Shadowheart (31 page)

When it was clear that Hendon Tolly would not speak further, Tinwright crawled into a corner and made himself as comfortable as he could in a pile of blankets on the stone floor. He pulled his cloak tight around him, but although the floor was chilly, that was not what set him shivering until sleep at last led him away.

Utta had never felt such confusion before. In all the strange happenings of the last months she had always had a clear-cut sense of what she needed to do next, but now she felt as if she were wandering lost in a fog. What had become of the old, familiar world she had known? The fairies had held her and Merolanna prisoner and threatened to kill them—but now those same fairies had become allies and were hiding beneath Southmarch. The Autarch Sulepis of Xis, a nightmare that had been little more than a name a year ago, was now camped on the near shore trying to blow down the castle walls. And the father of Merolanna’s child, the one she was so certain the fairies had stolen . . . was now revealed to be Avin Brone. How could any of that be?

Despite the late hour, the roads and greens of the inner keep were crowded. Thousands of people had flooded in from mainland Southmarch when it was abandoned, and during the attacks on the castle, first by the Qar and now by the Xixians, those refugees had crowded ever closer to the inmost parts of the castle, so that the royal residence was now scarcely more than an island jutting above a sea of desperate, homeless people. The center of the castle had become a sort of village fair, except that the faces in the crowd were nearly all angry or bleak or both. Many of them stared at Utta with dislike as she passed, and for the first time in her life she felt her Zorian robes marked her out not as someone who might help, but as someone who had done harm.

They think the gods have failed them
, she realized.
Zoria, the protector of the poor and downtrodden, has not answered their prayers.

As she passed through a narrow space in the crowd someone bumped her hard enough to make her stumble. A few women nearby murmured disapprovingly at the discourtesy, but no one actually said anything out loud against the man who had done it—he was already gone, anyway—and Utta began to feel as though she walked, not among Zoria’s children, as she usually did, but among beasts who might turn on her when she had gone far enough into their midst. Feeling suddenly old and frightened, she made her way out of the thickest part of the crowd toward the edge of the inner keep, but it was no less dangerous there. The camps along the wall seemed to be mostly full of men—she thought that strange, considering the need for every able-bodied man to fight—who turned from their campfires to watch her go past as though she were an object being offered for purchase, their eyes reflecting emotionlessly in the firelight.

Utta hurried toward the relative sanctuary of the guard tower that stood across from the front of the Throne hall. The Throne hall now was used mainly to house troops, and had already lost some of its roof to the autarch’s bombardment, but it was lit by lanterns and looking at it made her feel a little less as though the entire world had been replaced by a different one when her back was turned. The Xixian cannons had gone silent so she asked one of the pikemen if she could climb the guardhouse stairs up onto the wall of the inner keep. She was craving air from the sea, air that did not smolder with the smoke of hundreds of campfires.

The soldier squinted at her a little suspiciously, but then nodded and said, “But you take care up there, Sister. There are children running around like wild things. Don’t even have parents no more, some of them. They’ll steal your purse and push you right off if they catch you too far from the tower.”

Utta winced to think such things were happening here, in the middle of Southmarch keep. “I’m not going far. I just want to smell the ocean.”

She kept her word, taking only a few steps out along the walkway at the top of the wall and keeping the guardroom fire in sight when she stopped to lean against the cold stones and breathe the salty air. A seagull screeched somewhere nearby. The outer keep also sparkled with fires, but only those of the soldiers: beyond the New Walls as they were called, most of Midlan’s Mount was dark, although Utta could hear countless voices raised in argument and even the occasional song and knew that almost every inch of both the inner and outer keep were crowded with refugees from the mainland.

So many people! So little hope. Utta crossed her hands on her breast and prayed.

She was peering down, trying to make sense of where the gate to Funderling Town might be in the darkness, when she realized someone was standing next to her—someone who had come up to her in complete silence. Sister Utta was so startled she gasped and almost fell down, but the stranger did not move.

“You can feel it, too, can’t you?” asked the newcomer—a young woman with wild eyes. “You can feel that it’s happening.”

“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Utta said, “I don’t know what you mean.” Perhaps this was part of a trick—distract her, then others would come up and try to rob her. Had she not been so frightened she might have laughed. Utta was a Zorian sister—what did she have that could be stolen? A wooden brooch in the shape of an almond? Some prayer beads? Her life? None of them was worth even the price of a meal.

“It’s coming,” the girl said. “The great day is coming—I can feel it. But I cannot reach him!”

She’s mad, poor thing, but surely she cannot be worshiping the autarch?
There were a few benighted souls, Utta had found, who were already so terrified by the events of the past year that they saw the autarch as some kind of heavenly scourge who would bring the sinful world to an end.

“I’m not mad,” the girl said, startling Utta so that she drew back again in alarm. “I know. I know what is going on underneath the castle. I can hear it, smell it, touch it. He is returning. The god is coming back. And the one I love is there, too.” She turned and looked at Utta, her thin face youthful in the light of the torch burning at the guardhouse door. She looked as though she had scarcely eaten in days. “You! You know my lover. I can feel it. You have met him and spoken with him.”

Utta had already begun to back toward the door. “Bless you, child. May Zoria the Merciful protect you from harm ...”

