Not very likely I’ll be doing that, he thought, but he wondered how Flint could have managed to do it if he had descended these stairs. The boy was wiry, but was he that strong?
All this thinking gave Chert another idea and he crawled back out of the hole. He untied the shirt he had been wearing around his waist since he had got it back from Beetledown—it was far too hot down here for him to have felt any need of it—and tossed it out to the mouth of the dead-end so that someone in the passage would be able to see it without turning the corner.
With the stone cover off the opening, I couldn’t give the temple brothers a better idea of where I’ve gone if I wrote them a letter.
Feeling a little heartened despite his worries over what might be waiting in this narrow place, Chert Blue Quartz began to make his way down the stairs.
Either the quicksilver vapors were truly much stronger here or something else about the downward passage was . . . Strange… because Chert was finding it hard to keep his mind on the very important task of not falling down the narrow steps.
The stairwell was largely featureless! every few dozen steps he passed a string of symbols that might have been a single, enlarged word, rendered in the same stylized writing he had seen above, but there were no faces on these walls, no figures Still, he couldn’t escape the idea that things were moving around him, and that the failing light of his coral was being reflected back at him somehow from the bare walls as though it bounced off something less opaque than mere stone, as though the stairwell burrowed down not through the castle’s well-known limestone, but some huge, murky crystal. The dimensions of the place seemed to change, too, swelling and contracting even as he continued his trudge downward. For a time he couldn’t make sense anymore of how he had found his way here, and he became gripped by the dreadful certainty that he was descending the living stone throat of the Shining Man, being swallowed down into the heart of the Mysteries. Then the sensation passed, replaced by flickers of light all around him like the sparks that danced on the inside of closed eyelids. Wordless whispers swam up the stairwell, a dull and distant rush like waves crashing on a shore, and superstitious terror gripped him again.
This is not my place Only the temple brothers should be here, and perhaps even they do not know about this tunnel‘
Flint, he reminded himself, trying to fight off the panic that had him huddling on a step, hugging himself in exhausted terror. Remember the boy. That small, fiercely solemn face, the arms thin as Opal’s broom handle, the white-gold hair that would never he flat, and stood up like iron-flower crystals despite Opal’s best work with the brush. And Opal herself, of course—if Chert couldn’t bring the boy back to her, she would be crushed. Something inside her would die.
He forced himself to his feet and began descending again. One step. It all starts with one step, then another. Then another.
No, the Shadowline, he thought bleanly, it all started that day beside the Shadowline… But even as the memory came into his head with a sudden bizarre clarity—the forested hillside, the noise of hooves, the smell of the damp soil under his nose—as if a door had been opened and the past had crashed in, like a noisy guest into a quiet room, he put his foot down onto the next step and discovered something was very wrong Chert stumbled, flailed, and shrieked; then, with his heart pounding so hard it seemed it might cannon through the cage of his ribs, he realized that the wrong thing was not a deadly chasm beneath his feet but the opposite, a floor—not too much distance but too little. He had reached an end to what had seemed an endless downward spiral of steps.
He raised the chunk of coral and peered around, but if the world had suddenly gone from vertical to horizontal, it had not changed in many other ways- before him lay more corridor hewed through the same featureless stone. He was having trouble seeing clearly, but the passage extended as far as the light reached and probably much farther than that.
Beneath even the Sea in the Depths ? If so, there might be an end to the journey at some point—he had half feared that he might simply continue down into the earth for days and weeks, perhaps at last to arrive at the black tourmaline doors of Kernios’ own subterranean palace, doors that were famously guarded by Immon the Gatekeeper. It was a place Chert definitely did not wish to see while still alive, even if much of the original tale had been distorted by the big folk. The Funderling version was even more frightening. He tried to remember the distance across the quicksilver sea but the unstable light had confused him. Never having been any closer, he could only guess now in the most formless kind of way. He shrugged and took a deep breath.The hot, sour air did not seem to clear his thoughts. He staggered down the corridor.
“The deeps are no more like the town than the sky is like the ground, lad.”
It was his father’s voice in his head now, strangely Big Nodule (unlike his firstborn son, Chert’s brother, who was the current magister, his father would never have let himself be called anything so pretentious as “Nodule the Elder”) had been lamed by a rockfall in the early part of Olin’s reign, and had spent the last years of his life moving between his bed and his chair before the fire, but during Chert’s boyhood he had still been vigorous. Of all his sons, Chert had been the one most like him— ”the boy loves stone for stone’s sake,” Big Nodule had often proclaimed to his cronies at the guildhall—and he had taken Chert for long walks through the unfinished works outside Funderling Town, and even a few times to some of the hills above-ground or along the edge of Brenn’s Bay, pointing out the way limestone came to light where the rainwater washed away the earth, or the trapped centuries that were pressed in a sandstone bank above the waves like dried flowers in a noble lady’s book.
“A man who knows stone and its ways is as good as any man, big ‘un or Funderling, prince or kern, and he’ll never lack for things to do and think about.” That had been another of the old fellow’s favorite sayings.
Chert was astonished to find that he was walking blind, not because his toral lamp had finally died, but because he was weeping.
Hold on, you, he told himself. That man strapped you raw with his tie-rope for stealing a few sugarcap mushrooms out of Widow Rocksalt’s garden. When he finally died, your mother didn’t last even a year after, not because she missed him so much but because he’d worked her so in those last years that she was just bone-tired and couldn’t go on any longer.
Still, the tears wouldn’t stop. He found it hard to walk. His mothers face was before him now, too, the heavy-lidded eyes that could seem either beautifully dignified or painfully distant, the mouth that turned down at any hint of what she deemed an unnecessary fuss. He remembered Lapis Blue Quartz’s nimble, work-gnarled hands as she made a yarn doll for one of her grandchildren, her fingers always busy, always doing something. He couldn’t think of a time when she had been awake and those hands were not occupied.
“And what is this now?” He could hear her as clearly as if she stood beside him, her voice sour but not without humor. “What noise is this? Fissure and fracture, it sounds like someone’s skinning a live mole in here.”