The Running Girl (Kaunovalta, Book I)

by D. Alexander Neill

  Chapter 4 ♦ The Deeprealm

  It took them all night and most of the next day to traverse the Feywood. By the time they emerged into the tumbled foothills of the Feymount, the first line of peaks delineating the Deeprealm Range, Hax was nearly spent. She had managed to retain her saddle and therefore her pride, but the cost had been severe; bolts of pain were shooting up and down her spine, and her thighs and backside felt as though they had been flayed. She was hungry, and even thirsty; their water bags had gone dry a few hours back. They were, all of them, in dire need of rest. Wynstan, however, had firmly vetoed any halt.

  “Nearly done,” he kept muttering. “We can rest when we’re safe under stone.” Clearly, Hax thought, that phrase had a different meaning in the dwarven tongue than in the vernacular of her homeland.

  The end of the woods came almost as a surprise; one moment, they were rolling through twilit glades (Uchtred having slowed the fire-coach to match her horse’s tired walk); the next, they had left the trees behind and were clattering across a broad, sloping shield of grey stone.

  “That’s it,” Wynstan said, relief evident in his voice. “We’re nearly home. Two more miles, three at most.”

  “ ‘Home’ looks a little bleak,” Hax remarked. The rocky ground rose precipitously before them, seemingly refusing to support any growth more sophisticated than lichen.

  She glanced up. The mountain peaks were much, much closer, now, towering over them, glimmering with a white-verdant sheen that, Hax realized, was the result of the setting sunlight reflecting off the tips of the forest at their back, and colouring the mountains’ frosty mantle. Had she not been so painfully exhausted, she might have found it beautiful.

  “All homes do, if you sit outside on the doorstep,” Frida remarked primly. “The door wardens, dearest,” she said, simultaneously pointing and elbowing her husband in the ribs. “Over there.”

  “Saw’em,” Wynstan grunted. He turned the tiller obediently.

  Hax followed the priestess’ pointing finger. The road – it wasn’t really a road anymore, so much as a near-invisible set of ruts worn into the soft stone – bent to the right, seemingly aiming for a gap in the tumbled wall of rock. As they approached, two shapes that she had taken for fallen lumps of mountain resolved themselves. They were statues, carved out of the hills themselves – great, hulking, crouched effigies of dwarven warriors, armoured and bearing enormous shields and heavy, hooked axes. The road passed between them, looking too narrow for the cart to squeeze through.

  Hax mentioned this to Frida, eliciting a laugh from the three dwarves. “First-timer,” the priestess chuckled. “You’ll see. The distance is deceptive.”

  The elf-girl learned what that meant a few moments later. Thinking that the statues were close to life-size, she had misjudged the range. Badly. In fact, they were still more than a mile from the gap. The mottled stone ground-cover, moreover, blended imperceptibly with the stone of the mountain wall, confusing her further. As the distance shrank, she could see that the statues, and the gap between them, were huge. Enormous, in fact.

  Ten minutes later she was looking up, up, and still up, marvelling at the size and majesty of the stonework towering over her head. The stone effigies were easily a hundred feet tall, and despite being heavily weathered, retained a degree of detail and artistry that took her breath away.

  They were unlike anything she had ever seen. Elven architecture, when wrought in stone, was light, airy, almost insubstantial – strong, to be sure, but only just strong enough, and given to mimicking the growths of nature, lending an impression of grace and impermanence. This dwarf-work was as unlike the soaring arches and elegant, slender towers of Astrapratum as she was unlike her hosts. The guardian statues were squat, broad, and powerful; they radiated the solidity of the mountains, as if the dwarven artisans, in removing chunks and slivers of stone, had left behind something that was even stronger and more solid than the native gut-rock of the Feymount.

  Between the statues, the roadbed rose slightly, the close-fit stones smooth and untouched by time or the elements. Wynstan directed the fire-coach down the centre of the channel, his eyes fixed straight ahead. Frida, Hax noted, had bowed her head and was whispering a prayer, fingering her medallion all the while. Only Uchtred shared her curiosity; he was craning his neck, the better to look upwards. She followed his gaze, marvelling at the clean, sharp angles of the stonework, silhouetted against the scudding, fluffy clouds and wheeling ravens. Lichen like gilding adorned the stone, lending the immense effigies an austere, regal air.

  “What do you think?” Uchtred asked, eyeing her closely.

  “They’re amazing,” Hax replied. “I’d no idea your people built on…on such a scale.”

  Wynstan snorted sourly, and Frida and Uchtred burst into laughter. “Oh, my dear!” the priestess chortled. “This is…I mean…”

  “Wait’ll you see Elder Delvin,” Wynstan muttered. “The Door Wardens – these statues – are chess pieces compared to the Lords of the Great Cavern.”

  Hax nodded silently, still inspecting the stonework.

  Then she turned her gaze forward…and gasped again.

  Beyond the statues, the tumbled stone walls of the Feymount dropped away, plummeting into a vast chasm that ran parallel to the mountain foothills. Like a trench cloven by a god’s axe, the channel ran from north to south; craning her neck, she could see no end to it. It was broad, too, easily a hundred paces from the near edge to the vertical grey walls of the mountain face opposite.

  The road, flanked by smaller copies of the great stone statues flanking the entrance to the valley, led towards the lip of the chasm, where a long, narrow bridge of granite arced across the void towards the mountain. Where this tongue of stone touched the far wall, Hax could see a pair of high doors, glinting with a green-yellow lustre in the light of the descending Lantern. It was flanked by smaller, brighter glints. Shading her eyes, she could make out armed and armoured dwarves. Sunlight glinted like skyfire from polished shields and the tips of spears.

  She glanced at the fire-coach. Wynstan and Uchtred appeared to be sitting up straighter in their seats, and Frida was making a show of fixing her hair. “Coming home,” the priestess murmured apologetically. “Don’t worry,” she added with a knowing nod at the horrific state of Hax’s coiffure, “we’ll find a hostel with a hot bath as soon as we can. It’s only a couple of miles from the Doors of Brass to Eastgate.”

  Hax nodded. She was morbidly conscious of her ragged appearance after a full day in the saddle, and twitched her cloak around her shoulders to conceal the more obvious defects of her clothing. For some reason, looking presentable was more important to her in the dwarven realm than it had been while riding through human or halfling lands. Perhaps it had something to do with her new companions. Their good opinion had become important to her.

  As they traversed the narrow stone bridge, Hax tried to concentrate on unpacking this novel thought. It was an alternative to looking down.

  ♦

  Frida was as good as her word. They passed their first night in a hostel called the Árduru Æfenliss, located in a warren of tunnels and caverns only a short way beyond the gates. Uchtred had translated the name of the inn for her as, “the place of evening rest at the Brass Doors.” Hax reflected that she was going to have to learn at least some of the dwarven tongue if she was going to spend any time in the Deeprealm.

  The route they had taken once past the gate itself had been astonishing. The elves rarely spoke about the dwarves, and Hax knew almost nothing about them. Syllo had given her an overview of their battle practices, and Kalestayne had mentioned some of the accomplishments of the dwarven magi during the classes she had had to take in her later childhood. But when the Deeprealm was mentioned at all in elven circles, it was usually described as ‘caves’, or ‘tunnels’, or ‘burrows’.

  She had never really thought about it all that much, but such talk had con
ditioned her to think of the dwarves as little more than miners who occupied the played-out shafts they sunk into the earth while searching for gold or precious stones. The first mile she travelled under the earth demonstrated unequivocally how completely wrong her perceptions had been.

  To begin with, the Doors of Brass had, like the massive statues they had passed, been a noteworthy feat of engineering. The doors were easily five times her own height, and four times as wide. The fact that they were not solid brass, but plates of brass covering massive blocks of stone, was even more impressive. They were balanced on hinge-pins as thick as her torso, and connected to some sort of mechanical gearing system the purpose of which she was unable to descry, until Uchtred explained it to her.

  “Water-powered,” he huffed, nodding happily. “Doors’re well-balanced, o’course, but too heavy to open or shut by hand. So they’re powered by a water-column what drives pistons linked to a gear-box. Rack and pinion, with the rack concealed in a travelling chamber in the floor.”

  “Get any of that, dearie?” Frida stage-whispered once Uchtred fell silent.

  “Not a word,” Hax confessed. “Except ‘water’. And ‘floor’.”

  “I’ll draw you a diagram later on,” Uchtred shrugged.

  Beyond the doors lay the tunnel they were to follow. Hax, who had never been fond of small spaces, was enormously relieved when she saw its dimensions. Her relief quickly passed into amazement. The ‘tunnel’ was easily ten paces wide, allowing her horse and the fire-cart to travel rapidly, and half again as high, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling supported at intervals by buttressed coigns carved from the living rock. The floor was polished smooth by the passage of countless feet over the years. And, to her surprise and delight, it was lit by something that she took at first to be orblights, but which, when she slowed her horse to inspect one, seemed to be glowing spots in the rock wall itself.

  “Why?” she asked Frida.

  “Why what?”

  “Why the lights? I thought your folk could see in the dark?”

  “We can,” the priestess replied, smiling. “But a lot of visitors can’t. If we didn’t provide light, they’d need torches or lamps.”

  “Got enough problems with air circulation down here, without having to deal with smoke from pitch, tallow or oil,” Wynstan grumbled.

  “Helps with the draft animals, too,” Frida added. “A lot of them get panicky in the dark.”

  “I know the feeling,” Hax muttered. Thus far, the tunnels had been big enough that her fear of confinement had not yet asserted itself. But it was only a matter of time.

  Eastgate – the dwarven name for which Hax was entirely unable to understand, let alone pronounce – proved to be a large, natural cavern with a confusing jumble of passages leading off in all directions. Hax was somewhat relieved to see that it reinforced her long-held impression of the nature of dwarf-made dwellings, and she admired the large, open space. The floor had been cleared, but the ceiling, hundreds of paces overhead, still sprouted innumerable stalactites, the result of some long-vanished geological process. Evidently there was a great deal of moisture in the surrounding rock, as the cavern sported numerous decorative statues, both free-standing and built into the circumferential walls, that spouted trickles, streams and jets of water from different, and often humorously inappropriate, orifices.

  She made an admiring comment about the place, eliciting – to her surprise – laughter from her comrades. “This isn’t the city, dearie,” Frida chuckled. “It’s just the market.”

  Sure enough, the cavern was crowded with vendors and stalls of all sorts. “Where’s the city, then?” Hax asked, confused.

  Frida pointed at the stone walls. “All around us. In the rock. Tunnels, chambers, homes, store-houses, meeting-rooms, bath-houses, hostels, armouries, barracks, foundries…and the mines, o’course.”

  Hax looked around. There were many, many tunnel entrances interspersed, here and there, around the enormous room. “How many?” she wondered aloud.

  “Rooms?” Frida asked, looking helpless. “I’ve no idea.”

  “Not rooms. Dwarves.”

  “Ah. Not many. Eastgate is small, and we’re still a long, long way from the capital. Three, maybe fourscore thousand,” the priestess replied easily.

  Hax turned and stared at Frida, certain that the dwarf-woman was mocking her. “That’s not possible,” she said coldly.

  “Oh?”

  “Astrapratum itself,” the elf-woman snapped, “has no more than five-score thousand inhabitants. At most. And it’s the greatest city in the world.”

  Frida shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, cildic. This is just a small town.”

  “Wait’ll we get to Ædeldelf,” Uchtred chortled. “That’s a city.”

  Hax rolled her eyes at him. “And how big is Ed…Ethel…”

  “Just call it ‘Elder Delvin’, dearie,” Frida interjected helpfully. She looked thoughtful. “I’ll tell you what,” she continued briskly, “why don’t you ask me that question again, after you’ve seen a little more of the realm? You might be better disposed to believe me then.”

  Hax felt a little bad after that. Her automatic assumption that her new companions were either lying to her or deliberately having her on was unfair to them. She was the newcomer here, after all, and entirely dependent upon them for information and advice. The least that she owed them was to trust in what they told her.

  Uchtred selected one of the larger passageways and directed the fire-cart down it. Hax, her posterior aching, hoped that it led to the hostel they sought, but she was disappointed once again. The detour, however, was only temporary; a few moments later, Uchtred stopped at a set of heavy doors, from beyond which emanated the unmistakeable reek of manure.

  “Stables,” he explained. “No place for a horse in a dwarf-hostel.”

  Hax nodded gratefully. She removed her saddlebags and threw them over one shoulder while Frida haggled with the owner, a short, pudgy dwarf with flaming red hair and a badly tangled beard.

  In the end, Uchtred left the fire-cart there as well, and they returned to the market cavern on foot. As they left the stables, Hax – who had been a little concerned at taking a large animal deep underground – was glad to see that Breygon’s mare appeared perfectly content, and was tucking into a deep nosebag of grain.

  The ‘Brass Doors Inn’, as she thought of it to herself, being unable to vocalize the dwarven name, lay a few hundred paces down another, smaller passageway. There was little indication of its presence beyond a pair of glowing stone lanterns on either side of a pair of heavy brass doors. Wynstan did something to the wall that Hax could not quite make out; a moment later, the doors swung silently wide.

