"Are we walking all the way to Silverside, old man? " Opal asked as she came up from behind them, then she saw what Flint was holding. "What do you have there, boy?" She took it from him and carefully rubbed off the dust, then held the pale half-circle up to the light of her coral lamp. "Why, look, Chert, it's part of a sea imperial. What's it doing down here instead of on a beach? Did someone drop it, do you think?"

"Must have." Chert carefully examined the rock above their heads but it looked reassuringly solid and dry. "Nothing dripping here. Besides, the sea doesn't just dribble if it finds a way in. All that water, all that weight, it'd fill the place in a heartbeat." He could not help remembering the terrible stories his father had told him about the tragedy on Quarrymen's Bank, named after the guild that had been extending their living quarters there.

The first law of Funderling Town was, and always had been, that no serious digging of any kind should ever be undertaken beneath the waterline, since one mistake would be enough to bring the sea flooding into the depths, destroying the district of the Mysteries and the temple of the Metamorphic Brotherhood, as well as everything else in the lower caverns. But on that morning sixty or seventy years earlier the Quarrymen's Guild crew had lost track of how deep they'd dug. It was discovered later that they had also cut too far out toward the edge of the great stony island of Midlan's Mount on which Southmarch stood.

That day, a rumble of dislodged stone had been followed by a shocking spear thrust of chilly seawater that knocked Funderling diggers head over heels. Within moments the tremendous flow of water began widening the crevice; the thin spurt quickly became a barrel-wide gush. The quarrymen labored fruitlessly to close the hole, fighting the overwhelming power of the sea god himself, but the excavated rooms were already beginning to fill.