It was potentially a huge task, but Chert could understand how important it was. And, he realized, he could accomplish much if not all of it from the safety of the temple, so that Opal would not fret too much, and he would see her and the boy every day.
“How soon?” he asked. He would have to make sure Cinnabar knew about it, in case Brother Nickel made a stink about Chert using the temple library.
“I need it a tennight past.” Vansen rose and stretched, his joints popping so that even Chert could hear them. “I will take it as soon as it is ready—sooner. Show me what you have as you work. Now, if you will pardon me, friend Blue Quartz, I think I should find Jasper and Cinnabar and the others before they say something to turn the Qar back into enemies.”
“... So I will be in the library much of the day most days, and perhaps some nights until I finish this for Captain Vansen,” he explained to Opal. “But I can do a good deal of the work here at home, too, after I’ve finished with the Brothers’ books, since I doubt that Nickel will let me carry those home under my arms.”
“
Home
,” Opal sniffed. “I would not call a cramped, crowded room in the drafty, cold temple a home . . . but I suppose it is all we have for now. At least we don’t have to share it with your giant friend anymore.” The “giant friend” was Chaven, who on Opal’s return had moved to other quarters.
Chert was reassured. If Opal was complaining, she was . . . if not happy, then at least in reasonable spirits. “Yes, well, the mark of a noble character is how it stands up to suffering, my only love.”
“Then if I become any nobler, I’ll have to start screaming.” She gave him a sharp look. “Do you have time to talk to the boy before you go hurrying off to play your map games? He said you would understand, and if you do, you may explain it to me because I don’t.”
“Explain what?”
“Ask him. He’s gone down the hall to Chaven’s room.” She fluffed the straw mattress into a more pleasing consistency, but the look on her face made it clear straw would never compare with their swallow-fluff bed at home. He was surprised she had not carried the mattress down from Funderling Town on her back. “I have things of my own to do, in case you didn’t know.”
Chert turned back—he knew that tone and knew he should pay attention. “Of course, my love.” He waited, hoping she would go on without making him ask. Of course she didn’t. “And those things are . . . ?”
“Chert Blue Quartz, you are the flaw in the crystal of my happiness, I swear.” She was only half-serious, but the problem was that even half meant he was in trouble. “I told you several times, Vermilion Cinnabar asked me to help making sure all the men get fed. By the Elders, do you really think we can bring hundreds of men down here without providing for them? Do you think the monks have a magic garden that simply grows more food when you ask it?”
“No, of course not. ...”
“Of course not. So we are putting many of the women to work in the fungus gardens themselves, and replanting some of the old ones that have gone fallow. We are also bringing food down from the town, of course, which means someone has to organize the caravans.”
“Caravans?”
“What else would you call a dozen donkey carts a day, twice each way?” Funderling Town’s few donkeys, descended from upground ancestors almost twice as large, had never bred well in the depths, and the fact that the Guild had given so many to this cause showed how worried they were—and how much power Vermilion Cinnabar wielded. And now Opal was her second-in-command. Chert was proud of his wife. “Donkeys, and drovers, and we have another twenty men carrying the smaller goods, along with warders to protect them all. It makes quite a parade going down Ore Street.”
“The men down here are lucky to have you looking after them.”
“Yes.” She was slightly mollified. “Yes, I suppose they are.”
It didn’t matter where he found the boy; the circumstances always seemed to be slightly unexpected. This time Flint was indeed in Chaven’s room, as Opal had suggested, but the physician was not present. The flax-haired boy was on his knees atop Chaven’s stool, leaning on a table as he squinted at a leather-bound notebook.
“That looks costly,” Chert said. “Are you sure Chaven will not mind you handling it?”
Flint did not seem to hear the question. “The talk is all of mirrors,” he said as if to himself. “But no earthly glass could be large enough for a true god’s gateway ...”
“Flint?”
The boy turned and saw him, and for a moment seemed nothing more than a child caught doing something he shouldn’t, opening his blue eyes innocently wide. He closed the book quickly, but Chert saw that Flint kept his finger between the pages, marking his place until Chert went away again. “Hello, Papa Chert. Mama Opal sent you to speak to me, didn’t she?”
