She smiled and returned to stripping the bones out of a fish with her long delicate fingers. Our own blue shadow? Kov thought. I wonder what that may mean! His heart ached to consult with Dallandra about these mysterious folk and the even more mysterious mist rising from their stolen treasures.
Kov had recruited his swimming teacher for his work in the chamber of gold, one Jemjek, a young Dwrgi man who had the muscles necessary for all the lifting and hauling ahead. An unexpected recruit had volunteered as well, a boy named Clakutt, just ten years old, with bright dark eyes and slender hands that could reach into the narrowest clay jars and bring out their contents. When together, they all spoke an odd mix of the Mountain dialect of Deverrian and the few bits of Dwrgi that Kov knew. No one had offered to teach him their language in any systematic way, leaving him to pick up what he could here and there.
On the morrow, when they returned from a swimming lesson, Kov took his helpers into the chamber of gold. As it always did, the sight of all the treasure, heaped as casually as dirty laundry but glittering in the light from their candles, turned his breathing heavy with excitement. He could feel sweat beading his back and the palms of his hands. Although he could regain control of himself with one deep breath, he wondered if some day, perhaps soon, he would stop wanting to gain control. It was the mist from the gold, he supposed, muddling his thinking. He wiped his hands dry on his brigga and turned his mind to the work ahead.
“Now, our first task for today,” Kov told his two helpers, “is clearing one of the corners.”
“Why?” Jemjek said.
“So we’ve got a place to put things?” Clakutt broke in.
“Exactly. Carry everything in that corner there,” Kov said, pointing, “into this clear space where I’m standing. Then we’ll start putting all the coins in the empty corner while we move things from the next one. Jewelry pieces without gems in that one, I think. And so on around the room.”
“But we leave any coins we find in that corner?” Clakutt said.
“Just so. Good lad!”
Kov picked up a gold coin, glanced at it, and nearly swore aloud. Since the death masks were of obvious Horsekin work, he’d been expecting Horsekin coins, but the coin bore Westfolk runes on one side and a roughly stamped Westfolk face on the other. He found another coin—again, Westfolk work. He picked up a golden brooch of a horse with wind-tossed mane and realized he’d seen one like it back home in Lin Serr, displayed as a treasure from the Seven Cities. The more he examined the objects in the chamber, the more he realized that the vast majority of them had to be ancient workmanship, so delicately done of such pure metal that they made the beautiful crafts of the nomadic Westfolk look like the efforts of children.
Twice looted! he thought to himself. The Horsekin in those barrows must have been buried with the spoils of war before the plague wiped out their fellows back in the Seven Cities. Vaguely he remembered that the Horsekin stripped the flesh of their dead fellows from their bones, ate it, and then buried the bones in tidy bundles, bound with leather thongs to keep the ghosts from walking. Or so he’d been told—the story had the spiteful feel of mere legend about an enemy.
“Jemjek?” Kov said. “Have you ever gone gathering?”
“Once,” Jemjek said.
“Did you see any bones in the mound?”
“I did. All stacked up like winter firewood, they were.”
“Were they tied in bundles?”
“They were not, not no more, but there were stains on them from thongs or ropes. Rotted clean away, if you do ask me.”
Spiteful or not, part of the tale held true. What a lovely lot they are, the savages! Kov thought.
“Kov?” Clakutt came trotting over. “What be this?”
The boy handed Kov something that looked like a length of rope braided from fine strands of gold. As thick as his thumb, the “rope” had been twisted into a semicircle about eight inches in diameter, with a solid gold sphere for a finial at each end, leaving an opening about two inches across.
“I’m not sure,” Kov began then paused, running through his memory. “Wait! I heard somewhat once. I think it’s called a torc. A very long time ago the men of Deverry wore things like this around their necks.”
“They did?” Clakutt’s eyes narrowed in thought. “They must have had truly skinny necks to get them on.”
Kov laughed. “When the jeweler finished braiding this rope, it would have been a straight piece. He must have bent it very carefully around the person’s neck. Then they’d never take it off.”
