“I can’t give you answers, Father—I don’t know them. I saw this place when I was asleep and I knew I had to come here. I know what I must do. You will have to trust me.”
Chert stared at the small face, so familiar and yet so unknowably foreign.
“Very well, I’ll trust you. But if I say we leave, we leave. Understood?”
The boy did not reply, but turned and headed down the swaying gangway.
The barge at the end of it was low but wide, its deck a clutter of cabins and outbuildings—it looked more like the floor of a storage room than any seaworthy vessel. Lights flickered in several of the tiny windows, but Flint headed unerringly toward a patch of absolute darkness on the side of the barge; by the time Chert caught up with him the boy had already rapped twice on the cabin door there.
The door opened a crack. “What do you want?” a quiet voice asked.
“To speak with your headman.”
“And who is it wants to speak with him?”
“A messenger from Kioy-a-pous.”
Chert stared at the boy. Kioy-a-pous? Who or what was that? And what in the name of the Earth Elders was going on?
The door swung open, spilling amber light. A Skimmer girl stood there, waiting for them to enter. Chert had never seen one of her tribe close up. Her solemn face looked just like some of the ancient carvings he’d seen beneath Funderling Town, which made no sense—why would the old Funderlings have carved pictures of Skimmers?
The girl led them down a long, dark passage. Chert could feel the ship continuously moving beneath his feet, a most distressing sensation for someone who had lived all his life on stone. She took them into a low, wide cabin where half a dozen Skimmer men sat around a table whose height reflected the close-hanging roof: all the Skimmers sat on the floor, their knees bent and high. As they turned toward the newcomers the men’s large, wide-set eyes and hairless faces made them look like a gathering of frogs in a pond.
“My father, Turley Longfingers,” the girl told Flint and Chert, gesturing toward one of the men, “He is the headman of our people here.”
“What is this, Daughter?” Turley seemed upset by this sudden intrusion—almost shamefaced, as though he and the others had been caught planning something wicked.
“He says he comes as a messenger from Kioy-a-pous,” she said. “Don’t ask me more, for I can’t tell you. I’ll bring some drink.” She shrugged, then made a sullen little curtsy to the men and left the cabin.
“Why declare yourself with such a name, young one?” Turley said. “You have the stink of the northern king on you—old Ynnir Graywind. We do not serve him or his dying master. Too many broken promises lie between our peoples. We are the children of Egye-Var, Lord of the Seas, so what do we care for Kioy-a-pous? What do we care for the one called Crooked?”
Flint reacted very strangely to the Skimmer’s words: for the first time since he and Opal had found the child in a sack beside the Shadowline he saw a look of fury cross the boy’s face. It was a moment’s expression only, a flash like the white smear of lightning across a dark sky, but in that instant Chert found himself truly afraid of the child he had brought into his home.
“Those are old ideas, headman,” Flint told the Skimmer, his anger gone again, or at least invisible. “Taking the side of one of the Great Ones against another—that is a strategy from when the world was young and mortals had no part but that which the Great Ones allowed them. Things have changed. Egye-Var and the rest were banished for a reason, and you and the other inheritors would not like it if they came back to reclaim what was theirs.”
“What do you mean?” the Skimmers’ headman asked. “What have you come to tell us?”
“It is not what I have come to tell you that is important, it is what I need to ask,” the boy said with invincible calm. “Take me to the keepers of the Scale.”
The chief of the Skimmers was so startled he actually leaned back as though this odd child had struck him, his mouth working uselessly for a moment. “What . . . what do you speak of?” he demanded at last, but it sounded like weak bluster.
“I speak of the two sisters, as you already know,” Flint said. “Many things may depend on this. Take me to them, headman, and do not waste more time.”
Turley Longfingers looked helplessly at the other Skimmer men but they seemed even more taken aback than he was, their eyes bulging with anxious surprise.
“We . . . we cannot do it,” their chief said at last. Resistance was gone. His denial was an admission, not a refusal. “No shoal-mooted man may visit the sisters . . .”
“They need to go and my Rafe isn’t here,” said the headman’s daughter. “If you cannot take them, Father, I will.”
