Proper Blue Quartz

The boy has stopped to stare at the castle's jutting towers atop the heights of the Mount, still distant across the causeway. Wolfstooth Spire looms above them all, scratching the belly of the sky. They are on the hill road now, winding down through wide farmlands to the edge of the city that fills the shoreline.

"What is that place?" the boy asks, almost a whisper.

"Southmarch," Chert tells him. "Shadowmarch, some call it. 'The Beacon of the Marches', if you like poetry."

The boy shakes his head, but whether because he doesn't like poetry or for some other reason isn't clear. "Big," he says.

"Hurry up, you two," Opal calls back over her shoulder.

"She's right — we still have a long walk."

The boy still hesitates. Chert lays his hand on the boy's arm. The child seems strangely reluctant, as though the towers themselves are something menacing, but he allows himself to be urged forward. "There's nothing to be afraid of," Chert says. "Not as long as you're with us. But don't wander off."

The boy shakes his head again.

As they make their way into the city they find that Market Road is lined with people. For a strange moment, Chert wonders why so many people have come out of their houses and shops to stare curiously at two Funderlings and a ragged, white-haired boy, then realizes that the royal family's hunting party has passed through the middle of town just ahead of them. The crowd is beginning to disperse, the hawkers desperately reducing the prices of their chestnuts and fried breads, fighting over the few customers. He hears murmurs about the size of something the hunters have caught and paraded past, and other descriptions — scales? Teeth? — that make little sense unless they were hunting something other than deer. The people seem a little dispirited, even unhappy. He hopes the princess and her sullen brother are safe — he thought she had kind eyes. But if something had happened to them, surely folk would be talking about something other than their strange quarry.

As they trudge across the broad causeway, only a few cubits above the high tide, dodging wagons and heavily laden foot-peddlers, Chert looks out across the mouth of Brenn's Bay to the ocean. Despite the last of the bright afternoon sun there are clouds spread thick and dark along the horizon, and he suddenly remembers the shocking thing that the arrival of the riders and the mysterious boy had driven from his mind.

The Shadowline! Someone must be told. He would like to think that the king's family up in the castle already know, that they have taken all the facts into careful consideration and decided that it means nothing, that all is still well, but he cannot quite make himself believe it.

Someone must be told. The thought of going up to the castle himself is daunting, although he has been inside several times as part of Funderling work gangs, and has even led one there himself, working directly with Lord Nynor, the castellan — or with his secretary, in any case. But to go by himself, as though he were a man of importance . . .

But if they do not know, someone must tell them. And perhaps there will even be some reward in it — enough to buy Opal a new shawl, if nothing else. Or at least to pay for what this creature will eat when Opal gets him home.

He regards the boy for a moment, horrified by the sudden realization that Opal may very well intend to keep him. A childless woman, he thinks, is as unpredictable as a loose seam in a bed of sandstone.

Hold now, one thing at a time. Chert watches the clouds hurrying across the ocean, their black expanse making the mighty towers suddenly seem fragile, delicate as pastry. Someone must tell the king's people about the Shadowline. If I go to the Guild, there will be days of argument, then Cinnabar or puffed-up Young Pyrite will appoint himself messenger and I will get no reward.

Nor will you get the punishment if you're wrong, he reminds himself.

For some reason he again sees before his mind's eye the young princess and her brother, Briony's frightened gaze when she thought she had hurt him, the prince's face as troubled and impersonal as the sky out beyond the Mount, and feels a sudden warmth that almost, if it was not so ridiculous, feels like loyalty.

They need to know, he decides, and suddenly the idea of what might be coming closer behind that line of moving darkness pushes anything so abstract as the good graces of the royal family from his mind. There is another way to pass the news, and he will use it. Everyone needs to know.

