Chert looked at him gratefully, struggling for words. Vansen did not linger long enough to let it become an embarrassment. Jasper’s warders were waiting to meet him, men he would lead into danger and perhaps, for some of them, even to death. At this moment, the fact that they were half Ferras Vansen’s size meant absolutely nothing.
It was as strange as anything in Greatdeeps, Vansen thought—no, stranger. To think that sights like these had been beneath his feet all the years he had been in Southmarch! The Cascade Stair was huge, a vertical tunnel in the shape of a great downward spiral, as though the stone had hardened around a whirlpool that had subsequently drained away. The bobbing coral-lights of the men winding down it in front of him looked like little stars bouncing in a thundercloud.
We have our own Shadowline right here
, he thought.
But instead of two different lands side-by-side, it is two lands with one beneath the other, our Southmarch above and all this below.
“Watch your step, Cap’n,” growled Jasper. “Not so bad if you lose your footing here, but a little farther down you’d be falling for a long time. Better get used to looking where you’re walking.”
“Right.” Vansen paused for a moment, propping the weapon Cinnabar had found him against the wall, a “warding ax” as the magister had named it, a one-handed battle ax with a knobby hammer on the poll, the opposite side from the blade. He reached up to straighten the piece of coral bound to his forehead in its little lantern, then picked up the ax again. The sickly, greenish yellow light was not very revealing—Funderlings saw much better in these dark places than he did. He wished he had a good old-fashioned flaming torch, but when he had mentioned it the Funderling wardthane had looked at him with disgust.
“Oh, they’d smell and hear
that
coming from a long way away, wouldn’t they? Not to mention how fast it would eat up the air in some of the tight spots. No, Cap’n, you just leave the thinking to old Sledge.”
But the Funderlings have fires, don’t they? They have fires for cooking and for warmth—I’ve seen them! And what about their forges?
Of course, from what Chaven had told him, they also had very elaborate systems to draw the smoke up out of Funderling Town, with lazily spinning fans like water-wheels that pulled the foul air upward and then puffed it out into the air over the stony hill on which Southmarch had been built.
Chimneys up where we live,
was his bemused thought.
Roads that travel under the bay to the mainland, and others that tunnel down far beneath the water, if Chert Blue Quartz told me the truth. These Funderlings own more of this rock than we do!
Near the bottom of the Cascade Stair, with the stone walls looming so far above them now that their little lights could not reach the top, Vansen and the others trooped through into a large open space full of pale stone columns that were wider at the top and bottom than at their middles. After walking for some time, they paused at last in front of a wall pierced by several stone tunnel mouths.
“They call this place Five Arches,” Jasper whispered.
Brother Antimony prayed for a little while in a language Vansen didn’t understand, words full of harsh
kah
and
zzz
sounds, as the dozen warders dipped their heads reverently.
“Beyond this,” the acolyte said to Vansen when he had finished, “lies the Outer Halls. We go now from That Which was Built to That Which Grew.”
This made no sense to Ferras Vansen, but he was getting used to that. “Are we far from the place . . . what was it called . . . where your monks are?”
“The Boreholes? We are not far now,” Antimony told him.
“Close enough that we should keep our mouths shut,” said Jasper, and reached out a long hairy arm to smack one of his warders sharply on the back of the head, silencing him midmurmur. “
All
of us,” Jasper added sharply.
The young man who had been disciplined shot the wardthane a sulky look. For all Sledge Jasper’s ferocity, Vansen was worried that the rest of the warders might not be up to the task if there proved anything to it.
“Just around this bend,” Antimony whispered. “Let me go first and find someone who can talk to us. We should not disturb them more than we have to—they are on their Elder Walks, after all. That is what we call this time of retreat and prayer.”
“You’ll not go alone—you, Pig Iron,” Jasper said to the warder he had chastised earlier. “Go with him. Keep him out of trouble and bring him back safe.”
The one named Pig Iron looked pleased to have been given a suitably manly task: he puffed himself up inside his heavy cloak and lowered his short Funderling halberd, which was more like a spike-headed spear than like a proper halberd. Pig Iron had no helmet, no armor; but for the weapon, he might have been another monk.