If Chert thought Turley Longfingers would rage at the girl, hit her or drive her from the room, he was wrong. Instead he sounded almost apologetic. “But, Daughter, this is not a day to approach the sisters . . . not a shriven day, no salt has been sprinkled . . .”
“Nonsense, Father.” She shook her head as if he were a child who had made a mess. “Listen! This child speaks of things no outsider knows, let alone any landlegged child. He speaks of
the Scale!
As if we did not already know that a time of change is upon us.”
“But, Ena, we do not . . .”
“You may punish me later if you wish.” She stood. “But I am taking them to the drying shed.”
This finally opened the floodgates: the other Skimmer men all began to talk at once, arguing, hissing, vying for Turley’s attention, pointing their long fingers at the chieftain’s daughter as though she had walked into the room naked. The noise swelled until Turley flapped his long hands for silence, but it was not his voice that stilled them.
“Take us, then,” said Flint. “We have no time to waste. It is less than a turn of the moon until Midsummer.”
“Follow me, then.” Ignoring the looks of outrage and open befuddlement from the Skimmer men, the girl drew a shawl from a hook on the wall and draped it around her shoulders. “But walk carefully—some of the way is dangerous.”
To Chert’s surprise, the girl led them no farther than the floating dock attached to the stern of the ramschackle barge. The moon had vanished somewhere behind the castle’s outer walls and the night was so dark that but for the dull sparkle of stars when the wind blew the clouds aside, they might have been in one of the deepest tunnels of the Mysteries.
Ena pointed to a rowboat bobbing beside the dock. “Get in.”
Chert thought there could be nothing more frightening than getting into a boat, with only air above him and water beneath him. He quickly found out he was wrong.
“Now put this on,” Ena told them, handing Chert and Flint a length of cloth each. “Tie it over your eyes.”
“Blind ourselves??” Chert was almost choking. “Are you mad?”
“If you do not, I will not take you. The way to the drying shed is not for landleggers, even those who claim to serve Kioy-a-pous.”
“Please, Father,” Flint said. “All will be well.”
Oh, certainly,
Chert thought.
Why not? Perhaps when we fall in the boy will charm the sharks, too, like one of the holy oracles.
With great reluctance, he tied the stiff, salty rag over his eyes; a moment later he felt the boat beginning to move.
What truly happened to this child behind the Shadowline—and when he went to the Shining Man?
The Shining Man. Chert could not help thinking of how the boy had lain at the great figure’s feet. Like the rest of his people, Chert had been taught that the Shining Man was the image of their creator, the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone. During the Mysteries it had even been hinted to him and the others crossing into adulthood that the great crystalline shape was somehow alive—that the power of their god lived inside it. So why had the boy struck off on his own to find it? And what had he done with that strange mirror—the one that Chert had later risked execution to deliver to the terrifying Qar woman? And just as important, what in the name of the Earth Elders was the boy up to now? Flint had questioned ancient Brother Sulphur until the old man had flown into a rage, and now he had demanded—and been permitted!—access to some treasure of the secretive Skimmers. Sisters, scales—Chert had no idea what any of it might mean, but he knew for a certainty that he had no more control of events than a man caught at the top of a rockslide: all he could do was hang on and pray . . .
These thoughts and a hundred more flitted through his mind as the oars creaked and the waves splashed gently against the side of the boat. At some point they passed through a long tunnel, with echoes bouncing off the stone. When the echo dropped away again the water, which had been as mild as one would expect on a lagoon inside the castle walls, suddenly began to rock the boat so strongly that Chert began tugging at his blindfold in panic.
“Don’t!” said Ena. She sounded breathless, as though she was working hard. “Keep that cloth on you or I’ll turn us around.”
“What’s happening?”
“Never you mind, Funderling. Just sit back.”
Chert felt Flint reach over and squeeze his arm, so he reluctantly left the rag across his eyes. What was going on? Were they on the open sea? But how would they have got out through the harbor and past the harbor chain? What about the besieging Qar? It didn’t make sense.
