Free (Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch by Tad Williams Page A

were going in, mostly inhabitants of the mainland part of the city whose work brought them onto the Mount and who were now returning home at the end of the day. Chert and Opal had a hard time forcing their way against a tide of much larger people. Opal led them out of Market Square and through echoing covered walkways into the quieter, somewhat gloomy back streets behind the south waterway, called Skimmer’s Lagoon, and its docks, one of two large moorings inside the castle’s outwall. The Skimmers had carved the wooden dock pilings into weird shapes, animals and people bent and stretched until they were almost unrecognizable. The colorful paint was dulled by the dying light, but Chert thought the carved pilings still seemed as strange as ever, like trapped foreign gods staring out across the water, trying to get a glimpse of some lost homeland. The still shapes even seemed to mourn out loud: as boats full of half-naked Skimmer fishermen unloaded the day’s catch on several of the smaller docks, the air of the lagoon was full of their groaning (and to Chert’s ear, almost completely tuneless) songs.
    “Aren’t those people cold?” the boy asked. With the sun now behind the hills, chill winds were beginning to run across the waterway, sending white-tipped wavelets against the pillars.
    “They’re Skimmers,” Chert told him. “They don’t get cold.”
    “Why not?”
    Chert shrugged. “The same reason a Funderling can pick something up off the ground faster than you big folk can. We’re small. Skimmers 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. But there are even odder folk around here, some claim, although you can’t always tell it to look at them.” He smiled. “Don’t they have such things where you come from?”
    The boy only looked at him, his expression distant and troubled.
    They were quickly out of the back alleys of Skimmer’s Lagoon and into the equally close-leaning neighborhoods of the big folk who worked on or along the water. The light was failing quickly now and although there were torches at the crossings and even a few important people being led by lantern-bearers, most of the muddy streets were lit only by the candlelight and firelight that leaked from soon-to-be-shuttered windows. The big folk were happy to build their ramshackle buildings one on top of the other, ladders and scaffolding thick as hedgehog bristles, so that they almost choked off the narrow streets entirely. The stench was dreadful.
    Still, this whole place has good bones, Chert could not help thinking, strong and healthy stone, the living rock of 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 pushed away the odd thought—where would all these big folk go, for one thing?
    Chert and Opal led the boy down the narrow, sloping length of Stonecutter’s Way and through an arched gate at the base of the New Wall, leading him out from beneath the evening sky and into the stony depths of Funderling Town.
    This time Chert was not surprised when the boy stopped to stare in awe: even those big folk who did not particularly trust or like the small folk agreed that the great ceiling over Funderling Town was a marvel. Stretching a hundred cubits above the small people’s town square and continuing above all the lamplit streets, the ceiling was 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 had even been cut between the branches so that true sky shone through, or so that when night fell (as it was falling even now), the first evening stars could be seen