Utta shook her head in confusion. “You truly know that the Qar are there, beneath us? Or is it only something you’ve heard?”
The girl laughed again, incredulous. “Heard? Heard it with every part of my body, knew it with every thought! I can feel Kayyin’s heart beat through the stone.”
Utta shook her head. She had heard—and seen—stranger things of late. “What are you called, child?”
“Willow.” The girl made a clumsy little curtsy and laughed again, but this time the edge of desperation was gone; she sounded calmer, happier. “No one has called me that in a long time, though.”
“It’s a nice name,” Utta said. “Come back to Zoria’s shrine with me, Willow. You look as though you could use a good meal.”
13. A Glimpse of the Pit
“… He was beaten then by the wicked captain, who would have killed him, but that even the ship’s sailors took pity on the child and pleaded with their master to spare the Orphan’s life…”
The strange thing, Chert realized, was that the more he worked on the map for Captain Vansen and the more accurate he tried to make it, the more unfamiliar the whole matter became.
Because no one but the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone himself ever saw the world like this, he decided—all of it at once, open and naked. Only the great god could see things this way. Only a god would want to see things this way.
Still, although at times he despaired of being able to make anything useful at all, let alone do so quickly enough to help his people survive the siege, Chert found himself fascinated by the task. His slates and parchments had spread across the table in their temple dormitory room until Opal had demanded a second table, so that “people have something to eat on—if they ever stop working to eat.” Contemplating the dozens of different maps the Metamorphic Brothers had let him borrow from the library at Magister Cinnabar’s orders, Chert felt, if not like a god, certainly like more of a true engineer than he had ever been in his daily profession.
It was one thing to look at someone else’s idea of what the world looked like, something else entirely to devise one’s own. After struggling to imagine how he could show everything in one drawing, he had decided on a combination of maps to display the terrain, cross-sections of each level with a single, larger drawing to show how those levels fit together. With these maps and a little imagination, Ferras Vansen should be able to make some kind of sense of the tunnel world belowground.
Opal frequently questioned her husband’s sanity for agreeing to take on such a task, but she spent more than a little time each evening watching him at work, asking questions and even arguing a point from time to time, though she professed not to care about any of it. Flint also came in to watch the work, studying the scene as though to learn it by heart, but if he thought in any way about what the maps represented, he kept such thoughts to himself.
Flint was not as talkative as the last time the two of them had left the temple. In fact, he was silent.
Well, that’s back to the way things always were, isn’t it? Chert didn’t mind too much, anyway: he was trying to see things in his head in a way he hadn’t before, trying to notice how the tunnels and caverns actually fit together instead of relying on the usual Guild shorthand, which was a better way to think about some things but not so good for others. He had brought several pieces of lamp-coral that were bigger than what was ordinarily used for traveling—if he stumbled across a significant detail for his maps, he wanted to be able to see it well enough to record it properly.
The two of them made their way down to the bottom of the Cascade Stair, but when they got there, Chert turned and could not see Flint. He had a moment of panic—panic and something else less definable—and then the boy came around the corner. He had only fallen a few steps behind. Still, something about the moment troubled Chert.
It came to him as they walked on. The last time he and the boy had been here looking for Chaven, the boy hadn’t just fallen behind, he had got himself truly lost. When Chert found him, they had also discovered the crack in the wall and the telltale smell of the Sea in the Depths, the silvery lake around the Shining Man’s island where Chert had come so close to losing the boy forever. Now, though, the mundane side of it all came to him.
In his maps, he had traced what he believed must be the opening above the Sea in the Depths that stretched all the way to the surface—although he could only guess at its true shape and path. But he had forgotten to show anything of the spot where the boy had discovered a hole into the side of that shaft, and where Chert had been able to smell the Sea in the Depths’ unique scent—something that he still could not name. It might be the only place where the chimney leading up from the Mysteries could be entered. It belonged on his maps.
“Boy, do you remember the last time we were out, and you got away down a side tunnel and then you called me… ?”
To Chert’s mild astonishment, not only did Flint remember but immediately turned and began leading his adoptive father in what seemed like more or less the correct direction.
The journey seemed longer than Chert remembered, but Flint soon proved that he knew the route very well indeed, leading his stepfather through Five Arches and up the Great Delve—Stormstone’s long passage that surfaced all the way on the far side of the bay—and before another hour had passed, they reached the dead end of the corridor and the black gap between two slabs that had turned out to be not merely another shadow, but a hole into the great chimney that led up from the Sea in the Depths. As he leaned close, Chert could again smell the faint tang of the sea.
“It must lead all the way to the surface,” he said out loud. “Must do. Why does no one upground or down seem to know of it?”
“What is it, Papa Chert?” There was an odd tone in the boy’s voice, the measured speech he used sometimes that seemed too mature for his years. “What are you saying?”
“This… chimney, this hole in front of us. As far as I can tell it goes all the way up from the… the place where I found you that time”—for some reason Chert was reluctant to speak the Shining Man’s name—“to the surface of Midlan’s Mount.”
“Ah.” Flint nodded slowly, but there was still something strange about his behavior. “Then why doesn’t the ocean come in?”
“The opening must be somewhere above the waterline, or everything here really would be flooded with water,” Chert explained. “In fact, the Salt Pool is at sea level, so if the ocean got in, everything beneath there would be drowned—the Maze, the Five Arches, even the temple.”
Chert took one of the largest chunks of coral in his fist, tightened his headlamp so it wouldn’t fall off, and then slipped his arm into the crevice. He sucked in his gut to make himself narrower so he could get his body through the opening as well.
It was impossible to make out much past his own arm and the glare of the coral chunk in his fist, but two things struck him immediately: this great chimney was wider than he had guessed, perhaps longer than a rope-throw across; and there was a sizable ledge just a few yards away from him along the wall of the roughly cylindrical space, and a black crevice behind it big enough for a man his size to stand in upright. Could that be a tunnel? It would be a way to get in and have a better look at the great pit before him.