How can we hope to fight anyone?
Vansen wondered.
Our army is knee-high and dressed in wool.
The pair trotted down the winding passage and were quickly gone from sight. Vansen, whose back was sore because he had been forced in so many places to walk almost doubled over, had what seemed scarcely more than a few breaths to rest before the two came clattering back.
“Dead!” Antimony’s eyes were so big they looked like they might never fully close again. “All of them, in their cells!”
“How?” demanded Jasper before Vansen had a chance to speak.
“Couldn’t tell,” said Pig Iron excitedly, “But one of them was Little Pewter. I know him—he’s no more than thirteen years old!”
“But what killed them?” Sledge Jasper demanded. “Was there blood?”
Ferras Vansen was a stranger and Jasper was their familiar leader: Vansen could understand why they might want to stick to that which was familiar, but confusion now might cost lives later. “Let me ask the questions, Wardthane,” he said, softly but firmly. “Brother Antimony, what did you see? Just what you saw, not what you think might have happened. And let’s keep it quiet.”
Antimony took a deep breath. “The cells are side by side, only a few paces apart, and open to the outside. They are all still in the cells, slumped over like they died sitting up. Four of them—no, five. There were five, and the other cells were empty.” He paused for a moment—Vansen could see him calming himself, collecting his thoughts. “The other cells, as far as we went, were empty. Perhaps a dozen. We turned back then.”
“Was there any sign of what killed them? Were they cold?”
Antimony looked surprised. “No blood, but they were all dead. Their eyes were open, some of them! We did not touch them. We did not know who might still be out there, watching us . . .”
Vansen scowled. “It sounds very strange. If they all died like that, in their cells, they were not fighting back. They must have been surprised. But no blood? Very strange.” To get a better grip on his warding ax he wiped his hands on his breeches. Chert’s wife Opal had spent two days combining articles of Funderling clothing to make him a proper pair. “Let’s go. Pig Iron, you lead for now, but when we get there I will go first.” He turned to the others, who looked more than a little worried— all except for Sledge Jasper, who was grinning in a bloodthirsty sort of way. “We will go silently from now on. If you need to speak,
truly
need to, then for the gods’ sake, speak softly. If these are the Twilight folk, they are quieter, cleverer, and crueler than you can guess, and they can hear a whisper from a hundred paces.” Even as he said it he felt a momentary pang of shame. Had not Gyir been his friend, of a sort? But he had lost too many of his men at Kolkan’s Field and elsewhere to think of the rest of the Qar as anything but deadly enemies. “Do you understand me? Good. Jasper, you come behind me. Show your fellows how a man walks into danger.”
Ferras Vansen wanted no part of losing untrained men (or at least men who were not soldiers) while trapped behind them, unable to help, so he was determined to lead the way as soon as he could. But there was a risk to that as well: if he got caught in a tight enough spot, they might not be able to help him even if they wanted to.
Like Murroy used to say,
he thought,
if you can’t be a soldier, hurry up and die so you can be a shield for someone else.
If Vansen got wedged in a tight spot it might give the others a chance to retreat and take word back to Funderling Town.
Still, it would have been nice to have a proper soldier’s shield. Especially in the tight places, especially with all this darkness around them. Their quiet footsteps were beginning to sound like drumbeats to him. Surely the Qar had heard them coming long ago.
Vansen and his little troop stepped out of the narrow defile at last, into the open space of what Antimony had called the Boreholes, an underground chamber like a mountain valley, its sides scored with vertical creases that sloped upward into the darkness beyond the coral light. The great folds of stone between the creases were perforated with holes, some natural, some clearly chiseled out or at least enlarged by intelligent hands. Vansen could not see much in the thin, greenish light, but what he could see reminded him of the rockier heights of Settland where the old Trigonate mystics had hidden themselves away from the lures of daily life. But surely even the
oniri
would have found living in these heavy, lightless depths too hard to bear. Vansen had never thought you could miss the sky like a starving man missed food, but it was true.