“But how did it get off, then, to get here?”
“Well, I suppose you could bend it one more time without breaking it.” Another detail rose in his memory. “Or an enemy might have cut the person’s head off and pulled the torc free.”
Clakutt wrinkled his nose and growled in disgust, a throaty sound so animal that it startled Kov. He’d started thinking of the Dwrgwn as just a different variety of Mountain Folk, he realized. A mistake, he told himself. Don’t fall into it again.
At the end of the workday, the crone, Marmeg, who’d once been Kov’s captor, came to fetch Clakutt, her grandson. For the boy’s sake, Kov decided to be polite to her, even though he’d not forgotten the kicks and insults she’d given him during the night he’d spent tied up and helpless in her hut. When Clakutt launched into an excited recital of the day’s work, she laid one bony hand on the boy’s shoulder and scowled at Kov.
“You know,” Kov said, “your grandson’s unusually intelligent. I’m truly pleased he wants to help.”
At that her look softened, though not so far as a smile. Over the next few days, every time Kov saw Marmeg, he made a point of praising Clakutt and his mental abilities, which quite truthfully stood far above most of the Dwrgwn he’d met. Finally, when she came to fetch him, Marmeg brought Kov a flat basket laden with oatcakes. He’d won her over, but even as he thanked her profusely, he wondered why he’d cared to change her low opinion of him. I may be stuck here for the rest of my life, he thought. No use in keeping old enemies or making new ones.
His success came in handy the very next day. In the middle of the afternoon Kov discovered, carelessly wrapped in a twist of half-rotted linen, a pair of fire opals and a palm-sized brooch of obviously dwarven workmanship, displaying a silver hound, couchant, wound round with bands of interlace. He could place it as a style popular for trade goods some forty or fifty years past.
“This is a very different-looking thing,” Kov said.
“It be so,” Clakutt said. “It be not gold.”
“Very good! This was made by my people, the Mountain Folk.” Clakutt’s lips formed an O, and he nodded in wonder.
When Marmeg came to fetch the boy, Kov asked her on a whim if she knew anything about this unusual piece, mostly because she was the oldest Dwrgi he’d ever seen. To his surprise, she remembered it.
“It did come from a trader from the Far West,” she told him. “Varc or Ferrik or some such name he had.”
“Verrarc,” Kov broke in. “I met him once, when I was but a child. He came from Cerr Cawnen.”
“They all do, what traders we do see. But truly, Verrarc was his name. My man did take this bit of work and them there moonstones in trade for an old book he had, a nasty looking thing, all beaten and torn, but Verrarc, he were fair taken with it.”
“A book?” Kov said. “Do you remember what it was?”
“Just some book.” She shrugged in profound indifference. “None of us kenned what its marks did mean.”
“I see. Does anyone else have any old books around here?”
“They may well. There used to be a fair number of books around here, before the—” She stopped speaking and looked away, her toothless mouth working.
“Um, before the what?” Kov said.
“I forget what I did mean to say.” She gave an elaborate shrug. “I be old. I do forget things.”
“Before the Great Scour, you mean?” Clakutt said.
Jemjek,
who’d been idly listening, caught his breath with a gasp. Marmeg turned to Clakutt and hissed, then let go with an angry flood of Dwrgic words. Clakutt crossed his slender arms over his chest and glared up at her.
“But he be one of us now,” the boy said in Mountain dialect. “The dweomer did make him so.”
Marmeg hesitated in mid-tirade, then spoke normally, still in Dwrgic. Clakutt nodded and looked at Kov.
“She says, you might be asking Lady what we do mean by the Scour. If Lady does tell you, then all be right and proper.”
“Very well, then.” Kov gave Marmeg a conciliatory smile. “I’ll do that. I want to talk with her about another matter, as well. She told me that we’d have a scribe for the work, and I’ve not seen hide nor hair of one.”
“Scribe?” Clakutt quirked an eyebrow. “What be that?”
“A person who can read and write.”
“I know not of such a thing among us.”