Although his horse is dead, left behind for three footmen to bury on the hillside where the wyvern died, Prince Kendrick has suffered little more than bruises and a few burns from the creature's venomous froth. Of all the company he is the only one who seems in good cheer as they make their way back toward the castle, the corpse of the wyvern coiled on a wagon for the amazement of the populace. Market Road is crowded with people, hundreds and hundreds waiting to see the prince regent and his hunting party. Hawkers, tumblers, musicians and pickpockets have turned out too, hoping to earn a few small coins out of the spontaneous street fair, but the people seem glum and worried. Not much money is changing hands, and those nearest the road watch the nobles go by with hungry eyes, saying little, although a few call out cheers and blessings to the royal family, especially on behalf of the absent King Olin. Kendrick has been splashed in blood from head to foot; even after he has rubbed himself with rags and leaves, much of him is still stained a deep red. Despite the itch of his skin where the wyvern's spittle has burned him, he makes it a point to wave and smile to the citizens crowded in the shadows of the tall houses along the Market Road, showing them that the blood is not his own.

Briony feels as though she too were covered with some caustic, sticky substance. Her twin Barrick is so miserable about his own clumsy failure even to raise his spear properly that he has not spoken a word to her or anyone on the ride home. Earl Tyne and others are whispering among themselves, unhappy that the foreigner Shaso stole their sport by killing the wyvern with an arrow — Tyne is one of that school of nobles who believes that archery is a practice fit only for peasants and poachers, an activity whose primary result is to steal the glory from mounted knights in war. Only because the master of arms may have saved the lives of the young prince and princess is their unhappiness muttered instead of proclaimed aloud.

And more than a dozen of the dogs, including sweet Dado, a brachet who in her first months of life had slept in Briony's bed, are lying cold and still back on the hill beside Kendrick's horse, waiting to be buried.

I wish we'd never come. She looks up to the pall of clouds in the northern sky. It is as though some foreboding thing hangs over the whole day, a crow's wing, an owl's shadow. I wish they'd just gone out and killed the creature with arrows in the first place. Then Dado would be alive. Then Barrick wouldn't be trying so hard not to cry that his face has turned to stone.

"Why the grim look, little sister?" Kendrick demands. "It is a beautiful day and summer has not entirely left us yet." He laughs. "Look at the clothes I have ruined! My best riding jacket. Merolanna will skin me."

Briony manages a tiny smile. It's true — she can hear already what their aunt will have to say, and not just about the jacket. Merolanna has a tongue that everyone in the castle except perhaps Shaso fears, and Briony would give odds that the old Tuani only hides his terror better than the others. "I just . . . I don't know." She looks around to make sure that her black-clad twin is still a few dozen paces behind them. "I fear for Barrick," she says quietly. "He is so angry of late. Today has only made it worse."

Kendrick scratches his scalp, smearing himself anew with drying blood. "He needs toughening. People lose hands, legs, but they continue with their lives, thanking the gods they have not suffered worse. It does no good for him to be always brooding over his injuries. And he spends too much time with Shaso — the stiffest neck and coldest heart in all the Marchlands."

Briony shakes her head. Kendrick has never understood Barrick, although that does not keep him from loving his younger brother. And he does not understand Shaso very well either, although the old man is indeed stiff and stubborn. "It's more than that . . ."

She is interrupted by Gailon of Summerfield riding back down the road toward them. "Highness! A ship has come in from the south!"

Briony's chest tightens. "Father? Oh, Kendrick, do you think it's something about Father?"

The Duke of Summerfield looks at her tolerantly, as though she might be his own young and slightly sheltered sister. "It is a carrack — the Podensis out of Hierosol," he tells the prince regent, "and it is said there is an envoy on board sent from Ludis with news of King Olin."

Without realizing it, Briony has reached out and grabbed at Kendrick's red-smeared arm. Her horse bumps flanks with her brother's mount. "Pray all heaven, he is not hurt, is he?" she asks the duke, unable to keep the terror from her voice. The cold shadow she has felt all day seems to draw closer. "The king is well?"

Summerfield nods. "I am told the man says your father continues unharmed, and that he brings a letter from him, among other things."

