tongue for certain. He hurried after him.
"Where are we going?" he whispered as Flint led them along Sheeps Hill Road at the base of the New Walls, past what seemed like a single endless encampment of refugees huddled around miserable little fires. A few of these looked up to watch the pair go past-Chert could only hope they thought he was a child, too. He grabbed Flint's arm. "Get back in the shadows, boy!"
Citizens of Funderling Town were banned from being aboveground in Southmarch by night, in large part because of Chert himself, so not only did he have a price on his head, the mere fact of him being a Funderling would be enough to get him dragged to a cell in the stronghold. Either way, if the guards got hold of him, he was doomed.
What am I doing? How did I let myself get talked into this? Opal would have my skin if she knew. He had a sudden moment of terror-what if his wife came back to the temple while he was gone? What would he tell her? She would scorch him! But I suppose if I'm alive at that point for her to scorch, I'll already have my joists in, he thought glumly. Might as well not borrow trouble. "Flint, where are we going?" he asked again.
"Across Market Road Bridge, turn toward the guard tower, then stop at the fifth lantern."
"And how do you know that? Who told you?"
The child looked at him as though Chert had asked him why he kept filling his lungs with air. "Nobody told me, Father. I saw it."
As they approached the bridge Chert did his best to hide his face from everyone who passed. Market Road Bridge was a short, high-arching span that crossed the canal between the outer keep's two lagoons. Where the canal crossed a muddy field to join with the North Lagoon it made a small estuary, usually the home of many birds, but in this time of privations and with so many hungry folk packed into the castle, most of the birds had long since been caught and eaten. The torch on the bridge had gone out; the little patch of water and grass and sand lay silent and almost invisible on either side, even to the Funderling's keen eyes, as though they passed through a void between stars.
On the far side of the bridge they stepped off the road and onto a small, almost invisible path of rough logs along the edge of the water. They proceeded along this dark track until they reached the dim glow of a fish-skin lantern hung from a pillar at the canal's edge. Continuing on and passing four more lights brought them to a largely empty section of Skimmer's Lagoon, but the last light, the fifth lantern, shone on more than just black water and the dockside path: a rickety gangway made of boards and rope stretched out from the pool of lantern light onto the dark lagoon and toward a dark, uneven shape pricked with a few smaller, reddish lights, like a campfire that had burned to embers. Small waves patted at the edge of the walkway near their feet.
"What are we doing here?" Chert whispered. "How do you know this place? I will go no farther without some answers, boy."
Flint looked at him, face pale in the fish-skin glow. Chert was suddenly frightened, not by the boy himself but by what he might say, what changes it might bring. But Flint only shook his head.
"I can't give you answers, Father-I don't know them. I saw this place when I was asleep and I knew I had to come here. I know what I must do. You will have to trust me."
Chert stared at the small face, so familiar and yet so unknowably foreign.
"Very well, I'll trust you. But if I say we leave, we leave. Understood?"
The boy did not reply, but turned and headed down the swaying gangway.
The barge at the end of it was low but wide, its deck a clutter of cabins and outbuildings-it looked more like the floor of a storage room than any seaworthy vessel. Lights flickered in several of the tiny windows, but Flint headed unerringly toward a patch of absolute darkness on the side of the barge; by the time Chert caught up with him the boy had already rapped twice on the cabin door there.
The door opened a crack. "What do you want?" a quiet voice asked.
"To speak with your headman."
"And who is it wants to speak with him?"
"A messenger from Kioy-a-pous."
Chert stared at the boy. Kioy-a-pous? Who or what was that? And what in the name of the Earth Elders was going on?
The door swung open, spilling amber light. A Skimmer girl stood there, waiting for them to enter. Chert had never seen one of her tribe close up. Her solemn face looked just like some of the ancient carvings he'd seen beneath Funderling Town, which made no sense-why would the old Funderlings have carved pictures of Skimmers?
The girl led them down a long, dark passage. Chert could feel the ship continuously moving beneath his feet, a most distressing sensation for someone who had lived all his life on stone. She took them into a low, wide cabin where half a dozen Skimmer men sat around a table whose height reflected the close-hanging roof: all the Skimmers sat on the floor, their knees bent and high. As they turned toward the newcomers the men's large, wide-set eyes and hairless faces made them look like a gathering of frogs in a pond.
"My father, Turley Longfingers," the girl told Flint and Chert, gesturing toward one of the men, "He is the headman of our people here."
"What is this, Daughter?" Turley seemed upset by this sudden intrusion-almost shamefaced, as though he and the others had been caught planning something wicked.