Then why, Kov thought to himself, did she promise me one? Just like the wretched woman, her and her grand ideas!
Kov hadn’t seen Lady in some days. That evening, at the communal meal up in the village, he asked various people where she might be, but no one seemed to know or care. “Down some tunnel or other,” was the usual answer to his questions. “She does come and go as she wills.” He reminded himself that life among the Dwrgwn was—well, fluid, he thought. Their minds run this way and that like water, too. He wasn’t truly surprised that few—if any—of them could read.
Yet, apparently, Lady heard that he wanted to see her. The very next morning she came to the treasure chamber and stood just inside the door to watch them work. That particular day she went barefoot. Her long gray hair fell to the shoulders of her simple cloth tunic, fastened with brass pins, such as all her folk normally wore.
Humble clothes or not, she was still Lady and the lady of this peculiar underground city. Kov, Clakutt, and Jemjek all bowed to her. She acknowledged them with a wave of her hand, but said nothing. Finally, after some little while of watching, she motioned to Kov to follow, then stepped into the tunnel just beyond the door.
“I did hear that you wished to ask me a question,” she said.
“I did, my lady.” Kov decided that it would be safer not to mention Clakutt by name. “I don’t mean to give offense in any way, mind, but I overheard one of the children mentioning this, and I’m curious. What’s the Great Scour?”
“A painful but necessary thing that did happen some years ago now.” She looked down, and with one long toe began to make a little groove in the dirt floor. “There were some among us who had to be turned out.”
“Turned out?”
“Sent away. Some among us were folk like Deverry men or the First Ones. For years my own folk had lived with them and next to them in their villages. Some of us had made households with them and even borne children, impure children with both kinds of blood in their veins. Some could become Dwrgwn in the water, but most couldn’t.” She frowned, hesitating. “It was very peculiar. Most times some children in a litter could change in the water like normal folk, but not the rest. So we banished all those who couldn’t change.” She looked up, her dark eyes cold under their fan-shaped gray brows. “I lived among Deverry people. I know what evils they can work when they’ve a mind to. Once I became Lady here, I couldn’t allow my folk to have such as they living in our tunnels.”
“So you made them leave. What if they refused to go?”
“Then we killed them. They didn’t give us any choice.”
For a moment Kov could find no words. She was looking at him calmly, openly, her eyes wide, her mouth unsmiling but far from grimly set.
“I see,” he said at last. “I’m surprised you’ll let me live here.”
“Oh, you’re a man of the Mountain Folk.” She smiled and patted him on the arm. “Earth and water blend well enough.” The smile disappeared. “It was those others we couldn’t allow.”
“I see.” He repeated it for want of anything better to say. “Um, well, my thanks for telling me.”
She smiled again, turned, and trotted off down the tunnel. Kov went back to the chamber of gold, where Clakutt was waiting for him.
“She told you,” the boy said. “I heard her.”
“She did,” Kov said. “What do you think of all that?”
Clakutt shrugged, looked away, his face twisted in sorrow. “My gran, she did tell me it had to happen.” His voice wavered badly. He shrugged again and picked up a pottery jar from the floor. “Be it that I look inside this?”
“Good idea.” Kov had no desire to force him to say his opinion of the Scour aloud. No doubt it would be dangerous to do so, if Lady heard of it. “Lay it down on its side first and bang on the bottom. That’ll scare out any spiders or suchlike.”
As they continued working, Kov found himself thinking over Lady’s remark about Earth and Water blending. Apparently, the Dwrgwn knew about the abstract elements and their relationships. As a boy, Kov had been taught such things under the rubric of natural philosophy, an important study among the Mountain Folk. Fire and Water were the pure forms of the elements. Fire begat Air, and Water, Earth, with Earth and Air being mixed or impure forms. So did that mean that the Westfolk and the Mountain Folk were impure peoples somehow? They both lived far longer than Horsekin or, he suspected, the Dwrgwn, who were in theory at least pure peoples. Could it be that purity was more a drawback than a boon? Deverry folk, the Children of Aethyr, lived lives as short as those of the Horsekin. Was Aethyr a pure or impure element? In all his studies, Kov had rarely heard Aethyr mentioned, much less its properties.