  The proprietor of the Árduru Æfenliss, a stout and jovial hill dwarf who introduced himself as Yffi, spoke the travelling tongue fluently and almost without an accent. Uncharacteristically verbose for a dwarf (a result, he explained as part of the flood of verbiage which their arrival occasioned, of a youth misspent as a soldier of fortune, plying the eastern coasts of Erutrei in the company of a band of Oststrander corsairs), Yffi had recognized Hax’s pedigree instantly, expressing unbounded delight at the prospect of playing host to a scion of the Third House, a daughter of the Duodeci. His delight, though, immediately transmogrified into chagrin, and he began apologizing profusely for being, as he put it, “unable to offer her quarters suitable to her sylvan grace”. As a compromise, he offered her a chamber designed for occupancy by humans, but at half-price.

  “Nothing there to delight the eye of an elf,” he admitted, smiling apologetically, “but at least you won’t whack your noggin every few steps, or wake up with a crick in your neck from a too-short bed.”

  “My ‘sylvan grace’ will be just fine,” Hax laughed. “Just so long as a bath is included in the price of the room.”

  This remark set all three of her companions laughing. “It’s her first time amongst
civilized folk,” Frida explained jokingly. “Just give us the numbers, you chubby scrabbler, and we’ll be fine.”

  Yffi had smiled politely along with them, handing over one silver and three brass disks, all of them stamped with dwarf-script, and depending from fine-linked chains. Wynstan looked them over and passed the silver disk to Hax. “Thirty-one,” he grunted.

  “Come along, dearie,” Frida said, taking Hax’s elbow. “I’ll get you stowed.”

  “Æfengereordung licgan nóntíma,” Yffi called after them.

  “What was that?” Hax asked, nonplussed.

  “Dinner’s at nine,” Frida said shortly. “We’ve three hours and a bit. Plenty of time to get cleaned up.” She hustled the elf-girl along a lateral corridor.

  Hax kept a close eye on the ceiling, heeding Yffi’s words. Fortunately, the inn was generously proportioned in order to cater acceptably to men as well as to dwarves. For the most part, the vaulted stone roof remained a good two feet over her head.

  “I need some things,” she mentioned to Frida. “Soap, towels, some fresh clothing…”

  “Already taken care of,” the priestess replied, hurrying her along. “You’re in my homeland now, cildic. Trust me.

  “And step you lightly,” she added. “The bath-water’s a-waiting.”

  ♦

  The next three hours proved to be a greater shock to Hax’s senses, and to her sense of propriety, than the whole of her journey to date.

  Her room, which she had expected to display the same artistically spartan character as the great statues guarding the Eastgate, proved to be a pleasant surprise. Although all of the furniture was obviously sized for humans, and was thus a little too large for comfort, it was exquisitely crafted, and lavishly decorated with careful file-work and intricate runic carvings. The stone walls were largely concealed behind tapestries woven of brilliantly-dyed threads, most of them depicting underground scenes, gem-work or abstract patterns of brilliant complexity, while the floors were so thickly laden with heavy carpets and coarse furs that she was unable to see what sort of stone they consisted of. A small table, a writing desk, a shelf stacked with well-worn books. And the light…

  She looked around. The room was lit by a small stone orb set into the wall near the head of the bed. It was glowing softly, emitting a pale yellow luminescence more akin to the light of Lodan than to that of Bræa’s Lantern. Examining it more closely, she found a brass plaque set next to it bearing six lines of text – three in Dwarf-runes, matched by three in the travelling tongue: “Léohtlic – Bright; Léohtfæt – Dim; Déostorlic – Dark.”

  She touched the glowing stone with one finger. It was cool. She said, “Dark.”

  The light faded instantly, plunging the room into darkness. “Well, that was stupid,” she muttered to herself. Feeling around in the inky blackness, she found the stone again, and said, “Bright.” The light returned, glaringly brilliant this time. She found herself blinking rapidly, and said, “Dim.” The illumination dropped back to its former level.

  Important lesson, she thought grimly to herself. You can’t see underground, idiot. She’d known that, of course, but it was helpful to have confirmed it through experiment.

  A soft chime, like a gently-struck gong, interrupted her investigations. She looked around, alarmed. What on earth was…

  Of course, she realized. The door. She walked quickly back to the stone portal through which she had entered, and realized to her dismay that there was neither latch nor knob on this side. In despair, thinking of the light-orb, she muttered, “Open?”

  The door swung silently inwards. Outside, a young-looking, beardless dwarven lad stood with her saddlebags draped over one shoulder, and her bow and quiver in his opposite hand.

  “Evening, missus,” he said brightly. “Your kit.”

  Hax made a gesture as if to take the items from him, and he bustled past her, leaning the bow and quiver in a corner, and slinging the saddlebags over the back of a chair.

  She blinked in surprise. Her saddle-bags were clean, and the scuffed leather looked as though it had been expertly polished.

  The dwarf turned back to her. “I’m Coenred. Anything else I can do for you, mum?” he bubbled, rocking back and forth from heels to toes as if incapable of restraining his enthusiasm for his work.

  Hax thought frantically. “No, not at all. I…wait,” she corrected. “Er…” She felt embarrassed to have to ask, like a provincial bumpkin on her first visit to the big city (Isn’t that what you are? the Voice muttered snidely). But then she decided that a little embarrassment was infinitely preferable to spending five more minutes feeling as though she had just crawled out of a sewer. “How do I take a bath?” she asked in a rush.

  “Water closet’s at the far end of the hall,” Coenred replied instantly. “Instructions’re on the wall, in the common tongue if you don’t speak the Dweorgaspræc. As it seems you don’t.” He strode to one of the tapestries and brushed it aside, revealing a deep closet set into the stone. Piles of folded cloth adorned the shelves. “Bathrobes here. Don’t bring the room towels, there’re plenty at the baths. Soap and suchlike, too.” He paused. “Anything else?”

  Hax found herself warming to the cheerful fellow. “Actually,” she said, “I’m a little worried about light. I don’t have your vision. How do I get around in the dark?”

  The dwarf ambled over to the bed, opened a drawer in the nightstand, and extracted a small, regular solid, seemingly carved of crystal and about the size of her fist. He held this up, said, “Light,” and the object burst into glimmering luminescence. He said, “Dark,” and the extra light faded away. He tucked the thing back into the drawer and closed it gently.

  Hax immediately fished it out again, inspecting it closely. “Where can I buy one of these?” she asked intently.

  Coenred fished around in one of his pockets and extracted a smaller version of the same device, pressing it into her hand. “Yours,” he said conspiratorially. “They’re issue. Don’t tell anybody where you got it,” he whispered. “Anything else?”

  “No,” she said faintly, turning the small, crystal shape over in her hand. “Thank you.”

  “All part of the service, mum. Don’t forget, dinner’s at nine.”

  Hax nodded, bemused. The dwarf let himself out.

  Before the door closed, she remembered something. “Wait!” she called.

  Coenred’s head reappeared around the jamb. “Yes?”

  Hax gritted her teeth. “How do I…I’d like to…b-b-but I don’t have any of your coin,” she admitted, blushing.

  The lad shook his head. “Not necessary, missus. Your friends took care of it.” He winked. “Enjoy your bath.”

  And disappeared.

  ♦

  Hax’s next lesson came only a few moments later. Calling the baths a ‘Water Closet’ was, in the elf-girl’s opinion, as inappropriate as calling the massive statues guarding the Eastgate ‘figurines’.

  After Coenred left, she shed her filthy clothing as quickly as possible. She had located a brass panel in one of the walls with a dual legend engraved up it: ‘Gearwæsc – Laundry’. This seemed straightforward enough, so after only a moment’s hesitation, she dumped her travel-stained garb through it.

  That left her with another problem. The chill of the room raised an acre of gooseflesh before she managed to don one of the bathrobes. Human-sized, it trailed on the carpets and felt as though she had wrapped herself in a scratchy horse-blanket, but at least it was warm. Taking her silver room-medallion and looping the light chain carefully over her head, she opened her door again, and stepped out into the hall.

  Left led back to the reception desk. She turned to the right and padded down the corridor, bare feet freezing on the chill stone.

  She passed a dozen more doors like her own, all numbered in both dwarven runes and the angular characters of the travelling tongue, before she came to a broad
stone portal at the end of the hallway. The door bore a brass plate marked ‘Lafiærna – Water Closet’. She put one hand on the stone and pushed; nothing.

  “Open,” she said hesitantly. Still nothing. Then she remembered how her room door had worked. She pressed the silver medallion against the stone, and the door swung wide.

  Hax stood in the open door for the next few seconds, gaping. A slight odour of brimstone flared her nostrils. At length, she muttered, “ ‘Water Closet’,” to herself in a wondering, mocking tone, and stepped through, allowing the door to close behind her.

  The ‘Water Closet’ was a rough stone cavern at least twenty paces across, containing three separate pools – one large and two smaller ones. Light emanated from glowing stones set in the walls, and a half-dozen stone doors were set around the perimeter. The air was warm and moist, and she immediately felt better after the chill of her bedchamber. The floor…

  The floor felt oddly familiar beneath her toes. She looked down. It appeared to be carpeted, but on closer inspection the covering proved to be a thick bed of some sort of dark blue moss. It was soft, spongy, and an enormous improvement over the bare stone.

  Hax walked carefully around the chamber, inspecting the pools. The largest was cool but not cold, fed by a small waterfall pouring from a hole in the stone wall, and drained by some invisible means. The two smaller pools were still, but perfectly clear; one was icy, as though fed by a glacier, causing her to withdraw her hand quickly; the other steamed slightly, and was almost painfully hot.

  That’s the one for me, Hax thought blissfully. Doffing her robe, she gritted her teeth and slid into the simmering water, gasping as it rose over her hips. In a few moments, she had become accustomed to the temperature, and was floating blissfully on her back, trying to soak the weeks of embedded grime out of her tangled mass of hair.

  “HEEEYAAAAHH!!”

  Thundering footsteps and a deep-pitched shout woke her from her reverie. Hax inhaled a mouthful of the hot, sulphur-smelling water and struggled to find her footing, gasping and spitting. She opened her eyes just in time to see Uchtred’s naked, hairy form soaring over her head, beard and braids flying. The dwarf landed in the largest pool like a catapult boulder, splashing water in every direction and causing a tidal wave to burst over the stone rim, soaking the floor.

  “Léasere!”

  Hax heard laughter and turned, frantically searching for something to cover herself with, and of course finding nothing. Frida and Wynstan were standing at the edge of the hot water basin, laughing uproariously. The priestess noted Hax’s frenzied gestures, and quipped, “An inappropriate time for spell-casting, don’t you think, dearie?”

  As the elf-maid gaped, blushing furiously, both dwarves doffed their bathing robes and slid into the water, Frida with a blissful sigh, and Wynstan hissing curses under his breath. Hax turned away from them, only to find that Uchtred had emerged from the larger pool and was sliding into the hot water next to her. She got an alarmingly full view of a number of things she had never thought to see.

  Hax took a deep breath and screwed her eyes resolutely shut. Coping with life in the Deeprealm was going to be more of a challenge than she had thought.

  ♦

  “What d’ye expect?” Frida chuckled moments later. Hax, conditioned to Sylloallen’s credo that politeness demanded that one imitate one’s hosts, did her best to overcome her native shyness. Rather than leaping for her bathrobe, she settled for sinking into the water up to her neck. She tried to camouflage her timidity by remaining submerged to the jaw-line while scrubbing frantically at her hair. This became easier when Wynstan wordlessly handed her a large, greasy block of some unidentifiable, earth-toned material. Immersed in water, this produced a pleasant foam that did an admirable job of working the accumulated filth out of her tangled midnight tresses. It also produced a dense, concealing froth that was a helpful sop to her discomfiture.

  “We live cheek by jowl,” the priestess went on, pausing only to dunk her own head under the water. “Always have. In each others’ laps, from waking up to bedding down again. Not much point in an excess of modesty. Leastways, not between friends.”

  Hax nodded mutely, her common sense at war with a lifetime of social conditioning. Mixed bathing was widespread among her people, at least within social classes; but the nobility of the Third House, under whose strict regime she had been raised, lived according to different standards. Public nakedness was permissible only under certain social circumstances – swimming, bathing, training – and forbidden under others. Her father had tried to raise her that way, requiring Hax and her male training mates to use the same arming room, “Just as Dior’s warriors did!” But Kaltas often found himself a lone light of reason in a sea of prejudice. And besides, he wasn’t the one who’d had to strip down in front of a handful of painfully nonchalant male classmates.

  Even if she had been comfortable showing skin before members of her own social class, the unspoken but ingrained xenophobia of the Third House prohibited displaying any immodesty whatsoever before members of other races. The idea of being naked in front of a dwarf would have mortified any elf.

  Hax had always found her people’s collective attitude duplicitous on this score, especially in view of the nobility’s penchant for revealing clothing styles, and the open, if winked-at, licentiousness and casual liaisons of the High Court. It was almost as though common-sense accommodations were forbidden, while illicit pulchritude was tolerated. Encouraged, even. We’re all of us a pack of filthy hypocrites, she thought ruefully.

  Except Syllo. He’d’ve been the first to get his trousers off. The man always put politeness before propriety; he had an unerring instinct that way. Hax decided that she would do her best to emulate his example and copy her hosts, lest they think her the uncivilized one.

  To try to cover this depressing introspection, Hax hefted the beige block. “What is this stuff?” she asked. “It works like soap, but it doesn’t sting like it.”

  “Lámhéafodbæth,” Uchtred interjected. “Means ‘earth-head-wash’. Hair-soap.”

  “ ‘Shampoo’,” Frida corrected. “And t’isn’t soap, as you know it. It’s made from a fungus that grows in damp caverns. Better than your boiled fat and fire-ash. No stinging.”