At last, after what seemed an hour or more on the water, the last half tossing and pitching in a very queasy way, Chert felt the prow of the boat bump up against something solid. The girl jumped out and helped them both up onto a dock, and from there onto dry land.
“Keep the eye-cloths on,” she said. “I’ll tell you when to take ’em off.”
At last Chert heard a door open and he and Flint were led through, guided by Ena’s careful, rough-skinned hands. Immediately his lungs and nostrils filled with harsh, salty smoke.
“You can unbind your eyes now,” she said.
When he stopped coughing, Chert did. They were standing in what looked like some kind of upgrounder barn. A great fire roared in a stone pit in the room’s center, flames twice as tall as Chert painting everything a dull red-orange. On either side of the fire long poles stretched from one end of the high-ceilinged, rectangular room to the other, supported every few paces with thicker, rough-hewn wooden pillars. On the poles hung hundreds of splayed fish carcasses.
“By the Elders, it really
is
a drying shed,” Chert murmured, then found himself coughing again from the smoke. His eyes were already stinging painfully.
“Oh, who’s there, who’s there?”
The voice, though quiet, seemed to speak right in his ear. He jumped and whirled around but saw only Ena and silent Flint—for all he could tell, it might have been the split carcasses of the fish that spoke.
“Dear, dear, we seem to have frightened Papa Sprat.”
The invisible voice laughed, a cracked bray.
“Come here to us, darlings. Nothing to fear in the drying shed—unless you’re a fish. Isn’t that right, Meve?”
Chert hesitated, but Flint was already walking toward the fire. As he made his way around the firepit Chert saw two small shapes sitting on a bench near the flames. One of them, an old Skimmer woman, rose as Flint approached. She was tiny, barely taller than Chert himself, and although all of the fisher-people had a little of the frog in their looks, this ancient creature was like one of the entombed toads or mudskippers the Funderlings sometimes discovered in the foundations of buildings they were excavating—a withered, seemingly lifeless creatures that nevertheless would recover if dipped in water, though it had been sleeping in the clay for centuries.
“Good evening,” said the ancient Skimmer woman. “Gulda I am, and here is my sweet sister Meve.” Gulda gestured to the other figure, even smaller than she, huddled in a coarse robe with the hood pulled close, as if even beside the fire Meve felt uncomfortably cold. “She talks not as much as she once did, but what she says is wise—is that not right, my love?”
“Wise,” croaked the other woman without looking up.
“And greetings to you, Turley’s daughter,” Gulda said to Ena. “You can wait with your sea-pony. The great ones have naught to say to you tonight, although doubtless they will another time.”
“Another time,” Meve echoed in a dry rasp that suggested she had been in the smoky shed for a very long time indeed.
Ena looked disappointed but did not argue. She made a curtsy to the sisters and walked to the door.
“You are the keepers of the Scale,” suggested Flint when the girl was gone.
“And why wouldn’t we be?” Gulda’s leathery, pop-eyed face seemed almost merry, although there was an edge of irritation in her voice. “Given the lore by our mother, we were, and she by hers, stretching back since keels first ran on ground here—who else would keep it and polish it and know its secrets?”
“And the god speaks to you through the Scale,” said Flint, as though the sentence made absolute sense. It certainly must have to Gulda, because she nodded sharply.
“When he sees fit.”
“When he sees,” added Meve, nodding gently, as if too violent a motion—even coughing, which Chert himself was doing again—might shake something loose. Howold were these creatures?
“The god has been speaking much to you of late,” said Flint.
For the first time, Gulda hesitated. “Yes . . . and no . . .”
“No,” said Meve. “Yes.”
“He speaks to us.” Gulda shook her head. “But sometimes it seems as though the dreams have changed him. He seemed not so angry before as now. As though something had come into his sleep and pained him.”
“Sleep and pain,” added Meve.
“Perhaps he remembers how he left the world,” said Flint, each word taking him further away from Chert, who was feeling as though there was nothing solid in the earth to stand on anymore. “Perhaps he finally remembers.”
“Aye, could be,” said Gulda. “But still he seems changed.”
“And what does the Lord of the Green Depths say to you?”