"He says he comes as a messenger from Kioy-a-pous," she said. "Don't ask me more, for I can't tell you. I'll bring some drink." She shrugged, then made a sullen little curtsy to the men and left the cabin.
"Why declare yourself with such a name, young one?" Turley said. "You have the stink of the northern king on you-old Ynnir Graywind. We do not serve him or his dying master. Too many broken promises lie between our peoples. We are the children of Egye-Var, Lord of the Seas, so what do we care for Kioy-a-pous? What do we care for the one called Crooked?"
Flint reacted very strangely to the Skimmer's words: for the first time since he and Opal had found the child in a sack beside the Shadowline he saw a look of fury cross the boy's face. It was a moment's expression only, a flash like the white smear of lightning across a dark sky, but in that instant Chert found himself truly afraid of the child he had brought into his home.
"Those are old ideas, headman," Flint told the Skimmer, his anger gone again, or at least invisible. "Taking the side of one of the Great Ones against another-that is a strategy from when the world was young and mortals had no part but that which the Great Ones allowed them. Things have changed. Egye-Var and the rest were banished for a reason, and you and the other inheritors would not like it if they came back to reclaim what was theirs."
"What do you mean?" the Skimmers' headman asked. "What have you come to tell us?"
"It is not what I have come to tell you that is important, it is what I need to ask," the boy said with invincible calm. "Take me to the keepers of the Scale."
The chief of the Skimmers was so startled he actually leaned back as though this odd child had struck him, his mouth working uselessly for a moment. "What… what do you speak of?" he demanded at last, but it sounded like weak bluster.
"I speak of the two sisters, as you already know," Flint said. "Many things may depend on this. Take me to them, headman, and do not waste more time."
Turley Longfingers looked helplessly at the other Skimmer men but they seemed even more taken aback than he was, their eyes bulging with anxious surprise.
"We… we cannot do it," their chief said at last. Resistance was gone. His denial was an admission, not a refusal. "No shoal-mooted man may visit the sisters…"
"They need to go and my Rafe isn't here," said the headman's daughter. "If you cannot take them, Father, I will."
If Chert thought Turley Longfingers would rage at the girl, hit her or drive her from the room, he was wrong. Instead he sounded almost apologetic. "But, Daughter, this is not a day to approach the sisters… not a shriven day, no salt has been sprinkled…"
"Nonsense, Father." She shook her head as if he were a child who had made a mess. "Listen! This child speaks of things no outsider knows, let alone any landlegged child. He speaks of the Scale! As if we did not already know that a time of change is upon us."
"But, Ena, we do not…"
"You may punish me later if you wish." She stood. "But I am taking them to the drying shed."
This finally opened the floodgates: the other Skimmer men all began to talk at once, arguing, hissing, vying for Turley's attention, pointing their long fingers at the chieftain's daughter as though she had walked into the room naked. The noise swelled until Turley flapped his long hands for silence, but it was not his voice that stilled them.
"Take us, then," said Flint. "We have no time to waste. It is less than a turn of the moon until Midsummer."
"Follow me, then." Ignoring the looks of outrage and open befuddlement from the Skimmer men, the girl drew a shawl from a hook on the wall and draped it around her shoulders. "But walk carefully-some of the way is dangerous."
To Chert's surprise, the girl led them no farther than the floating dock attached to the stern of the ramschackle barge. The moon had vanished somewhere behind the castle's outer walls and the night was so dark that but for the dull sparkle of stars when the wind blew the clouds aside, they might have been in one of the deepest tunnels of the Mysteries.
Ena pointed to a rowboat bobbing beside the dock. "Get in."
Chert thought there could be nothing more frightening than getting into a boat, with only air above him and water beneath him. He quickly found out he was wrong.
"Now put this on," Ena told them, handing Chert and Flint a length of cloth each. "Tie it over your eyes."
"Blind ourselves??" Chert was almost choking. "Are you mad?"
"If you do not, I will not take you. The way to the drying shed is not for landleggers, even those who claim to serve Kioy-a-pous."
"Please, Father," Flint said. "All will be well."
Oh, certainly, Chert thought. Why not? Perhaps when we fall in the boy will charm the sharks, too, like one of the holy oracles. With great reluctance, he tied the stiff, salty rag over his eyes; a moment later he felt the boat beginning to move. What truly happened to this child behind the Shadowline-and when he went to the Shining Man?
