Elders protect us both, he thought. The boy from any harm, and me from Opal should anything happen to him.
He missed his wife. Never in his life since the days he was apprenticing under old man Iron Quartz and had traveled with him as far as Settland had he been separated from her so long. It was not that he missed her in the same way he had when they were newly married, when to be apart from her felt like a bodily ache, when he could not be near her without touching her, teasing her, kissing her, and to be denied those things was torment; rather he missed her now as he would have missed a part of himself if it had been taken from him. He was incomplete.
Ah, old girl, I really do ache for you! I’ll have to tell you that as soon as I see you, instead of being silly. I can’t wait until I can give you the squeezes I’ve been saving. And I want to hear your voice, even if you’re calling me foolish. I’d rather be mocked by you than praised by the Guild.
“She’s a good woman, your mother,” he said out loud.
Flint cocked his head. “She’s not my real mother. But she is a good woman.”
“Do you remember your real mother?” Chert asked.
Flint kept walking, but Chert had learned the boy had different kinds of silences. This was the kind that meant he was thinking.
“My mother is dead,” he said at last, his voice as flat as a split slate. “She died trying to save me.”
But despite this sudden, surprising assertion, when pressed Flint could not remember anything else. After a while, concerned that they were far enough from the temple now that quiet was better than unnecessary talk, Chert let the matter drop.
They searched the dark areas at the sides of the Cascade Stair and up as far as the tunnels on the level below the Salt Pool, then stopped to eat mushrooms and some smoked mole Chert had brought for a treat. They were thirsty when they’d finished so they walked a little way farther up the great stair to a spot where the sloping cavern was pierced by a natural sinkhole, a phenomenon the Funderlings called an “Elders’ Well.” Unlike the Salt Pool, which seeped in from the bay and whose surface was never any higher or lower than the sea itself, the Elders’ Wells were full of fresh, sweet water that soaked down from rainfall on Midlan’s Mount. In fact, it was these sinkholes that made life on the great rock possible for both the Funderlings and the Big Folk, who dug their own wells into these aquifers from the surface.
As he watched Flint kneeling at the edge of the pool, filling his hands and drinking with his usual fierce concentration, as though experiencing something he had never done before, Chert wondered at how the simplest things in life could be so complicated. Here, fresh water. Only a few hundred cubits above was the saltwater of Brenn’s Bay. Only the limestone of Midlan’s Mount kept the two apart, and if that ever changed—say, perhaps because of an earth tremor like the ones that occurred frequently in the southern islands, but never in Chert’s memory here—then everything else would change, too: the bay would flood in and drown everything lower than the Salt Pool, killing all the monks and everyone else in the temple. Many of the deeper sweet water springs would become undrinkable.
And yet despite this precarious balance, life had gone on here, hardly changing, for century upon century. Chert, with the help of the Blue Quartz family tablets, could track his own line back nearly ten generations; some of the richer and more powerful families claimed they could name a line of a hundred ancestors.
But would the next generation be able to say the same? Or would they be reciting their Funderling history in some kind of poor scrape or burrow after a Qar victory had destroyed their ancient home? Would the Funderlings of days to come live wild in unshaped caves, as some of their more eccentric philosophers claimed their ancestors once had?
Chert realized with a little start that Flint had finished drinking and was standing just in front of him, staring with those calm, wide eyes. “Did you hear that?” he asked. “I thought I heard someone moaning.”
“Could it be Chaven?”
The boy shook his head. “Too big. Too deep.”
“Likely just earth sounds, then. Sorry, lad. I was thinking about water and stone—the kind of things an old guildsman like me tends to think about.”
“This is shellstone,” the boy told him solemnly, holding up a pale, irregular rock. “The kind of limestone with shells in it.”
Chert laughed and stood up. “I’m glad to see you’ve been paying attention. Good lad.”
Having found no sign of Chaven or anything else out of the ordinary in the halls around the Cascade Stair, Chert and Flint made their way down past the temple again and through the Five Arches gateway, then into the complicated web of tunnels that led down to the Maze. He was not going to go any closer to the Mysteries, of course—the last thing he wanted to do was run the risk of somehow losing track of the boy in those confusing depths—but if Chaven was lost somewhere in the deeps below the temple, this seemed the most likely place to look. The Maze was even more confusing, of course, but if the physician had made his way that far down Chert would need the help of the Brothers themselves to search it properly: he had not forgotten his own disturbing experiences in that benighted place.
Something like an hour later, Chert was standing at the fork of two tunnels and thinking it was probably time to give up and head back to the temple if they wanted to have a hope of supper when he noticed that Flint was no longer standing behind him.
He ran back down the tunnel, fear swelling inside him. “Flint!” he shouted. “Boy! Where are you? ” Chert cursed himself over and over again as he searched every cross-track he had passed: everything Opal had ever said about him, even at her most uncharitable, was clearly true—he was an utter dunderhead. Bringing the boy right back to the place where he had already vanished once, a place where he had suffered through the Elders only knew what kind of terrifying times!
As he was exploring perhaps the sixth or seventh cross-track he found himself in a long corridor that dipped and twisted several times. After he had run for some time Chert began to feel he was wasting too much time down this one rabbit hole. He was just about to turn and make his way back to the main hall when the corridor opened in front of him. This wider space ended in a great crevice as wide as the Funderling’s arm and three or four times his height, but he had only a moment to notice that before he saw the pale-haired figure lying crumpled in the shadows a short distance away.
“Elders preserve us all!” he cried and threw himself down on his knees beside Flint. To his immeasurable relief, the boy was breathing, and even began to stir as Chert pulled him a little way off the ground and awkwardly cradled him against his chest.
“Oh, child, what have I done?” Chert said. The boy twitched in his arms, just a little at first, but then harder. A moment later Chert felt something wet and warm against his neck and leaned back, searching desperately for a bleeding wound… but it was not blood that had run from the boy’s face and splattered on him but something else. Flint was weeping.
“Boy?” Chert said. “Boy, what is it? Are you well? Can you hear me?”
“Dying ...” he said. “Dying.”
“You are not! Don’t say such things—you will draw the Elders’ attention!” He pulled the boy close to him again. “Don’t tempt them—they must fill their hods with souls each day.”