The voices poured like dark rain down the walls.

"You pass through these, unharmed, unchanging but now you see them

strung on our words on your own conceiving as you pass from night to awareness of night

to know that remorse is the calm of philosophers

that its price is forever

that it draws you through meteors

through winter's transfixion

through the blasted rose

through the shark's water

through the black compression of oceans

through rock through magma

to yourself to an abscess of nothing

that you will recognize as nothing

that you will know is coming again and again

under the same rules."

Whether he joined in or only listened, Firebrand often wept at this chanting. He shed soft tears on the tenebral necklace he wore, upon each little hooked claw, each little silvered tooth that stood for a vanished, long-dead year the Que-Tana had spent underground. For the Chant of Years was a map of sorrow, a chronicle of time forever wasted in a mission of darkness.

Oh, the Chant of the Men was sorrowful enough, Firebrand could tell you, with its heavy alternation of names and of teeth and the claws of cave bears. And the Chant of the Women was a testament to the terrible ruin of innocence, as the people knelt and prayed, touching leopard tooth, leopard claw, as their hands raced along the necklace and the litany raced along the roll of names.

All were names of those who had died underground, in search of the dark wisdom of the godseyes, of the black glain opals that held five thousand years of memory intact, like a fly preserved for eons in the heart of amber. And the names were mourned indeed, for many of them Firebrand recalled-the faces of the old and of the children, the soft movement of the young women who died beautiful and much too soon, all buried in the search for the stones. The children below him intoned the Chant of Years, the most sorrowful of all, wherein the People recorded the time they had irretrievably lost, while the others-the Que-Shu, the Que-Kiri, the self-important cousin Que-Nara-lived carefree in the light and the wind and the rain.

Quickly he collected himself and reached up to touch the tight collar about his neck, from which the teeth and claws hung.

How like the tenebral we are, he thought, casting his mind away from the chant as again the hot tears threatened. How like the small, yellowed squirrels that swoop through the subterranean abbey, their leathery wings aglow with the strange lumen, the secretion that burns when touched by the sunlight.

For Firebrand knew what happened to the tenebrals when, by accident, their path of flight took them out of the caverns into a sunlight they had mistaken for the light of torches or for the lumen that glowed in their strange hanging nests. Indeed, one of his men had carried one back to show him-its body shriveled into half its size, the wings also shriveled, ravaged by the phosphorous riding in the clear streams of lumen.

The animal was consumed by its own fluttering heart.

Such things happened quickly, the People maintained. Sometimes it was a matter of only a second.

How like the tenebral we are, Firebrand thought once more. Or at least how like them are my people. For they would burn and dry and wither away in the Bright Lands, in the Nations of Light. Why, even the moonlight blisters the very young.

He shook his head, and the beads and leather thongs braided in his dark locks rattled like the tail of an ancient crotalin snake-the creature who warns before he strikes, but strikes nonetheless. For a moment, the miners below him paused, wan faces lifted to the sound, for judgment and punishment rained down from that throne as suddenly and as unexpectedly as rockslides or cave-ins.

This time they received neither judgment nor punishment. Instead, they saw the dark-haired man, who was always smaller than they remembered him, seated atop the natural chair formed in the Age of Dreams by the continual rush of water over rock. Firebrand's dark eyes were closed now, his face flushed with some strong emotion. His hands each clutched a free stalactite vaguely, as though he lay entranced in the fanged mouth of an enormous beast.

His lips moved along with the chant, but his memory, swayed to the chant of his own years…

There was no Porch of Memory when he came here, flying from the anger of his own unforgiving people. The Que-Tana had built no great halls yet, choosing to tunnel like leaderless termites in their endless, winding search for the godseye. They had built no throne from the rock and the moist darkness. Then there were only small chambers aglow with candles, smelling of tallow and smoke.

He had turned his back on the surface and scurried like a rat into that stinking smoke as he followed the passage that only he knew, down into the darkness, guided by candle and one eye. So had he come out of the sun, alone down narrow dark corridors into the embracing silence, where he was lost for good in the heart of the mountain, prey to accident, or to starvation, or to the long fur claws of the vesper-tile, the huge flightless bats that scour the bottommost recesses of the caverns.

He drank of the stagnant pools, gobbled the small crawling things he stepped upon in the loud blackness, and nothing he ate and nothing he drank could taint or harm him.

For the dark god had a hand in his traveling. That much Firebrand knew from the start, from the moment he put on the Namer's Crown, admiring the dozen flawless black godseyes set in its intertwining silver knots. "Visions," the old Namer had said to him. "The crown will bring visions, then knowledge, then wisdom."

He had held the silver circlet in his two strong hands as the old man spoke. Over the years, he could still remember the last words of his old predecessor.

"Visions, then knowledge, then wisdom," the Namer repeated. "And perhaps long years between each. But do not despair, my boy, and above all, grow not impatient. For it is said that 'sometimes the waiting is the doing.' "

Idle thoughts of a mind in its dotage. He learned later to laugh at the old man, to be glad of his passing.

The god in the stones taught him that, taught him also that prophecy was easy. For after all, was he not the youngest of the Namers? And a Namer among the Que-Nara, where even the infants touched the hem of Mishakal?

For beyond knowledge and wisdom lies prophecy. Of that Firebrand was sure. So he looked into the opals deeply, into the godseyes, and as the name of the stones should have foretold for him, the eye of a god looked back.

"Sargonnas," it called itself. And "Consort of the Dark." Quickly it taught him to prophesy, to leap over knowledge and wisdom straight into the fire and the glamor of things foretellable.

He sat at the edge of the fire, peering into the crown as the others-the simple ones, unskilled in philosophy and lore- busied themselves with the menial things, with setting and striking the camp, and with the gathering of food. There, alone where the firelight stopped at the edge of the darkness, he pondered the mystery of stones, saw the seas roll and the moons wink out.

He saw a dark woman rise from a deeper darkness, her hair spangled with ice and winter stars.

All of these were yet to come, the god in the crown told him. He was not sure what they meant, these visions, but they were his, and they foretold something grand and terrible. Of that he was sure, and the god agreed.

And when he had seen them all, the countless visions and portents from that moment three centuries ago to the time in which all things will end, the voice in the stones whispered hauntingly, sweetly: