“Leave now!” Nickel looked like he meant to grab the boy and drag him away, but Chert squeezed the monk’s arm hard and held him back.
The old man’s silence grew so long and deep that for the first time they could hear the squeak of ladders being moved on the far side of the room and even the murmur of whispered conversations between the other Metamorphic Brothers, who had not failed to notice what was going on at the center of the garden. Sulphur looked down at his own hands, knotted in his lap.
“My little Iktis found it,” he said at last in a voice so quiet everyone but Flint leaned forward. “He brought it to me, dragging it all the way. He loves shiny things and sometimes he goes as far up as the town. I have had to send back many a woman’s bracelet or necklace with the brothers who go to market. Sometimes Iktis even goes upground. And sometimes he goes… deep.”
“Can you show it to me?” Flint asked him. “I promise no one will take it from you.”
Again the silence thickened. At last Sulphur reached into his thick robe, which was frosted with mold along the crest of every wrinkle. Iktis, still hidden in the old man’s sleeve, loosed a twitter of protest as Sulphur withdrew a shiny thing that hung around his neck on a braided ratskin cord.
“It is my seeing-glass,” he said. “I knew it was meant for me the moment I saw it.”
It was the thing he had been holding when they first saw him, a small, thin shard of crystal in an irregular silvery metal frame that had clearly been built around the crystal’s natural shape and decorated with intricate little carvings even Chert’s strong eyes could not quite make out. The metal was not one that he recognized, and neither was the style of the metalwork or even the crystal itself, although it was hard to be certain in the poor light of the fungus garden.
Chaven took a deep breath. “That is Qar work,” he said dreamily. “Yes. The voice of the tortoise. A cage for the white owl. Yes, of course…”
“And when the little animal brought you this,” said Flint, as calm as ever, “then the dreams of the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone began.”
“But I have always dreamed of the gods!”
“Just let me…” Chaven reached out his hand toward the oblivious Sulphur; the physician’s breath was sawing in his throat, his eyes staring like a sleepwalker’s. “Yes, let me…” His voice had grown hoarse, a loud whisper. “I must…”
Chert had seen this before, if only briefly: Chaven’s mirror-madness was upon him. He knew as surely as if it had been planned that in another moment the physician would snatch the crystal away from the old man and chaos would follow. In the end they would likely be sent away from the temple, their last and best hiding place.
Chert kicked Chaven in the shin, right on the same spot the physician had struck so painfully on one of the stone tables a short while earlier. The physician let out a shriek and began to hop up and down, trying to grab at this new wound. A moment later he fell, knocking over a pile of tools. Startled and suspicious, the old monk slipped his shard of crystal back into the safety of his moldy robe.
“What is going on here?” Nickel shouted. “Have you all gone mad?”
“Chaven hit his leg again,” said Chert. “Nothing more. Help me get him back to the temple—the poor fellow’s bleeding from the shin. Flint, you are needed too. Thank Grandfather Sulphur for his help and let’s go.”
The boy looked at the old man, whose face had gone stony and secretive again. Flint did not say anything to him, but turned and walked out of the garden, leaving Chert and Nickel to follow with the hopping, whimpering physician propped between them.
The first thing Ferras Vansen saw was a pale, yellow-green star hovering in the darkness above him. It was strange a star should move in such a lively manner: not only was it swooping back and forth across the darkness in a series of loops like a browsing bumblebee, it seemed to be talking to him as well.
Stars don’t talk. Ferras Vansen was fairly certain about that. Stars don’t… bumble, either.
“… Are you… ?” asked the star. “Can… hear… ?”
He was a bit disappointed: he had expected that if a star ever did speak to him it would have more important things to say. Weren’t stars supposed to be the souls of fallen heroes? Had they all hung in the sky so long they had become simpletons, the way Vansen’s father had in that dreadful last year of his life?
For a moment he wondered if he was dead himself and had somehow made his way into the heavens—not that he had done anything to deserve a hero’s place—but thinking of his father made him wonder if death could be so… fuzzy, so confusing. It didn’t seem likely.
“… He… more water now…” said the star.
Vansen tried to focus on the moving light. He soon realized a strange thing: he could see something beyond it—beyond the star! And not the black curtain of night he would have expected, but something that looked like a face. Could it be the great god Perin Skylord himself, inspecting Vansen’s fallen soul? Or was it Kernios, the keeper of the dead? A trembling cold moved over him at the thought of that grim god. But if it was Kernios, he looked familiar. In fact, the god of the underworld looked like… Brother Antimony… ?
Vansen finally recognized that the yellow-green glow he had been staring at so blearily since his senses had returned was only the coral lamp bound to Antimony’s forehead.
“I’m… not… dead?” His mouth was dry as sand. It was hard to make words.
“He’s speaking sense again,” said Antimony with clear relief. “No, Captain Vansen, you’re not dead.”
“What happened?” A memory rose up like a dark cloud. “We found them. Those things…”
“They used a kind of poison,” Antimony said. “A powder they blew through a tube, as our ancestors used to do. We were fortunate it did not kill you. Also, you blocked the way so the rest of us were not harmed by it.” He helped Vansen to sit up, then gave him some water. The other Funderlings crouched nearby, bald Sledge Jasper and his fellow warders. To Vansen’s uncertain eye they all seemed to be present. “Is everyone alive?”
“All of us, thank the Earth Elders,” said Antimony. “And look!” He pointed to a huge lump of darkness lying against the tunnel wall, something big as a horse. “One of the deep ettins—we killed it!”
“I did most of the killing,” said Jasper with pleasure. “Let’s speak the truth, Brother! Put my pointy bit right in its eye.”
“What is it?” said Vansen. He crawled toward the massive corpse, then wished he hadn’t: it gave off a smell so rank and musty that it made his eyes water. “You said… ettin?”
“Krja’azel,” said Antimony, the word so strange and harsh on his tongue that the kindhearted young Funderling suddenly seemed a different kind of creature entirely. “Something we have not seen since my great-grandfather’s time, and even then rarely.”
“But those were wild,” said Jasper. “This one fought beside the fairies.”
“And what is this under it?” asked Vansen, holding his nose. At first he had thought it was some sort of fin at the back of the thing’s neck, but now he saw that what protruded there were stubby little fingers. He tried to move the ettin, but the thing was several times his own weight.
“One of its masters,” said Sledge Jasper. “The ones with the powder-pipes. We saw them all rush past in their hoods when you fell, but when I spiked that thing in the eye, this one must have been caught underneath it.”
Vansen began to shove at the stinking Scraper. “Could he still be alive?”
The wardthane’s laugh was unpleasant. “You don’t know how long you’ve been knocked senseless, do you?”