It was in Emberstone Reach that he suddenly realized there was a reason for Beetledown’s long silence when the little man swayed and tumbled off his shoulder. Chert caught him and crouched, holding him up to look at him in the light from the orange-gold ember crystals. The Gutter-Scout was alive but clearly in great discomfort. “Too hot,” he said weakly. “Can’t… get air.”
Chert fought a powerful dread. He was so close now! They were only a short distance from the end of the tunnels, at least the end of those parts he and the rest of the Funderlings knew, and thus only a short distance from Flint, but he didn’t want to kill the tiny Rooftopper in the act of saving the boy. He forced himself to think as carefully as he could with head and limbs so weary, then untied the shirt he had tied around his waist when the air got too hot and made a nest for the little man. He put Beetledown in it and set him on a knob of stone high off the ground. Chert knew that poison air, even the milder varieties, was heavy and tended to stay low. He also left the little man his coral lantern for company.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said. “I promise. I’m just going down a little farther.” He gave the tiny bowman his kerchief moistened in water to fight thirst.
“Cats… ?” asked Beetledown weakly.
“No cats down here,” Chert assured him. “I already promised you that.”
“Just in case,” the little man said, and sat up—it took much of his strength—then pulled his bow and quiver off and set them down within easy reach before slumping back into the makeshift bed.
Chert hurried on. He had all the more reason for haste now—not just his worries about the boy and about Opal and the dying light of the coral, but also about whether he would repay the kindness of the Rooftopper queen and of brave Beetledown himself with the emissary’s death.
Emberstone Reach ended and the Maze began. He cursed the luck that had brought him into the befuddling labyrinth without the Rooftopper and his keen nose, but there was nothing to be done. Chert remembered something he had been told as a child, at an age when whispering about the initiation was more important than whispering about girls. A lways turn left, his friends had said with the confidence of those who had not been tested. When you hit a dead end, turn and backtrack, then do the same thing again with the next tunnel. At their intiation they had not needed to solve the Maze after all—they had been led in by the acolytes, abandoned for a while, and then led out. Now he had no choice but to try the ancient advice, since this time there were no temple brothers around to help him.
Here between the Reach and the Sea in the Depths there were also no natural lights, and Chert had to make his way through the Maze in darkness, with only the sound of his own ragged, weary breathing and the thump of his heart for company. After what seemed like an hour tracing and retracing what to the touch were indistinguishable passages, he finally grew certain he was lost, he was just about to sit down and weep with despair when he felt moving air on his face. Heart pounding now for joy and relief, he followed the breeze a few more turnings until he stepped out of the Maze and into the blue-lit vastness of the Sea Hall, but his happiness lasted only moments. He was on the balcony on the outside of the Maze with a long fatal drop below him, a barrier so effective that even the pilgrims who completed the Mysteries never saw more of the monsterous Sea Hall cavern than this. There was no way down to the cavern floor, and no sign of Flint on the great raw stone balcony.
There was nowhere else the boy could be.
Now Chert did weep a little, exhausted and despondent. He got down on his knees and crawled close to the edge, half certain that he would see the boy’s mangled body on the jagged, rocky shore beneath him, illuminated by the weird blue crystals of the cavern’s roof Instead, the reach of broken, piled stone was empty all the way to the silvery Sea in the Depths and the unreachable island at its center where the vast rocky form stood that figured in so many Funderling nightmares and revelations. The man-shaped formation was shrouded in shadow, but the roof-stones shed their light almost everywhere else. There was no sign of Flint, either living or dead.
Chert was plunged back into the misery of uncertainty. Had he and Beetledown walked right past Flint at some other turning, not knowing that the boy lay senseless or even dead nearby? The Mysteries and the tunnels and caves above them were unimaginably complex. How could he even guess where to start a new search if the Rooftopper’s nose was not to be trusted’.
Then, as if it had sensed Chert’s distant presence, the huge and mysterious stone figure known as the Shining Man began to flicker alight on its island at the center of the Sea in the Depths, and Chert’s heart sped until he thought it might burst. He had seen the statue only one other time, at his initiation, in the company of other young Funderlings, under the guidance of the Metamorphic Brothers. This time, he was alone and full of an interloper’s guilt. As the massive crystalline shape suddenly blazed with blue and purple and golden light, it threw strange reflections on the sea itself, which was not water but an immense pool of something like quicksilver, so that all the cavern was full of leaping colors and the Shining Man almost appeared to move, as if awakening from a long slumber Chert flung himself down, his belly against the stone. He begged the Earth Elders’ forgiveness and prayed to be spared.
The gods did not see fit to strike him dead, and after a few moments the light dimmed a little, enough that he dared to raise his head, but when he did so, Chert’s superstitious terror was suddenly made worse. In the new light he could see a small shape on the island—a moving figure that advanced, crawling slowly upward from the edge of the shining metal sea toward the feet of the glowing giant, the Shining Man. Even from this distance, with the figure small as an insect, Chert knew who it was.
“Flint!” he shouted, and his voice echoed out across the quicksilver sea, but the small shadow did not stop or even look back.
30. Awakening
RED LEAVES:
The child in its bed A bear on a hilltop
Two pearls taken from the hand of an old one
The ceiling of the main trigonate temple was so high that even with the great doors closed it had its own subtle winds— the thousands of candles on altars and in alcoves were all fluttering. At this hour of the morning it was also very cold. Barrick’s arm ached.
The prince regent was surrounded by the men who would accompany him into the west, his unloved cousin Rorick Longarren and more proven warriors like Tyne of Blueshore and Tyne’s old friend, the extravagantly mustached Droy Nikomede of Eastlake, along with many others Barrick knew mostly by reputation. In fact, much of the flower of the March Kingdoms’ nobility had gathered for this blessing—doughty Mayne Calough from far Kertewall, Sivney Fiddicks who some called the Piecemeal Knight because his armor and battle array were all prizes he had won in various tilts, Earl Gowan M’Ardall of Helmingsea, and several dozen other high lords dressed in white robes, plus five or six times that number of humbler stature who yet possessed their own horses and armor and at least a cottage or field somewhere so they could call themselves “landed.”
Like all the others, Barrick Eddon was down on one knee, facing the altar where Sisel told the blessing, the ancient Hierosolme phrases rolling from the hierarch’s tongue like the meaningless babble of a fast-running stream. Barrick knew he would soon be riding to war, perhaps even to death Not only that, the enemy they all faced were the wild creatures from the shadowlands, the old terror, the stuff of nightmares—yet he felt oddly flat, empty and unconcerned.