“The world will not end while you are gone, my old darling,” he told her now. “It wouldn’t dare. Just promise me you’ll stay with Agate as you promised—don’t go back into our house. If you need something send someone else, in case it’s being watched.”
“How could it be watched without all of Funderling Town knowing?”
Chert shook his head. “You are thinking of soldiers—Big Folk. But I do not trust all our neighbors so far that I cannot imagine one of them taking some money to pass information to the Lord Constable if they see you back in our house. That is why we told no one outside the family where we were going.”
“Now who thinks the world will end if he stops making it spin?” she asked, but he could tell from her voice that she wasn’t angry. She squeezed him again, then let go. “Do keep a close eye on the boy.”
“Of course.”
“I wish I could take him.”
“And if anyone is watching, what surer way to announce our presence? No, my dearest, he must stay here and you must hurry back to us.”
Opal stood up to kiss his cheek and he kissed her back on the mouth, which surprised her and made her smile. She put the bag over her shoulder then and turned to where Brother Natron, a friend of Brother Antimony’s, had been waiting a discreet distance away while they said their goodbyes. Natron seemed an intelligent and careful young man, which made Chert’s mind a little easier, but he would have preferred the familiar and trustworthy Antimony, who was off with Ferras Vansen and some Funderling warders searching for incursions in the outer tunnels.
Worry suddenly clutched him. “Come back safe to me, my only love,” he called, but Opal and the young monk were already up the trail and out of sight.
“Papa Chert, I need you to help me.”
He could only stare at the boy in amazement—it was the first time Flint had ever called him anything like that. To make it even stranger, the boy had been largely silent for the last few days. Now, with Opal gone, he seemed to have gone through another of his odd, unsettling changes.
“Help you?”
Flint sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed, then bent and scrabbled on the stone floor for his shoes. “I want to talk to the old one. The one who has the dreams.”
Chert could only shake his head. “What are you talking about?”
“There is an old man here. He has dreams. Everyone knows him. I need to speak to him.”
A dim recollection came to Chert. “Grandfather Sulphur? But how would you know that? You weren’t here when Nickel told us about him.”
Flint ignored this unimportant detail. “Take me to him, please. I need to talk to him.”
Chert stared at this maddening, confusing, sometimes truly frightening child, remembering that moment which now seemed a lifetime ago when the sack had not yet been opened and Flint was still an unknown quantity.
And what if I had not opened it? What if I had taken Opal firmly by the arm and walked away—left it to be someone else’s problem. Would things be different? Better . . . or worse? Because it was hard to avoid the idea that Flint’s coming had something to do with all the other strange things that had seized their lives and the lives of everyone they knew, Big Folk and Funderlings alike.
He sighed. In for a scrape, in for all the dig, as they say. “Very well,” he told the boy. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“I do not understand any of this,” said Brother Nickel. The scion of a powerful Funderling family, he had only recently been elevated from acolyte to kainite, a common monk of the temple, but everyone, most definitely including Nickel himself, knew he was the abbot’s handpicked successor, and he generally acted as though he had already taken up the ceremonial mattock. “Already your little group has upended all tradition and habit here. Women, children, big people, fugitives—we seem to be taking them all in. Were it not that Cinnabar and the Guild swear that the need is great . . .”
“But they do swear,” said Chert. “Please, Nickel, just tell us where to go. We’re grateful for your help but we don’t want to steal anymore of your time than necessary . . .”
“Let you go off without supervision and . . . interrogate our oldest brother?” Nickel stood up. “I do not think so. I will take you to him myself. He is old and frail. If your questions upset him the conversation will end. Understood?”
“Very well, yes. Of course.”
Chaven the physician, who had stood watching the discussion with some interest, cleared his throat. “I think I will come along, too—if that is acceptable, Chert . . . ?”