"Thank the gods," Briony murmurs.

Kendrick frowns. "But why has Ludis sent this envoy? That bandit who calls himself Protector of Hierosol can't think we have raised the ransom yet, can he? A hundred thousand gold dolphins! It will take us at least the rest of the year — we have dragged every last copper out of the temples and churches, and the peasants are already groaning under the new taxes."

"Peasants always groan," says Gailon. "They are as lazy as old donkeys — they must be whipped to work."

"Perhaps the envoy from Hierosol saw all these nobles in their fine clothes, out hunting," Barrick suggests sourly. None of them have noticed him riding closer. "Perhaps he has decided we must have found the money if we can afford such expensive amusements."

The duke of Summerfield looks at Barrick with incomprehension. Kendrick rolls his eyes, but otherwise ignores his younger brother's jibe. "It must be something important that brings him. Nobody sails all the way from Hierosol to carry a letter from a prisoner, even a royal prisoner."

The duke shrugs. "The envoy asks for an audience tomorrow." He looks around and spots Shaso riding some distance back, but lowers his voice anyway. "He is as black as a crow."

"What has Shaso's skin to do with anything . . . ?" Kendrick demands, irritated.

"No, the envoy, Highness. The envoy from Hierosol."

Kendrick frowns. "That is a strange thing."

"The whole thing is strange," says Gailon of Summerfield. "Or so I hear."

If the nameless boy seemed disturbed by his first glimpse of the castle known as Shadowmarch, he appears positively terrified by the Basilisk Gate. Chert, who has been in and out of it so many times he has lost count, allows himself to see it now with a stranger's eyes. The white stone facing four times a man's height — and many more times Chert's own small stature — is carved in the likeness of a glowering reptilian creature whose twining coils surmount the top of the gate and loop down on either side. The monster's head juts out above the vast oak and iron doors, its staring eye and toothy mouth dressed with thin slabs of gemstone and ivory, its scales edged with gold. In the Funderling guilds, if not among the big folk, it is common knowledge that the gate has been here longer than the human inhabitants.

"The monster is not alive," he tells the child gently. "Not even real. It is only a carving."

The boy looks at him, and Chert thinks that what is in his eyes seems deeper and stranger than mere terror.

"I . . . I do not like to see it," the child says.

"Then close your eyes while we walk through, otherwise we will not be able to reach our house. That is where the food is."

The boy squints up at the lowering worm for a moment through his pale lashes, then closes his eyes tight.

"Come on, you two!" Opal calls. "It will be dark soon."

Chert leads the boy under the gate. Guards in high-crested helmets and black tabards watch curiously, unused to the sight of a human child being led by Funderlings. But if these tall men wearing the Eddons' silver wolf-emblem are concerned by this oddity, they are not concerned enough to lift their halberds and move out of the last warm rays of the sun.

The princess and her party have already reached their destination. As the Funderlings and their new ward reach Market Square, Chert can see all the way to the bottom of the walls around the central hill, the lights there numerous as fireflies on a midsummer evening. The inner keep's gate is open and dozens of servants with torches have come out to meet the returning hunters, to take the horses and equipment and guide the nobles to warm meals and warm beds.

"Who rules here?" asks the boy. It seems a strange sort of question, and now it is Chert who hesitates.

"In this country? Do you mean in name? Or in truth?"

The boy frowns — the meaning is chopped too fine for him. "Who rules in that house?"

It still seems a strange thing for a child to ask, but Chert has experienced far stranger things today. "King Olin, but he is not here. He is a prisoner in the south." It has been almost half a year now since Olin left on his journey to urge the small kingdoms and principalities across the heartland of Eion to make a federation. He had hoped to unite them against the growing menace of the Autarch, the god-king now reaching out from his empire on the southern continent to snap up territories along the lower coast of Eion like a spider snaring flies, but instead Olin has been delivered by the treachery of the king of Jellon into the hands of the Protector of Hierosol, an adventurer who has made himself master of that ancient city. But Chert scarcely understands all the details himself — it is too much to try to explain to a small, hungry child. "His oldest son Kendrick is the prince regent. That means he is the ruler while his father is gone. The king has two younger children, too — a son and daughter."

