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.