“Acceptable to Chert? ” Nickel seemed far too dark a shade of red for a man of his comparatively young age. “What about the Metamorphic Brotherhood? No, by all means, let us take as many as wish to go! Perhaps we should simply declare a parade, as on the Day of First Delving—round up all the citizens, and lead a procession to the gardens to surprise the poor old man!”
“You perhaps exaggerate a little, Brother Nickel,” said Chaven gently. “I am a physician, after all. Who better to have along if you worry about Grandfather Sulphur’s health? And the child Flint has also been under my care. Yes, I think it is a very good idea that I come along.”
Chert smiled, but he already felt weary and more than a little put out and the task had not even been begun. Why did it seem he was forever helping other people get their way?
“I have not been in this part of the temple,” Chaven said as they zigzagged their way through a low-ceilinged cavern of twisted limestone shapes, following a path that Nickel alone could recognize.
“And why should you have been? ” the Metamorphic Brother demanded. “Nothing of interest to your lot happens here. These are gardens and farms where we grow our food. We had almost a hundred mouths to feed here even before all of you started arriving.”
And many more will be coming soon, Chert thought. If you’re lucky they’ll be Funderlings, not fairies. But he didn’t say it aloud.
“Ah, but you see, I am interested in such things,” said Chaven. “Any true man of science never ceases being a student. Please do not be so stern, Brother Nickel. We are grateful you have taken us in. This is a time of war and stranger things. All good people must stand together.”
Nickel snorted, but when he spoke again he sounded a bit more civil. “That is the road to the salt mine. The mine is small, but it gives us enough for our own use as well as to trade with the city above.”
Flint alone seemed uninterested in the cavern and its grotesque fixtures of living stone. His face had resumed its usual placidity: he stared straight ahead like a soldier marching toward a life or death battle.
Who are you, really, boy? Chert no longer felt certain he would understand even if someone told him. What are you? In any case, the answer did not really matter. What mattered was that his wife loved the boy and he loved his wife. What he felt for Flint himself was harder to put into words, but as he looked now at the serious child with his shock of almost white hair he knew he would do whatever he could to keep the boy safe.
“Down here.” Nickel gestured to a side passage.
Chert could smell the garden’s pungent air of mold, moisture, and animal manure long before they stepped through the opening. The cavern was lit only by a few torches and scarcely brighter than the corridor. Chaven, still not entirely used to the dim light in which Funderlings lived, stopped and held out his hands like a blind man; Chert took his elbow.
The fungus garden was surprisingly big, a natural high-ceilinged cave that had been further shaped by the hammers and chisels of the Funderlings. Most of the effort had gone into clearing the middle of the floor, which was now crammed full of low stone tables, but the walls had also been thoroughly worked, incised with deep grooves to make rows and rows of shelves.
Every table on the wide floor was laden with trays of black dirt, each tray pockmarked with little pale dots. The alcoves had also been stuffed with manure and soil: thousands of delicate fanlike fungi were growing along the walls, from floo
r level to five or six times a Funderling’s height, where monks on ladders tended the crops. Chert had just begun to wonder which of robed shapes was Grandfather Sulphur when he noticed a bent, bony old man perched on a stool near the center of the room, examining one of the trays with a rock-crystal seeing glass. Flint was already walking toward him, much to the distress of Brother Nickel.
“Here, now! You must let me speak to him first . . .” Nickel hurried after the boy and Chert trotted behind the two of them, fearing it might turn into an actual wrestling match. Flint was half a head bigger now than any of the Funderlings except Brother Antimony, so Chert wasn’t worried the boy would be hurt, but they were all guests of the Metamorphic Brotherhood: it would be a bad idea to start a brawl.
“Chert?” called Chaven from behind him. “Where have you gone?” The physician let out a squeal of pain as he banged his shin against one of the stone tables.
Chert reluctantly turned and went back to help Chaven. It was too late to catch up to Nickel and Flint in any case.
