The minutely carved roof of the cavern that shielded Funderling Town was renowned throughout Eion. In better times people actually traveled up from distant countries like Perikal and the Devonisian islands just to see the fantastical forest of stone, the loving work of at least a dozen generations of Funderlings.

The ceiling of the House of the Stonecutters’ Guild was not so famous, and certainly nowhere near so large, but was in its own way just as stupefying a piece of art. In a natural concavity on the underside of Southmarch Castle’s foundation slab a combination of limestone, cloudy quartz, beams of ancient black ironwood and the Funderlings’ own matchless skills had been crafted into something the gods themselves might envy.

Chert had seen it many times, of course—his grandfather had been part of the team which had performed its last major repairs—but even so it never failed to impress him. Staring up at it from his lonely position at the ceremonial Outcrop, the ceiling seemed a window through quartz crystal and limestone clouds to some distant part of heaven, but those clouds were braced with great spars of ironwood far too thick and workmanlike to be merely ornamental. It was only when the viewer’s eyes adjusted to the darkness (which grew paradoxically greater as the empty space ascended) that he saw the robed and masked figure surrounded by smaller robed and veiled figures, all seated upside down at the apex, glaring down from the vault, and he realized that the view was not that of someone looking up, but looking down into the depths of the earth—a great tunnel leading downward into the J’ezh’kral Pit, domain of the Lord of the Hot, Wet Stone—Kernios, as the big folk called him.

But of course, the true cleverness of the room was beneath the viewer’s feet—something Chert had time to appreciate now as he waited for the noisy reaction to his last words to die down. The Magisters’ semicircle of benches and the four stone chairs they faced sat around the edge of a huge mirror of silvered mica, so that everything above was reflected below. Chert and the others seemed to be sitting around the rim of the great Pit itself, looking down into the very eyes of their god. To approach the Highwardens was to seem to walk on nothing above the living depths of Creation.

It was disconcerting at the best of times. Tonight, with the whole Guild joined together to judge Chert’s actions, it was downright frightening.

“You did what?” His own brother, Nodule, was predictably leading the charge against him. “You cannot imagine the shame I feel, that one of our family…”

“Please, Magister,” said Cinnabar. “No one here has even determined that anything wrong’s been done, let alone that Chert has brought shame to the Blue Quartz family.”

“To the entire Quartz clan!” cried Bloodstone, Magister of the Smoke Quartz branch. Fat and bulging-eyed, he was an ally of Nodule’s and quick to join Chert’s brother in most things—including, it seemed, in being horrified by what Chert had done. He was not alone: the Magisters of the Black, Milk, and Rose Quartz families had also been grumbling all through Chert’s appearance at the Outcrop.