The Shining Man. Chert could not help thinking of how the boy had lain at the great figure's feet. Like the rest of his people, Chert had been taught that the Shining Man was the image of their creator, the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone. During the Mysteries it had even been hinted to him and the others crossing into adulthood that the great crystalline shape was somehow alive-that the power of their god lived inside it. So why had the boy struck off on his own to find it? And what had he done with that strange mirror-the one that Chert had later risked execution to deliver to the terrifying Qar woman? And just as important, what in the name of the Earth Elders was the boy up to now? Flint had questioned ancient Brother Sulphur until the old man had flown into a rage, and now he had demanded-and been permitted!-access to some treasure of the secretive Skimmers. Sisters, scales-Chert had no idea what any of it might mean, but he knew for a certainty that he had no more control of events than a man caught at the top of a rockslide: all he could do was hang on and pray…
These thoughts and a hundred more flitted through his mind as the oars creaked and the waves splashed gently against the side of the boat. At some point they passed through a long tunnel, with echoes bouncing off the stone. When the echo dropped away again the water, which had been as mild as one would expect on a lagoon inside the castle walls, suddenly began to rock the boat so strongly that Chert began tugging at his blindfold in panic.
"Don't!" said Ena. She sounded breathless, as though she was working hard. "Keep that cloth on you or I'll turn us around."
"What's happening?"
"Never you mind, Funderling. Just sit back."
Chert felt Flint reach over and squeeze his arm, so he reluctantly left the rag across his eyes. What was going on? Were they on the open sea? But how would they have got out through the harbor and past the harbor chain? What about the besieging Qar? It didn't make sense.
At last, after what seemed an hour or more on the water, the last half tossing and pitching in a very queasy way, Chert felt the prow of the boat bump up against something solid. The girl jumped out and helped them both up onto a dock, and from there onto dry land.
"Keep the eye-cloths on," she said. "I'll tell you when to take 'em off."
At last Chert heard a door open and he and Flint were led through, guided by Ena's careful, rough-skinned hands. Immediately his lungs and nostrils filled with harsh, salty smoke.
"You can unbind your eyes now," she said.
When he stopped coughing, Chert did. They were standing in what looked like some kind of upgrounder barn. A great fire roared in a stone pit in the room's center, flames twice as tall as Chert painting everything a dull red-orange. On either side of the fire long poles stretched from one end of the high-ceilinged, rectangular room to the other, supported every few paces with thicker, rough-hewn wooden pillars. On the poles hung hundreds of splayed fish carcasses.
"By the Elders, it really is a drying shed," Chert murmured, then found himself coughing again from the smoke. His eyes were already stinging painfully.
"Oh, who's there, who's there?" The voice, though quiet, seemed to speak right in his ear. He jumped and whirled around but saw only Ena and silent Flint-for all he could tell, it might have been the split carcasses of the fish that spoke. "Dear, dear, we seem to have frightened Papa Sprat." The invisible voice laughed, a cracked bray. "Come here to us, darlings. Nothing to fear in the drying shed-unless you're a fish. Isn't that right, Meve?"
Chert hesitated, but Flint was already walking toward the fire. As he made his way around the firepit Chert saw two small shapes sitting on a bench near the flames. One of them, an old Skimmer woman, rose as Flint approached. She was tiny, barely taller than Chert himself, and although all of the fisher-people had a little of the frog in their looks, this ancient creature was like one of the entombed toads or mudskippers the Funderlings sometimes discovered in the foundations of buildings they were excavating-a withered, seemingly lifeless creatures that nevertheless would recover if dipped in water, though it had been sleeping in the clay for centuries.
"Good evening," said the ancient Skimmer woman. "Gulda I am, and here is my sweet sister Meve." Gulda gestured to the other figure, even smaller than she, huddled in a coarse robe with the hood pulled close, as if even beside the fire Meve felt uncomfortably cold. "She talks not as much as she once did, but what she says is wise-is that not right, my love?"
"Wise," croaked the other woman without looking up.
"And greetings to you, Turley's daughter," Gulda said to Ena. "You can wait with your sea-pony. The great ones have naught to say to you tonight, although doubtless they will another time."
"Another time," Meve echoed in a dry rasp that suggested she had been in the smoky shed for a very long time indeed.
Ena looked disappointed but did not argue. She made a curtsy to the sisters and walked to the door.
"You are the keepers of the Scale," suggested Flint when the girl was gone.
"And why wouldn't we be?" Gulda's leathery, pop-eyed face seemed almost merry, although there was an edge of irritation in her voice. "Given the lore by our mother, we were, and she by hers, stretching back since keels first ran on ground here-who else would keep it and polish it and know its secrets?"
