It was potentially a huge task, but Chert could understand how important it was. And, he realized, he could accomplish much if not all of it from the safety of the temple, so that Opal would not fret too much, and he would see her and the boy every day.
“How soon?” he asked. He would have to make sure Cinnabar knew about it, in case Brother Nickel made a stink about Chert using the temple library.
“I need it a tennight past.” Vansen rose and stretched, his joints popping so that even Chert could hear them. “I will take it as soon as it is ready—sooner. Show me what you have as you work. Now, if you will pardon me, friend Blue Quartz, I think I should find Jasper and Cinnabar and the others before they say something to turn the Qar back into enemies.”
“... So I will be in the library much of the day most days, and perhaps some nights until I finish this for Captain Vansen,” he explained to Opal. “But I can do a good deal of the work here at home, too, after I’ve finished with the Brothers’ books, since I doubt that Nickel will let me carry those home under my arms.”
“Home,” Opal sniffed. “I would not call a cramped, crowded room in the drafty, cold temple a home… but I suppose it is all we have for now. At least we don’t have to share it with your giant friend anymore.” The “giant friend” was Chaven, who on Opal’s return had moved to other quarters.
Chert was reassured. If Opal was complaining, she was… if not happy, then at least in reasonable spirits. “Yes, well, the mark of a noble character is how it stands up to suffering, my only love.”
“Then if I become any nobler, I’ll have to start screaming.” She gave him a sharp look. “Do you have time to talk to the boy before you go hurrying off to play your map games? He said you would understand, and if you do, you may explain it to me because I don’t.”
“Explain what?”
“Ask him. He’s gone down the hall to Chaven’s room.” She fluffed the straw mattress into a more pleasing consistency, but the look on her face made it clear straw would never compare with their swallow-fluff bed at home. He was surprised she had not carried the mattress down from Funderling Town on her back. “I have things of my own to do, in case you didn’t know.”
Chert turned back—he knew that tone and knew he should pay attention. “Of course, my love.” He waited, hoping she would go on without making him ask. Of course she didn’t. “And those things are… ?”
“Chert Blue Quartz, you are the flaw in the crystal of my happiness, I swear.” She was only half-serious, but the problem was that even half meant he was in trouble. “I told you several times, Vermilion Cinnabar asked me to help making sure all the men get fed. By the Elders, do you really think we can bring hundreds of men down here without providing for them? Do you think the monks have a magic garden that simply grows more food when you ask it?”
“No, of course not. ...”
“Of course not. So we are putting many of the women to work in the fungus gardens themselves, and replanting some of the old ones that have gone fallow. We are also bringing food down from the town, of course, which means someone has to organize the caravans.”
“Caravans?”
“What else would you call a dozen donkey carts a day, twice each way?” Funderling Town’s few donkeys, descended from upground ancestors almost twice as large, had never bred well in the depths, and the fact that the Guild had given so many to this cause showed how worried they were—and how much power Vermilion Cinnabar wielded. And now Opal was her second-in-command. Chert was proud of his wife. “Donkeys, and drovers, and we have another twenty men carrying the smaller goods, along with warders to protect them all. It makes quite a parade going down Ore Street.”
“The men down here are lucky to have you looking after them.”
“Yes.” She was slightly mollified. “Yes, I suppose they are.”
It didn’t matter where he found the boy; the circumstances always seemed to be slightly unexpected. This time Flint was indeed in Chaven’s room, as Opal had suggested, but the physician was not present. The flax-haired boy was on his knees atop Chaven’s stool, leaning on a table as he squinted at a leather-bound notebook.
“That looks costly,” Chert said. “Are you sure Chaven will not mind you handling it?”
Flint did not seem to hear the question. “The talk is all of mirrors,” he said as if to himself. “But no earthly glass could be large enough for a true god’s gateway ...”
“Flint?”
The boy turned and saw him, and for a moment seemed nothing more than a child caught doing something he shouldn’t, opening his blue eyes innocently wide. He closed the book quickly, but Chert saw that Flint kept his finger between the pages, marking his place until Chert went away again. “Hello, Papa Chert. Mama Opal sent you to speak to me, didn’t she?”
“I suppose. She said that I might ‘understand.’ Understand what, Flint?”
The boy pulled up his legs to sit cross-legged atop the stool like an oracle on a pillar. “I’m not like other children.”
Chert could not argue with that. “But you’re a good boy,” he said. “Your mother and I… we ...” He did not know quite what to say next.
“But the problem,” Flint went on, “is that I don’t know why. I don’t understand why I am so full of thoughts and ideas that seem… like they don’t belong. Why can’t I remember more?”
Chert spread his hands helplessly. “Where we found you… beside the Shadowline… well, we always knew there had to be some kind of magic on you. I knew it from the first. Opal knew it, too, but she would never admit she knew.” He let his hands drop. “I’m sorry, lad. I didn’t know it was hard on you, too.”
“Someday, I think I will have to go away,” Flint said. “To find out all the things I want to know. All the things about why I’m… this way.”
“When you’re grown, son, if that’s what you want to do. ...” But even as he said it he knew that Opal would see even this distant consent as a form of betrayal. “Just remember, your mother loves you very much… and I love you, too ...”
The boy shook his head, but not, it seemed, at what Chert had said. “I do not think I can wait so long,” he said. “I’m frightened that if I don’t understand, I’ll… I’ll miss something.”
“Miss what? I don’t get you, boy.”
“That’s just it!” His pale face had gone red. “I don’t understand it myself. But I can feel that things are bad, so bad! And I think I know the answers, or some of the answers, that I can… I don’t know, reach in and find them. But when I try, they all just fly away, like bats, like ...”
To Chert’s astonishment, Flint’s eyes were shiny with tears. He had never seen the boy like this. He hesitated, then stepped forward and wrapped his arms around him. Flint swayed on the flimsy stool but hung on tightly, his chest moving with sobs like small hiccoughs. At last the boy pulled himself away and slid down to the floor.