Shadowmarch

surface.

“Who comes down here so far to light torches?” Beetledown asked, distractedly sniffing.

“You’ll see.” Chert stepped out into the pool on a bridge of submerged stones near the edge of the cataract and headed straight for the falling water.

“Tha’ll drown us!” Beetledown chirped in alarm.

“Don’t fear There is space between the water and the stone—and look!” There was more than space between water and wall—there was a hole in the great slab of stone, a hole that from most angles was hidden behind the waterfall Chert stepped through, taking more care than he normally would to avoid the edge of the waterfall so that Beetledown would not accidentally be washed off his shoulder. On the far side of the water they entered a single chamber the size of an entire Funderling Town neighborhood, whose walls were lined with bracketed torches and whose high ceiling was covered with the same kind of strange carvings that filled the Garden of Earth Shapes. At the far side of this massive chamber stood the pillared front of the Temple of the Metamorphic Elders, cut directly into the living rock.

“By the Peak!” the little man said in wonder. “Un goes on and on’. Have tha Funderling folk truly dug all the way down in the dark earth and out through the bottom’!”

“Not quite,” Chert told him, looking at the intricately worked stone facade—only the unevenness of some of the shapes showed that it had been natural cavern once. “But we have found many of the deep places of the earth that water dug, then carved them even more to make them our own.”

Beetledown made a face, sniffed. “But for the first time I do not scent the boy strongly. Un’s track runs weaker here, behind the water-wall.”

Chert sighed. “I will ask the temple brothers, anyway,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to wait here.” “Art coming back for me?”

“I won’t go out of your sight. Just sit here on this stone.” He placed Beetledown atop a relatively flat bit of carved wall, high off the cavern floor. He was glad he didn’t have to go far: he felt a responsibility for the little man he had not expected. He remembered the tiny fellow’s worry about cats and the joke he had made about it and was again struck by shame. It’s true there aren’t too many cats down here, he thought, but I don’t think I remembered to tell him that many here keep snakes against rats and voles and other vermin. I doubt Beetledown likes snakes any better than cats.

He hurried across the wide floor of the temple chamber. It was here that the people of Funderling Town made pilgrimage, gathering on the nights when the Mysteries themselves were celebrated and for other important holiday observances. Chert was relieved to see a dark-robed acolyte standing just inside the doorway of the temple proper, so that he didn’t have to break his word to stay within Beetledown’s sight. “Your pardon, Brother.”

The acolyte came out into the full glow of the torches. The Metamorphic Brothers did not use stonelights, considering them to be dangerously modern, even though the glowing lamps had been used in the streets of Funderling Town for at least two centuries. “What do you seek, Child of the Elders?” he asked. He was dressed in the temple’s costume of archaic, loose-fitting clothes and was younger than Chert would have expected. He looked like he might be from one of the Bismuth families.

“I am Chert Blue Quartz. My foster son is lost.” He took a breath. Here was where the trouble might really begin. “He is one of the big folk. Has he come past here?”

The acolyte raised an eyebrow but only shook his head. “Do not go away just yet, though. One of the brothers came back from the market and said he saw a Gha’jaz child.” Chert was not surprised to hear the man use the old Funderling word—he had spoken the Common Tongue of big folk and Funderlings awkwardly, as though he didn’t use it very often. The Temple had always disliked change. “I will bring him out.”

Chert waited impatiently. When the other acolyte at last emerged, he confirmed that he had seen a boy much like Flint hours earlier, fair-haired and small but clearly not a Funderling, in one of the outer Festival Halls, but heading away from the Temple rather than toward it. Just as Chert was absorbing the implications, he heard a clamor from behind him. Three more acolytes, apparently returning from some errand, had stopped and clustered around the bit of wall where he’d left Beetledown.

“Nickel!” one of them shouted to the first acolyte. “Look, it is a real, living Gha’sun’nk!” Chert cursed under his breath.

Several more of the Metamorphic Brothers spilled out of the temple, some bare-chested and sweaty as though they had just come from forges, kilns, or ovens, within moments a dozen or so had surrounded the Roof- topper. They seemed even more curious than he would have expected. Chert waded through them and lifted the little man up onto his shoulder; Beetledown was looking a bit panicky.

“Is he really Gha’sun’nk?” asked an acolyte, again using the old Funderling name for the Rooftoppers—the little, little people.

“Yes. He is helping me hunt for my foster son.”

As the other acolytes whispered to each other, Nickel approached, a strange gleam in his eyes. “Ah! This is a terrible day,” he said and laid both fists on his chest in a gesture of surrender to the Earth Elders.

“What do you mean?” Chert asked, startled.

“We had hoped that Grandfather Sulphur’s dreams spoke of a time still to come,” said the acolyte. “He is the oldest among us, our master, and the Elders speak to him. Lately he has dreamed that the hour is coming when Old Night will reach out and claim all the di-G’zeh-nah’nk,” —he used an old word that meant something like “left-behinds”—”and that our days of freedom are over.”

The acolytes began to argue among themselves. Chert had left Beetledown on the wall simply to avoid having to explain him and acknowledge the breach of tradition, but the Metamorphic Brothers’ unhappy confusion was real and honest.

“Will they kill me?” Beetledown fluted in his ear.

“No, no. They’re just upset because the times are strange—like your queen and her Lord of the High Place or whatever it was, the one that she said warned you that some kind of storm was coming.”

“The Lord of the Peak,” said Beetledown. “And he is real. The storm is real, too, mark tha—’twill blow the very tiles of our roofs out into darkness.”

Chert did not reply, but stood suddenly rigid in the midst of the tumult like a traveler lost without light on one of the wild roads on the outskirts of Funderling Town. He had just realized where Flint must be going, and it was a fearful thought indeed.

* * *

The snores of Finneth’s husband seem loud as the roar of his forge fires.

The clanging all day, she thought, then lying sleepless in the dark with him snorting like a bull all night. The gods gwe us what they think fit, but what have I done that this is my lot? Not that she had only complaints. Her man, called Onsin Oak-arms, was not the worst husband a woman could have. He worked hard in his little smithy and did not spend too much time at the tavern at the end of the drove road. He was not one of the wasters lolling on the bench beneath the eaves, shouting at the passersby. If he was not the most affectionate of men, he was at least a responsible father to their son and daughter, teaching them to love the gods and to honor their parents while hardly ever resorting to any punishment more painful than a cuff on the top of the head or the snap of his thick fingers against a child’s backside. A good thing, too, Finneth thought. He is strong enough to kill a grown man with those big hands. Thinking of his broad back and how the dark curly hair grew tight on his thick neck, the way he held up a bar that would be an ox shoe to show their son the color it should be when it was ready for shaping, she felt a little tickle of desire for him, snoring or no snoring. She rolled against his back and pressed her cheek against him His sleep-rumble changed—there was a note almost of question in it—but then subsided again. Their daughter Agnes stirred in her cot. To her mother’s immense terror, both children had caught the fever that had lately passed through Candlerstown and all the dales, but although little Agnes had taken it the worse, her breathing had been almost normal again for a week Zoria the Queen of Mercy, it seemed, had heard Finneth’s prayers.

She was floating toward sleep, thinking of the damp straw on the floor that would have to be replaced with dry now that wet weather had come, and of how she must also press Onsin to plaster up the cracks around the window of their little house, when she heard the first faint sounds— someone shouting. When she realized it was not the watchman calling out the hour, suddenly all her sleepiness was gone.

At first she thought it must be a fire. It was different living in a town than the village where Finneth had