  “Doesn’t keep, though,” Uchtred added. “It rots after a few weeks.”

  “It doesn’t smell at all like soap,” Hax replied, dubious. “In fact, it smells…” she broke off, laughing. “Is that beer?”

  “Aye,” Frida replied.

  “What else would you wash your hair with?” Wynstan grunted, scrubbing furiously at his braids.

  Hax shrugged, smiling, and continued worrying away at her knotted mane.

  They bathed in comfortable silence after that. Hax noticed that despite the amount of time they had spent in the pool and the masses of filth they scrubbed off, the water remained clear, and the temperature remained comfortably constant. She mentioned this to Frida. Without speaking, the priestess nodded at Uchtred.

  “Hot springs,” the engineer replied. “One of Lagu’s gifts to the Dweorga. Our diviners locate them and we pipe the water throughout the cities. Never have to worry about washing up.”

  “But how does it stay clean?”

  “Filtered through sand-beds,” he replied. He ducked his head under the water and came up with a handful of fine grey sand. “The fungus that we make soap from clots onto the dirt, and the whole sticks to the sand. You can either discard the sand, if you’ve got a ready supply, or fire it over magma to cleanse it for reuse.”

  “Amazing,” she said, honestly astonished. “I had no idea what this place was like. You people are wonder-workers.”

  “We aren’t naturally attuned to the flux, like you point-ears are,” Frida replied solemnly. “Wizardry comes hard to us, and inborn casters…” She sighed.

  Hax’s eyes widened. “What about them?” she asked, curious.
/>
  Frida pursed her lips thoughtfully. “There aren’t any.”

  She continued rapidly, “Those of us who serve the Dwarf-Lords can help, of course, and we do – moving earth and stone, finding voids and water and the like. But to make the Deeprealm support so many families, we had to create devices to enable one to do the work of many.” She smiled wryly. “Running water and rocklight were only the beginning, dearie. Wait’ll you see the Tube.”

  “The what?” Hax asked, curious.

  “The Dweorgaværk,” Uchtred interjected. “The great endeavour of the modern era.” He dug feverishly at something that was lodged in his beard. “Pride o’the Deeprealm.

  “Designed and built the valve beds at the Carrlár station myself, you know,” he added proudly. “Worst draining problem we ever faced. They’ve been working thirty-nine years, now, without a failure.” He beamed at her.

  “I don’t understand,” Hax replied honestly. That was quickly becoming her mantra.

  “You will, dearie,” Frida said. “Carrlár’s our first stop.” She turned to her husband, who was floating silently on his back, revealing far more than Hax wanted to see.

  “Hey! Slug-a-bed!” The priestess hurled the block of fungus soap at him, narrowly missing his protruding belly. “Scrub my back!”

  ♦

  Half an hour later, Hax realized that she faced a minor dilemma. She was beginning to feel like a sponge, but despite her growing comfort in her new friends’ company, she didn’t want to exit the pool in full view. She could not, however, see any other option. So, while the three were engaged in an argument about whether to leave on the morrow or take another day to recuperate from the travails of their journey, she made a hasty dash for her bathing robe, struggled into it, tied the too-long belt around her waist, and began wringing the water out of her waist-length curls.

  “All done?” Frida called, interrupting the discussion.

  “Yes,” Hax answered. “Is there anywhere warm I can dry my hair?”

  The priestess nodded. “Through the second door.”

  Hax padded obediently across the moss-carpet and pushed on the indicated portal. It swung open easily.

  A blast of dry, searing heat, like the exhalation of a furnace, struck her full in the face, and she gasped.

  “Lúcan dyren!” an unfamiliar voice rasped.

  Hax guessed what the words meant. Squinting against the intense heat, she stepped across the threshold and let the door shut behind her.

  “Incuman ægther licgan criba!”

  “Excuse me?” Hax said, blinking rapidly until her eyes cleared. The scene slowly resolved; she was in a long, low chamber, lit redly by a heap of glowing stones set dead-centre between what looked like four low stone biers.

  “Niet ánspræcan dweorgaspræc?”

  The speaker was a dwarf – bald, bearded, braided and bare-chested, clad only in sandals, trousers and a heavy leather apron.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, resorting in desperation to the travelling tongue and clutching her robe about her neck.

  “Ah, sorry,” the fellow grunted, smiling broadly. “Should o’guessed. Don’t speak elfy, myself.” He gestured at one of the stone tables. “Stretch out, miss, and I’ll take care of you.”

  “ ‘Stretch out’?” Hax asked, confused.

  “Get comfortable,” the fellow replied. He turned to a shelf on the wall and selected a stoneware pot. Then he glanced back over his shoulder at her, shook his head, replaced the pot and selected a different one. “And lose the gown.”

  “Hunh?” she blurted, bereft of her usual eloquence by the abrupt command.

  A sudden blast of seemingly frigid air hit her in the back of the neck. “Bert!” Frideswide shouted happily.

  The bare-chested dwarf dropped his pots and swept the priestess up in a spine-cracking hug, planting an indelicate buss on her cheek. “Frida! Léasbréd hæmedwíf! Why didn’t you tell me you were in town?”

  “We just got here, you goat,” Frideswide replied, slapping him on his bald pate. “This is our first stop.”

  “As it damned-well should be.” He hooked a thumb at Hax. “Who’s your skinny friend?”

  Before Hax could speak, Frida said, “Lyszia Ellacana, sell-sword of Oststrand; meet Tordbert Twelvefingers. Best bone-cracker in the Deeprealm.”

  Hax blinked rapidly. “Twelve fingers?” she asked.

  Bert held up his hands. They looked normal.

  “He has the usual ten,” Frida said with a hearty chuckle. “They just feel like twelve.”

  “You’re gonna make me blush,” the bald dwarf said gruffly.

  Frida threw off her robe and draped it over the foot of one of the tables. “Come on, old man. Make me purr.” She climbed up on the stone – Hax saw that it was covered with a fine layer of the same sort of spongy lichen that covered the floors – and stretched out on her belly. She also noticed that Frida had an enormous, rune-covered anvil tattooed across her shoulder blades. Knowing something about the art, she winced at the amount of time and needlework that must have gone into it.

  Bert laughed. “Sorry, my dear.” He turned back to Hax. “Up you get, sweet thing. First come, first served.”

  Hax waved her hands in alarm. “No, that’s all right,” she said, taking a step back. “I think I’ll just go brush my hair.”

  “That can wait,” Frida said, a humorous lilt in her voice. She grinned. “Courage, dearie. My home, my rules.” She turned her eyes to her countryman. “Bert, get somebody else in here with strong hands. I’ve been on the road for two weeks, and my spine feels like Khallach’s own tuning fork.”

  Hax hesitated, considering; then, setting her jaw, she climbed up onto one of the low tables, opposite the prostrate cleric.

  Bert stopped her. “Lose the robe, skinny-britches,” the dwarf commanded.

  Hax sighed, gritted her teeth, and complied.

  ♦

  A half-hour under Tordbert’s masterful touch (she told Frida that his nickname should have been “Twelve-Hands”, evoking chuckles) left her as limp as an empty stocking, and feeling more herself than at any time since she had left her father’s house. The Elves practiced massage, but more as a sensual art than as the exercise in clinical sadism that the dwarves had made of it. She reflected later that their techniques were probably not designed for anyone as lightly built as an elf, and blessed Syllo for the muscles that six decades of training had added to her lithe frame. Given his enormous strength, Bert would probably have snapped one of her less robust countrymen like a dry twig.

  Whatever the fellow did, though, worked miracles. Hax had never felt so good. After a few moments spent evaluating her muscular strength, the range of motion of her joints, and her tolerance for pain, Bert had systematically pummelled, twisted, stretched and loosened every muscle between her jaw line and her toes, eliciting squeals of agony and groans of ecstasy in equal measure. Hax wasn’t certain, but she thought she might have shrieked out a marriage proposal at one point. She hoped it had been in her tongue, and not his.

  Frida, similarly contorted by a burly dwarf-woman half her age, matched Hax groan for groan. This went gone on for close to an hour. They were able to speak in the intervals between squeals.

  “Do you mind a personal question?” Frida mumbled at one point.

  “Not at all,” Hax replied, minding very much, but unwilling to offend her newfound friend with an outright refusal.

  “Your tattoos,” the priestess said after a moment. Her eyes were still closed, and she waved a finger vaguely in Hax’s direction. “I thought they were just on your face, but you’ve got’em all over. Or just about. What do they signify?”

  Hax was silent for a moment. Frida had inadvertently hit upon one of the few areas of inquiry that the Elf-girl preferred not to discuss. In fact, she’d never discussed it with anyone. Not even Syllo. Or her father.

  You should’ve thought about
that before taking the needle to your face, she told herself ruefully.

  Frida noticed the girl’s silence. “Sorry, ducks,” she said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “It’s not that,” Hax replied quickly. “It’s just that – well, I don’t really have a good explanation for you. It’s just one of those things. I feel I have to do it.”

  “So it’s a regular practice, then?” the priestess prodded.

  Hax nodded slowly. “Every time.”

  “ ‘Every time’ what, dearie?”

  “Every time I kill,” the elf said quietly.

  Frida opened her eyes. “Do you mind – I won’t, if you’d prefer – ”

  “Twenty-four,” Hax replied. “Sorry, twenty-seven.” She’d forgotten the most recent trio, added after her little adventure in the Queen’s garden.

  Frida nodded solemnly. “That one, there – its looks new,” she murmured, pointing to a tattoo on Hax’s right thigh, where the flesh was still red and raised.

  The Elf-girl smiled sheepishly. “It is. But it…ah, it doesn’t count, exactly. That one was to remind me of a fight with some ghouls on the road north, through the Zaran Bjerglands. They were gnawing on a small party of travellers.”

  “Looks painful,” the priestess remarked sleepily.

  “Not as painful as the other leg,” Hax chuckled. “I came into the fight from the wrong end. Took an arrow for my trouble.”

  “Oh, my,” Frida snickered. “I hope you got some healing out of it.”

  “No healer,” Hax shrugged. “Got a nice, sincere apology, though.”

  Frida was silent for a while. Hax winced as the masseur found a tight spot in her neck, and went to work on it.

  Moments later, the priestess said, “Why ghouls?”

  Hax blinked, surprised. “Well, to begin with, the wretched things ate my horse.”

  “No, no. I meant, why the remorse for slaying them? You were doing the world a favour.”

  “Oh, I know.” Hax flushed. “It…it wasn’t really about the ghouls, so much. That’s why I said it didn’t count.”

  Frida raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Oh?”

  The elf-girl sighed. “One of the party of travellers I helped rescue was a likely enough fellow. I sort of…it’s…damn it!” Her face was flaming. “That one’s for him.”

  “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

  “No!” Hax flared, embarrassed.

  “Oh ho!” the priestess expostulated, suddenly interested. She raised herself on one elbow. “A suitor, then? Tell me more!”

  “Not a suitor,” the Elf-girl objected. “Not hardly. Not while I’m on the run. And not –” Hax stopped herself, unwilling to go any further.

  “Not what?” Frida pressed.

  Hax sighed. She wasn’t going to be able to avoid this any longer. “ ‘Not a half-blood’, is what I was going to say,” she replied ruefully. “I’m sorry, Frida. My upbringing got the better of my sense, there.”

  The priestess was silent for a moment. “Sounds like an elf thing,” she said at last.

  “It is.”

  Frida nodded slowly. “Far be it from me to question your customs,” she said, in the tone of one who was about to do precisely that. “But I’ve never understood why you folk of the Third House deem the ancient half-breeds, the Hiarsk, acceptable as friends or mates, but hound the recent half-breeds so mercilessly.”

  Hax’s voice was small. “Nor do I.”

  An uncomfortably moment of silence ensued. Finally, Frida said, “You were telling me about the tattoos. You do them yourself, aye?”

  “Are they that bad?” Hax asked, surprised.

  Frida chuckled. “No. It’s just that there’re none on your back,” she replied. Glancing lower, she added, “Or your backside.”

  Hax hastily adjusted the narrow towel that Bert had draped across her posterior.

  “Stop twitching, skinny,” the masseur growled. He went to work on her lower spine. Conversation ceased as Hax lapsed into a relaxed haze.

  Thoroughly tenderized, the pair stumbled into an adjoining chamber where careful attendants brushed, combed and disentangled their hair. Neither spoke the travelling tongue, so Frida obligingly translated Hax’s questions and instructions. And, as it became apparent later on, gave a few of her own.

  Exhausted by their endurance ride through the Feywood, warmed by the bath, loosened up by Tordbert’s expert ministrations, and lubricated by a large glass of mead, Hax fell asleep in the soft leather chair while still under the brushes and combs of the hairsmiths. Some unknown time later, she was shaken awake and handed a polished steel mirror – and gasped when she saw that her thick masses of curls had been expertly knotted into an intricate pattern of braids, complete with silver, bone and stone beads. They clicked and clattered when she shook her head.

  As she gaped, she heard Frida laughing and slapping her knee in a transport of hilarity. “I look like a dwarf,” Hax said plaintively. The she blushed, hoping it didn’t sound like an insult.

  The priestess didn’t seem to take it as such. “Well,” she gasped between chuckles, “if you gained a hundred pounds and we pencilled in a moustache, you’d be well on your way.”

  This set Hax to giggling. She was still laughing brightly when she got back to her chamber.

