by Thomas Head
“Oh! Master Fie,” my guide said. “He die, master. Oh, he die now. When dog cry lok dat, he dead!”
Then he scrambled down into the gorge, making silent, fear-fueled gestures for me to follow.
For a time—but not long—I lay there alone, watching and listening. Batt’s ears might hear the moans of a sick man or dwarf, but mine could not. And I sure as hell wasn’t about to return to the hall without ascertaining whether it was man or dwarf in that tent. Slipping off the snowshoes, I rose and tip-toed over the snow with the full intention of silencing the dog with my pole.
Suddenly, I was stopped by the sound of pain-racked groaning. Then the brute of a dog almost hung himself, trying to get me.
A voice shouted in perfect Dellish. “Go! Go away!”
“Who has the plague?” I bawled back.
“I am Ullinarn the Red. Of the venerable King’s Fur Company, ye wee cuttin’s bas-terd!” the voice said.
My own countryman had mistaken my voice for that of a dwarf.
“I didn’t ask after you, Dellishman. I said who has the plague?”
“The damned shaman o’ the bunch downhill. If ye have anything for him, lay it on the snow. I’ll come for it.”
“Then why do you lie with him?”
“Because, Dwarf, I gave it to him! I can no sooner go back than the elvish scum!”
I harrumphed, softly. Honor pledged me to serve Halvgar until he found his wife, but I was anxious, and in the end, I halted, then retraced my way to the gorge and hurried homeward with Batt.
As I left, the look that passed between the big she-elf and Delthal came back to me with a level of significance I had not felt when I first saw it. It was hard to say what it was, exactly. It was like the presence of an indefinite, unknown evil, which lay dormant in my own nature and had only just been aroused. I felt, rather than knew, that Delthal had deceived me. It was not hard to imagine the crafty little dwarf telling a lie, but then, a lie is the clumsy invention of the novice. An expert accomplishes his deceit without anything as tangibly dishonest as a lie.
And Delthal was a master.
Though I hadn’t a pint of proof, as they say, I could not help but think about how he and Addly were so close and chummy not so many years ago.
The significance of it would not leave my head.
Chapter 6
“You should have hacked that damned quarantine’s head off!” Uncle Jickie thundered.
I had been relating my experience with the campers, recounting how the Dellishman in the tent had warned me of the plague. But, being highly successful in all his own dealings, Jickie could not tolerate failure in other people. Two days of vigilant searching had yielded not the slightest inkling of Shiri and the child, and the aggravation of it ignited all the fury of my dwarven uncle’s fiery temperament.
“Chopped his head off and cleaved him in two, nephew!” he continued. “Make it a point to knock the ballocks off anything that stands in your way—”
“Dangerous business, dealing with the plague.”
“Danger is our business, Fie! We are dwarven—you as much as any of my kin!”
“But you don’t suppose …”
“Suppose!” he roared. “I make it a point never to suppose anything. I act on facts, nephew! You wanted to go into that tent, didn’t you?”
“Of course!”
“Well then why the frozen hell didn’t you go and hack the head off anything that opposed you?”
“You’ve said that several times already, Uncle Jickie,” I put in, having taken on a touch of his own peppery temper from my years with him.
But in truth, I hand no answer.
To anything.
We had felt so sure Killroot’s band of vagabonds would hang about till the brigades of the traders from Delmark set out for the east, and all our efforts were spent in a vain search for some trace of the rascals in the vicinity of Goback.
But it was as if they had disappeared with fewer signs than Halvgar’s family.
* * *
Jickie, Halvgar and I hired spies and dogged the footsteps of Dellish traders who were awaiting the breaking up of the ice. But the shadowy, kilted voyageurs proved far less mysterious than we would have thought. Somehow both violent and idle, they passed days in the little town of tents and cabins they had erected around their frozen-in vessels. They had wild, open-field orgies with the she-elves and often fought among themselves to the death.
And as we watched them, we scrutinized every blue-faced native who crossed our path, ever on the alert for a glimpse of Killroot, or his associates. Diligently, we tracked all elvish trails through Frostetch Forest and examined every tent within a week’s march of the city.
Watches were set along the Trollwater River so no one could approach an opening before the ice broke up, or launch a canoe after the water had cleared without our knowledge.
Even so, Killroot and his band had vanished as mysteriously as Shiri. It seemed as impossible to learn where he had gone as to follow the wind.
But it was the very fruitlessness of the search that redoubled our zeal. Dark suspicions grew in our heads, the darkest being that the bastard had slain his captives. But no one would speak these things.
The conviction that Delthal had, somehow or other, played me, stuck in my mind like the depression that stays with you after a bad dream. Again and again, I related the notion to my uncle; but he “pished” the very idea of any kidnappers remaining so near the city and giving me free run of their tents—besides, he noted, there was a reason Delthal and Addly kept contact. The human guard bought wild game from the elves.
That relieved me, in a weird way. But it was all that I had to go on, and it’s hard to let a theory die, so hard that my reasonless persistence was beginning to irritate him. On one occasion, he threatened to hamstring the “fool idiot mute” who led me such a wild-goose chase.