“I called him Gil, but his name is Kayyin now.” She laughed a little. “It was Kayyin before, as well, but he changed it for a while. My silly, clever Gil.”

The close-cropped hairs on the back of Utta’s neck stood up under her coif. “What . . . what name did you say?”

“Kayyin of the Changing tribe. Lady Porcupine is his mother, but he is not so thorny as she is.” She giggled, and it transformed her from a figure of potential menace into something entirely different. “But I cannot go to him. I feel him in my thoughts, but he cannot feel me.” Her voice grew somber. “The men, the soldiers, they will not let me go down into Funderling Town. And Kayyin is beneath, waiting for the god to be reborn. But his thoughts are full of things I don’t understand—worries about eggs and fevers, fevers and eggs . . . !”

Utta shook her head in confusion. “You truly know that the Qar are there, beneath us? Or is it only something you’ve heard?”

The girl laughed again, incredulous. “Heard? Heard it with every part of my body, knew it with every thought! I can feel Kayyin’s heart beat through the stone.”

Utta shook her head. She had heard—and seen—stranger things of late. “What are you called, child?”

“Willow.” The girl made a clumsy little curtsy and laughed again, but this time the edge of desperation was gone; she sounded calmer, happier. “No one has called me that in a long time, though.”

“It’s a nice name,” Utta said. “Come back to Zoria’s shrine with me, Willow. You look as though you could use a good meal.”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

 

 

 

T
HE STRANGE THING, Chert realized, was that the more he worked on the map for Captain Vansen and the more accurate he tried to make it, the more unfamiliar the whole matter became.

Because no one but the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone himself ever saw the world like this
, he decided—
all of it at once, open and naked. Only the great god could see things this way. Only a god would
want
to see things this way.

Still, although at times he despaired of being able to make anything useful at all, let alone do so quickly enough to help his people survive the siege, Chert found himself fascinated by the task. His slates and parchments had spread across the table in their temple dormitory room until Opal had demanded a second table, so that “people have something to eat on—if they ever stop working to eat.” Contemplating the dozens of different maps the Metamorphic Brothers had let him borrow from the library at Magister Cinnabar’s orders, Chert felt, if not like a god, certainly like more of a true engineer than he had ever been in his daily profession.

It was one thing to look at someone else’s idea of what the world looked like, something else entirely to devise one’s own. After struggling to imagine how he could show everything in one drawing, he had decided on a combination of maps to display the terrain, cross-sections of each level with a single, larger drawing to show how those levels fit together. With these maps and a little imagination, Ferras Vansen should be able to make some kind of sense of the tunnel world belowground.

Opal frequently questioned her husband’s sanity for agreeing to take on such a task, but she spent more than a little time each evening watching him at work, asking questions and even arguing a point from time to time, though she professed not to care about any of it. Flint also came in to watch the work, studying the scene as though to learn it by heart, but if he thought in any way about what the maps represented, he kept such thoughts to himself.

 

Flint was not as talkative as the last time the two of them had left the temple. In fact, he was silent.

Well, that’s back to the way things always were, isn’t it?
Chert didn’t mind too much, anyway: he was trying to see things in his head in a way he hadn’t before, trying to notice how the tunnels and caverns actually fit together instead of relying on the usual Guild shorthand, which was a better way to think about
some
things but not so good for others. He had brought several pieces of lamp-coral that were bigger than what was ordinarily used for traveling—if he stumbled across a significant detail for his maps, he wanted to be able to see it well enough to record it properly.

The two of them made their way down to the bottom of the Cascade Stair, but when they got there, Chert turned and could not see Flint. He had a moment of panic—panic and something else less definable—and then the boy came around the corner. He had only fallen a few steps behind. Still, something about the moment troubled Chert.

It came to him as they walked on. The last time he and the boy had been here looking for Chaven, the boy hadn’t just fallen behind, he had got himself truly lost. When Chert found him, they had also discovered the crack in the wall and the telltale smell of the Sea in the Depths, the silvery lake around the Shining Man’s island where Chert had come so close to losing the boy forever. Now, though, the mundane side of it all came to him.

In his maps, he had traced what he believed must be the opening above the Sea in the Depths that stretched all the way to the surface—although he could only guess at its true shape and path. But he had forgotten to show anything of the spot where the boy had discovered a hole into the side of that shaft, and where Chert had been able to smell the Sea in the Depths’ unique scent—something that he still could not name. It might be the only place where the chimney leading up from the Mysteries could be entered. It belonged on his maps.

“Boy, do you remember the last time we were out, and you got away down a side tunnel and then you called me . . . ?”

To Chert’s mild astonishment, not only did Flint remember but immediately turned and began leading his adoptive father in what seemed like more or less the correct direction.

 

The journey seemed longer than Chert remembered, but Flint soon proved that he knew the route very well indeed, leading his stepfather through Five Arches and up the Great Delve—Stormstone’s long passage that surfaced all the way on the far side of the bay—and before another hour had passed, they reached the dead end of the corridor and the black gap between two slabs that had turned out to be not merely another shadow, but a hole into the great chimney that led up from the Sea in the Depths. As he leaned close, Chert could again smell the faint tang of the sea.