  She dressed in a simple but serviceable blouse and skirt, with a calfskin vest that she loved – the one that her benighted aunt had said made her ‘look like a pirate’. So attired, she sought out the dining hall.

  Dinner was an enormous success. Wynstan had arranged a private room, and the four of them made merry late into the night. At least, it felt like night to Hax.

  At one point – after three deep cups of mead – Hax finally thought to ask the question that had been bothering her for hours. “How d’ye know it’s ‘night’?”

  “Clocks,” Wynstan grunted. “How do Elves do it? Look up?” He chuckled into his mug.

  Frida rapped her husband across the knuckles with the rib-bone she had been gnawing on for the past several minutes. “Léasergerád!” she snorted. Turning to Hax, she said, “We keep time with water-clocks, dearie. Bells strike the hours during the work-day.”

  “How do you…how do you set them?” Hax asked. Her lips felt slightly numb. Evidently, the mead was a little stronger than the Homelands vintages to which she was accustomed.

  “The Art,” the priestess replied shortly. “Each city has a master-clock; the magi use their divinations to determine when the Lantern is directly overhead. We servants of the Powers can do it too. I’ve done it myself, from time to time. It’s nothing special. We set the master-clock like that, and all the citizens set theirs by the master-clock.”

  Hax shook her head, puzzled. “Why do you care?” she asked blearily. “Why does this hour matter, or that one?” Blinking, she added unnecessarily, “I’m a little drunk.” Reaching out, she carefully slid her cup to the centre of the table. Enough, she thought blearily.

  “Gotta keep the Tube on time,” Uchtred replied happily, misreading her gesture and topping her goblet up from a clay pitcher. “Can’t schedule the coaches without a decent clock.”

  “What you just said,” Hax replied solemnly, her eyes blinking with alarming rapidity, “made absolutely no sense.” The room began to spin.

  Wynstan and Frida shared a look. “Bed,” they said simultaneously.

  Hax shook her head angrily. “Non…nonshensh,” she stammered. “’m fine. No problem. Got an iron…an iron cons…consti..”

  Uchtred caught her as she tumbled off her chair.

  ♦

  They started early the next day. Hax’s head was still throbbing from the evening’s excesses, but with characteristic cross-grainedness, she refused Frida’s offer of healing magic. Wynstan had controlled his appetite, but Uchtred had imbibed four cups for each of Hax’s, and was in sore straits until the priestess sorted him out with a bri
ef prayer and a much longer lecture.

  “At least she didn’t poke me in the ribs,” the engineer quipped to Hax as they started out. Frida heard him, and did just that.

  The elf-girl was delighted to find that she would be able to ride Breygon’s mare to their next destination. The Gamolportherpath (“ ‘Ancient Town-Road’,” Frida explained primly while Hax choked on the pronunciation) was of the same generous proportions as the road to the gate: some ten paces wide and twice as high, vaulting to an ogive somewhere high above their heads. This was enough space not only for her to go horsed, but for Wynstan and Uchtred, with care, to navigate their fire-coach. “We’ll have to leave it at Midpoint Station,” Uchtred told her, “at least until a bulk cargo coach has space for it. Your horse, too. But they’ll catch up with us eventually.”

  Hax didn’t know what a ‘bulk cargo coach’ was (or for that matter, a ‘midpoint station’), but she knew that she did not like the idea of being separated from her mount. It wasn’t so much a question of affection, although she had grown genuinely fond of the companionable creature, not least because it represented, in some distant way, a link to its former owner. It was more a matter of speed. She had no idea whether there was anyone on her trail, but if there was, she hoped to be able to outrun anything she couldn’t outfight.

  This last question was still plaguing her. Since entering the Deeprealm she had relaxed a little; she might be woefully ignorant of dwarven customs and lifestyles, but she now knew that their homeland was shielded against flux-leaping by ancient and powerful magicks. Even if someone was capable of probing for her with arcane means, they wouldn’t be able to pop in and assault her. She was as safe as she could be, for now.

  She finally learned to pronounce the name of the city they had visited – Néwólnes Ceastorhlid – as they were leaving it behind; but as her comrades continued to refer to it as “Eastgate”, she did the same. Hax was determined to learn more of the dwarven tongue, and to her delight, Uchtred and Frida agreed to teach her.

  It proved to be a more difficult task than she had anticipated. The dwarves’ language was wholly unlike her native tongue, replete with peculiar accents and odd, guttural stops. But it wasn’t as difficult as it might have been; she was already fluent in the travelling tongue, and that, after all, was really nothing more than a barely organized mish-mash of the old Yonar-ri and modern Jarlin tongues, flavoured with dashes of Elven, dwarven and even halfling talk, and with a smattering of archaic contractions, giantish proverbs, goblin curses and the odd bit of wyrm-speech thrown in for good measure. Many of the easier words they taught her she already knew; it was simply a matter of discovering how to pronounce them correctly and in the proper order, and learning to spell them using the angular dwarven runes.

  This latter task was something of a bother, as she was unable to read while on horseback. Frida resolved this difficulty via the simple expedient of writing the letters in fiery lines in the air before her. Hax’s lessons progressed speedily after that.

  They spent their nights at the comfortable if utilitarian hostels that appeared alongside the Town-Road at regular intervals, every five miles or so. Uchtred tried to augment her linguistic training by recounting children’s tales in the dwarven tongue: simple stories and parables, intended to convey simple messages. It was slow going; after each telling, Frida would help the elf-girl work through the syntax and verb tenses, and correct her understanding of some of the concepts and vernacular that she had missed. The priestess did so with good humour and no visible frustration, and Hax thanked Miros for her luck at finding someone who not only genuinely liked her, but enjoyed teaching too, and had a knack for it.

  On one of these occasions, Frida managed to prod Uchtred into singing an old dwarven ballad, recounting the tale of Malloch the Mighty at the Bridge of Bones. Hax listened to it carefully, and was disappointed to only be able to pick up a word here and there. Frida told her not to feel bad, as although the piece had been written recently, it had been crafted in an ancient idiom by an author trying to recapture the sense of battles long past. She made the engineer repeat it, and translated it for Hax, working line-by-line. Hax agreed that it was an admirable tale, but that it lost some of its rolling majesty when rendered in the travelling tongue.

  More songs were sung. Other groups of travellers used the hostels as well, and Hax overheard many ballads, jingles and laments variously warbled and bellowed over the course of the evenings that followed the long days of travel. Most would have been indecipherable even had she possessed a rudimentary knowledge of the dwarven tongue; even her companions seemed to ignore them. But at one point during an evening’s meal, all three seemed to prick up their ears. Uchtred merely sighed; but both Wynstan and Frida looked grim, and the priestess, after a few stanzas, hissed “Tchah!”

  “What is it?” Hax asked, nonplussed by their reaction. She couldn’t understand the words, of course, but the rhythm and tune seemed remotely familiar.

  Frida seemed to come out of a grim reverie. “Eh?” she said. “Oh. Sorry, ducks. It’s just the song.” She nodded at the cluster of dwarves responsible for the offending tune. “Léoth ymbe Isenfyst. ‘The Lay of Ironfist’.” She snorted. “Hargóin’s great masterpiece.”

  “What about it?” Hax asked, perplexed at the mixture of annoyance and contempt in her friend’s tone.

  “Load o’bollocks,” Wynstan growled. He was staring at the offending singer with narrow, red-rimmed eyes.

  Hax listened more closely, trying to sort the melody from the syncopated rattle of the tambours. “I’ve heard this before,” she said, increasingly certain. “A skald sang it, at one of my…at a feast I attended, back in Joyous Light. It’s about how Ironfist slew the Spellweaver, the king of the Sobrinatri, the Shadelf who invaded the Deeprealm.”

  “That’s the one,” Wynstan grumbled. “Threescore years it’s been, now.” Hax noticed that he had a spoon in his hands, and had twisted it into an unusual shape.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear, dearie,” Frida said, patting her husband soothingly on the arm.

  They did not offer to translate the song for her, and, after witnessing their reaction to it, Hax decided that it would be imprudent to ask.

  Afterwards, lubricated by a little too much mead (the first she had touched since what she had come to call her ‘day of debauchery’ in Eastgate), she was convinced to sing a ballad of her own. Hax had never been considered much of a songstress among her own people. The minstrels of Eldisle were renowned throughout the Homelands, and her own lute master – a scrawny halfling martinet with a lazy eye and the unlikely and deliberately appalling stage-name of ‘Packalful of Shyte’ – had once dismissed her vocal pretensions as “the tuneless warblings of a gravel-throated little thug.” Her training companion, poor Palkywan, outraged at the insult to his friend, had chased the nimble little fellow around her father’s great hall with a hearth shovel. But with her inhibitions numbed by honey-wine, she stood near the firestones and, doing her best to recall her lessons, held forth.

  As Wynstan had given her a war-song, she decided to reply with one of her own: Ultimo Pugnum Fineleorus et Antaïssina – the ‘Last Battle of Fineleor and Antaïssin’, which Sylloallen had, at her mother’s urging, drummed into Hax’s head. After so many repetitions, she could at least be certain that she wouldn’t forget the complex stanzas, even under the influence of too much drink. There were other reasons for her choice, too; the ancient general was, after all, her namesake, and the source of her nomen virago, her war-woman’s moniker. And, too, the song reminded her of the tavern in Bornhavn; of a local skald who had known the Lugeo, of rough hands in hers, a racing heart thudding against her ribs, and warm breath on her neck.

  She shook her head to clear it and tried to concentrate. Her voice was untutored, but it was at least clear, and several octaves higher than the dwarves were accustomed to. I must sound like a twittering bird to them, she thought giddily,
appalled at her audacity, wondering idly how many of them had ever seen or heard a bird. Such inane introspections nearly caused her to stumble and she forced herself to concentrate. As she worked her way through the convoluted verses, singing in her mother tongue to preserve the rhyme and scansion, sweat beaded her brow.

  When she finished, she was surprised by a thunderous round of applause. Flushing scarlet, she turned to see that the whole population of the Town-Road hostel had gathered behind her. Five-score Dwarves, including a dozen children, were hooting enthusiastically and slapping their left hands against their right shoulders. Her embarrassment deepened further when one of their number – an ancient greybeard, so bent with age that his chin-whiskers seemed to brush his knees – came forward, mumbled something incomprehensible to her, and favoured her with a gap-toothed smile.

  “Bend down,” Frida whispered. Hax complied. The old fellow seized her by the shoulders with a grip that belied his frailty, and kissed her soundly on both cheeks. Feeling as though her face was likely to burst into flame, Hax straightened up again, and found that the eldling had put something around her neck. She fingered it, finding a bright, irregular orange stone on a fine silver chain.

  She returned the old fellow’s smile, and made as if to return the bauble, but he motioned for her to keep it. Sensing the mood of the crowd, she seized one of the old fellow’s hands, kissed it, and placed it against her forehead in the elven gesture of a student acknowledging a master. This proved to be a hit with the onlookers, who responded with a roar of approval. The old dwarf grinned toothily again, bursting into laughter; then, oddly, he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, smiled again, and ambled back into the crowd.

  Hax found a battered copper mug thrust into her hand, and realizing that she was thirsty, raised it to her lips and took a deep draft. Raw, scented alcohol seared her throat, and she sputtered and hissed like an untended kettle. “Appello Defensor!” she swore, choking. “What in all the hells is this?”

  “Laguhland,” Frida replied with a grin. “It’s a distilled spirit.”

  “What’s it m-made from?” Hax gasped. “Dragon b-b-bile?”

  “It’s – ” Uchtred began.

  Frida stopped him. “You don’t want to know,” she interjected, winking at her. “And don’t try to dump it when nobody’s looking.”

  “Why not? Would it damage the stone?”

  “Custom,” the priestess smiled. “You have to finish it, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re not serious,” Hax gasped. Her throat felt as though she had swallowed a handful of nails.

  “It’s the ‘Cantor’s Cup’, dearie,” the priestess replied, smiling roguishly. “You’ve been adjudged the best singer of the camp. Old Burarda tradition. Bad luck not to empty it.”

  “Bad luck not to empty it in one go,” Uchtred added helpfully, draining his own cup by way of example.

  Hax looked at the oily poison swirling in the bottom of the vessel. “What was the old fellow chortling about?” she asked.

  “Just some subtle cultural differences,” Frida answered, grinning. “When a Dwarf-maid kisses her suitor’s hand and places it on her forehead, she is agreeing to be ruled by him. It’s part of our betrothal ceremony.” She laughed. “Lucky for you I’m not a priest of Lagu, or I could have welded you to that knock-kneed old bugger on the spot!”

  “Don’t you mean ‘priestess of Lagu’?” Hax asked, eyes wide. “And what do you mean, ‘welded’?”

  “Lagu…only admits priests,” Uchtred snorted drunkenly. “M-m-men. Frida l-l-lacks at l-l-least one of the qual…qualifications.”

  Frida threw a bone at the engineer, striking him squarely in the forehead. Unperturbed, he rubbed grease from between his eyes, adding “And ‘welded’ means m-m-married.”

  Ally turned to Frida. “I’m lost,” she admitted.

  “Lagu’s priests,” the dwarf-woman said slowly and carefully, “are the only members of the Dwarf-Lords’ clergy empowered to perform namings, betrothals, weddings, and funerals. The rest of us can assist, but not officiate.

  “So you see,” she added, taking a deep draught, “you should ask about our customs instead of improvising. By law and tradition, you just about got engaged to the old fellow.”