In spite of this, I once more donned snow-shoes and took off with Batt for a second visit to the campers of the gorge.
And a second time, I was welcomed by Delthal. The plague tent still sat on the crest of the hill.
When I asked about the patient, Delthal pointed without a word to a rocky mound where an elf and kilted man lay, being eaten by crows.
“That’s the Dellishman. And the other one. That’s… our shaman. Killroot.”
“What remains of him,” I sighed.
* * *
Soon after, I learned a fact I did not know about the elves, that their shaman rarely stays in their camps. And they would certainly never take the life of a woman or a child. So, in the end, it turned out that Killroot had simply put a curse on Halvgar, nothing more. It had never been a threat at all.
Meanwhile, Halvgar came to accept the unkind truth of this. Which only made his search more frantic. He rested neither night nor day. In the morning, he would outline the plans for the day with a few hurried words. At night, he rode back to the lodge with eager questions in his eyes, and I knew he had nothing better to report to me than I did to him.
After a silent and meager meal, he would ride through the dark forests on a fresh mount. How he passed those sleepless nights, I do not know.
When it seemed we had exhausted every possible venue, my uncle and I actually began to discuss different things.
* * *
“What about Addly’s rage?”
“Addly’s what! What rage? Your countrman’s been in fine form since. Hell’s depths, but that scar has been a nothing but a boon to him since he earned it!”
I harrumphed. The thought of a scar made me think of Delthal’s wife. Specifically her split lips.
“That Delthal,” I said. “Phew! His wife! She’s got a face to ward off demons.”
My uncle laughed.
“Delthal… I still think he’s hiding something… or was.”
“Oh! That son-in-law of an inflated old shaman! He was hiding something alright! A lazy pig! He whored that big she-elf out to the Dellish traders last spring.”
“Damn funny way to treat a wife.”
“Funny? My lad, fun and funny are easy to come by for those with our kind of money. Pray your wife, whoever you should find for the job, shows you half as much love and dedication of those blue-faced elvish whores. Thundering shit, nephew, compared to them beasts, most dwarves don’t have enough balls in their sac to fill an acorn shell!”
At first, I thought that this might have been the first argument to pierce my uncle’s view of elves as animals, for though he called them beasts, he seemed to reserve some corner of his heart for envy of them.
“At any rate, they were no help in finding Shiri. It’s as if some giant bird scooped them up!”
My uncle froze, his back to me.
He turned, very slowly. His keen eyes glanced up at me as if there might be some hope for my intelligence, and he took several turns around the room. But apparently, I had only brought something else to mind. Suddenly, he stood still. Then he looked at me again with the first sign of worry I’d ever seen flash across that battered old face.
“Come along, Fie my lad,” he said quietly. “There is something we Cutters need to discuss.”
Chapter 7
Uncle Jickie, Frobhur, Gilli, and Kenzo were old. They sat around me like visages of wisdom, saying nothing. But no one in their right mind would start any trouble with a single one of them. No one who has lived the wild, free life of the dwarven woodcutter would have any trouble understanding the cost of that freedom—not if they looked around me just then. Lords and earls never waged more ruthless war on each other than the native Yrklandic elves and Dwarven Cutters during those first years of the Wild Wars. The savagery and sorrow seen by the eyes around the table would not be eclipsed for centuries.
But it did not damage the hearts of these old bucks.
They were the sort of dwarves who were still pulled by the life of the wild cutter, felling as many elves as they did trees, all the while living off the land. They still wanted to rise up and salute their destiny with a growl. They were still ravenous for danger and barbarity. They still felt the stirring of youth, the places where they had faced down and laughed at death, and roared at the inexpressible depths of defeat. But since we had taken our seat at a table behind Gilli’s Hall, they sat silently across from Halvgar and me. We were positioned in a mossy and rock-strewn clearing, the long hall casting us in the moon’s dim shadows.
We sat for long minutes, perfectly still. All of us were staring in the lone candle before us. Beside it was a goblet of goat’s blood, boiled and mixed with milk, to be drunk should any oaths be sworn this night.
Gill harrumphed quietly at the head of the table. He fidgeted with his sharp green longshirt, worn over his chainmail, thumbing at the silver waist-clasp.
“There is in every dwarf some secret, a truth with which he does not dare depart,” he said, leading the meeting, as was his right, being that we were at his home.
“But tonight, lads… we must.”
Frobhur, the largest and stoutest Dwarf I had ever seen, was shaking Gilli’s shoulder reassuringly.
“Here, here.” Uncle Jickie said with unusual slightness. “It is so, Master Gilli. It would seem, dear lads, that we pursued the wrong fellow for some days now. And we have allowed those days to turn into a pair of weeks. But the answer to the riddle may not yet be beyond us. These silent disappearances, we have seen them before.”
Gilli cocked an eye at Kenzo, a dour, ancient dwarf whose might was still not to be doubted. We called him Mighty Kenzo, as did people who had never met him. He was smaller than Frobhur, but far more muscular. His eyes were particularly fierce, and his hair had not yet been flecked with the slightest bit of gray.
“So it falls to me,” Kenzo growled like a bear. “As it should be, lads. I am he whose runes on the Rock of the Heir’s Sea first woke the beast.”
