Days of Blood and Fire

by Katharine Kerr

  Still smiling he glanced at the river, swore, and rose to his feet. Walking on the river as if it were a silver road came a procession of tall, slender women, all dressed in white, with silver kirtles at their waists and silver torcs round their necks. They walked in pairs except for their leader, who carried a spear with a silver point. As they walked, they wept, tossing their heads and whipping their disheveled hair round, sobbing and covering their faces with slender hands. Without thinking Rhodry ran to the bank and called out.

  “My ladies, what’s so wrong? Can I be of help to you?”

  At the sound of his voice, the woman with the spear turned her head and smiled at him, just briefly, before they vanished, leaving only a faint mist blowing over the silver ripples of the river. Rhodry tried to tell himself that he’d been asleep and dreaming, but no man spends his dreams thinking about shaving. He turned cold, shuddering. He stayed on his feet, walking by the river, until the dawn brightened gray with the first sun.

  As he was debating whether or not to wake the others, Rhodry heard a sound so distant that at first he thought it might only be some echo of water over rock. He paused, listening hard, heard it again—a definite ring or clang of metal on metal. He trotted back to their improvised camp just as Garin hauled himself out from under the lean-to.

  “Did you hear that?” the dwarf said.

  “I did. Like a sword striking a metal boss, in a way.”

  They stood together and listened, straining into the wind. Around them the sunlight brightened, and Otho joined them, muttering to himself until Garin cursed him silent. They heard nothing.

  “Well, worms and slimes,” Garin said at last. “We were probably just imagining things. The high mountains do that, sometimes, to a man. Go wake your nephew, will you? I’ll start taking down the shelter and suchlike.”

  For a few moments more Rhodry stayed by the river-bank and watched the river swirling out of the crack in the cliffs. In the morning light he could see the break more clearly. At the surface it gaped some twenty feet wide, fringed with white water though the river ran reasonably steady in the middle. As it rose it narrowed, closing completely just before the top of the cliff.

  All day they waited, while the wind sighed through the valley and sniffed round their camp. The dwarves mostly slept or diced with each other while Rhodry paced back and forth, unable to sit and rest no matter how tired he’d been the day before. Although Garin invited Rhodry to join the game, he preferred to watch rather than get into one of the heated squabbles that seemed part of the amusement. Toward evening, when the sun was sending long shadows through a blue haze, Rhodry walked down to the river and stood studying the white water. Directly inside the tunnel mouth, it seemed, he could see some huge thing clinging to the wall, but because of the boulders piled on the bank at that point, he couldn’t get close enough to see it clearly. Since it never moved, he could assume that it wasn’t dangerous. Just as he gave it up and turned to go, he heard the clang again.

  This time he could identify the sound as one of the brass gongs he’d heard in Lin Serr. Echoing and bouncing it seemed to come from deep within the cliff, as if someone were striking in an interrupted attempt at rhythm. Before he could hail the others, a boat shot out of the crack, riding high on the current. All painted green and carved it was, long and narrow, with a tall prow in the shape of a dragon, or so he assumed, a long neck with a small snakelike head, the mouth open to reveal gilded teeth. As it glided past he could pick out a helmsman at the stern, two oarsmen amidships, and in the prow a man holding a rope with a huge flower of iron hooks at one end. Near this anchorman hung a brass gong on a wooden frame, bolted right into the boat.

  “Oy!” Garin yelled, waving madly. “Here!”

  All the dwarves ran toward the bank, but the ship had passed in an instant, gliding on downstream toward the bend in the river. The dwarves barely had time to start swearing, though, before it began to turn about, oars flailing, the helmsman leaning and hauling madly to use the shifts in the current to his advantage. Since he’d been raised round boats and water, Rhodry took off running downstream. The prow came round, and the oarsmen began rowing for the bank.

  “Hila!” the anchorman called, then threw.

