“I do not remember much of what happened next. I must have found the hole at the back of the cave and wandered in, although I do not remember doing so. I dimly recall lights, or a dream of lights, and voices, but all that I can know for certain is that when my father and the servants came for me, bearing torches because it was hours after nightfall, they found me curled in a smaller, deeper cave whose entrance we had never found in all the times we had played there. My father subsequently had that inner cavern blocked and the ladder to the caves taken away. We never went there again—Niram could not have climbed down to them in any case.” Chaven ran his hands over his balding scalp. “I have had a horror of dark, narrow places ever since. It took all I had those three days past simply to come down into Funderling Town seeking you, although I knew I would die if I did not find help.”

It was hard to imagine feeling stone over your head as oppressive instead of sheltering—how much less secure to stand in some wide open space with no refuge, no place to hide from enemies or angry gods! But Chert did his best to understand. “Would you like to go back, then?”

“No.” Chaven stood, still trembling, but with a resolution on his face that looked a little like anger. “No, I cannot leave my house to the plundering of the Tollys without even knowing what they do there. I cannot. My things…valuable…” The physician dropped into a mumble Chert could not understand as he pushed himself off from the wall and began walking again, heading bravely into the long stretches of shadow between stonelights, shadows which Chert knew must seem darkness complete and hopeless to a man from aboveground.

As he paused to drop a fresh piece of coral stone into the saltwater of the lantern Chert could not help thinking of his last two journeys through these tunnels, passing this way with Flint when they took the strange piece of stone to Chaven, then the other direction with Gil on their march to the fairy-held city on the other side of the bay. How could his life, such an ordinary thing only a year before, full of orderly days and restful nights, have been turned inside out so quickly, like Opal readying shirts to dry on a hot rock?

“And the stone, Flint’s stone, was the thing that killed a prince…” Chert said half-aloud as he hurried to catch up to physician. Even after all the other things that had happened to him in the last days, he still found it hard to believe—found Chaven’s entire story nearly impossible to grasp. He, Chert Blue Quartz, had carried that stone in his own hand!

Chaven, walking grimly ahead, did not seem to have heard him.

“If I had put that what-was-it-called stone in my own mouth,” Chert said, louder this time, “would I have turned into a demon, too? Or did I have to say some magical words?”