A gleam comes to the boy's eye, a light behind a curtain. "Merolanna?"

"Merolanna?" Chert stares as if the child has slapped him. "You have heard of the duchess? You must be from somewhere near here. Where are you from, child? Can you remember now?"

But the small white-haired boy only looks back at him silently.

"Yes, there is a Merolanna, but she is the king's aunt. Kendrick's younger brother and sister are named Barrick and Briony. And the king's wife is carrying another child as well."

The strange gleam in the boy's eyes fades.

"He knows of Duchess Merolanna," Chert tells Opal. "He must be from these parts."

She rolls her eyes. "He'll probably remember a lot more when he gets a meal and some sleep. Or were you planning to stand in the street all night talking of things you know nothing about?"

Chert snorts, but waves the boy forward.

More people are streaming out of the castle now than are going in, as the inhabitants of the city whose work brings them onto the Mount return home at the end of the day. Chert and Opal have a hard time forcing their way against a tide of much larger people. Opal leads them out of Market Square and into the quieter back streets behind the southern waterway and its docks, one of two large moorings inside the castle walls. The pilings are carved and painted, but the colors are dull in the dying light. Boats full of half-naked skimmers are unloading the day's catch on several of the smaller docks. The air is full of their moaning songs.

"Aren't they cold?" the boy asks. With the sun now behind the hills, chill winds are beginning to run across the waterway, sending white-tipped wavelets against the pilings.

"They're skimmers," Chert tells him. "They don't get cold."

"Why not?"

Chert shrugs. "The same reason a Funderling can pick something up off the ground faster than you can. We're small. They have thick skins. The gods just wanted it that way."

"They look strange."

"They are strange, I suppose. They keep to themselves. Some of them, it's said, never step farther onto dry land than the end of a loading dock. Webbed feet like a duck, too — well, a bit between the toes." He smiles. "But there are odder folk around here. Don't they have such things where you come from?"

The boy only looks at him, his expression distant and troubled.

They are quickly out of the back alleys of Skimmer's Lagoon and into the neighborhoods of the big folk who also work along the watercourse. The light is failing quickly now and although there are torches in the squares and even a few important people being led by lantern-bearers, most of the muddy streets are lit only by candlelight and firelight leaking from soon-to-be-shuttered windows. The big folk are happy to build their ramshackle buildings one on top of the other, ladders and scaffolding thick as hedgehog bristles, so that they almost choke off the narrow streets. The stench is dreadful.

Still, this whole place has good bones, Chert cannot help thinking, strong and healthy stone, living rock going right down into the Mount. It would be a pleasure to scrape away all this ugly wood. We Funderlings would have this place looking as it should in a trice.

Looking as it once did . . . He pushes away the odd thought — where would all these big folk go, for one thing?

Chert and Opal lead the boy down the narrow, sloping length of Stonecutter's Way and through the arched gate at the bottom, leading him out from beneath the evening sky and into the stony depths of Funderling Town.

This time Chert is not surprised when the boy stops to stare in awe. Even those big folk who do not particularly trust or like the small folk agree that the great ceiling over Funderling Town is a marvel. Stretching a hundred cubits above the small people's town square and continuing above all their mazy, lamplit streets, the ceiling is a primordial forest carved in every perfect detail out of the dark bedrock of the mount. At the outer edges of Funderling Town, closest to the surface, spaces have even been cut between the branches so that true sky shines through, or when night falls (as it is falling even now), the first evening stars can be seen sparkling through the gaps in the stone. Each twig, each leaf has been carved with exquisite care, centuries of painstaking work in all, one of the chief marvels of the northern world. Birds feathered in mother-of-pearl and crystal seem as though they might burst into song at any moment. Vines of green malachite twine up the pillar-trunks, and on some low branches there are even gem-glazed fruits hanging from stems of improbably slender stone.