“I suppose. She said that I might ‘understand.’ Understand what, Flint?”
The boy pulled up his legs to sit cross-legged atop the stool like an oracle on a pillar. “I’m not like other children.”
Chert could not argue with that. “But you’re a good boy,” he said. “Your mother and I . . . we ...” He did not know quite what to say next.
“But the problem,” Flint went on, “is that I don’t know
why
. I don’t understand why I am so full of thoughts and ideas that seem . . . like they don’t belong. Why can’t I remember more?”
Chert spread his hands helplessly. “Where we found you . . . beside the Shadowline . . . well, we always knew there had to be some kind of magic on you. I knew it from the first. Opal knew it, too, but she would never admit she knew.” He let his hands drop. “I’m sorry, lad. I didn’t know it was hard on you, too.”
“Someday, I think I will have to go away,” Flint said. “To find out all the things I want to know. All the things about why I’m . . . this way.”
“When you’re grown, son, if that’s what you want to do. ...” But even as he said it he knew that Opal would see even this distant consent as a form of betrayal. “Just remember, your mother loves you very much . . . and I love you, too ...”
The boy shook his head, but not, it seemed, at what Chert had said. “I do not think I can wait so long,” he said. “I’m frightened that if I don’t understand, I’ll . . . I’ll
miss
something.”
“Miss what? I don’t get you, boy.”
“That’s just it!” His pale face had gone red. “I don’t understand it myself. But I can feel that things are bad, so bad! And I think I know the answers, or some of the answers, that I can . . . I don’t know, reach in and find them. But when I try, they all just fly away, like bats, like ...”
To Chert’s astonishment, Flint’s eyes were shiny with tears. He had never seen the boy like this. He hesitated, then stepped forward and wrapped his arms around him. Flint swayed on the flimsy stool but hung on tightly, his chest moving with sobs like small hiccoughs. At last the boy pulled himself away and slid down to the floor.
“Will you let me go when I need to?” he asked. “When I truly, truly need to?”
“Before you’re grown? We can’t, son. We can’t do that!”
The boy looked up at him, and precisely now, when his flushed face was as childlike as Chert had ever seen it, another look stole across, something strange and sly and somehow alien. “Then I will go anyway without your blessing, Papa Chert.”
“No!” He took hold of the boy’s shoulders. “You must promise me you’ll do nothing of the sort. It will break your mother’s heart—that’s the truth! You must promise me that, until we say you’re old enough, you will stay here with us. Promise!”
Flint tried to squirm out of his grasp, but years of working stone had given Chert strong hands and the boy could not get away. “No!”
“You must promise, boy. You must.” Chert was almost weeping himself. “That’s all I can say. Promise me you won’t go without our . . . without my permission.” Opal would never allow it, but if he had to—if he felt it was the only way not to lose the boy in other, deeper ways—he knew he would go against her. And that would be a terrible day. “Promise.”
The boy at last stopped struggling. “Only with your permission?”
“Until you reach a man’s age.”
“But how old am I?”
Chert was so upset that it surprised him how suddenly the laugh came. “Well struck, lad. So, let us say . . . five more years, shall we? By any standard, that should give you time to do some growing.”
“Five years?” He looked dully resigned. “In five years the world might be ended, Father.”
“Then what you and I do won’t be such a worry, will it?” He had won, but Chert did not feel particularly good about it. “Come,” he said. “You like the temple library, don’t you? I have business there. Come and spend the afternoon with me.”
Silent and thoughtful again, his tears all but dried, Flint followed Chert back through the busy temple halls, past priests and soldiers and more than a few women, all silent, all apparently in a hurry. Each and every one of them wore a face as grim as Black Noszh-la, Gatekeeper of the House of Death.
