brown rock. Then even bone and broken earthenware gave way to clean tunnels that were unnaturally dark and quiet, as if at some point we had crossed a border into a region where living things could not long abide.
'So this leads us to Firebrand, you say?' I asked my brother, who weaved in and out of the light.
'Surely it does, Galen,' he replied. 'I've been in those very quarters, but they blindfolded me on the way there and back. So instead of firsthand experience, I shall rely on a sort of… scholarly pursuit.'
He smiled and looked at me directly.
'I saw the maps in that library back there, and I have pieced together the directions from the library to Firebrand's quarters with only a little research and common sense. This is the way, I am reasonably certain. It leads not only to Firebrand, but to his quarters and no doubt to the Namer's Tunnel and the secret passage back up to the surface.'
He stopped in the tunnel, pausing in movement and thought until I nearly lost balance trying to keep from running into him. He looked at me wryly and frowned.
'At least I suppose so,' he concluded.
'At a thousand feet beneath the surface,' I snapped, 'one does not rest well with supposings, Brother.'
To that he was silent, dodging ahead of me like something frayed and insubstantial.
Now, Brithelm was never all that reliable in a library.
To him, a wealth of books was like a mountain range tunneled through by an army of mad dwarves-much like the terrain we found ourselves in at the time. For just when he would get going in his research, would follow a fact or a thought or a phrase from one book to the next, something new and more interesting in that next book would catch him off guard and lure him away as though he had followed an interesting side tunnel, until he would lose himself in the maze of his own interests, having forgotten entirely what had brought him to the library in the first place.
As a result, my brother believed that the Cataclysm was the result of the 'double cellars' popular in Istar almost three centuries ago, and that although legend blamed the Kingpriest of that city for the disaster, true blame resided in the architect who, in a reckless attempt to create space in cramped properties near the center of town, chose to build one basement under another and undermine the foundations of block after block of ancient buildings.
Brithelm also believed there were walking trees in Estwilde and that the men of Ergoth had eyes in the back of their heads, through which they could see the past. He believed in a third black moon.
Nor was my brother's research any better on things closer to home: As a boy, growing up in a house where religious observance was rare, he decided that he would celebrate major religious holidays, but he never could figure out or understand the idea of movable feasts. Yes, the feasts moved, but not according to anyone else's calendar. Sometimes we would celebrate Yule in summer, sometimes in spring.
It turned out that Brithelm began to confuse regular holidays with those movable feasts, until he would wake each of us on odd days with the announcement that 'Today is your birthday.' And though each of us recognized the mistake full well, none of us ever corrected him, eager as we were for the presents. Brithelm, after all, was the only generous Pathwarden.
Though I am not quite twenty, by his tally and because of my greed, at last count I have celebrated fifty- seven birthdays.
All of this is a long way of saying that I was afraid that the research had misfired again. Here we were, a quarter of a mile below light and fresh air, trusting in a common sense that had not displayed itself as all that prominent a Pathwarden quality, and a sense of direction that might well lead us back into the jaws of vespertiles or worse.
My legs were tired, and the air was fetid. I was feeling my fifty-seven years.
After a while, our wandering became an issue. There in the bare corridors, I completely abandoned my hope in my brother's judgment.
'Suppose with me for a second, Brithelm,' I suggested as we came puffing to a junction of tunnel and tunnel. 'Just suppose. What if… those rooms are no longer a Namer hideaway of sorts? What if they're used for something entirely different? Or used not at all-those rooms you read about?'
'It will not matter,' Brithelm stated flatly, coming to a sudden stop in the corridor so that I nearly ran into him. 'It will not matter, because this is not the way to the rooms I read about.'
He turned to me sheepishly.
I imagined us there in the corridor-lost entirely and completely and no doubt forever, white bones moldering into the history of the caverns and tunnels as our small intrusion into the lives of the Que-Tana faded to a footnote in one of the massive histories we had seen in the Porch of Memory.
I hadn't the heart to rail at Brithelm, who could not be blamed that his readings had gone awry. Our mission, I am afraid, was further imperiled by the fact that we had no weapons. In our ignited exit from the Porch of Memory, we had left anything fit for menace lying among papers and crumpled Que-Tana.
'There is, however, another way to find the path to Firebrand,' Brithelm said, squinting into the corridor ahead of us.
I looked at him expectantly.
'Let us stand here until we can figure out what it is,' he suggested. He sat calmly on the floor of the corridor, drew forth his spectacles, and put them on.
'Brithelm, I really think that-'
'Hush, Brother. Hush. Sit here and join me.'
I seated myself at his side. I fidgeted as I thought of the Namer somewhere, fixing the stones into his crown, preparing to receive the power of life and death while I joined my brother in wool-gathering.
'Have you a scarf, Galen?' Brithelm whispered.
'I beg your pardon?'
'A scarf,' Brithelm repeated, graciously but firmly. 'Or a bandanna. Or even a sleeve that you do not need.'
'No, I'm afraid I- Stop it!'
I clutched him by the shoulders and spun him around to face me.
'Listen to me, Brithelm! We are not in the best of straits here. There are a thousand Que-Tana who would gladly skin us alive, and their leader is somewhere on these premises thinking he's about to translate himself into a deity and is ready to destroy the lot of us in the whole harebrained venture, and we are the only ones who can stop him, and we are seated in the middle of an empty corridor discussing fabric and accessories like a damned pair of ladies-in-waiting!'
'I want you to blindfold me, Brother,' Brithelm replied serenely. 'If scholarship alone does not work, I shall have to recreate the circumstances under which I visited the Namer's quarters. It is the best of our hopes.'
In resignation, in fatigue, perhaps in a bit of despair, I lay back on the floor of the corridor, resting my head against cool stone for a moment.
Then voices arose-a strange echoing in the rock, rising
from the stone itself, as voices in a closed room will reach you when you set the mouth of a ceramic cup to the door and listen.
Voices I could not untangle from each other.
'…
Then, above all of these, a last voice rising shrill and mournful and filled with the music of a cold, impassable desert.
'…