  “Ælást,” Uchtred chortled drunkenly. “Don’t se-se-settle for l-l-less.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What my inebriated kinsman means, I’m sure,” Frida said, casting a threatening glance at the engineer, “is that we should all hope for a lifemate who inspires Ælást: the eternal vow, unbreakable even by death.”

  “How can a vow be ‘unbreakable by death’?” the elf-maid asked, baffled.

  “ ‘S a dw…a dw…dwarven thing,” the engineer mumbled. Somehow he managed to get himself to his feet, and trundled off to a dark corner, his intentions obvious.

  “I have got to learn more about this place,” Hax muttered to herself. “And your...ah, peculiar customs.”

  Frida chortled gleefully. “You’re holding one of those customs right now, cildic,” she prodded. “Bottoms up!”

  Hax stared into the vessel; there had to be a good half-pint of liquid skyfire remaining in it. She braced herself, put the cup to her lips, took a deep breath, and upended it.

  Things went rapidly downhill from there.

  ♦

  Despite moving at a steady pace and over much smoother terrain than she was accustomed to, it took the group eight days to reach the small underground town known as ‘Midpoint Station.’ Frida had explained the peculiar etymology during the trip. Due to the great distance between Eastgate and Elder Delvin, the Town-Road had, in the past, originally led to the surface on the western edge of the Feymount, allowing caravans to travel through uninhabited and fairly inhospitable valleys high in the Deeprealm Range, before plunging underground again closer to the centre of the dwarven kingdom. But the cutting of the Tube lines had changed that. Now, the Town-Road led to a station on the line connecting Gálmodnædre – a large settlement southeast of the Famgían Mere – to Carrlár, which, after Elder Delvin and Underdarrow, was the oldest of the ancient dwarven tunnel cities. The Town-Road met the Tube line roughly at its midpoint – hence the serviceable, if unromantic, name.

  “Sooner or later,” Frida explained, “we’ll get around to cutting a direct line from Carrlár to Eastgate. Then this highway will be no more than a relic of older days.”

  “It won’t be ‘sooner’,” Uchtred groused. “That’ll be the longest tunnel ever cut. And it won’t be nice and straight, either; it’ll have to pass under valleys and through a lot of fractured rock. Nasty proposition.”

  “I’m sure you lot’ll manage,” Frida said soothingly.

  “You’re working on that project?” Hax asked, surprised. She had known the Uchtred had some experience with the Tubes, but he had never mentioned any ongoing involvement.

  The dwarf shrugged, saying nothing. Frida lowered her voice. “He won’t admit it, but they need his help. One of his old school chums is a chief architect on the Carrlár- to-Eastgate dig, and he’s asked Uchtred to help devise new – what’s the word? ‘Mission cams’?”

  Uchtred nodded soberly.

  “New mission cams,” the priestess continued, “for the line. The tunnellers are having trouble negotiating the waterbreaks, strain zones and blind caverns. And nobody knows the little tin buggers like their daddy does.” She gave Uchtred an affectionate shove.

  Hax blinked several times. “I didn’t understand any of that,” she confessed.

  Frida chuckled. “Well, you will once you see more of the system. We’re proud of the old wrench-bender here; each of his toys can do the work of a thousand dwarves.”

  “Four hundred and sixty six,” Uchtred corrected her absently.

  This peculiar exchange gave Hax plenty to think about as they entered Midpoint. The town was nothing like the orderly if busy Eastgate; it was a jumbled, chaotic mass of surging
dwarven bodies, a throng vastly complicated by countless parcels, coaches, carriages, carts, vendors, hawkers, itinerant priests, soldiers, draft and food animals and a bewildering variety of pets. Odours both identifiable – roasting meat, mead, and even the dreadful Laguhland that she had learned through bitter experience to avoid – and unidentifiable assailed her nostrils. And the aural cacophony was, after more than a week underground, simply deafening.

  What truly overwhelmed her senses, however, was the sight that awaited her once they reached their destination. After struggling through surging crowds for more than an hour, they finally reached the heart of the settlement. The fire-coach, followed closely by Hax on horseback, rolled slowly through an enormous pair of bronze-rigged stone doors, and into a cavern greater than anything she had yet seen underground.

  “Welcome to Midpoint Station,” a grinning Uchtred shouted over the din.

  Hax goggled. The tunnel opened onto a roughly spherical chamber that was easily two, maybe three hundred paces across, lit by crystal globes hanging from chains fixed to the far-distant ceiling. Overhead, immense stalactites hung point-downwards, water dripping from their gleaming tips. Before her, and all around, thousands upon thousands of dwarves surged in disorderly waves, circumnavigating piled ranks of wooden crates, metal barrels, nets of miscellaneous cargo and tethered animals of all kinds. The walls were lined with vendors of every possible variety, selling everything from hot bread, cold ale and spit-roasted meat to clothing, arms, armour, more animals, books, printed broadsheets, potions, exotic spices and fungi, hair and beard-trimming services and an indescribable welter of miscellaneous knick-knacks.

  An odd sound made her look down, and she gasped. The stone floor was gone; the pedestrians, the fire-coach and her horse were walking across an artificial floor made entirely of intermeshed metal rods. She could see larger iron beams and thick, angular braces beneath them, connecting the structure to the stone walls, as well as numerous walk-ways, passages and ladders further down, and, far below – very far, she thought with a gulp – the glint of water.

  Uchtred damped the coach’s boiler down to a low hiss, and Wynstan edged the contraption forward at a crawl, leaning over the buckboard to keep a closer eye on the foot traffic, all the while making for the opposite end of the metal platform. Hax examined this more closely. The platform ended before reaching the far wall, butting up against what appeared – from a distance, anyway – to be a colossal tree trunk lying on its side. As they approached, however, she could see that her perception had been somewhat off. The thing was clearly artificial: a gigantic cylinder of metal, seven or eight paces in diameter and more than a hundred paces long. It emerged from the left-hand wall of the cavern, traversed its full width, and disappeared into the right-hand wall. Robust iron braces supported it, fastened to the stone walls with heavy bolts, and it was covered by a bewildering metal scaffold, and festooned with other pipes and conduits both large and small.

  Her inspection was interrupted by a sudden rumble, like distant thunder. She looked around, alarmed; but no one in the crowd seemed to be disturbed. The sound grew louder, and louder still; and then it was suddenly overtaken by a roaring like a nearby waterfall. The cacophony reverberated through the immense cavern. Hax’s horse, reacting to her nervousness as much as to the sudden roaring, shifted skittishly, and she struggled to keep him from trampling the dwarves that clustered all around.

  She leaned over and tapped Frida on the arm. “What in all the hells is that thing?” she shouted.

  “Our next leg!” the priestess shouted back.

  Like vapour from a bursting dam, a blasting spray of water exploded out of a series of valves protruding from the gigantic iron tube. As this new noise died away, Hax could hear a rumbling squeal, like ungreased wagon wheels, and a heavy clatter, all seemingly growing closer.

  The enormous tube began to shiver, and then shake, vibrating like a tree in a high wind. A groan of stressed metal echoed through the cavern, and the squealing rose in pitch until it seemed to pierce her ears…and then it suddenly died away. Silence fell, and the bustling babble of the dwarves began again.

  Blasts of air and water issued from the enormous pipe…and then, suddenly, huge doors opened all along its length, disgorging hundreds of busy-looking dwarves onto the platform. These newcomers melded instantly with the crowd, who began pushing and jostling towards the metal portals.

  The commotion overwhelmed Hax’s senses. She came back to herself with Frida all but yelling into her ear. “Let’s go!” the priestess shouted. “We’ve about a half-hour to see to the coach and your horse, and get aboard.”

  “Aboard? That?!” the elf replied, incredulous.

  “Aye!”

  Hax took a deep breath and tried to force her misgivings into a small compartment in her mind.

  “Is there a problem?” Frida asked, seeing the look of panic on the elf-girl’s face.

  Hax forced an unconvincing smile. “Not so long as you’ve got some more of that Laguhland handy,” she shouted back.

  ♦

  “Won’t Wynstan be upset?” Hax asked.

  Frida fluffed her pillow. “Not as upset as you’d be if you had to put up with Uchtred’s nocturnal gut-rumblings. And his ‘accidentally’ pawing you while you’re washing up.”

  As it turned out, Frida had some pull with the station manager, and despite a long waiting list, had managed to secure two cabins in a first-class coach. As all of the cabins came with two bunks, she had decreed that the two women would travel in one room, and the two men in the other. Obviously doesn’t think I’m sufficiently acclimated to dwarven customs just yet, Hax thought wryly when she heard about the sleeping arrangements. Not that she’d been looking forward to getting another glimpse of Uchtred’s hairy torso. The man ought to shave with sheep-shears. If he ever shaved, she amended belatedly.

  They had turned over the fire-coach and Hax’s horse to the station’s cargo wranglers. Hax had been concerned about saying goodbye, but the patient animal seemed perfectly content to go with the dwarves, who appeared to be competent at their trade and accustomed to dealing with large beasts. The purser had assured her that the mare would be sent along with the next bulk cargo shipment (“Midnight tonight, at the latest, my lady!” the fellow had promised, looking harried but efficient), so she shouldered her saddle bags and followed Frida and Wynstan, who were trundling their own rather bulkier possessions along in a hand-cart.

  They had only just found their rooms when the great doors clanged shut, and the coach lurched slightly. “Best sit down until we’re up to speed,” Frida had counselled. Hax had plopped herself down on her bunk, feeling her gorge protest as the coach accelerated. She could hear water rushing past beneath her. From all around came a low, thundering rumble, like a cacophony of cartwheels on a smooth road. She concentrated on studying the bunk on which she sat; built for a dwarf, it was barely long enough for her to stretch out, but could have accommodated three others of her girth. A human’s feet would be out in the hallway, she thought with an inward chuckle.

  After a couple of moments, the tremble subsided and the rushing noise eased somewhat. The walls, ceiling and floor still vibrated slightly, but there was something in the suspension of her mattress that damped the motion down. She found that if she picked her feet off the floor, there was almost no sensation of movement save for an occasional, almost imperceptible lurch.

  “What’s ‘up to speed’?” she asked, curious.

  “Eh?”

  Hax glanced over at the dwarf-woman. “You said to sit down ‘until we get up to speed’. How fast are we going?”

  “Ah,” Frida replied. “About five leagues in the hour, I think.”

  Hax blinked. This thing – which, by the evidence of her senses, was scarcely moving at all – was travelling as fast as a galloping horse? “You’re joking,” she said uncertainly.

  “Not me, dearie,” Frida answered with a light laugh. “
They can go faster, of course, but the pilot keeps the speed down so as not to mess up the schedules. And to avoid accidents, of course.”

  Hax nodded, looking around at the tiny room, and marvelling at the sophistication of the contraption. “How does it all work, anyway?” she asked, her voice full of wonder.

  Frida shrugged. “Water pressure,” she replied. “Best get Uchtred to explain it for you,” she added. “That way he won’t have to correct any mistakes I make.”

  She reached for and found a small bronze key in the ceiling, and made a small adjustment. Cool, moist air flooded into the tiny room. “A little chilling,” she said apologetically. “But it gets stuffy otherwise.”

  The cabin may have been small, but it was comfortable. Hax had to watch her head, as the outer wall of the coach - it was a perfect cylinder, conforming to the shape of the vast metal tube she had seen from the platform – curved up and over them. But in view of Hax’s slender physique, Frida probably had more room than if she had shared a compartment with her broad-shouldered husband.

  She mentioned this to the priestess, who laughed. “Aye, doubtless they’re in each others’ laps over there.”

  Despite the stature of the accommodations, Hax found them very cleverly laid out. Small compartments were built into the ceiling, floor, walls and even the bunk itself; she had no problem stowing her kit, and she was even able to wedge her sword and bow into one of the shelves by laying them cross-wise. Frida opened a low, broad closet, and showed her how to work the facilities it contained. Hax was delighted to see that she would not be forced to go without bathing, or to share common toilet facilities with hundreds of other passengers.

  “Worth every doubleweight,” Frida snorted. “The poor souls in steerage make do with wooden benches and one pot for four-score riders. Of course, they pay pennies. It’s fine to ride this way, but plenty costly.”

  Hax started slightly. It was the first time that any of the dwarves had ever mentioned money in her presence. At the conclusion of their stay at the inn in Eastgate, she had tried to settle her bill, only to find that it had already been paid. No one at the any of the Town-Road hostels had ever asked for remuneration (she had assumed that the dwarves were paying her way behind her back – an uncomfortable situation, but one that she had not been able to figure out how to address). She had bought a few things at the odd vendor’s stall during their underground voyage, paying in the plain but serviceable Zaran coins, which the proprietors had accepted readily enough; but the one time she had tried to raise the question of paying her share with Wynstan, he had harrumphed abruptly and stomped away.

  She had been afraid to raise it again. But she couldn’t let the matter go unsettled any longer. “Frida,” she said hesitantly, “I want you to tell me how much this costs, so I can pay you what I owe.”

  “Nothing,” the priestess said curtly, concentrating on arranging her bedding to her satisfaction.

  “Come now,” Hax snapped. “You’ve been extraordinarily generous, offering the open hand of friendship to a stranger, no questions asked, when you could have asked many, and would have been justified in expecting answers. I will always treasure the friendship you have shown me. But I cannot allow you to continue to pay my debts. I have money. I want you to take it.” She crossed her arms and did her best to look stern.

