“What are we doing here?” Chert whispered. “How do you know this place? I will go no farther without some answers, boy.”
Flint looked at him, face pale in the fish-skin glow. Chert was suddenly frightened, not by the boy himself but by what he might say, what changes it might bring. But Flint only shook his head.
“I can’t give you answers, Father—I don’t know them. I saw this place when I was asleep and I knew I had to come here. I know what I must do. You will have to trust me.”
Chert stared at the small face, so familiar and yet so unknowably foreign.
“Very well, I’ll trust you. But if I say we leave, we leave. Understood?”
The boy did not reply, but turned and headed down the swaying gangway.
The barge at the end of it was low but wide, its deck a clutter of cabins and outbuildings—it looked more like the floor of a storage room than any seaworthy vessel. Lights flickered in several of the tiny windows, but Flint headed unerringly toward a patch of absolute darkness on the side of the barge; by the time Chert caught up with him the boy had already rapped twice on the cabin door there.
The door opened a crack. “What do you want?” a quiet voice asked.
“To speak with your headman.”
“And who is it wants to speak with him?”
“A messenger from Kioy-a-pous.”
Chert stared at the boy. Kioy-a-pous? Who or what was that? And what in the name of the Earth Elders was going on?
The door swung open, spilling amber light. A Skimmer girl stood there, waiting for them to enter. Chert had never seen one of her tribe close up. Her solemn face looked just like some of the ancient carvings he’d seen beneath Funderling Town, which made no sense—why would the old Funderlings have carved pictures of Skimmers?
The girl led them down a long, dark passage. Chert could feel the ship continuously moving beneath his feet, a most distressing sensation for someone who had lived all his life on stone. She took them into a low, wide cabin where half a dozen Skimmer men sat around a table whose height reflected the close-hanging roof: all the Skimmers sat on the floor, their knees bent and high. As they turned toward the newcomers the men’s large, wide-set eyes and hairless faces made them look like a gathering of frogs in a pond.
“My father, Turley Longfingers,” the girl told Flint and Chert, gesturing toward one of the men, “He is the headman of our people here.”
“What is this, Daughter?” Turley seemed upset by this sudden intrusion—almost shamefaced, as though he and the others had been caught planning something wicked.
“He says he comes as a messenger from Kioy-a-pous,” she said. “Don’t ask me more, for I can’t tell you. I’ll bring some drink.” She shrugged, then made a sullen little curtsy to the men and left the cabin.
“Why declare yourself with such a name, young one?” Turley said. “You have the stink of the northern king on you—old Ynnir Graywind. We do not serve him or his dying master. Too many broken promises lie between our peoples. We are the children of Egye-Var, Lord of the Seas, so what do we care for Kioy-a-pous? What do we care for the one called Crooked?”
Flint reacted very strangely to the Skimmer’s words: for the first time since he and Opal had found the child in a sack beside the Shadowline he saw a look of fury cross the boy’s face. It was a moment’s expression only, a flash like the white smear of lightning across a dark sky, but in that instant Chert found himself truly afraid of the child he had brought into his home.
“Those are old ideas, headman,” Flint told the Skimmer, his anger gone again, or at least invisible. “Taking the side of one of the Great Ones against another—that is a strategy from when the world was young and mortals had no part but that which the Great Ones allowed them. Things have changed. Egye-Var and the rest were banished for a reason, and you and the other inheritors would not like it if they came back to reclaim what was theirs.”
“What do you mean?” the Skimmers’ headman asked. “What have you come to tell us?”
“It is not what I have come to tell you that is important, it is what I need to ask,” the boy said with invincible calm. “Take me to the keepers of the Scale.”
The chief of the Skimmers was so startled he actually leaned back as though this odd child had struck him, his mouth working uselessly for a moment. “What… what do you speak of?” he demanded at last, but it sounded like weak bluster.
“I speak of the two sisters, as you already know,” Flint said. “Many things may depend on this. Take me to them, headman, and do not waste more time.”
Turley Longfingers looked helplessly at the other Skimmer men but they seemed even more taken aback than he was, their eyes bulging with anxious surprise.
“We… we cannot do it,” their chief said at last. Resistance was gone. His denial was an admission, not a refusal. “No shoal-mooted man may visit the sisters…”
“They need to go and my Rafe isn’t here,” said the headman’s daughter. “If you cannot take them, Father, I will.”
If Chert thought Turley Longfingers would rage at the girl, hit her or drive her from the room, he was wrong. Instead he sounded almost apologetic. “But, Daughter, this is not a day to approach the sisters… not a shriven day, no salt has been sprinkled…”
“Nonsense, Father.” She shook her head as if he were a child who had made a mess. “Listen! This child speaks of things no outsider knows, let alone any landlegged child. He speaks of the Scale! As if we did not already know that a time of change is upon us.”
“But, Ena, we do not…”
“You may punish me later if you wish.” She stood. “But I am taking them to the drying shed.”
This finally opened the floodgates: the other Skimmer men all began to talk at once, arguing, hissing, vying for Turley’s attention, pointing their long fingers at the chieftain’s daughter as though she had walked into the room naked. The noise swelled until Turley flapped his long hands for silence, but it was not his voice that stilled them.
“Take us, then,” said Flint. “We have no time to waste. It is less than a turn of the moon until Midsummer.”
“Follow me, then.” Ignoring the looks of outrage and open befuddlement from the Skimmer men, the girl drew a shawl from a hook on the wall and draped it around her shoulders. “But walk carefully—some of the way is dangerous.”
To Chert’s surprise, the girl led them no farther than the floating dock attached to the stern of the ramschackle barge. The moon had vanished somewhere behind the castle’s outer walls and the night was so dark that but for the dull sparkle of stars when the wind blew the clouds aside, they might have been in one of the deepest tunnels of the Mysteries.
Ena pointed to a rowboat bobbing beside the dock. “Get in.”
Chert thought there could be nothing more frightening than getting into a boat, with only air above him and water beneath him. He quickly found out he was wrong.
“Now put this on,” Ena told them, handing Chert and Flint a length of cloth each. “Tie it over your eyes.”