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.

—from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One

“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.”