  It didn’t work. Frida chuckled ruefully. “Time for another lesson, I see. Sit down, ducks,” she said, waving at Hax’s bunk.

  Hax sat, feeling both frustrated and puzzled.

  “I know how we dwarves are portrayed in the outside world,” the priestess mused, pulling out a soft cloth and polishing her medallion with it as she spoke. “As money-grubbing jewel-mongers, no? Hoarders of treasure. Greedy, grasping, gold-hungry…”

  “Yes,” Hax interrupted, feeling terribly embarrassed. “That’s about the gist of it.”

  “And,” the priestess continued remorselessly, “those tales are especially pointed when told by the folk of the Third House. Are they not?”

  Hax nodded, her face flaming.

  “I’m not trying to embarrass you, dearie,” the dwarf-woman said in a kindly tone, “but only to suggest that you think about the other things you have seen in the past week. Think about how well your experience accords with the tales you were told.”

  “Not at all,” Hax replied immediately. “You…this place…” She shrugged. “It’s like the difference between cub-tales and the real world.”

  Frida nodded. “It’s time to broaden your linguistic education a little.” She settled herself comfortably. “Do you know the word for we use for ‘money’?” she asked.

  Hax nodded. She had heard it used many times around her household as a child, and it was one of the staples of the travelling tongue. “Goldóra,” she replied instantly.

  “Wrong,” Frida said, grinning. “That’s just a colloquialism. It really means ‘gold ore’. The gold-bearing rock from which we smelt the pure metal. A common misconception.”

  Hax frowned, taken aback.

  “How about ‘wealth’?” the priestess prodded.

  The elf-girl thought about that. She had overheard a great deal of dwarven conversation over the past few weeks, and thought she knew the answer. “Koneringerne?” she said hesitantly.

  “That means ‘royal seal’. We stamp the King’s seal on the coins, but that’s not what we call them. Try again.”

  Hax shrugged, and offered the only other term she had heard them use: “Céapgyld, then.”

  “Sorry,” Frida answered, smiling again. “That means ‘purchase price’.” She paused. “Shall I tell you?”

  “Please,” Hax answered, mildly annoyed, but interested in learning why she had misjudged what she had overheard.

  “Horines,” Frida said, with a guttural rasp in her throat.

  “Hang on,” Hax interrupted. “You’ve never used that word before. Not in my hearing.”

  “Not in a way that you would understand.” She breathed on her medallion, carefully polishing the mist away. “Do you know any words in our tongue that sound similar to horines?”

  Hax shook her head.

  “How about ‘gor’?”

  “ ‘Filth’?” Hax asked, incredulous. “What does that have to do with wealth?”

  “Everything,” the priestess replied intently. “Listen carefully, because it’s important that you understand this, and it’s not often any of our folk will pause to explain it to an outsider.

  “We dwarves,” Frida said, growing serious, “do not judge wealth by gold, or silver, gems or mithral, ostentation or the lack of it. We judge wealth by what it costs us to acquire it. We don’t care if one of our folk has a huge store of coin; we care how he obtained it.”

  “I don’t see the…” Hax interrupted.

  Frida ploughed ahead. “There are lesser means of obtaining wealth, and greater means. The lesser means include business, trade, taxes, usury; the greater means are knowledge, labour, the sweat of the brow, the aching back.

  “ ‘Filth’ and ‘wealth’, cildic, sound similar because, in our eyes, only the man who earns his fortune by his own labours is judged truly wealthy. Filthy hands mean a clean heart. The mud-spattered stonemason, the flat-thumbed smithy, the rouge-stained gem-cutter – these have always been the measure of truly wealthy men. They were the model for all, because they made wealth. Men with clean hands were reviled, because even if they paid dearly for it, they only took wealth.

  “In the travelling tongue,” Frida continued, chuckling, “there is a saying: ‘filthy rich’. You use it to revile someone who is exceedingly well-off, regardless of where his money comes from. Our saying - Gorine horines – sounds the same, but means the opposite. ‘Filthy wealth’ is, for us, a mark of pride. It is the origin that matters. Not the quantity.”

  She stowed her holy symbol back within her bodice and replaced the polishing cloth in her kit. “When you grasp that di
stinction, dearie,” she concluded, “you’ll understand us a good deal better.”

  “Just a minute,” Hax stopped her. “You can’t tell me dwarves don’t admire show-goods. I’ve seen some incredible clothes and trinkets here, and some downright stunning gem-work. Isn’t that ostentation?”

  “Remember who has the dirty hands, dear,” Frida chided her. “If I wear a diamond tiara – I have one, somewhere back at home – I’m not telling my neighbours that I have a great deal of money. I’m telling them that I disposed of my money in order to share in the glory of the work of someone whose skill and perseverance created it. My choice is to rid myself of ‘clean’ coin in order to acquire ‘filthy wealth’ – to own and display something exquisite, wrought by a master craftsman.” She began unpacking her luggage, folding her smallclothes carefully and stowing them away in the various compartments beneath her bunk. “By displaying a great artisan’s work, I honour the artisan. The money I pay for the piece is just a way for him to live while he plies his trade, and enriches us all.”

  “ ’Lyszi,” Hax muttered darkly.

  “Sorry?”

  “My aunt,” the elf said moodily. “My mother’s sister. She has a habit of giving people a tour of her show-room, telling them how much she paid for each of the trinkets. I once admired a silver brooch she was wearing – simple work, but powerful, a wonderful piece – and asked her where she got it. She couldn’t remember where or when she had purchased it, let alone who had made it – but she knew how much she’d paid for the thing. Down to the last, edge-clipped groat.”

  Frida nodded sagely. “Clean hands, I suppose?” she asked.

  Hax laughed without humour. “The cleanest.”

  “Customs differ, ducks.”

  Hax nodded slowly. “All things considered, I think I like your way better. Thank you for explaining that to me.” She snorted suddenly. “But none of it answers why you won’t let me pay my share.”

  “Oh, that,” Frida said, colouring slightly. “Well, the same principle – wealth lies in achievement, rather than money – encourages us to assist others according to their means. You’re on a quest, dearie. It’s the ultimate in ‘dirty hands’. We gain honour, and ‘clean our coin’, as it were, by spending it to assist you. The more assistance we can provide, the more honour we gain. And the more coin we ‘clean’.”

  Hax blinked several times. “Well, just don’t ‘clean’ yourself into the poor-house on my account,” she said, smiling.

  “Little chance of that,” Frida said glumly. “We’re…ah…rich, I suppose, is the best way to put it.” She looked uncomfortable, as if she were confessing a peccadillo.

  Hax sighed in confusion. “And that’s a bad thing?”

  The priestess managed to look furtive and embarrassed at the same time. “Well, among us, there’s such a thing as being too successful,” she said quietly. “Uchtred’s fire-coach design, the ‘lightless heat’ spell…Wynstan managed to turn those inventions into a business that did…a little better than we expected.” She sighed. “Well, a lot better, actually.”

  “I still don’t see how it’s bad,” Hax prompted when the dwarf-woman fell silent.

  “We couldn’t keep up with demand on our own,” Frida said. “That’s a shameful thing for a dwarven artisan to have to admit. We had to hire labourers to keep the business running.”

  Hax rubbed her forehead tiredly. “And it’s not good to employ your countrymen at a salary?” she asked, confused.

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Frida said, looking shocked. “It’s wonderful for them. But it meant running a business rather doing our own work. Putting his hammer down nearly killed Uchtred.

  “Now he’s so busy supervising the factory that he has no time for personal errands. No time to spend in his workshop, at his forge, inventing. For the first time in his life, his hands are clean. He’s a taker now, instead of a maker. That’s not true, of course, but that’s how he feels. Wynstan, too. That’s why I’ve been trying to talk Uchtred into taking the commission on the Carrlár-Eastgate tube. To keep him from going out of his mind.

  “This was our first time away together in six years, and we still spent it working. Uchtred had to keep his hand in. Idleness would’ve been the death of him.”

  Hax shook her head, perplexed. “All right, I can see how you would miss your métier,” she replied. “But it can’t be as bad as all that. I mean, how many people do you employ?”

  Frida scratched her chin. “When we left,” she said thoughtfully, “it was about eight thousand, with a payroll of about a quarter of a million double-weights.” She shrugged. “Probably more, now.”

  Hax did the arithmetic in her head. “Half a million crowns? Per year?” She asked faintly, her eyes slightly unfocussed.

  “Per month,” Frida corrected. Noticing the Elf’s dazed expression, she added sadly, “I told you we don’t like to talk about money.”

  Hax cleared her throat. “Just forget I asked,” she said after a moment. “I won’t challenge you for the tab any more. You can keep me as a pet for as long as you like.” Smiling widely, she added, “If you want to buy me something, I’ve always liked Ekhan. You could buy me Ekhan…”

  She kept up the flow of inane patter until Frida relaxed and began laughing again.

  ♦

  The half-day that Hax spent encased in the metal cylinder of the Tube coach between Midpoint and Carrlár was easily among the most fascinating in her long life to date.

  She nattered happily with Frida until the priestess fell asleep. Hax, much younger and in better shape after a month on horseback, was certainly fatigued by all of the travelling, but the unusual surroundings invigorated her, and her eyes refused to close. Moments after Frida’s snores began, the elf-girl stole out into the corridor, closing the cabin door with care and padding soundlessly down the long hallway.

  The coach was easily fifty paces from prow to stern. Do they even use those terms? she wondered idly. Based on the orientation of the thing when they had entered it, Hax’s cabin was on the ‘port’ side, so upon exiting it, she turned left, towards what she assumed was ‘forward’.

  The corridor was about five feet wide and comfortably high; the curved ceiling was an arm’s length over her head. Cabin doors punctuated the walls every three paces or so, and there were twenty on each side of the coach. Eight hands of passengers, she thought. Four-score in all. She tried to calculate how many people were under way at the moment…then realized that she had no idea how many coaches were linked together.

  Forward, she saw another door. Unlike the portal to her chamber, this one was heavier, a circular hatch of green-gold metal surrounded by what appeared to be about a dozen heavy bolt-ends. The whole apparatus was set in the end-wall of the metal tube.

  When she reached the door, she was surprised to see a middle-aged dwarf-woman tucked into a small nook, sitting in a comfortably padded chair. Before her, a small bronze bell protruded from the wall. A large, horizontal metal wheel with spokes like a ship’s tiller stood on a heavy metal screw set into the floor.

  “Feeling restless?” the dwarf murmured, speaking – much to Hax’s surprise – the elven tongue.

  “Yes,” she replied in the same language. “Is it possible to go forward?”

  The dwarf nodded brusquely. “Knock when you get to the pilot coach; the conductors get twitchy if you barge in on them.”

  “How about aft?” she asked.

  “Surely. Not much to see, though; you’ll have to crawl over the steerage passengers, and the cargo coaches’re buttoned up tight.”

  “Safety reasons?” she asked, wondering what lay beyond the cargo containers.

  “Necat. Insurance.”

  Hax didn’t know what that was, so she merely said, “Thank you,” and tried the hatch. After some fumbling, she managed to get it open.

  “Dog it behind you,” the dwarf said, and closed her eyes again
.

  Hax looked around, but did not see any dogs. Then, by process of elimination, she realized what the woman meant, and snorted in amusement.

  The hatch was heavy, but balanced and well-oiled. She was able to swing it open and shut again without difficulty. She snugged the latches down (‘dogged’ them, she sniggered softly) and found herself in a short, hinged tunnel formed of overlapping bronze rings. Some sort of black, spongy substance oozed from between the plates; she touched it with a fingertip and found it to be cold, and slightly sticky.

  She traversed the tunnel in two swift paces, and found herself facing another hatch. She opened this, stepped through, and secured it quickly again. Glancing around, she found that she was in another first-class coach, identical to the one she had just left. Once again, she padded noiselessly forward. Another dwarf – this one younger, and male – was perched on a chair behind the spoked wheel. He was snoring loudly. She managed to open the hatch and secure it again without waking him.

  Another short, hinged tunnel. On the far end, however, the hatch door had a runic inscription in dwarven runes, which of course she could not read. “Must be the ‘pilot coach’,” she muttered. Shrugging, she rapped on the door. She waited a few moments, then rapped again.

  The latches twitched and the door swung out, towards her. She stepped back.

  An older dwarf – male, with long, silvery braids and elaborate tattoos stencilled across both his cheeks in faded russet ink – blinked at her in surprise. Then, suddenly, he grinned. “First-timer, right?”

  “Yes,” she replied, relieved that he spoke the travelling tongue.

  “Want to take a look-see?”

  “Yes, very much,” she answered.

  He beckoned her forward. “Come on in. And make sure you shut the door tight; Theolg’s already had his bath this month, and ‘e won’t stand for another.”

  Hax stepped over the threshold, pulled the metal door to, and snugged the latches down. The dwarf watched her closely, nodding approval. “Good. Safety first.” He gave her a frank once-over. “Pretty,” he added, much to her surprise, and stuck out a calloused hand. “Welcome to the Iron Python, Pretty. I’m Faulgrimm Coyle, engineer.” Jerking a thumb over his shoulder, he added, “Conductor’s Doff Ogrettik. Co-conductor – that lump o’bacon there – hight Theolg Weasand.”

  The co-conductor – an immensely fat, hairy dwarf, with uncharacteristically yellow braids – called back from the front of the coach: “If she’s that pretty, you tunnel rat, you gotta share!”