  The iron hook gleamed and spun through the air.Rhodry grabbed the rope just behind it, whipped it round, and sank it hard into the damp turf. The anchorman leapt ashore to jump with his full weight on the hook cluster’s flat head, sinking it deep and tethering the boat to the earth. The oarsmen followed, and with Rhodry’s help they ran her up into the shallows. When the anchorman panted out a few Dwarvish words and smiled, Rhodry smiled in return, knowing a thanks when he heard it no matter what the language. The other dwarves came running up, or rather, Mic and Garin ran, with Otho stalking behind.

  “Very impressive, silver dagger,” Garin said, then turned to the anchorman and spoke rapidly in Dwarvish.

  The anchorman said nothing, merely pointed at the helmsman, who was just leaping ashore. The helmsman was tall for a dwarf, and slender, too, though at just over five feet he was short for a human being and decidedly stocky. Although the boat crew were all dressed more or less alike, in rough brown trousers and floppy brown shirts that gave their arms plenty of room to move, the helmsman sported a silver brooch pinned to one shoulder, a free-form dragon shape, neck and tail all twined and knotted round each other. With a nod Rhodry’s way, Garin switched to Deverrian of a sort, laden with Dwarvish words.

  Rhodry had a good deal of trouble understanding the conversation. It seemed that Garin was trying to get them all passage into Haen Marn, while the helmsman suffered from grave doubts about the wisdom of such a thing. Finally the helmsman turned to him and spoke a few words that Rhodry could pick out.

  “What be your name?”

  “Rhodry from Aberwyn.”

  Shrewd dark eyes considered him for a long moment.

  “And it be needful that you talk with Enj? Why?”

  Rhodry saw no reason to waste time in courtesy or fencing.

  “I need his help to hunt a dragon.”

  The helmsman blinked rapidly several times.

  “Ah,” he said at last. “I think me you be expected. Get your accoutrements into the boat.”

  Rhodry exchanged a startled look with Garin. The dwarf shrugged, then trotted off back to the camp. Once they had their packs and suchlike stowed, the oarsmen helped each in turn clamber aboard, but Rhodry swung himself up with a laugh. The anchorman pulled the hooks free, then ran, leaping aboard just as the boat floated clear, nosing round into the current.

  Rowing upstream was hard work, and the closer they came to the crack in the cliff face the harder and slower it became, because the river narrowed. Rhodry began to wonder how they could possibly get through, even if every passenger found oars and set to. The anchorman, hooks in hand, stood at the prow, peering forward, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth in concentration. When the prow inched its way under the shadow of the cliff, Rhodry saw a riband of braided ropes, a sort of flat strip of web work, hung along one side of the tunnel and threaded through a huge iron wheel.

  “Hila!” the anchorman whirled the hooks round his head and threw.

  The cluster hit the braid, grabbed and stuck fast in the web. The anchorman flung his whole weight back, tightening the throw rope.

  “Gong!” he yelled.

  Rhodry grabbed a padded stick he found dangling from a chain and swung hard. The boom echoed and quivered over the sound of the white water. With a creak and almost human groan the wheel began to turn, and the webbed strip began to move, hauling them upstream against the current while the rowers bent and sweated. It was no wonder Haen Marn had the reputation of being so inhospitable, Rhodry thought, if it took all of this to bring strangers in. With the anchorman clinging and leaning to the rope like a groom, the boat bucked like an angry horse, but they moved forward, creeping past the rough stone walls toward a small and distant patch of light. Rhodry heard the helmsman yell something in
Dwarvish.

  “Keep striking the gong,” Garin yelled, translating. “He says our lives might well depend on it.”

  Rhodry struck, grabbed the stick in both hands, and swung again, finding and keeping a regular rhythm as the boat inched along, its slender figurehead bowing and rising, the helmsman cursing a steady stream as he fought with the current. If the prow should dash against the stone wall, they were all lost. When he glanced up between strokes, next to the widening square of light Rhodry saw another wheel. Just beyond, on a sandy strip of beach, two dwarves bent over a crank such as turns meat on a spit.

  “Hila!” the anchorman called.

  “Hola!” they called in return.

