by Tad Williams
Yis-fidri’s wife Yis-hadra threw back her head and moaned, startling both Maegwin and the count. Sho-vennae and Imai-an, Yis-fidri’s other two companions, joined her. Their lament turned into a kind of eerie, sorrowful song that rose to the cavern ceiling and echoed in the darkness above. The other dwarrows turned to watch, heads slowly swaying like a field of gray and white dandelions.
Yis-fidri lowered his heavy lids and cupped his chin in trembling fingers. When the moaning had died away, he looked up.
“No, Hern’s Child,” he said slowly, “we are not immortal. It is true we are far longer-lived than you mortals be, unless your race has much changed. But unlike Zida‘ya and Hikeda’ya—our old overlords, Sithi and Norn—we do not live on and on, eternal as the mountains. Nay, Death comes for us as for your folk, like a thief and a reaver.” Anger touched his face. “Mayhap our once-masters were of somewhat different blood since back in the Garden of our old stories, whence came all the Firstborn; mayhap then we are just of shorter-lived stock. Either that, or there was in truth some secret kept from us, who were after all deemed only their servers and vassals.”He turned to his wife and gently touched her cheek. Yis-hadra hid her face against his shoulder, her long neck graceful as a swan’s. “Some of us died, some left, and The Art of the Witnesses has escaped us.”
Eolair shook his head, confused. “I am listening carefully, Yis-fidri, but I fear I still do not understand all the riddles in what you say. The voice that spoke to us from the stone—the one you called the grandmother of the Sithi—said that Great Swords are being sought. What does Prince Josua have to do with any of this?”
Yis-fidri raised his hand. “Come with us to a better place for speaking. I fear that your presence has bewildered some of our folk. It has been beyond the lives of most of us since Sudhoda’ya were among us.” He stood up with a creak of leather, unfolding his spindly limbs like a locust climbing a stalk of wheat. “We will continue in the Pattern Hall.” His expression became apologetic. “Also, Hern’s Folk, I am tired and hungry.” He shook his head. “I have not talked so much in a long age.”
Imai-an and Sho-vennae stayed behind, perhaps to explain to their shy fellows what sort of creatures the mortals were. Maegwin saw them gather the other dwarrows together in a solemn group at the center of the giant bowl, huddling near the inconstant light of the Shard. Only an hour before she had been brimming with anticipation and excitement, but now Maegwin was glad to see the arena disappearing behind them. Wonder had turned to unease. A structure like the Site of Witness should stretch beneath an open sky filled with stars, as did the circuses of Nabban or the great theater of Erchester, not crouch beneath a firmament of dead black basalt. Anyway, there was no help for the Hernystiri here.
Yis-fidri and Yis-hadra led them through Mezutu’a’s deserted byways, crystal rods glowing in the murk like swamp-ghosts as they wound through the narrow streets, across broad, echoing squares and over icicle-slender bridges with only shadowed emptiness below.
The lamps that Maegwin and Eolair had brought down to the subterranean city had guttered and gone out. The soft, roseate glow of the dwarrow’s batons cast the only light. Mezutu’a’s lines seemed softer now than they had by lamplight, the city’s edges gentler, rounded as though by wind and rain. But Maegwin knew that here in the deeps of the earth no such weather had troubled the ancient walls.
She found her thoughts straying even from such wonderfully strange sights as these, returning instead to the trick that had been played upon her. The Sithi were not here. In fact, if the remaining Peaceful Ones were calling for the help of a diminished tribe like the dwarrows, they were probably in worse straits than Maegwin’s own folk.
So here was the end of her hope of assistance—at least of earthly aid. There would be no rescue for her people, unless she herself could think of some way. Why had the gods sent Maegwin such dreams, only to dash them to pieces? Had Brynioch, Mircha, Rhynn and the rest truly turned their back on the Hernystiri? Many of her people, crouched in the cave above, already thought it dangerous even to fight back against Skali’s invading army—as though the gods’ will was so clearly against Lluth’s tribe that to resist would be to insult the minions of heaven. Was that the lesson, both of her dreams about the lost Sithi and the actuality of Yis-fidri’s frightened folk? Had the gods brought her here only to show her that the Hernystiri, too, would soon diminish and fade, as the proud Sithi and crafty dwarrows had themselves been brought low?