  “I don’t think you’re her type,” Faulgrimm shot back. “She’s not blind or drunk! Come on, Pretty,” he continued with a wink. “I’ll show you ‘round.”

  “My name’s not ‘Pretty’,” Hax said faintly. “It’s…” she paused for a heartbeat, remembering what Frida had told Bert at Eastgate. “Lyszia. Lyszia Ellacana. Of Oststrand.”

  “Oststrand!” Theolg exclaimed, glancing over his shoulder. “Fantastic! Why, I once knew an Ostrander girl, nimble as a tunnel viper. She could wrap her legs…”

  Another dwarf – Hax assumed it was the conductor – leaned over and swatted Theolg on the head, hissing “Átemia! Keep your eyes on the shaft, you fat fool!”

  “Now, see, there you go again,” Theolg said in an aggrieved tone. “The clíewen ládmann told you, no more hitting…”

  “If you can ignore the comedy troupe,” Faulgrimm said sotto voce, “I’ll give you the tuppenny tour.”

  “Thank you,” Hax whispered. “What’s a clíewen?” she asked as they walked forward.

  “It’s…ah, there ain’t no word for it, in this tongue,” he replied, looking puzzled. “It’s a gathering, an organization. Of folk who work in the same field. To ensure good pay, fair treatment…”

  “Conlegium!” the elf-girl blurted out. “A guild! Like chandlers, or barrel-makers…”

  “…or teamsters,” Faulgrimm replied, smiling. “Right, right. Except we tunnel rats got a little more power than that. ‘Cause we keep things moving. Or we don’t. See?”

  Hax nodded. She did see. They could refuse to work.

  Or could they? she wondered a moment later. After what she had seen thus far, she had difficulty imagining any dwarf ever refusing to work.

  She had no more time for speculation about the nature of labour relations in the dwarven realm. Faulgrimm halted at the centre of the coach. “You can see most of it from here,” the elderly dwarf said in satisfied tones.

  He was right. The chamber was only about ten paces from the hatch at the rear to the two dwarves seated at the front. Beyond them was nothing but what looked to be a sharply angled, mist-clouded mirror, glittering with rainbow shimmers.

  The two drivers – conductors, she reminded herself – sat in comfortable, high-backed chairs. Each had a bewildering array of levers, all with different-coloured handles, protruding from the floor before him. Between them and slightly to the rear stood a larger version of the horizontal, spoked ‘ship’s wheels’ that she had seen at the forward ends of the coaches she had already traversed.

  Further back, on the left side of the coach, a small metal desk lay covered with open scrolls and bound volumes containing intricate ink drawings; while the right side consisted of an enormous armoire of beaten metal containing scores of tiny drawers. Further back still – near where she and Faulgrimm stood – were two sealed rooms.

  “Heads on the left,” Faulgrimm explained with a jerk of his thumb, “sleeping cabin on the right. For an extra co-conductor, on long-haul runs.

  “Okay,” the dwarf continued. “Left front is the conductor; he’s in command of the caravan. You ever see a boat?”

  “Of course,” Hax said, shooting the dwarf an incredulous glance.

  “Hey,” he said, raising his hands defensively, “it’s a natural question, no? I mean, how many dwarves have ever seen one?”

  The elf-girl nodded apologetically. “Sorry.” Am I ever going to get used to this place? she wondered despairingly.

  He waved her chagrin away. “Never mind. Anyway, conductor’s like the captain of a boat, you unnerstand? Second in command is the co-conductor. That’s him on the right. They each got the same controls.”

  “That’s what I wanted to know!” Hax interrupted eagerly. “How does it work?”

  “Oh, it’s really complicated,” Faulgrimm chuckled. “The wheel makes it go; the coloured levers make it stop.”

  Hax blinked. “That’s all?”

  “C’mere,” the dwarf said, motioning her towards the desk behind the conductor’s chair. “This is my station. I’m the engineer. I fix things when they break – not often – and spend the rest of my time telling these two idiots to slow the hells down.”

  Theolg raised a hand over the back of his chair and made a rude gesture.

  “Look here.” Faulgrimm pulled a large scroll from the chaos on his desk and unrolled it.

  It was a schematic diagram of the pilot coach. Hax goggled; the intricacy and sheer beauty of the penmanship was breathtaking. “It’s beautiful!” she breathed.

  “It’s just a technical drawing,” Faulgrimm said dismissively. “Look. See all of the coaches? They’re all basically cylindrical pipes, yes? Each is surrounded by wheelbelts, and the wheelbelts are connected fore and aft with braketendons. The bottom of each coach – beneath the floors, see? It’s hollow. A big channel. So we line up all the coaches and connect them with the hinged tunnel tubes, and ligature up the braketendons all the way from the aft-most coach to the main-cables here in the pilot coach. That lines up the bottom channels. Then we flood the tunnel behind the caravan.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Hax said, blinking at the deluge of unfamiliar terms. He was speaking the travelling tongue, to be sure, but it was like listening to an unfamiliar dialect. Only half of the words made any sense.

  But she thought she had understood one principle correctly. “Do you mean to te
ll me,” she asked in a tiny voice, “that we’re surrounded by water?”

  “Not ‘surrounded’,” Faulgrimm said patiently. “Not exactly. And keep your pretty yap shut whilst I explain the rest of this.” He softened his rebuke with a wink so elaborate that Hax couldn’t help but snicker.

  “The water flows under the coaches down the channel, see?” he continued. She nodded. “So when we’re ready to go, the conductor releases the braketendons and all the wheelbelts are free to roll. Then I turn the wheel and that shuts the watergate under the pilot coach. The water pressure builds up behind us, and off we go.”

  “Like a stick down a creek,” she whispered, staring at the schematic in fascination.

  “More like a cork out of a bottle,” Faulgrimm amended. “But yes, that’s the general idea.”

  “How fast?” she mused, half to herself.

  “Eh?”

  “How fast can you go?”

  “Fast as you want, bee-yootiful!” Theolg chortled, slapping an enthusiastic paradiddle against the arms of his seat, his beard bouncing against his enormous gut. Despite herself, Hax smiled at the man’s buffoonery.

  “Operating speed’s twenty-two feet per second,” Faulgrimm replied. “Call it fifteen miles in the hour, or so.”

  Hax nodded. She had no idea what a ‘second’ was, but it was obviously shorter than a minute. And fifteen miles in the hour was a reasonable canter for a good horse. “No faster?” she asked, sounding disappointed.

  The dwarf chuckled. “Plenty faster. Depends on how much of a hurry you’re in. We keep the speed down and steady mainly to serve the schedules and prevent avoidable accidents. Don’t want to bang into the south end of a northbound caravan. Also, slower speed means fewer maintenance problems. And it reduces the chance of a prang-up if we throw a wheelbelt or have a shaft problem.”

  “How much faster can you go?” she asked immediately. “And what’s a ‘shaft problem’.”

  “You’re a curious one, ain’t you?” Faulgrimm said with a grin.

  “Give her to me!” Theolg shouted. “I like’em brainy!”

  “You like’em breathing!” Faulgrimm shouted back, throwing a book at the co-conductor’s head. “Sorry about him,” the engineer said apologetically.

  Hax was quaking with suppressed laughter at this exchange. “How fast?” she asked again.

  Faulgrimm shrugged. “I’ve done a test run on a six-car caravan at ninety eff-pee-ess,” he said. “That’s close to forty-eight miles in the hour. We were trying out a new wheelbelt array, and held speed for thirty minutes without anything falling off.

  “And,” he went on, looking thoughtful, “I once had a repair coach, all by its lonesome, up to ninety miles in the hour, whilst trying to reach a flooding caravan that had buckled in the north-south tunnel near Cáffyst.” He scratched his beard solemnly. “Whoo. That was thirty years ago!

  “Well,” he mused, “wheel bearings’re better now. We could probably manage a hundred or better with a new pilot coach, unburdened, on a downhill run.”

  “Downhill?” Hax asked, puzzlement clear on her face.

  “Sure,” Faulgrimm replied easily. “Tunnellers keep the shafts level as they can. That way the water’s only fighting the wheels and the walls, not the world’s weight as well. But some lines have a slight downhill trend. Hard to avoid if you’re heading for an especially deep destination.

  “Like Dthrosmcíne, for example. The royal city’s deep, so the line from Elder Delvin’s downhill all the way. Return trip takes an extra three hours; you can only make about twelve eff-pee-ess, as the water’s got to push you uphill from start to finish. Plays hob with the schedules, heya, but what can we do? When theory bangs into the real world, you get engineering.” He paused for a moment, scratching his beard. “What was the other thing you asked?”

  She thought for an instant; the flood of information was fascinating, overwhelming, and she was struggling to take it all in. Hax resolved to have a sharp talk with her father when she got home. Nothing she had ever been told about the Deeprealm had revealed so much as a hundredth part of the glories she had witnessed thus far.

  Then she remembered that she was a fugitive. Her face fell as the crushing realization that she might well never see Joyous Light again landed on her like a falling tree limb. “Er…‘Shaft problem’,” she said. The vibrancy had gone out of her voice. “What does that mean?”

  With more than four centuries under his tool-belt, Faulgrimm was no fool. He noticed the change in the elf-girl’s demeanour and decided to take a slightly different tack. “Oh, lots of different things,” he said dismissively. “Fault line lets the water drain out, or a fallen bit of stone jams a wheel. Every now and then some tunnelling beastie breaks through and we have to do an emergency patch job to hold pressure until the masonry crews can come out and fix things up. Nothing serious.”

  Theolg turned in his seat and shot Faulgrimm a meaningful glance. The older dwarf shook his head surreptitiously. Hax, still focused on the schematic and her own inner concerns, noticed none of this.

  “D’ye want to look out?” Faulgrimm said, hoping to reignite her interest.

  Hax glanced up, eyes widening. “You can do that?”

  “Doin’ it right now, gorgeous,” Theolg interjected. “What’d ye think this was in front of me, artwork?”

  Hax stepped carefully around the big wheel and leaned over the portly dwarf’s shoulder. She stared intently at the angled wall with the rainbow pattern of flickering…and thought she saw…

  “It’s a window!” she exclaimed. “But what’s that on the other side?”

  “Spray,” Theolg interjected before Faulgrimm could answer. “We don’t close the watergate completely; if we did, we’d burn out the brakebelts and have us a runaway. So a lot of water escapes through the channel ahead of us. What you’re seeing is spray, reflecting the light in the cabin.”

  “It’s not just a speed control mechanism,” Faulgrimm added. They seemed to be competing for her attention, and Hax smiled again. “The coaches are watertight, up to the air intakes. They’re designed to float in the tunnels. Helps reduce friction. If we didn’t let a little water flow through ahead of us, we wouldn’t float, and the pilot coach wheelbelts would take too much pressure.”

  “It’s amazing,” she said, impressed beyond words. “But I don’t see how the window helps.”

  “Maybe elves don’t have dwarf-sight,” Theolg stage-whispered loudly.

  “Comedian.” Faulgrimm rolled his eyes. “Light the floods.”

  Theolg placed a chubby hand on a copper-coloured panel before him, intoning a short phrase in the dwarven tongue. Hax jumped as brilliant white light exploded into the tunnel ahead of them.

  “We keep the floods off because they’re distracting,” Theolg explained. “Only turn’em on if there’s an obstruction or something. We can see well enough without them.”

  “He means they keep him awake,” Faulgrimm added dryly.

  When her eyes recovered from the initial shock, Hax laughed out loud. She could see at least a hundred paces into the tunnel. Bright light illuminated the slick, shiny and perfectly cylindrical walls of the tube, and glaring in brilliant sparkles off the tumbling, frothy mass of foam that boiled out from under the prow of the pilot coach. The walls raced by; for the first time, Hax noticed the vibrations beneath her feet, and felt a sense of speed. She groped reflexively for the back of Theolg’s chair.

  The co-conductor laughed. “You should see what it looks like at top speed,” he chortled.

  “Yes, I absolutely should,” she agreed, mesmerized by the sight of the gleaming stone walls whipping past the window.

  Theolg leaned over to the conductor. “What do you say, boss?” he said conspiratorially. “Want to wind her out a little? Rattle the slugs a bit?”

  “Slugs?” Hax murmured.

  “Passengers,” the engineer replied.


  The conductor, who had sat silent and grim throughout all of this, cleared his throat. “Faulgrimm,” he said distantly, “If this blubbering pudding doesn’t put a clamp on his ale-pipe, you have my permission to render him down for bearing grease.”

  “Tyranny,” Theolg muttered darkly, as Faulgrimm and Hax laughed.

  The portly co-conductor shot an aggrieved glance at the elf-girl. “See what sort of conditions I have to work under? I’m telling you, the clíewen’s gonna hear about this.”

  ♦

  “Waste of bed linen, if you ask me,” Frida said half-seriously, handing Hax the cheese-knife. “Why pay for clean sheets if you’re going to spend the night chattering with ne’er-do-wells?”

  The second bunk had still been tightly made when the priestess had awoken after twelve hours’ unbroken slumber. Hax had returned from the pilot coach while Frida was refreshing herself in the cabin’s tiny water closet. When the priestess was finished, the elf-girl had splashed some water on her face, and the pair had gone in search of breakfast.

  “I was having fun,” Hax said, mumbling around a mouthful of dark, heavy bread. “This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. How much longer?”

  She was tired but alert, astonished by what she had seen. The realm of the dwarves was so astoundingly different from everything that she had been led to expect that she was still attempting to wrap her mind around the reality of the place.