The boy whispers something that Chert cannot quite hear. "It is wonderful, yes," the little man says. "But you can look all you want tomorrow. Let us catch up with Opal, otherwise she will teach you how a tongue can be sharper than any chisel."

They follow his wife down the narrow streets, each house carved back into the stone, the plain facades giving little indication of the splendid interiors that lie behind, the careful, loving labor of generations. At each turning or crossing oil lamps glow on the walls inside bubbles of stone thin as blisters. None of the lights are bright, but they are so numerous that all night long the ways of Funderling Town seem to tremble on the cusp of dawn.

Although Chert himself is a man of some influence, their house at the end of Wedge Road is modest, only four rooms all told, its walls but shallowly decorated. Chert has a moment of shame, thinking of the Blue Quartz family manor and its wonderful great room covered with deeply-incised scenes of Funderling history. Opal, for all her occasional spikiness of tongue, has never made him feel bad that the two of them should live in such a modest dwelling while her sisters-in-law are queening it in a fine house. Still, Chert could no more have stayed in the place, subservient to his brother Nodule — or "Magister Blue Quartz", as he now styles himself — than he could jump to the moon. And since his brother has three strong sons, there is no longer even a question of him inheriting it should his brother die first.

"I am happy here, you old fool," Opal says quietly. She has seen him staring at the walls. "At least I will be if you go and clear your tools off the table so we may eat like decent people."

"Come, boy," he tells the little stranger, making his voice loud and jovial to cover the fierce, sudden love he feels for his wife. "Opal is like a rockfall — if you disregard her first quiet rumblings, you will regret it later on."

He watches the boy wipe dust from the pitted table with a cloth, moving it around more than actually cleaning it. "Do you remember your name yet?" he asks.

The boy shakes his head.

"Well, we must call you something — Pebble?" He shouts to Opal, who is stirring a pot of soup over the fire, "Shall we call him Pebble?" It is a common name for fourth or fifth boys, when dynastic claims are not so important and parental interest is waning.

"Don't be foolish. He shall have a proper Blue Quartz family name," she says. "We will call him Flint. That will be one in the eye for your brother."

Chert cannot help smiling, although he is not entirely happy about the idea of naming the child as though they are adopting him as their heir. But the thought of how his self-important brother will feel on learning that Chert and Opal have brought in a human child and given it miserly old Uncle Flint's name is indeed more than a little pleasing.

"Flint, then," he says, ruffling the boy's fair hair. "For as long as you stay with us, anyway."

Waves lap quietly at the pilings. A few seabirds bicker sleepily. A plaintive, twisting melody floats up from one of the sleeping-barges, a chorus of high voices singing an old song of moonlight on open sea, but otherwise Skimmers' Lagoon is quiet.

Far away, the sentries on the wall call out the midnight watch and their voices echo thinly across the water.

Even as the sound fades, a light gleams at the end of one of the docks. It burns for a moment, then goes dark, then burns again. It is a shuttered lantern, and since its beam is pointed out across the dark width of the lagoon, no one within the castle or on the walls seems to mark it.

But the light does not go entirely unobserved. A small, black-painted skiff slides silently and almost invisibly across the misty lagoon and stops at the end of the dock. The lantern-bearer, outline obscured by a heavy cloak, crouches and whispers in a language seldom spoken in Southmarch. The shadowy boatman answers just as quietly in the same language, then hands something up to the one who has been waiting for almost an hour on the cold pier — a small object that disappears immediately into the pockets of the dark cloak.

Without another word, the boatman turns his little craft and vanishes back into the fogs that blanket the dark lagoon.

The figure on the dock extinguishes the lantern and turns back toward the castle, moving carefully from shadow to shadow as though it carried something very precious or very dangerous.