"And the god speaks to you through the Scale," said Flint, as though the sentence made absolute sense. It certainly must have to Gulda, because she nodded sharply.
"When he sees fit."
"When he sees," added Meve, nodding gently, as if too violent a motion-even coughing, which Chert himself was doing again-might shake something loose. Howold were these creatures?
"The god has been speaking much to you of late," said Flint.
For the first time, Gulda hesitated. "Yes… and no…"
"No," said Meve. "Yes."
"He speaks to us." Gulda shook her head. "But sometimes it seems as though the dreams have changed him. He seemed not so angry before as now. As though something had come into his sleep and pained him."
"Sleep and pain," added Meve.
"Perhaps he remembers how he left the world," said Flint, each word taking him further away from Chert, who was feeling as though there was nothing solid in the earth to stand on anymore. "Perhaps he finally remembers."
"Aye, could be," said Gulda. "But still he seems changed."
"And what does the Lord of the Green Depths say to you?"
Gulda peered at him for a while before answering. "That the day of the gods' return is coming. That our lord wants us to do everything we can to help him come back to us."
Flint nodded. "To help Egye-Var come back. But you said he seems different when he speaks to you these days."
Gulda nodded. "Closer, like. And never so angry before, even in our grandmothers' days. Hot, not cold. Impatient and hot and grasping, like a thirsting man."
"Thirst," Meve said, and then began to struggle slowly to her feet. She swayed as she rose, a tiny, brittle bundle like a dried bird's nest, all mud and sticks. Gulda went to help her but Meve swatted her sister away with a tiny, trembling hand. When she turned back to them, Chert saw her eyes were white with pearl-eye-she was almost certainly blind.
"Dreams… changed…" she rasped, thrusting her hand at Chert as though he had stolen something from her. "Hot. Hot sleep! Cold time. Angry!"
He shrank back but Flint stepped forward and took her bony fingers in his own. The tiny old woman was shaking all over as though with a fever.
Her sister hurried to comfort her. "Oh, there, my love, my sweet, there," she said, kissing the sparse white hairs on her sister's head. "Don't fear. Gulda's with you. I'm here."
"Fear," said Meve in a rasping whisper. "Here."
"What's here, my love? What's here?"
The little old woman spoke so softly Chert could barely hear her. "Angry…"
Ena, Longfingers' daughter, brought them back to the fifth lantern on the estuary path and let them take off their blindfolds again. Chert was glad to have his sight back, but he had been even happier just to escape the salty, smoky air of the drying shed.
"So, did you find what you were looking for, little man?" the girl asked Flint.
"I don't know," he said. "I am touching unfamiliar things in the dark, trying to make out their shapes."
"A strange one, aren't you, boy?" The Skimmer girl turned to Chert. "I remember now who you are-Chert of the Blue Quartz."
Chert, who had thought the long night of strange surprises was over, stared at her. "How do you know me?"
"Never mind that. Better not saying. But you're a friend of the Ulosian, Chaven, aren't you?"
Even if she had helped them in some way-and since Chert had no idea what Flint had been doing, he couldn't even say that for certain-he was not such a fool as to tell a near stranger anything about the fugitive physician. "I used to visit him. That is common knowledge. Why?"
"I have a message for him. We helped him and he promised us payment. Days of work we gave him and because he has not paid us our due it makes my father look foolish in front of the others. If you see him, tell him that-the Skimmers want their payment."
As Chert and Flint made their way through Chaven's house toward the hidden door and the tunnel to Funderling Town, they heard noises-footsteps and what sounded like distant, ghostly voices. Chert's superstitious fright quickly gave way to a more straightforward terror when he heard the voices more clearly and realized that some of Hendon Tolly's guardsmen were in the house looking for them.
They must have been watching the place, he thought, fighting down panic. But we stayed in the shadows-perhaps they are not sure we came in. Earth Elders, let it be so!
Chert knew the place better than did any guards, at least the lower levels, and they managed to get out the door at the bottom of the house before any pursuers caught them. Once outside, Chert jammed the door closed with shards of rock and hoped that if the guards found the door behind the tapestry on the other side, they would think it had been sealed off long ago. But it meant that Chaven's observatory was being watched carefully. The place was no longer safe.
We are running out of ways to escape Funderling Town, he thought as he followed the boy back toward the temple. Or even just to see the sky. Soon we will be like those rabbits trapped in their run by hunters. Stormstone's worst fears for our people are coming true.