“The beast?” I asked.
“Aye, lad. The beast. We had gone further south than any dwarf had ever stepped, and as such, we made quite merry for the first time in months. I struck the cliff face of the sea’s bank to mark as fully damned evident the date and time of the arrival of the Merry Cutters. But no sooner had I finished than a creature rose to escape the crags. I scampered back and saw it climb with a scuttling hiss. Lad, the noise alone made the flesh want to run from your bones. Then we saw it. It was dragon, a true dragon—not one the wee bronze wyverns you get up here. This thing was a thunderwyrm. The Thunderwrym. So incredible. So evil. Nothing written in the darkest, fevered corners of your soul could imagine it. As black as the inside of a coffin, it slithered to the highest spot among the peaks. Even from our lowly vantage, we could the outrageous girth of the wyrm. It was as long as twenty horses if it was a foot. As wide as ship! Its roar was as thunder and its tongue was as some gruesome blue banner. And when the chills had crawled fully across our backs, it launched itself and took flight!”
All of us, silent and rapt, turned to Halvgar. He made a strange wincing expression and seemed to study stars a moment.
“That is when it began,” said Mighty Frobhur. He had a voice like the Thunderwyrm he spoke of, a voice whose whispers were like snorts of a boar. “Our merry band may speak of cutting. Cutting down timber. Cutting down the elves. For in truth we did—but we took to hell only a fraction of what the beast carried back to those crags.”
“Which was hell enough!” Gilli said.
Suddenly, Halvgar breathed sharply. Then he let out a roar like the dog outside the quarantine’s tent, and he punched to table hard enough to knock the candle high over our heads, landing nearby and leaving us in nearly perfect black. “Damn it to the frozen depths, y’ old fools! Tell me nothing more of this!”
Silently, we all stared in the blackness where the candle had been.
Then, with surprising quickness, Halvgar placed the candle back in its spot. “Damn it, then! See here, Kenzo. Hear an unspoken apology; know an unknowable thing: A beast such as you describe cannot be woken with naught but the scratching of runes. This thing… it may fly, and it may prey upon innocents. But that it hunts at all means it eats. If a thing eats, it lives…”
Then he did something I had not ever seen. He nodded to me a with a bow like one might reserve for a Dwarven captain, or even a king.
“And by damn if it lives, it can be killed!” I called.
“Here, Here!” Uncle Jickie thundered. “Then once more, lads! Once more to the filthy joys of war!”
“Here, here!” we all cried.
And each of us, in turn, drank from the goblet of goat’s blood.
Chapter 8
In making my oath, they had decreed me a Merry Cutter, and I took up the role with an enthusiasm that prompted more than a few eager nods from our band of adventures. A young man on his first escape into the night with a horny young woman couldn’t have been half as exhilarated as I was to have so venturesome a quest before me. I wore black plate mail on my upper body, a bishop’s helmet, which was open at the top, and decided on a kilt instead of oversized dwarven trousers for my legs.
My great Dellish longsword, called an orphanmaker, was longer than the tallest of my fellows. Its hilt was as black as my armor. I also carried a long spear, and what the dwarves call a lesser axe, meaning it’s blade was one-sided.
As for the crew, I provisioned us with every worthless trinket and flashy trifle that could tempt the elf into aiding us with supplies or the secrets of the forest. And if these things should fail, I added a dozen fine as new dwarven dirks, which everyone knew could corrupt the soul of even the hardiest elf, and I also equipped us with a box of wicked-looking hunting knives. I placed these things in square cases that were slow to open, which would surely add to their aweing power. As to our needs, I secured a twenty-seven foot longboat with a flat bot
tom, specially designed for the river. It was lovely thing with a hull of oak, with carved goat’s horns at the prow and a pair of carved, bucking goat legs at the stern. It had a triangular wind vane made of bronze on which a leaping goat was painted in black. The wind vane was mounted at her masthead, though the mast was lowered now, supported by two timber crutches so that it ran like a rafter down the center of the long ship.
And for all our posturing, preparation, and searching the week prior, it seemed like no time at all before the unlucky number of six of us were loading the vessel with every manner of supply: Tents, blankets, bows, arrows, flints, pipes, starweed, flour, smoked herring, milk, and beer.
The Feisty-Goat was a Dellish military ship, so despite the handsome cost in silver, I had to suppose that Addly, loyal to jolly ol’ Delmark through and through, harbored no grudge against my good friend—for we bought it from his commander, and I believe, without doubt, that he could have made the purchase more difficult if he chose.
From a distance. the Feisty-Goat looked lean, and knifelike, but when you were aboard you could see how the midships flared outward so that she sat on the water like a shallow bowl rather than cut through it like a blade. Even with her belly laden with a man, several stout dwarves, our weapons, shields, food, and supplies, she needed very little depth.
Testing it, we cutters went out rowing with our full crew and a full load of supplies, our painted shields lining the ship’s sides. They chanted a song I did not know as we rowed, pounding out the tale of how Mighty Kenzo had fished for a trout and caught Gilli by the britches. It was a good tale and its rhythms took us down the Trollwater.