  The boat inched past the wheel, then broke free of the dark, scooting with a sudden lunge to the rope’s length out to gray light from an open sky and Haen Marn. While the anchorman struggled to free his hooks from the web of ropes, and the two dwarves who’d been cranking the pulley scrambled aboard, Rhodry stared across the lake, wide miles of dark water, surrounded by hills that plunged down steeply without a sign of level shore. He could just make out forests marching down, deeply shadowed in the last of the sunlight. Directly across from the entrance flashed a silver glint that seemed to be a waterfall pouring into the lake from some great height.

  Out in the center rose a small island shaped like the crest of a rocky hill and topped by a strange tower, all right angles and built square, with other rectangular buildings huddled beneath it. Off behind this main island rose islets, some no more than huge boulders poking their heads above water. He found himself remembering Jahdo’s description of Cerr Cawnen and Citadel, because mist rose heavily in the far reaches, hinting at warm water bubbling up from springs.

  “Gong!” the helmsman screamed. “Gong now!”

  Rhodry realized that he’d been so taken with the sight that he’d slacked off. He swung two-handed, found his rhythm again, and kept it up while the new dwarves bent to the oars. With fresh oarsmen the boat darted across the lake. Echoing off the distant hills, the sound of the gong fled before them, then turned to greet them again as the island came closer and closer. Garin scrambled to his feet and moved up next to Rhodry.

  “They say the noise drives beasts away,” Garin yelled. “I’ll take a turn.”

  Rhodry surrendered the stick gladly and moved away from the boom, which was beginning to throb in his temples with a tangible ache. He found a spot on the other side of the figurehead where he could lean on the prow and have a good look round. When he looked behind, the flat cliff rose high about the water level, then leveled at the top in a suspiciously regular manner. So, then, the entrance ran through some sort of dam, and Haen Marn was not entirely a natural creation, no matter which world it belonged in. When he looked ahead, he could see the main island clearly, with its tall watchtower rising from a grove of wind-bent trees, and what seemed to be a long manse at its base, a cluster of small sheds round that, and then a boat dock jutting from a covered boathouse. Off to his left a trail of tiny islets led back toward a cove among the hills.

  In the cove something was moving, gliding through the gathering mists, not very large or visible from its distance. At first Rhodry assumed it was another longboat, because he could see the same curved neck, the same tiny head arching above the rippling water, but this head suddenly turned,swiveling on a neck as glossy as snake skin. A massive wave formed and buckled as a body like an overturned boat rose out of the lake. Rhodry yelped and swore. The dwarves all screamed.

  “Gong!”

  Garin pounded harder, faster. The other dwarves began screaming and swearing at the top of their lungs. The creature hesitated, staring their way, waves rippling round it as, or so it seemed, it kept its place with some subaqueous paddling motion. It swung its head away, swung its body ma jestically after, then arched its neck and dove, heading back toward the distant inlet and cove. As it disappeared under mist and water, Rhodry was for a moment unsure that he’d really seen it, simply because it moved so smoothly, so silently. The others seemed to have no such doubts. They kept up their deliberate cacophony until at last the boat pulled in beside the wooden jetty.

  “They hate noise,” Garin yelled at him over the general din. “Or so I’ve been told. The beasts, I mean.”

  “I see,” Rhodry yelled back. “Are they common?”

  Garin merely shrugged to show his ignorance.

  On the jetty someone stood waiting, dressed in a pair of bright blue trousers of fine wool, a Deverry style pullover shirt, belted in at the waist, and a gray cloak, fastened at one shoulder with a dragon-form brooch as big as a man’s hand. Judging his distance the anchorman crouched, then leapt onto the jetty, wrapping his rope round a bollard while the oarsmen backed water. Hawser in hand, the helmsman leapt out as well. The waiting figure strolled over just as they got the boat secure.

  It was a woman, standing a bit over five feet tall with the dark narrow eyes and thin slit of lips of the dwarven race, but her mane of pale hair, pulled back into a loose braid, indicated Deverry blood in her veins. In the fading light it was impossible to tell her stage of life, but she stood and looked about with far too much authority to be a lass.