Maegwin straightened her shoulders. She could not let such qualms frighten her. She was Lluth’s daughter ... the king’s daughter. She would think of something. The error was in relying on the fallible creatures of earth, men or Sithi. The gods would send to her. They would—they must—give her some further sign, some plan, even in the midst of her despair.
Her sigh drew a curious glance from Eolair. “Lady? Are you sick?”
She waved away his concerns.
“Once all this city was full-lit,” Yis-fidri announced suddenly, waving an elongated hand. “The mountain-heart all besparkled, yes.”
“Who lived here, Yis-fidri?” the count asked.
“Our people. Tinukeda’ya. But most of our kind are long gone. A few are here, and some few lived in Hikehikayo in the northern mountains, a smaller city than this.” His face twisted. “Until they were made to leave.”
“Made to leave? By what?”
Yis-fidri shook his head, palpating his long chin with his fingers. “That would be a great wrong to say. Unkind it would be to bring our evil on Hern’s innocent children. Fear not. Our few remaining folk there fled, leaving the evil behind them.”
His wife Yis-hadra said something in the fluttering dwarrow tongue.
“True, that is true,” Yis-fidri said regretfully. He blinked his vast eyes. “Our people have left those mountains behind. We hope that they have left the evil behind as well.”
Eolair looked at Maegwin in a way she supposed was somehow significant. The talk had mostly slipped past her, immersed as she was in the greater problems of her unhomed people. She smiled sadly, letting the Count of Nad Mullach know that his laboring after such fruitless details did not go unnoticed or unappreciated, then lapsed back into silent contemplation once more.
Count Eolair shifted his disconcerted glance from Lluth’s daughter back to the dwarrows. “Can you tell me of this evil?”
Yis-fidri looked at him speculatively. “No,” he said at last. “I have not the right to share so much, for all you be noble persons among your kind. Mayhap when I have had a greater while to think, you will hear more. Content yourself.” He would say nothing further concerning the subject.
Silent now but for the quiet noise of footsteps, the odd procession crept on through the ancient city, lights bobbing like fireflies.
The Pattern Hall was a dome only slightly smaller in circumference than the Site of Witness, set low in the midst of a forest of towers, surrounded by a moat of rock sculpted to resemble the waves of a crashing sea. The dome itself was fluted like a sea shell, constructed of some fair stone that did not shine like the rose-crystal rods, but nevertheless seemed faintly radiant.
“The Ocean Indefinite and Eternal,” said Yis-fidri with a gesture at the spiky stone waves. “Our birth-home was an island in the sea that surrounds all. We Tinukeda’ya built those craft that took all the Gardenborn across that water. Ruyan Vé, the greatest of our folk, steered the ships and brought us here to this land, safe out of destruction.” A light came to the dwarrow’s saucerlike eyes, a note of triumph to his voice. He wagged his head firmly, as though to emphasize the importance of what he said. “Without us, no ships would have been. All, both masters and servants, would have passed into Unbeing.” After a moment he blinked and looked around, the fire abruptly gone. “Come, Hern-folk,” he said. “Hie we down to the Banipha-sha-zé-the Pattern Hall.”
His wife Yis-hadra beckoned, then led Maegwin and the count around the frozen gray ocean to the back of the dome, which sat off-center in t
he moat like the yoke of an egg. A ramp curled down into the shadowed depths.
“This is where my husband and I dwell,” Yis-hadra said. She spoke Hernystiri more haltingly than her husband. “We are keepers of this place. ”
The inside of the Pattern Hall was dark, but as Yis-hadra entered before them, she drew her hands along the walls. Where her long fingers touched, stones began to glow with a pale light, yellower than that given off by the rods.
