“No, Golden One.”
“All else you need to know you will learn from Paramount Minister Vash.” Sulepis started to turn away, but the soldier still had not moved. The autarch’s eyes narrowed. “What is it? If you succeed you will be rewarded, of course. I am as good to my faithful servants as I am stern with those who are less so.”
“I do not doubt it, Golden One. I only wondered if such a... creature...had been introduced to the girl, Qinnitan, and if so why you would not use so certain a method to bring her back to Great Xis.”
“Whether such a thing has been done to her or not,” the autarch said, “is beside the point. It is a clumsy and dangerous method if you wish your subject to survive. I wish the girl returned alive and well—do you understand? I still have plans for her. Now go. You sail for Hierosol tonight. I want her in my hands by the time Midsummer’s Day arrives or you will be the most sorrowful of men. For a little while.” The autarch stared. “Yet another question? I am minded to wake the xol-beast now and find someone less annoying.”
“Please, I live to serve you, Golden One. I only wish to ask permission to wait until tomorrow to set out.”
“Why? I have seen your records, man. You have no family, no friends. Surely you have no farewells to make.”
“No, Golden One. It is only that I suspect I have broken my elbow fighting the bearded one.” He held up the arm he had smashed against the tile floor, using his other arm to support it. The sleeve was a lumpy bag of blood. “That will give me time to have it set and bandaged, first, so I can better serve you.”
The autarch threw back his head and laughed. “Ah, I like you, man. You are a cold-blooded fellow, indeed. Yes, go now and have it seen to. If you succeed in this task, who knows? Perhaps I will give you old Vash’s job.” Sulepis grinned, eyes as bright as if he were fevered. That must be the explanation, thought Pinimmon Vash: this man—or rather this god-on-earth—was in a perpetual fever, as though the sun’s fiery blood really did run in his veins. It made him mad and it made him as dangerous as a wounded viper. “What do you think, old man?” the autarch prodded. “Would you like to train him as your replacement?”
Vash bowed, keeping his terrified, murderous thoughts off his face. “I will do whatever you wish, Golden One, of course. Whatever you wish.”
9. In Lonely Deeps
Tso and Zha had many sons, of whom the greatest was Zhafaris, the Prince of Evening. On his great black falcon he would ride through the sky and when he saw beasts or demons that might threaten the gods’ tents he slew them with his ax of volcano stone, which was called Thunderclap—the mightiest weapon, O My Children, that was ever seen.
“I know you think it is...because I am stout,” said Chaven as he sagged against the corridor wall and fanned himself with his bandaged hand. “But it is not. That is to say, I am, but...”
“Nonsense,” Chert told him. “You are not so fat, especially after the past tennight spent starving and hiding. If you need to rest, you need to rest. There is no shame in it.”
“But that isn’t it! I am...I am afraid of these tunnels.” Even by the glow of the stonelights, which made everyone seem pale as mushroom flesh, his pallor was noticeable.
Chert wondered if it wasn’t the dark itself that was unnerving the physician: even to Funderling eyes, the light was very dim here on the outer edge of the town, where Lower Ore Street began to touch the unnamed passages still being built or begun and then abandoned when Guild plans changed. “Is it the darkness you fear, or...something else?” Chert remembered the mysterious man Gil, who had taken him to the city to meet the Qar folk. Gil too had been wary, not of the tunnels themselves it had seemed, but of something that lurked in the depths below them. “Do I trespass by asking?”
“Trespass?” Chaven shook his head. “After saving my life and...taking me into your home, kind friend, you ask that? No, let me...catch my wind again...and I will tell you.” After a few moments of labored breath he began. “You know I come from Ulos in the south. Did you know my family, the Makari, were rich?”
“I know only what you’ve told me.” Chert tried to look patient, but he could not help thinking of Opal waiting at home, saddled with the painful burden of a child who had become a stranger. Already much of this morning had slipped away like sand running from a seam but Chert still did not know the purpose of their errand, let alone actually getting to it.
“They were—and may still be, for all I know. I broke with them years ago when they began to take gold from Parnad, the old autarch of Xis.”
Chert knew little about any of the autarchs, living or dead, but he tried to look as though he routinely discussed such things with other worldly folk. “Ah,” he said. “Yes, of course.”
“I grew up in Falopetris, in a house overlooking the Hesperian Ocean, atop a great stone cliff riddled with tunnels just like these.”
Chert, who knew that the honeycombed fastness of Midlan’s Mount was not merely the chief dwelling, but the actual birthplace of his race, that the Salt Pool had seen the very creation of the Funderling people, felt a moment of irritation to have it compared to the paltry tunnels of Falopetris, but checked himself—the physician had not meant it that way. Chert was anxious to be moving on and he realized it was making him unkind. “I have heard of those cliffs,” he said. “Very good limestone, some excellent tufa for bricks. In fact, good stone all around there...”
Now it was Chaven who looked a little impatient. “I’m certain. In any case, when I was small my brothers and I played in the caves—not deeply, because even my brothers knew that was too dangerous, but in the outer caverns on the cliff below our house that looked out over the sea. Pretended we were Vuttish sea-ravers and such, or that we manned a fortress against Xixian invaders.” He scowled, gave a short unhappy bark of a laugh. “A good joke, that, I see now.
“It was on such a day that my older brothers grew angry with me for something I cannot even remember now and left me in the cave. We came down to it by a steep trail, you see, and at the end there was a rope ladder we had stolen from the keeper’s shed that we had to clamber down to reach the entrance. My brothers and my sister Zamira went back up ahead of me, but took the ladder with them.
“At first I thought they would return any moment—I had scarcely five or six years, and could not imagine that anything else could happen. And in fact they probably would have come back once they had frightened me a little, but the younger of my brothers, Niram, fell from the trail higher up onto some rocks and broke his leg so badly that the bone jutted from the skin. He never walked again without a limp, even after it healed. In any case, they managed to lift him back to the trail and carry him home, but in their terror, and the subsequent hurry to bring a surgeon from the town, no one thought about me.
“I will not bore you with my every dreadful moment,” Chaven said, as if fearing the other man’s impatience, although that had faded now as Chert considered the horror of a child in such a situation, thought of Flint just days ago, alone in the depths, going through things he and Opal could never know. Chert shuddered.
“Enough to say that I heard screaming and shouting from the hillside overhead,” Chaven continued, “and thought they were trying to frighten me—and that it was succeeding. Then there was silence for so long that I at last stopped believing it was a trick. I became certain they had forgotten me in truth, or that they had fallen to their deaths, or been attacked by catamounts or bears. I cried and cried, as any child would, but at last the barrel was empty—I had no tears left.