He was not at all bad to look at—he was in fact quite handsome, which was likely one of the reasons Barrick disliked him—but she was far too impatient for even this harmless nonsense today. “Do you want to go with the army so you can write poems about the battlefield, Master Tinwright? You have my permission. Now, if you will excuse me…” He seemed to be swallowing something the size of a shuttlecock. “Go with… ?”
“The army, yes. You may. Now if that was all…”
“But I…” He seemed dazed, as though the possibility that he might be directed to join the army of Southmarch had never occurred to him. In truth, Briony was mostly being spiteful—she did not actually wish to saddle any commander with both her brother and this idiot poetaster. “But I did not come to ask .” Tinwright swallowed again. It was not getting easier for him. “In truth I came to you, Highness, because Gil wishes an audience with you.”
“Gil?”
“The potboy, Mistress. Surely you have not forgotten already, since it was his errand that first brought me to your attention.”
She remembered now, the thin man with the strange, calmly mad eyes. “The one who has dreams—he wishes to speak to me?”
Tinwright nodded eagerly. “Yes, Highness. I was visiting him in the stronghold—the poor man scarcely sees anyone, he is almost a prisoner— and he asked me specially to speak to you. He says that he has something important to tell you of what he called ‘the upcoming struggle.’ ” For a moment Tinwright’s forehead wrinkled. “I was surprised to hear him use such a term, to be honest, Mistresss, since he is not at all educated.”
Briony shook her head as if to clear it, a bit overwhelmed by the poet’s swift and highly inflected speech. He was a popinjay in more than just his cheapstreet finery. “Gil the potboy wants to talk to me about the upcoming struggle? He must have heard about it from the guards in the stronghold.” The stronghold held another prisoner, she could not help remembering. A moment of dislocation washed over her, something approaching real panic. Shaso dan-Heza was the one who should be commanding both this war party and the defense of the castle that might come later. Had someone anticipated just that? Had he been made to look guilty of Kendrick’s murder for just that reason?
“Yes, Highness,” Tinwright confirmed. “Doubtless that was where he heard of it. In any case, that is the message I was asked to give you. Now, about this riding off with the soldiers…”
“I already gave you my permission,” she said, then turned and headed off at a fast walk toward Sister Utta’s room. Behind her she could hear her guards snarling as they struggled to push past Matty Tinwright, who seemed to be following her.
“But, Highness…!”
She turned. “The potboy—he gave you a gold dolphin to write that letter, did he not?” “Y-yes…”
“So where did a potboy get a thick, shiny gold piece?” She saw that Tinwright obviously had no answer to that and turned away again.
“I don’t know. But, Highness, about what you said… the army… !” Her mind was too full. She scarcely even heard him.
“We do not often go deeper than the temple,” Chert explained to his small passenger as they made their way down the twisting slope known as the Cascade Stair. The curve of the wide spiral, at its uppermost reaches wider in circumference than Funderling Town itself, was beginning to tighten, and the air was noticeably warmer. A seam of white quartz in the limestone directly above them seemed to undulate back and forth above their heads like a snake as Chert descended. They had left the last of the Funderling wall lamps behind, Chert was glad he had brought coral from the Salt Pool. “I think the acolytes come down this way to make offerings, especially on festival days, and of course all of us come here for the ceremonies when we reach manhood or womanhood.” Even with all his worries he couldn’t help wondering how many young ones the acolytes would take down into the depths this year. Chert would know them all, of course—Funderling Town was a small, clannish community and there were never more than a couple of dozen who had reached the proper age on the night the Mysteries were formally celebrated. As he walked, he told Beetledown some memories from his own initiation into adulthood, so many years ago now—the giddiness brought on by fasting, the strange shadows and voices, and most frightening and exhilarating of all, that brief glimpse of the Shining Man that the young Chert had not been entirely certain was real. In fact, much of the experience now seemed like a dream.
“Shining Man?” asked Beetledown.
Chert shook his head. “Forget I said it. The others will already think it bad enough I bring you to these sacred places.”
As they stepped down from the Cascade Stair and into a natural cavern full of tall, hourglass-shaped columns, Chert walked forward until they stood in front of the one unnatural thing in the chamber. It was a wall even larger than the Silk Door, with five big arched doorways in it, each one a black hole into which the coral-light could not reach.
“Five?” said Beetledown. “Have thy people naught better to do than dig tunnels side by side?"
Chert was still keeping his voice low, although the unlit lamps in these chambers suggested that if the acolytes had been down today they had already left. “That is more to do with the weight of stone and less to do with the number of tunnels. If you cut one tunnel it makes an arch in the fabric of the living stone above it—I cannot think of the words to explain it, since we use an old Funderling word, dh’yok, to describe such a thing.That one arch will be a small one, and eventually the stone above it will crush the tunnel closed again.”
“Wind from the Peak!” swore Beetledown, scrambling in from the point of Chert’s shoulder to the presumably greater protection next to the Funderling’s head, making Chert’s neck itch and tickle in the process. “The stone crushes un?"
“Even that doesn’t happen right away, never fear. But when you make several tunnels beside each other, the dh’yok, the… arch in the stone is much bigger and stronger, and even when the weight of the stone above starts to collapse it at last, it takes the outer tunnels first, giving us plenty of warning to shore up the inside tunnels and eventually to stop using them altogether.”
“You mean, someday mountain will just crush all down? All thy building? All thy digging?” He sounded almost more outraged on the Funderlings’ behalf than fearful of the danger.
Chert laughed a soft laugh. “Someday. But that’s a long time—that’s stone time, as we call it. Unless the gods take it into their minds to send an earthshaking—a far stronger one than we’ve ever had before—even these outside tunnels will still be standing when the grandchildren of the men and women joining the Guilds today are brought down to see… brought down for their coming-of-age.”
His explanation didn’t seem to mollify Beetledown all that much, although the little man was reassured when Chert chose the middle tunnel, presumably the safest, to continue their journey, and Chert didn’t share the less inspiring truth with him—that nobody ever used any of the other tunnels anyway, since they existed purely to support the passage through which he and the Rooftopper were descending to the next level.
“But why build tunnels here at all?” Beetledown asked suddenly, perhaps to break the silence in the close-quartered passage, whose abstract carvings seemed just as weirdly unsettling to Chert now as they had on that long-ago night of his initiation, and which must seem even more so to a stranger like the tiny man.”All else down here in deeps be touched by no hand.”