Maegwin saw Eolair’s sharp profile hovering beside her, spectral and dreamlike. She was beginning to feel the burden of her long, strenuous day; her knees were growing weak, her thoughts furry. How had Eolair ever let her do such a foolish thing, she wondered? He should have ... have ... have what? Knocked her senseless? Carried her kicking and screeching back to the surface? She would have hated him if he had. Maegwin ran her hands through her matted hair. If only none of these terrible things had ever happened, if only life at the Taig had gone on its small, foolish way, with her father and Gwythinn alive, with winter in its proper place....
“Maegwin!” The count took her elbow. “You almost hit your head against the doorway.”
She shook off his hand and bent to pass through. “I saw it.”
The room beyond slowly revealed itself as Yis-hadra touched more stones into radiant life. It was circular, the walls pocked every few paces by a low doorway. The doors themselves were carved of dressed stone and hinged with tarnished bronze. Their surfaces were covered with runic letters unlike anything Maegwin had seen, different even than the great gates that had led her to Mezutu’a in the first place.
“Seat yourself, if you please,” Yis-fidri said, gesturing to a row of granite stools, solid upcroppings that rose like mushrooms beside a low stone table. “We will prepare food. Will you dine with us?”
Eolair looked at her, but Maegwin pretended to be looking in the other direction. She was desperately tired and confused, full of regret. The Sithi were not here. These bent, flawed creatures could be no help against the likes of Skali and King Elias. There was no earthly help coming.
“You are very kind, Yis-fidri,” the count said. “We will be pleased to share your table.”
A great show was made of lighting a tiny bed of coals in a trough set into the stone floor. Yis-fidri’s anxious care with them suggested that such fuel was hard to find, and used only for very special occasions.
Maegwin could not help noticing the strangely graceful way that the dwarrows moved as they fetched the ingredients of their meal. Despite their awkward, stiff-limbed gaits, they stepped in and out of the two doors at the room’s opposite end and slid around obstacles with an odd, dancing fluidity, and seemed almost to caress each other in passing with their tuneful, pattering speech. She knew she watched a pair of ancient lovers, both enfeebled, but so accustomed to each other that they had become two limbs of the same body. Now that the strangeness of the dwarrows’ owl-eyed appearance had worn away, Maegwin observed their quiet interactions and felt certain that they were just what they seemed—a couple who might have seen terror and sorrow, but whose happiness with each other spanned centuries.
“Come now,” Yis-fidri said at last, pouring something from a stone ewer into bowls for Maegwin and the count. “Drink.”
“What is it?” Maegwin asked quietly. She sniffed the liquid, but could discern nothing unusual in its smell.
“Water, Hern-child,” Yis-fidri said, puzzlement plain his voice. “Do your folk no longer drink water?”
“We do,” Maegwin smiled, lifting the bowl to her lips. She had forgotten how long it had been since she had last sipped from her water skin, but it must have been hours. The water ran down her throat in gulps, cold and sweet as iced honey. It had a taste she could not identify, something stony but clean. If it were a color, she decided, it would have been the blue of new evening.
“Wonderful!” She let Yis-fidri pour her another bowl.
The dwarrows next produced a dish piled high with pieces of white, faintly luminous fungus, and other bowls with things in them that Maegwin was sinkingly sure were some kind of many-legged bugs. These had been wrapped in leaves and roasted over the coals. The spell cast by the draught of delicious water abruptly vanished and Maegwin found herself tottering once more on the edge of a terrible homesickness.
Eolair manfully took a few bites of fungus—it was not by chance that he was deemed the best court envoy in Osten Ard—and ostentatiously chewed and swallowed one of the leggy morsels, then settled down to rearranging his supper in a way that resembled eating. If Maegwin had needed any additional proof, the expression on his chewing face was enough to keep the contents of her own bowl far from her mouth.
“So, Yis-fidri, why is your house called the Pattern Hall?” the Count of Nad Mullach asked. He quietly let a few blackened grubs fall from his fingertips and down into the hem of his cloak.
“We shall show that to you when eating is finished,” Yis-hadra said proudly.
“Then, if it is not impolite, may I ask you of some other things? Our time here is growing short.” Eolair shrugged. “I must return this lady to our people in the caverns above.”
Maegwin bit back a sneering remark. Return this lady, indeed!
“Ask, Hern’s child.”