“Ah, there you are.” Chaven clutched at his arm. “I will be better in a moment—my eyes do not take to darkness as well as they did when I was younger . . .”
By the time they’d made their way across the dim room Flint was waiting beside the old man’s stool, his face once more expressionless, as though he had gone away somewhere inside his own head. Brother Nickel was talking to Sulphur, a tumble of words of which Chert heard only the tail end.
“ . . . strange times, of course—you heard of the visitors, Grandfather, didn’t you? This is one of them. He wishes to ask you something.”
The old monk looked from Nickel to Flint, then back to Nickel again. Sulphur’s face was gaunt, the wrinkled skin hanging slackly as though with age his skull had shrunk. His eyes, although clearly almost blind with cataracts, were squinting and suspicious. “Wishes to ask something . . . or wishes to take something?” The voice was cracked and dry as a sandstone cliff.
“I have told them very strongly that they can only . . .” Nickel broke off, staring. Chert was staring too. The hood of the old man’s robe was quivering, as if one of his ears was trying to detach itself from his head. A moment later a grotesque little face popped out of the hood beside his cheek, so that everyone except Flint gasped and took a step back in surprise.
“Ha!” said Sulphur. “Iktis, down.” He flapped his hand in his lap and the slender, furry little animal crawled out of his hood and down his arm. It settled on the monk’s lap and turned to watch them all with bright eyes. It was a fitch, what some upgrounders called a robber cat. Some of the richer Funderlings had them in their houses to hunt mice and voles, but Chert had never seen one kept as a pet. “So, what does this child want of me?” Sulphur demanded.
Flint did not hesitate. “You have dreams,” the boy said. “Frightening dreams of the gods. Tell me about them.”
The old monk straightened up. The fitch chattered indignantly, clinging as a man in a storm might hang onto a pitching raft. “What could you know of my visions, gha’jaz? ” Grandfather Sulphur’s voice was a hoarse growl—he seemed fearful as well as angry. “Who are you, an upgrounder child, to demand the gods’ words from me?”
Nickel and Chert both began to speak at the same time but Flint calmly ignored them both. “I am a friend. Tell me. Your people need you to tell me.”
“See here, child . . .” Nickel began again, but Sulphur was ignoring him too. For a moment it seemed to Chert that everyone else in the great, musty room had vanished except for the old man and the pale-haired boy. Something passed between them—a language without words, like the tiny, all but invisible seeds of the mushrooms themselves, which passed through the air like a cloud of unseen spirits.
“The tortoise,” said Grandfather Sulphur abruptly. “It began with the tortoise.”
“What?” Nickel put his hand on Flint’s shoulder as if to pull the boy away. “Grandfather, you are tired . . .”
“The tortoise came to me in a dream. It spoke to me of the coming times—the time when evil men will seek to destroy the gods. Of the catastrophe they will bring down on the Funderlings. It was truth, that dream—I know it. It was the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone himself.”
“The tortoise . . .” said Chaven slowly, distantly, as if speaking to himself. Something in the physician’s voice put the hairs up on the back of Chert’s neck. “The tortoise . . . the spiral shell . . . the pine tree . . . the owl . . .”
Flint would not be distracted. “Tell me, Grandfather, what were you to do? What did the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone ask of you?”
“This is blasphemy,” Nickel sputtered. “This . . . upgrounder, this gha’jaz, should not be asking about such sacred things!”
But Grandfather Sulphur did not seem to mind—in fact, Chert thought the old man seemed to be warming to the subject. “He said I must tell my people that Old Night is coming and that this sinful world will end soon. He came to me in many dreams. He said to tell the people that there is nothing they can do to resist his will.”
“He told you not to fight against the will of the gods?” Flint asked. “But why would your god say such a thing?”
“Blasphemy!” said Nickel. “How can he ask such questions of Sulphur, who is the select of the Stone Lord himself?”