  “Angmar!” the helmsman cried. “Guests!”

  She nodded, looking his passengers over one at a time, slowly, carefully, while they scrambled out of the boat and got their gear safe on the jetty. Rhodry she saved for last, looking him over coldly even though he bowed to her. Her eyes carried such authority that he wondered if she had dweomer.

  “Welcome to Haen Marn.” Angmar spoke in Deverrian of a sort. “You be the man who covets a dragon, bain’t you?”

  “I am,” Rhodry said. “I was told that a man named Enj could help me.”

  “Enj be my son, not but what I have rule over him no more, not this long score of year or mayhap it be more now. But over Haen Marn I do have rule, and of more import I have knowledge of its ways, and it were a wise thing that you all do remember such.”

  “My lady.” Rhodry bowed again.

  Garin had already followed his lead several times. Otho and Mic looked back and forth, one to the other, then bowed as well.

  “And what do it become me to call you, then?” Angmar said.

  “My mother named me Rhodry, but a woman who lived deep in the heart of the earth called me Rori once, saying it was a better sounding name. Which do you prefer?”

  She looked him over, smiling a little.

  “Then welcome to Haen Marn, Rori, you and your friends both.” She nodded their way. “Envoy Garin, welcome.”

  “My lady. It gladdens my heart to see you again.”

  Angmar acknowledged his bow with a small nod, then turned and began snapping orders in Dwarvish. The helmsmen picked up the gear and carried it as they all trooped down the jetty and onto the island, heading for the manse with Angmar in the lead, clumping along like a boy in her sheepskin boots. A little path led away from the lakefront through trees all bent and twisted from the wind, then came out into a vast kitchen garden, passing through row after row of cabbages and turnips, winding round a henhouse, too, before it brought them to the manse, where windows glowed with firelight, and the massive oak door stood ajar.

  Dwarven servants, all young men, waited to take the baggage and lead them inside to a great hall where fires crackled in two hearths of slabbed stone, one on either side of the square room. The walls were made of massive oak planks, scrubbed down and polished smooth, then carved in one vast pattern of graved lines rubbed with red earth. Looping vines, spirals, animals, interlace—they all tangled together across each wall, then swooped up at each corner to the rafters, before plunging down again in a riot of carving. At one hearth a small boy turned a spit where an entire side of beef was roasting; at the other stood tables and benches, scattered hospitably over the water-polished plank floor. At the far end a wooden staircase swept up into shadows.

  “Show them chambers,” Angmar said to the servants. “And bring them what they need as to wat
er for wash and suchlike.” She glanced at her guests. “When you do assemble here again we will begin our eating.”

  “My thanks, my lady,” Garin said. “Is Enj in residence here?”

  “Not this day, no, though I do think he will appear as soon as soon. All his life has he dreamt of the searching of high mountains for a great wyrm and of the seeing of such fly. If he do not know that his hour has come, then he be no son of mine.”

  Rhodry’s chamber turned out to be square and spare, a mattress upon a wooden floor and naught else, though when Rhodry begged water for shaving a servant did bring him a stool to put the basin upon and a silvered bronze mirror as well as a chunk of soap, herbed with bergamot. The water itself came in a big iron pan, so hot that the servant wrapped his hands in rags to carry it, and the water stayed warm enough for all the time it took Rhodry to rid himself of ten days beard. He was just finishing when the dwarves knocked on his door and let themselves in.

  “Just like an elf,” Otho said. “Shaving a perfectly good beard away. You people have no sense, you know.”

  “Hum.” Garin looked round. “More than a bit plain, this room. We’ve fared a good bit better in ours, I must say, with proper beds and shutters at the windows and suchlike.”

  “It’ll do,” Rhodry said. “Silver daggers are used to taking what they get.”

  “I should hope it’s dawned on you by now that the silver dagger doesn’t mean one cursed thing up here.” Garin gave him a grin. “Our people think you carry it because it’s a nice piece of work and naught more.”