  The elves of the Third House dismissed the children of Lagu as miners and metal-smiths, and she had had in her mind’s eye an image of bow-backed, grunting troglodytes scratching a living out of the rocks of the Deepdark. It was as false a notion as could be imagined, and the truth had set her back on her heels. She had to see, to learn, more.

  Did father know the truth? she wondered. Or Syllo? Or even Kalestayne the wizard, the most widely-travelled man she had ever met?

  Had her mother known?

  She wished she had more time. Hax had a passion for novelty, and an almost boundless capacity for wonder. She could easily have spent weeks on the tube, listening to Faulgrimm, prowling the thing’s innermost workings, learning more and still more without feeling fatigued, much less sated.

  But there was no time. No time! She had to push her astonishment into the background, and concentrate on the present.

  Not everything was glory and sunshine. Breakfast, normally her preferred repast at home, was proving to be her least favourite meal in dwarven lands. Where the elves emphasized fruits, nuts, bread and light pastries, a dwarf’s idea of fast-breaking appeared to be based on cured and smoked meats, salt fish, thick porridge (including what appeared to be a porridge chiefly of minced meat, with more meat roasted atop it), dense, dark breads and pungent cheeses. There was also a dizzying array of fried and pickled ‘deep-veg’ – assorted mushrooms and fungi, the origins of which Frida, after a first disastrous attempt involving something called gyruláser, or ‘mud-weed’, had delicately avoided explaining to her.

  And – of course – beer. Hax liked beer, but not for breakfast. She hunted in vain for tea.

  In response to her question, Uchtred swallowed, glancing up at the dials of the complicated chronometer that hung like a decoration over the door to the kitchen coach. “A little over an hour,” he replied.

  Turning to Frida, he added, “D’ye suppose Bedwulf’ll meet us?”

  The priestess shrugged. “I hope so. I’d like to show ‘Lyszi’ the glories of Stonewisdom.

  “If not,” she continued pensively, “we’ll leave a message and carry on. He can catch the next caravan, and link up with us in Ædeldelf.”

  Hax’s silent curiosity must have shown in her face. Frida nodded in her direction. “We’re stopping in Carrlár to look into a boiler design that Uchtred left with an artisan friend before we hied us for Dunholm and points east. Probably take a day or so. Then we’ll carry on to Elder Delvin, and then to Dthrosmcíne. That’s where the factory is. And home.”

  She paused for a moment, as if she wasn’t certain how her next words would be received. Smiling uncertainly, the priestess said, “You’re welcome to join us, cildic, and to stay as long as you like. Our home is yours.”

  Hax was taken entirely aback. Would a casual acquaintance in the Homelands have offered her houseroom so readily? She knew the answer, and it did not reflect well on elven hospitality. Or trust.

  She tried to smile in reply, but knew that it looked like a grimace. “I’ve never explained…”

  Frida reach quickly across the dining table and patted her hand. “No need to, ducks. There aren’t any conditions on the offer.”

  “I know. And I’m grateful,” Hax continued in a rush. “More grateful than you can imagine. But I’m not travelling, like you are.”

  That was sufficiently ominous to gain their attention. Three pairs of eyes widened.

  Hax sighed, and came to a decision. “I’m running. Before you offer to help me, you need to know why.”

  Glancing over her shoulder to make certain she would not be overheard, she told the three dwarves her story in about a dozen terse sentences. She told them everything – her dispute with her aunt, the battle in the palace gardens, her long flight eastwards. She did not bother recounting her meeting with Breygon and his comrades, reasoning that it had no bearing on her travails; and she omitted describing the cup she had found. Just to be safe, she mused. After all, she had suspicions about what it might be, but they were no more than that.

  “So you’re hunted,” Frida said matter-of-factly. “By your own folk, no less. And the Elf-Queen’s seers, and her guardians, too.” She laughed softly. “Oh, my. What a pickle, lass!”

  “No better place for you to run to,” Wynstan said unexpectedly. “You made a sound decision, there.”

  “How’s that?” Hax asked, subdued. She was relieved to finally have told her story to sympathetic ears, but nervous at spreading it further than she had to.

  The priestess shrugged. “The Deeprealm’s a good place for a runner to hide. It’s not easy to find one among millions, so far underground. And even if your queen’s diviners could locate you, there’s no way for them to leap in to accost you, or take you away from us. There’s no bending of the flux in the Deeprealm. Not in that wise, anyway.”

  Hax nodded. Qaramyn had told her the same thing, but she still wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think that will stop them,” she said quietly. “The Queen has the whole of the Ludus Astralis at her beck and call. The Master Magister of the College may well agree to seek me out himself. No disrespect to your ancient mages,” she said with a lopsided grin, “but it’ll take more than a dwarf-magic to stop Kalestayne of Arx Eos if he decides to seek me out himself. He’s…” She caught herself again. “I’ve known him since I was a little girl,” she finished lamely.

  Frida let out a prim snort. “And what would an elf-mage know of dwarf-magic?” she said, so haughtily that Hax could not help but laugh. “If need be, I’ll spirit you off to Underdarrow, and dare your mighty Kalestayne to seek you behind the door that denied Lagu himself!”

  “Actually,” Hax said quietly, “I was thinking of going there anyway.”

  “Really?” Uchtred said, leaning forward and entering the conversation. “My sister’s husband’s niece lives there. Got a nice doubler right down on the holy waters. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind a little extra company.”

  Hax chuckled wanly. “I wasn’t looking for company,” she said. “I was thinking of dropping in on your Archpriest, Deephammer.”

  Uchtred coughed into his ale, and Frida’s eyes widened. “ ‘Dropping in’, now,” she said softly, “and on the master of the First Forge, at that. That’s a bold plan.” The priestess leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “What could an elf be wanting to discuss with Father Deephammer, dearie?”

  “I’ll tell you back in the cabin,” Hax said evenly. She discarded the loaf-heel she had been toyi
ng with. “I’m full, anyway. Let’s go.”

  ♦

  “Dótheri dweorgalar!” Frida gasped, when Hax unwrapped the stolen cup and laid it on her bunk. “Do you…” she paused, catching her breath. “Ducks, do you know what this is?” The priestess extended a trembling hand, then drew it back. She turned stricken, worshipful eyes on the elf-girl.

  “I didn’t when I found it,” Hax replied morosely, “But I’ve had my suspicions ever since we spoke about it on the road, and Uchtred demonstrated his virtuosity as a poet. Judging by where I found it, and from your reaction just now, I’d guess it’s probably Lagu’s Cup.”

  She sighed heavily. “But if it is, then that only raises more questions. Who was trying to steal it from the royal vaults? Did they take anything else? Who were they working for?” She shuddered slightly. “Why was I allowed to escape so easily? If this is the most ancient and precious thing in the Queen’s vaults, then why isn’t every mage at the College looking for me, eh? Why hasn’t there been a regiment of the High Guard dogging my steps from the moment I left Starmeadow?”

  “All good questions,” Frida muttered, wiping her streaming eyes. “I can think of one more.” She glanced sidelong at the Elf-girl.

  “ ‘What am I going to do with it now’?” Hax asked, staring at her hands.

  “Aye,” Frideswide whispered.

  Hax shrugged, grinning wryly. “Give it back to the Dwarves, I suppose.”

  The priestess burst into racking sobs. Hax watched her carefully, slightly worried; she had never seen her friend break down so completely.

  After a moment, Frida regained control of herself. “Just like that?” she asked with a twisted smile.

  “Just like that,” Hax answered honestly.

  “It belongs to your queen,” Frida countered.

  “Does it really?” Hax asked. “I don’t know. And even if it did,” she continued, “your people have as much a claim on it as mine. I can think of no compelling reason to bring it back to Starmeadow. And I can think of at least one good reason to give it back to you.”

  Frida swallowed heavily. “What’s that, dearie?”

  Hax shrugged. “You took me in, befriended me, protected me, gave without asking recompense. You opened your hearts to me, a complete stranger, without equivocation or reserve.”

  She dropped heavily onto her bunk, causing the cup to bounce around and Frida to emit a terrified squeal. “Had our positions been reversed, do you know how unlikely it is that you would have received similar treatment from my kin? When we entered your lands, Frida, you vouched for me, and I was admitted without delay or demur. I doubt I could get you past the Crane Gate and into Starmeadow even if I held a knife to the Guard Captain’s throat.”

  “Would we not even be welcome in your home?” the priestess asked, surprise replacing awe on her face.

  Hax nodded. “For my part, always,” she replied. “But my home is my father’s home, and there his word is law. After…that…” she indicated the cup with a thrust of her chin “…well, I doubt my word will carry much weight, even with him.”

  “Surely you father would believe you if you told him the truth?”

  “Perhaps,” the elf-maid replied. “But he’s more than just my father, Frida. He is Lord of Joyous Light, Duke of Eldisle. He’s the Knight Commander of the Champions of Larranel, and one of the foremost members of the Queen’s Council. If the Queen has set her hand against me, then to believe me is to betray her.”

  She lowered her eyes, studying the floor. “Such a thing would be unwise in any kingdom. Amongst the children of the Third House, it would mean the end of his lordship. Perhaps the end of his life.” She drew her knees up to her chest, crossed her arms about them, and bit her lip to keep it from trembling. “I can’t make him choose, because I’m afraid that he would choose me...and that would be the end of him and our line. So, like as not, I’ll never see my home, or my father, again.”

  Frida sat next to the stricken elf and put a bulky, companionable arm about her shoulders. “Never say ‘never’, cildic,” the priestess chided gently. “We’ll build this one brick at a time, shall we?

  “First things first.” She took a deep breath. “If you’re serious about returning the Holy Cup to us – and I’m not pushing you, there’s no need to decide about it yet – then you’re right, you’ll need to see the Archpriest.” She smiled. “I know it’s small consolation, dearie, but if you do present him with a relic crafted by the hand of Lagu himself, you’ll be a hero of the realm, honoured for as long as you live. Deephammer will bless you, kneel before you, and shower you with gifts. Your own people may name you traitor, but here you’ll have your pick of titles.

  “And suitors, of course,” she added with a wink. “If, that is, you don’t mind bending down to kiss your husband, and shaving his back for him twice daily.”

  Hax, who had been weeping silently, burst into appalled laughter at this last sally. She used her sleeve to dry her eyes. “You make it sound so tempting,” she half-chortled, half-wept. “How could I refuse?”

  Frida smiled and patted her shoulder. “Here’s what I suggest,” she said. “Come with us to Elder Delvin. If you change your mind and decide to go on running, you can take the Tube from there to the north, to Céappyt – that’s ‘Seagate’ – and cross the Gebrytansæ to the lands of the Jarlin plunderers if you like. Or you can head south to Korfax, and the Great Waste, and Skywaters, however you please. From either destination, you can find a ship or a caravan, and keep moving.

  “If you decide to go on with your plan, though,” she continued, tapping her lower lip with a finger, “you can stay with us until we leave for Dthrosmcíne. I don’t know Deephammer personally, and Khallach’s servants have little pull with the masters of the First Forge. And my own hierarch, Akkinlo the Mountain-Tall, dwells at the mother temple in Caffyst. That’s too far out of our path.

  “But,” she added decisively, “one of my old acolytes works at the Palace. He’s an aide to Elder Brightly, the Archpriest of Zoraz, and the King’s spiritual advisor. Brightly’s a wise and sober man. If we can get to him, he can arrange your passage to Underdarrow, and give you his sigil as an introduction to Deephammer.” Her face turned solemn. “I’d like to see that. You’d be the first elf to pass the Barrow of Bowrnleoch since the Spellweaver met his end at Inflède under Deephammer’s fist, nigh on threescore years ago.”

  Hax nodded absently. “I thought Ironfist slew the Spellweaver,” she said after a moment’s reflection. “Along with Ven Porwenna, the elf-mage, and Harwéac Hargóin. Isn’t that what the song says?” She had heard the piece sung only recently, at one of their stops on the road from Eastgate, and recalled the tune vaguely. There was something in it about Ironfist’s sword breaking against the Spellweaver’s midnight blade; and Ven Porwenna falling before the white staff, to save her comrades.

  Ven Porwenna. Hax sighed. It wasn’t even an elven name so far as she could tell; certainly not Third House. Artistic license, she supposed. Or an exile trying to preserve her anonymity.

  “Well, Hargóin wrote that song himself, didn’t he?” Frida replied, slightly nettled, “and he was a friend of Ironfist, not Deephammer, was he not?” She snorted. “We’ve still a bit of a trip ahead of us. I’m sure you’ll hear more than one tune.” Then, calming her irritation, she took Hax’s hand and held it gently. “What do you say, cildic? Does it sound like a plan?”

  Hax nodded. “Thank you for being so…well, so good, about all this.”

  Frida shrugged the compliment off. “It’s my job, dearie. Now, dry your eyes,” she added, passing Hax a small, rough cotton handkerchief. “We’ll be in Carrlár shortly, and we’ll have at least a two-hour layover. Even if we’re not staying, that’s more than enough time to take a turn ‘round the shops of the lower market. I’ll need to see the runners and send a message to Bedwulf. And there’s a dressmaker there, does wo
nders with dthéostrfluyer hide…”

  As the priestess spoke, Hax wrapped the cup in a cloth and repacked it with the rest of her kit.

  They continued nattering about inconsequentialities, and by the time the caravan began to shuddering to a halt, with the customary shuddering, roaring whoosh of escaping water, Hax felt a good deal better.

  ♦♦♦