“You spoke of a mortal, one we know as Josua Lackhand. And the voice from the stone said something about Great Swords. What are these swords, and what do they have to do with Josua?”
Yis-fidri scraped with his spoon-shaped fingers at a fragment of fungus on his chin. “I must begin before the beginning, as we say.” He looked from Eolair to Maegwin and back. “In days agone, our folk made for a king of the northern men a sword. That king betrayed his bargain. When the time came to pay, the mortal king instead argued, then slew the leader of our folk. That king hight Elvrit, first master of Rimmersgard. The sword dwarrow-forged for him, he named Minneyar.”
“I have heard this legend,” Eolair said.
Yis-fidri held up a spidery hand. “You have not heard all, Count Eolair, if I have recalled your name aright. Bitter was our curse on that blade, and closely did we watch it, though it was far from us. Such is dwarrow-work, that nothing we have forged is ever far from our hearts or our sight. Minneyar brought much sadness to Fingil and his tribe, for all it was a mighty weapon.”
He took a swallow of water to clear his throat. Yis-hadra tenderly watched his face, her hand atop his. “We told to you that our Witnesses have stood unused for centuries of silence. Then, little more than one year ago, the Shard spoke to us—or rather, something spoke to us through the Shard, as in the elder days.
“That which spoke was someone or something who we knew not, something that used the Speakfire in the old dwarrow-home of Hikehikayo, something that talked to us in gentle and persuasive words. Strange enough was it to hear Shard and Speakfire talking as of old, but we also remembered the evil that had driven our fellows from their home—an evil of which you mortals need not hear, for it would throw you into great fear—so we trusted this stranger not. Also, as long as it had been since we had last used the Witnesses, still some for us remembered the elder days and what it felt like when the Ziday’a did speak to us then.
“This was not the same. Whatever stood before the Speakfire in the north seemed more like a cold breath of Unbeing than a living creature, for all its kindly words.”
Yis-hadra moaned softly beside him. Maegwin, caught up in the dwarrow’s story despite herself, felt a chill travel through her.
“That which spoke,” Yis-fidri continued, “wished to know of the sword Minneyar. It knew we had been the blade’s makers and it knew that we dwarrows are bound to our work even after it has gone from us, as one who has lost a hand often feels it still at the end of his arm. The thing that spoke to us from Witness to Witness asked if the northern king Fingil had indeed taken the sword Minneyar into Asu’a when he conquered that great place, and was it there still.”
“Asu’a,” Eolair breathed. “Of course—the Hayholt.”
The dwarrow leaned forward on his padded elbows. “Then, a short time ago—a few of the Moon-woman’s changes, as you would reckon it beneath the sky—the Shard spoke again. This time it did speak with the voice of the eldest of the Sithi, the voice you heard. She also asked us of Minneyar. With her, also, we were silent.”
“Because you fear they will make you their servants again.”
“Yes, Hern’s man. Unless you have ever fled from bondage, you will not understand that terror. Our masters are ageless. We are not. They retain the old lore. We diminish.” Yis-fidri rocked back and forth on his stool, the ancient leather of his garments rubbing and squeaking like crickets.
“But we knew something neither of our questioners did,” he said finally; there was a gleam in his round eye unlike anything the surface dwellers had yet seen. “Do you see, our masters think the sword Minneyar never left Asu’a, and that is true. But the one who found the sword there beneath the castle, the one you call King John Prester, had it reforged and made new. Under the name of Bright-Nail, he carried it all across the world and back.”
The Count of Nad Mullach whistled, a low, surprised trill. “So Bright-Nail was the old Scourge of the North, Fingil’s Minneyar. Strange! What other secrets did Prester John take to his grave above the Kynslagh, I wonder?” He paused. “But, Yis-fidri, still we do not understand ...”
“Patience.” The dwarrow showed a wintry smile. “You could never tend and harvest balky stone as we do, you quick-blooded Children. Patience.” He took a breath. “The mistress of the Zida’ya told us that this sword, one of the Great Swords, was somehow much concerned with events now transpiring, and with the fate of the mortal prince named Handless Josua ...”