Oh, gods in heaven,
he thought,
please let me live long enough to see the light of day again!
Antimony pointed to the nearest fold of stone and its honeycomb of holes. For the first time, Vansen regretted the coral lamps. If they faced something that lived down here without light, or some of the many Twilight folk who thrived in darkness, their own lamps, however dim, would make them into nothing but slow-moving targets.
Vansen stepped out in the lead now, skirting dark places in the floor that, as far as he knew, might be holes that would drop him into the center of the earth. As he drew nearer he saw that the closest cell was occupied, its inhabitant fallen halfway out, arms splayed and twisted. In the sickly light of the coral, the victim looked to be little more than a youth. Vansen moved forward and touched the Funderling acolyte’s skin. It was warm, but he was otherwise limp as a rag, his eyes halfway open. He pressed his ear against the Funderling’s chest, but could hear nothing. Dead, then, but for how long?
As Antimony had said, motionless forms filled several of the sparsely furnished cells on the bottom row, one of the bodies so small it made even Vansen’s hardened heart ache in his breast. As Jasper and the other Funderlings crouched over Little Pewter, murmuring angrily, Vansen moved around the edge of the outcropping, wondering how many more cells might contain bodies, and how they had all died with no mark on them. Each dead man was in his own cell, which seemed to suggest that the catastrophe had struck them all at the same time, or else with extreme silence and swiftness.
The first cell in the next stony slope was empty, and Vansen was about to pass on to the next when his lamp showed him something he had not seen in the other cells—a hole at the back of the small space, leading deeper into the rock. He leaned closer. The floor of the cell, which in all the others he had seen so far had been kept scrupulously clean, was a mess of broken stone and dust. The hole in the back wall looked like something that had been done swiftly with a mallet and chisel. But why . . . ?
Vansen suddenly realized what he was seeing. He climbed out of the cell as quietly as he could manage and returned to where the others were waiting, most looking fearful now that their anger was spent.
“I think I’ve found the place they came through,” he whispered. “Come this way.”
Jasper was the first to follow him, with Antimony not too far behind, but the others hung back. Vansen felt a pang of renewed worry. These untrained Funderlings were not soldiers—they were nowhere near being reliable. He would have to remember that.
Sledge Jasper turned and glared at his warders, his face a grotesque mask in the light of their lamps. His men scrambled to their feet, but their reluctance still showed.
“It is a hole, dug through from the other side,” said Antimony as he stared at the opening in the back of the empty cell.
“And not with Funderling tools, either,” growled Jasper quietly. “Or Funderling knowledge. This is foul-looking work. See, the edges are ragged.”
“The tunnels Chert spoke of—the Stormstone tunnels,” Vansen said to Antimony. “Are we close to one?”
“I don’t know. Let me think.” Antimony stood up from examining the hole. “Yes, I think so, although we would never go through the Boreholes to reach it—there is a connecting passage much closer to the temple. But yes, it passes along behind this formation here.”
“Then this may well have been done by the Qar,” Vansen said. “Their invasion may already have begun. We must go through to the far side and see what is there,” he told the warders. “We cannot report back to Cinnabar and the others without learning the truth. Follow me. Stay close together. And remember—silence!”
The low tunnel beyond the cell was an uneven path over scree and larger loose stones, sometimes through spaces so small Vansen was forced onto his knees and into the very real worry that he might become stuck. Once his coral lamp faltered, dimmed, and died, leaving him for some moments in near-total darkness until one of the Funderlings behind him passed forward a spare piece. At last the passage widened and he was able to climb to his feet; a few hundred stumbling paces later he stepped through another crude hole in the stone and, on the other side, could stand upright again.
As the Funderlings moved up beside him into the much wider space, the light of their combined lamps reached out and illuminated a passage half a dozen paces wide, a monument to careful workmanship and masterful craft whose ceiling, floor, and walls (except for the hole through which they had just come and the pile of debris beside it) were all finished with smoothly sanded stone.