10
Fools Lose the Game
“For a year the poor child labored in the temple, but then the corrupt mantis of that place sold the Orphan and several other slaves to a ship’s captain in need of crew . . .”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
T
HE ROOM WAS WARM AND DARK and smelled of the heart-shaped roots that one of Tolly’s other minions had set in the fireplace to smolder the night before, a smell that made Matt Tinwright’s head ache even as he peered around the chamber through slitted eyes. He still had no idea whether the roots had been meant for some magic ritual or simply so the smoke could provide a kind of dreamy drunkenness, which it had definitely done. Hendon Tolly’s pursuits, though often disquieting, were still largely mysterious, despite nearly a tennight of Tinwright being kept at the man’s side like a dog on a leash.
He groaned and opened his eyes wider. The groan became a gasp of surprise as he saw that Tolly was sitting on the edge of the bed next to him, staring down like a vulture watching a living thing turn into carrion.
“Wh—wha—what is it, my lord?” Tinwright stammered. “Do you need something?”
They were alone in the chamber: the women had gone. Tinwright hoped they were all still well. He had seen a few frightening moments before he had finally collapsed into welcome oblivion.
“Brother Okros never decided precisely what he wanted,” the lord protector said, as if in continuation of an early conversation. Perhaps it was: Tinwright could remember little of what had happened. He struggled into an upright position.
“I beg your pardon, Lord Tolly?”
“What he wanted. I’m talking of that pinchsniff Okros. Some days he played the man of learning, concerned only to uncover the great secrets of existence.” Tolly smirked. The lord protector looked remarkably well-groomed for a man who lived the way he did: Tinwright could not help wondering if the nobleman had snuck off to bathe while Tinwright himself was still sleeping. “It was quite amusing, really. On those occasions, he would treat me as a fine cook might treat his grossly fat master—as an embarrassment, but a necessary one, because I was the sponsor of his art.” Tolly rose and gestured impatiently. “Get up, poet. This will be a momentous day or I miss my guess.”
“My lord . . . ?”
“But Okros lost the path, you see. He came to believe that what we sought were the answers to
his
questions.” Tolly looked at Matt Tinwright with the bright eyes of a hunting hawk.
The lord protector was stranger than usual, Tinwright thought—as though he were drunk, but in some hard, crystalline way. “But he was wrong, Lord . . . ?”
“What I want had nothing to do with him. He was a fool . . . and fools lose the game.” Tolly smiled a hard smile. The warning was very clear. “Now come, poet.”
Tinwright followed Hendon Tolly across the crowded residence to the Prince Kayne Library, which had become the lord protector’s throne room and council chamber during the days of the Qar siege. The old library had always been a quiet, neat room despite its large size, with books crowding all the shelves between the floors and the high ceilings, but now it looked as though it had been in the front lines of the siege. Books lay scattered everywhere, both modern bound volumes and parchment scrolls from Hierosol and even ancient Xis, as well as a dozen chairs and stools and even a few tables dragged in haphazardly from other parts of the residence. The disorder was in large part because Tolly and Brother Okros had emptied the Tower of Summer, King Olin’s refuge, and brought almost everything out of his locked room to this library—some of the books, Tinwright had noticed, even seemed to have been written by Olin himself, and he thought about how glorious it would be to be left alone long enough to read some of them. What a boon for a poet—to read the true thoughts of a mindful king! But Hendon Tolly was clearly not going to let him stray from his side long enough to do such a thing.
Tinwright had not spoken to Elan or his mother in days, and had been hard-pressed even to send them a pair of short, secret letters telling them what had happened. He only prayed that his mother would not show up at the palace demanding that her newly elevated son—she must think he was Tolly’s secretary!—find a place for her in the residence.
Nightmare.
And not just the idea of having her underfoot—what if she mentioned Elan?
Tinwright forced these thoughts from his head as a group of soldiers led by the lord constable, Berkan Hood, came to the library seeking an audience with Hendon Tolly. They were understandably distressed about the idea of the autarch’s ships landing unhindered in the harbor just opposite the castle.
“Two dozen warships, Lord Protector, and there are still more coming!” Berkan Hood was doing his best to keep his voice even but not entirely succeeding; he was clearly not the kind of man who usually practiced such restraint. “Yet we have not fired so much as a single bombard. Please, my lord, why do we not fight back? We struggled against the fairies for months, threw them back a dozen times. Now that those demons have retreated, why have we gone shy as maidens in front of the Xixies, who are only mortal?”