Chert put his hand on the monk’s arm. “Brother Sulphur is not afraid to speak to the boy, so let them talk. Come, Nickel, these matters are beyond either of us—but you must see that these are extraordinary times.”
Nickel could barely stand still. “That does not mean I should allow a . . . a mere child to do as he pleases in our holy temple!”
Chert sighed. “Whatever he is, I have known for a long time that my Flint is no ‘mere child.’ Isn’t that right, Chaven?”
But the physician did not reply: he was listening raptly to the old man and the boy.
“You have always dreamed of the gods.” Flint was telling more than asking.
“Of course. Since I was younger than you, child,” said the old man, not without satisfaction. He lifted a spotted, clawlike hand. “When I had but two years I told my parents I would be a Metamorphic Brother.”
“But these dreams are different,” said Flint. “Isn’t that true?”
The old man leaned back sharply, as though he had been struck. His milky eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“The dreams of the tortoise—the dreams that brought you the god’s own voice. You have not had dreams like that all your life—have you?”
“I have always dreamed of the gods . . .” the old man said, blustering.
“When did they change? When did they become . . . so strong?”
Again a long, silent communication seemed to pass between Flint and the old monk. At last Sulphur’s lined face went slack. “A year ago or more, just after the season of cold. That is when I first dreamed of the tortoise. That is when I first began to hear His voice.”
“And what came to you just before the dreams began?” Flint spoke as gently as if he were the priest and the old man some hapless, troubled penitent. “You found something, or someone gave something to you—isn’t that true?”
Chert could not help being disturbed by this newest face of the child in whom he and Opal had put so much of their hope. What had been done to this boy behind the Shadowline? More important, was he even a boy, or some kind of Twilight dweller that only looked like a child? What kind of serpent had they taken to their breasts?
“Yes, what?” said Chaven with an edge of hunger in his voice. “What came to you?”
Sulphur waved his hand. “I do not know what you mean. I am tired now. Go away.” In his lap, Iktis the fitch grew anxious; chittering, the creature vanished up the old man’s sleeve.
“That is enough!” said Nickel. “You must go now!”
“No one will take it away from you,” said Flint as if no one else had spoken. “That I promise, Grandfather. But tell the truth. Even the gods must respect truth.”
“Leave
now!” Nickel looked like he meant to grab the boy and drag him away, but Chert squeezed the monk’s arm hard and held him back.
The old man’s silence grew so long and deep that for the first time they could hear the squeak of ladders being moved on the far side of the room and even the murmur of whispered conversations between the other Metamorphic Brothers, who had not failed to notice what was going on at the center of the garden. Sulphur looked down at his own hands, knotted in his lap.
“My little Iktis found it,” he said at last in a voice so quiet everyone but Flint leaned forward. “He brought it to me, dragging it all the way. He loves shiny things and sometimes he goes as far up as the town. I have had to send back many a woman’s bracelet or necklace with the brothers who go to market. Sometimes Iktis even goes upground. And sometimes he goes . . . deep.”
“Can you show it to me?” Flint asked him. “I promise no one will take it from you.”
Again the silence thickened. At last Sulphur reached into his thick robe, which was frosted with mold along the crest of every wrinkle. Iktis, still hidden in the old man’s sleeve, loosed a twitter of protest as Sulphur withdrew a shiny thing that hung around his neck on a braided ratskin cord.
“It is my seeing-glass,” he said. “I knew it was meant for me the moment I saw it.”
It was the thing he had been holding when they first saw him, a small, thin shard of crystal in an irregular silvery metal frame that had clearly been built around the crystal’s natural shape and decorated with intricate little carvings even Chert’s strong eyes could not quite make out. The metal was not one that he recognized, and neither was the style of the metalwork or even the crystal itself, although it was hard to be certain in the poor light of the fungus garden.
Chaven took a deep breath. “That is Qar work,” he said dreamily. “Yes. The voice of the tortoise. A cage for the white owl. Yes, of course . . .”