“Demon!” he moaned, struggling. The thing retreated, or its horrid face did, but he could still feel something scratching at his neck.
“Not pretty, mayhap,” a voice said, “but un’s carried me well. Seems sour t’name un so.”
Chert stopped fighting, astonished, wondering if he had lost his wits again or was wandering in the tunnels of dream. “Beetledown?”
“Aye.” A moment later the little man clambered down Chert’s shoulder and into his view. “Why can’t I move? And what was that thing?”
“For movin’, well, it’s thy boy lying athwart ‘ee hampering thy arms. That thing, as tha says, well… a flittermouse, I calls it. Rode it back here, did I.”
“A flit… A bat?”
“Aye, likely.” Something dark leaped past Chert’s face. “There un goes,” said Beetledown a little sadly. “Gone now, afeared because tha would try to roll over un.” He shook his head. “Testing and fidgeting, thy flittermouse may be, but a treat to ride once going along proper.”
“You rode a bat?”
“How else to get over yon evil-smelling silver water?”
Chert slid out from under Flint, letting the boy down onto the stony beach as gently as he could. “How fares thy boy?” asked Beetledown.
“Alive, but I don’t know anything more. I have to get him away, but I can’t carry him.” He wanted to laugh and cry. “Good as it is to see you, you won’t be much help there. And now you’ve lost your bat, so you’re stuck here, too.” It seemed impossibly sad. Chert sat on the loose stones, staring out across the Sea in the Depths.
“Mayhap if tha tell how tha came here, yon temple fellows who followed me can come across and help carry thy boy.”
“Temple fellows… ?” He looked up.There were shapes on the far side of the quicksilver sea, small dark forms moving atop the great balcony of stone. Chert’s heart sped. “Oh, Beetledown, you brought them! The Elders bless you, you brought them!” He cupped his hands around his mouth, tried to shout, coughed, then tried again. “Hoy! Nickel! Is that you?”
The temple brothers voice came down to him, faint but echoing with urgency. “In the name of the Elders, how did you get across?”
Chert started to reply, then stopped. When he did speak, he couldn’t keep the astonishment out of his voice, for surely it was the Metamorphic Brothers’ own tunnel he had used. “Do you mean—do you mean to say you don’t know… ?”
There were more surprises—Chert even managed to surprise himself. Despite being grateful to his rescuers, not to mention having been raised in the lifetime habit of trained respect toward their order, when he finally stumbled back into the temple, he answered all the brothers’ questions about his journey and the Shining Man as truthfully as he could but volunteered nothing about the mirror or Flint’s unusual origins.
If I tell them anything about where the boy comes from, they won’t let him leave. He felt certain of that, although he was not sure why. The brothers were concerned, of course, and even a little angry about the boy’s incursion into the Mysteries, but not inordinately so. He knew that his reticence was selfish, perhaps even foolishly dangerous, but Opal was waiting for him back on Wedge Road, and she must be frightened now not just for the boy but for her husband as well. He couldn’t bear to think of going back to her only to tell her the boy was being held prisoner in the temple.
For their own part, the brothers brought him no farther into the temple than the outer chamber, the great room of natural stone that the people of Funderling Town were allowed to see on a few of the highest holy days. Even Chert’s carefully shaped version of the tale was enough to make them examine the boy very carefully while they made a fruitless attempt at waking him. Flint had no visible wounds, no lumps or bruises anywhere on his pale skin, but nothing they did could raise him from his deep sleep. Even wrinkled, wild-eyed old Grandfather Sulfur, whose prophetic dreams had apparently contained Rooftoppers and a disturbance at the Sea in the Depths, came in on the arms of two acolytes to examine Flint, which made Chert as nervous as walking on a slope of loose tailings, but the ancient fellow went away again shaking his hairless head, saying that he saw and felt nothing special about the boy. At last Brother Nickel told Chert, “We can do nothing more for him. Take him home.”
Chert finished his cup of water. He had drunk a bucket’s worth in the last hours, he felt sure, every drop a splendor. “I cannot carry him myself.”
“We will send a brother who can help you take him in a litter.”
“Methinks I will ride on that, friend Chert,” said Beetledown in his tiny, high-pitched voice. “Better than thy pocket, being less whiffsome, beg thy pardon, and better than yon old flittermouse, which tended to the bony.”
Nickel stared at the Rooftopper with superstitious distrust, as though he were a talking animal, but went off to make arrangements.
Chert let a young acolyte named Antimony, moonfaced and broad-shouldered, take the front of the litter while he took the back. A silent crowd of temple brothers watched them go. Tired as he was, Chert was quite content to let someone else find the way and pick the best spots. He looked down at Flint, pale and motionless but oddly peaceful, and even through his fear for the boy he felt a new rush of gratitude to Beetledown and to the Metamorphic Brothers: at least he was bringing a living child, however ill, back to Opal.
“You really rode a bat?” he asked Beetledown who, to lessen the chance of being accidentally crushed, was riding on the top edge of the litter near Flint’s head.
“A Gutter-Scout am I. All animals we master to perform our duty.” The tiny man coughed, then grinned. “And yon rat fellow was so piddling slow I could have outrun him my ownself.”
“All I can say is thank you.”
“Uns be useful words, so no need to apologize on them.” “You’ve been very kind to us.”
“All for honor of queen and Rooftops.” He made a little salute. “And I have found thy stone world not so dull as I thought. Could tha only bring a little more wind, rain, and sunlight down into these holes, I would come again to make a visit.”
Chert smiled wearily. “I’ll mention that to the Guild.”
The shaking of the earth had frightened almost everyone in the castle, but there was not too much damage Some crockery had fallen and shattered in the keep’s huge kitchen and a serving maid had been terrified into apoplexy when an ancient suit of royal armor in the Privy Gallery shook off its stand and collapsed to the floor in front of her, but otherwise the toll had been light Still, even without the news from Marnnswalk and the tremor, it would have been a hectic morning Briony was kept busy until after the noon bell, mostly working with Nynor and Brone to sort the movement and housing of the incoming troops as well as many of the folk from the city outside the castle walls. The keep seemed crowded to bursting with people and animals and the time had almost come when no more could be accommodated.
She stole a part of an hour to eat a meal with her great-aunt, but it was not much reliee. The dowager duchess was consumed with fear for Barrick just as Briony was, and had also been waiting to question the princess regent—and in several cases, argue with her—about the disposition of various nobles and their families within the inner keep When their voices rose, Merolanna’s little maid Ellis watched with wide, frightened eyes, as if at any moment something horrible could happen in this unexpected and unsteady new world.