Kov wished he could consult with his old teacher, Loremaster Gwarn, an impossibility at the moment, of course. With a sigh, he turned his mind back to the work at hand. When he began to tally up the coins in the hoard, he remembered that he’d never asked Lady about the promised scribe. That’s what you get for letting your mind run off after vagaries, he told himself. Better to stick to practical matters, just like Father always said. He did find a bit of wood, and Jemjek had a little knife. They counted up the coins in twelves and notched the wood for each lot.
Because of the scribe, at dinner that night Kov mentioned how much he wanted to talk with Lady again. When, the next day, one of her servants summoned him, he assumed she’d gotten his roundabout message.
“She’s in the council chamber,” the young Dwrgi lass said. “I’ll take you there.”
Kov followed her through winding tunnels that led down, deep into the complex to a big chamber, where the only light came from baskets of bluish-green fungi much like those of Lin Serr. Dressed in plain pale linen, Lady sat on a high-backed chair placed between two large light baskets. Beside her stood a tall Dwrgi with gray hair at his temples and a bristly mustache that covered his entire upper lip. Around his waist a leather belt with a gold buckle clasped his brown tunic. Kov noticed a long knife in a sheath dangling from the belt, which he took to be a mark of some sort of position or rank. He was proved right when Lady introduced him.
“Our spearleader,” Lady said. “His name is Leejak.”
Kov made Leejak a bow, which the spearleader returned.
“We’ve had troubling news from our gatherers in the north,” Lady continued. “The Horsekin are building a fortress.”
“Troubling, indeed!” Kov said. “How close is it?”
Lady shot Leejak a sideways glance. “Far away, I think,” she said.
“Huh, not far enough!” Leejak said. “Maybe ten days by tunnel. We do have tunnels that lead that way, you see. This fortress, it be south of the barrows where we do gather.”
“That’s not much of a distance for men who ride horses above ground.” Kov decided that giving Leejak an honorific would sweeten their relationship. “Does my lord agree with me?”
“So our spearleader told me,” Lady broke in. “Now, they do build it in a place we call the Long Barrow, or on top of it, I should say.”
“It’s a grave site, the
n?”
“I think so. We’ve not gone gathering there, because it lies on the wrong side of the river. Besides, a mound that large—it could well be haunted or suchlike.”
“They be putting stone walls on top of the barrow,” Leejak said. “We did call you here because your people do ken much about building with stone. How long think you it takes them for the finishing of the fortress?”
“Without seeing it, I can’t possibly tell.” Kov made his voice as casual as he could, but thoughts of escape were filling his mind. “I’d have to go there and take a look at it, but normally it takes a long time to build solid stone walls and the like, if that’s what they’re doing.”
“I’m told,” Lady said, “that they have many slaves working upon it.”
“Then it could rise much faster, of course. If you and the spearleader want to prevent them from settling there, we’d need to act quickly. If I could just be taken there for a look—”
Leejak cleared his throat with an angry growl and crossed his arms over his chest. Lady glanced at the spearleader with a nervous toss of her head. “He did suggest that,” she said, “but I fear you’ll leave us suddenly if we let—”
“There be a need on us to take some action,” Leejak interrupted her. “It does trouble my heart, thinking of Horsekin so close.”
“It troubles mine, too,” Kov said. “You’re sure they’re building in stone?”
“For now the buildings are only made of wood,” Lady said, “or so they told me, the messengers, that is, but they say that the Horsekin are hauling in stones from the west. They come on river barges, and then big cows pull them to the fort.”
Oxen, Kov supposed. “If they finish building stone walls around this fort,” he said aloud, “there’ll be precious little we can do about it, even if it turns out that we should do somewhat.”
She winced, then glanced at her hands, where rings glinted in the bluish light. “As long as our people are safe in their tunnels,” she said, “I’d rather merely post watchers up at Long Barrow.”
The Silver Mage Page 18