“Of course.”
“I wish I could take him.”
“And if anyone is watching, what surer way to announce our presence? No, my dearest, he must stay here and you must hurry back to us.”
Opal stood up to kiss his cheek and he kissed her back on the mouth, which surprised her and made her smile. She put the bag over her shoulder then and turned to where Brother Natron, a friend of Brother Antimony’s, had been waiting a discreet distance away while they said their goodbyes. Natron seemed an intelligent and careful young man, which made Chert’s mind a little easier, but he would have preferred the familiar and trustworthy Antimony, who was off with Ferras Vansen and some Funderling warders searching for incursions in the outer tunnels.
Worry suddenly clutched him. “Come back safe to me, my only love,” he called, but Opal and the young monk were already up the trail and out of sight.
“Papa Chert, I need you to help me.”
He could only stare at the boy in amazement—it was the first time Flint had ever called him anything like that. To make it even stranger, the boy had been largely silent for the last few days. Now, with Opal gone, he seemed to have gone through another of his odd, unsettling changes.
“Help you?”
Flint sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed, then bent and scrabbled on the stone floor for his shoes. “I want to talk to the old one. The one who has the dreams.”
Chert could only shake his head. “What are you talking about?”
“There is an old man here. He has dreams. Everyone knows him. I need to speak to him.”
A dim recollection came to Chert. “Grandfather Sulphur? But how would you know that? You weren’t here when Nickel told us about him.”
Flint ignored this unimportant detail. “Take me to him, please. I need to talk to him.”
Chert stared at this maddening, confusing, sometimes truly frightening child, remembering that moment which now seemed a lifetime ago when the sack had not yet been opened and Flint was still an unknown quantity.
And what if I had not opened it? What if I had taken Opal firmly by the arm and walked away—left it to be someone else’s problem. Would things be different? Better… or worse? Because it was hard to avoid the idea that Flint’s coming had something to do with all the other strange things that had seized their lives and the lives of everyone they knew, Big Folk and Funderlings alike.
He sighed. In for a scrape, in for all the dig, as they say. “Very well,” he told the boy. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“I do not understand any of this,” said Brother Nickel. The scion of a powerful Funderling family, he had only recently been elevated from acolyte to kainite, a common monk of the temple, but everyone, most definitely including Nickel himself, knew he was the abbot’s handpicked successor, and he generally acted as though he had already taken up the ceremonial mattock. “Already your little group has upended all tradition and habit here. Women, children, big people, fugitives—we seem to be taking them all in. Were it not that Cinnabar and the Guild swear that the need is great…”
“But they do swear,” said Chert. “Please, Nickel, just tell us where to go. We’re grateful for your help but we don’t want to steal anymore of your time than necessary…”
“Let you go off without supervision and… interrogate our oldest brother?” Nickel stood up. “I do not think so. I will take you to him myself. He is old and frail. If your questions upset him the conversation will end. Understood?”
“Very well, yes. Of course.”
Chaven the physician, who had stood watching the discussion with some interest, cleared his throat. “I think I will come along, too—if that is acceptable, Chert… ?”
“Acceptable to Chert? ” Nickel seemed far too dark a shade of red for a man of his comparatively young age. “What about the Metamorphic Brotherhood? No, by all means, let us take as many as wish to go! Perhaps we should simply declare a parade, as on the Day of First Delving—round up all the citizens, and lead a procession to the gardens to surprise the poor old man!”
“You perhaps exaggerate a little, Brother Nickel,” said Chaven gently. “I am a physician, after all. Who better to have along if you worry about Grandfather Sulphur’s health? And the child Flint has also been under my care. Yes, I think it is a very good idea that I come along.”
Chert smiled, but he already felt weary and more than a little put out and the task had not even been begun. Why did it seem he was forever helping other people get their way?
“I have not been in this part of the temple,” Chaven said as they zigzagged their way through a low-ceilinged cavern of twisted limestone shapes, following a path that Nickel alone could recognize.
“And why should you have been? ” the Metamorphic Brother demanded. “Nothing of interest to your lot happens here. These are gardens and farms where we grow our food. We had almost a hundred mouths to feed here even before all of you started arriving.”
And many more will be coming soon, Chert thought. If you’re lucky they’ll be Funderlings, not fairies. But he didn’t say it aloud.
“Ah, but you see, I am interested in such things,” said Chaven. “Any true man of science never ceases being a student. Please do not be so stern, Brother Nickel. We are grateful you have taken us in. This is a time of war and stranger things. All good people must stand together.”
Nickel snorted, but when he spoke again he sounded a bit more civil. “That is the road to the salt mine. The mine is small, but it gives us enough for our own use as well as to trade with the city above.”
Flint alone seemed uninterested in the cavern and its grotesque fixtures of living stone. His face had resumed its usual placidity: he stared straight ahead like a soldier marching toward a life or death battle.
Who are you, really, boy? Chert no longer felt certain he would understand even if someone told him. What are you? In any case, the answer did not really matter. What mattered was that his wife loved the boy and he loved his wife. What he felt for Flint himself was harder to put into words, but as he looked now at the serious child with his shock of almost white hair he knew he would do whatever he could to keep the boy safe.
“Down here.” Nickel gestured to a side passage.
Chert could smell the garden’s pungent air of mold, moisture, and animal manure long before they stepped through the opening. The cavern was lit only by a few torches and scarcely brighter than the corridor. Chaven, still not entirely used to the dim light in which Funderlings lived, stopped and held out his hands like a blind man; Chert took his elbow.
The fungus garden was surprisingly big, a natural high-ceilinged cave that had been further shaped by the hammers and chisels of the Funderlings. Most of the effort had gone into clearing the middle of the floor, which was now crammed full of low stone tables, but the walls had also been thoroughly worked, incised with deep grooves to make rows and rows of shelves.
Every table on the wide floor was laden with trays of black dirt, each tray pockmarked with little pale dots. The alcoves had also been stuffed with manure and soiclass="underline" thousands of delicate fanlike fungi were growing along the walls, from floor level to five or six times a Funderling’s height, where monks on ladders tended the crops. Chert had just begun to wonder which of robed shapes was Grandfather Sulphur when he noticed a bent, bony old man perched on a stool near the center of the room, examining one of the trays with a rock-crystal seeing glass. Flint was already walking toward him, much to the distress of Brother Nickel.