The Shadow Isle

by Katharine Kerr

  “Will we be stopping here to trade?” Kov asked Aethel.

  “We will, but not for long. They lack much in the way of goods to bargain with. Dried fish, though—it be handy to have on a long journey.”

  Kov noticed that some of the villagers carried big baskets of just that commodity. They walked up slowly, gravely, without a smile or a greeting among them. Even the naked children looked solemn; they stood a little way behind their elders and stared at these foreigners while they sucked a dirty finger or scratched themselves. A slightly older girl stood behind one small boy and hunted lice in his hair while he watched the muleteers. Now and then she brought her fingers to her mouth as if she were eating the small game she’d caught.

  While Richt led the majority of the mules and muleteers a couple of hundred yards on, mostly to get them out of the way, Aethel and a few of his men unloaded one pair of panniers and laid simple goods out on a blanket—knife blades, needles, net floats, and a few bits of copper jewelry, roughly worked by apprentices in the jewelers’ guild back in Lin Serr.

  “I wondered why he wanted those.” Mic strolled over to inspect the trade goods. “They’re cheap work.”

  “Good enough to trade for dried fish, I gather,” Kov said.

  “Just.” Mic grinned at him. “Barely.”

  While the haggling went on, Kov decided to have a look at the village. Since it lacked any sort of wall, he assumed that no one would mind him wandering around. Certainly no one stopped him as he walked among them. Some of the huts sat only a few feet from the riverbank, which made him wonder all over again if those reputed monsters were real. A few doors stood open, and when he glanced inside, he realized that these people led poor lives indeed. A stone hearth, a few blankets, some baskets, a spear or primitive bow leaning against a wall—these appeared to be the sum total of their goods.

  What truly interested him, however, was not the huts but the stone pillar. It stood some fifteen feet high, a roughly shaped log of granite weathered into a uniform gray, a totally unprepossessing thing except for one detail. Deeply-carved runes, as big as a man’s head, graced each side. Kov stared, fascinated, then raised his staff to compare. Sure enough, two of the runes on the pillar matched the pair on his staff that Dallandra had been unable to decipher. He walked all the way round the stone, studying the runes, six in all.

  Behind him something hissed like a large cat. He spun around to find a woman, her gray hair streaked with white, her face a fine web of wrinkles, standing with her hands on her hips and glaring at him with narrowed eyes.

  “Er, excuse me,” Kov said. “Could you perhaps be so kind as to tell me what these runes mean?”

  She continued to stare.

  “Um, these runes.” Kov pointed to the marks on the stone. “What be they? You tell me?”

  “I will not.” She turned and strode away.

  Kov watched her as she joined the crowd around Aethel and his blanket of goods. Not a friendly sort of crone, he thought. Some of the men in the crowd turned to look back at him. He decided that he’d best leave the village before someone else took offense.

  Just beyond the huts, on the far side of the village from the trading, stood a pair of ramshackle structures much like the tollbooth. Kov walked on through and headed for them, but as he did so, he became aware of the ground under his feet. Like all Mountain Folk, he’d been trained since childhood to stay alert for fissures and possible sinkholes in their underground world. He could tell now that he was walking over a tunnel from the sudden slight sponginess of the ground.

  Aha! Kov thought. Those peculiar cratelike things must protect entrances. He took a few steps to one side, then walked back, did the same on the other side. As he walked he thumped the butt of his staff against the ground. He could trace out a wide tunnel, well reinforced, and leading straight for the booth ahead. As Kov watched, a naked little boy came out of the booth. He paused, stuck a finger in his mouth, considered Kov for a moment, then ran off into the village.

  Beyond the booth stood another stone pillar, sitting between two willows on the riverbank. Kov trotted over to it. Sure enough, it, too, held runes, but in this case, only two, the same two that were carved on his staff.

  “Water!” he murmured aloud. “They must mean water, and that’s the fifth element. I must tell Lady Dallandra—”

  Something grabbed his ankles from behind. Kov yelped, twisted around and struck out with his staff, but the water was roiling with creatures—creatures with brown fur. Clawed paws grabbed and yanked. He started to scream, but he hit the water hard enough to knock the wind out of him. His staff jumped from his hand and floated away.

  “Hold your breath!” a voice hissed in his ear. “We be going down!”

  Kov gasped and got a deep gulp of air just as whatever it was pulled him under. He flailed his arms, tried to kick, but a second pair of claws caught his wrists. Together, the two creatures pulled him fast along through water laced with streams of bubbles. His lungs ached until he was sure they would explode from the pressure of his hoarded air. Just ahead, the water turned black. He thought he was fainting, but the creatures dragged him into a dark tunnel on dry land and, mercifully, into air. Kov emptied his lungs of the fetid air and gasped for breath, panting. His chest ached as badly as if he’d been beaten.

  He heard footsteps slapping along the tunnel and sat up, wishing he still had his staff. A pale blue light grew around him and cast his shadow on the dirt wall. When he twisted around to look, he saw a village man coming with two baskets of glowing blue fungus. His baggy brown garment stuck to his body, soaked with water. Kov turned back, expecting to see that his captors were villagers, too.

  Instead, he saw a creature, a brown-furred creature, sleek and wet, about five-and-a-half feet tall, with bright black eyes in its intelligent though hairy face. Its arms—or forelegs—ended in clawed paws. As he watched, it shook itself in a shower of water drops, great silver drops that sprayed from its fur as it spun in a circle, around and around, the drops shimmering like flecks of light, cloaking the spinner, then fading away.

  A man stood in the creature’s place, a naked man with normal skin, short brown hair, slicked back, and a human face, distinguished by plumed eyebrows and tufts of brown hair at the corners of his mouth. He bent down and picked up a length of cloth from the ground, then tied it round his waist.

  “Dwrgi,” Kov said, and his voice sounded as feeble as the ancient crone’s. “Otters. You. Shapechangers.” He stopped himself before his speech degenerated into babble.

  The fellow smiled, exposing strong white teeth, prominent in front.

  “Clever dwarf,” he remarked. “You know too much, you do.”

  “Just so,” the other Dwrgi said. “I be sorry, Mountain Man, but we cannot let you leave. Ever.”

  Kov scrambled to his feet. “Then I shall face my death with dignity.”

  “What?” the first Dwrgi said. “Never would we kill you! That be a nasty thing, bain’t?”

  “What do you think we be?” said the second. “Monsters?”

  And they both laughed.

  Berwynna was watching Aethel trade net floats for dried fish when she heard a woman start screaming. Everyone in the crowd around the trader spun around to look back at the village. An elderly woman came hurrying toward them, waving her arms in the air, and screaming out a single word: “Gartak, gartak!” Swearing under their breaths the village men ran, racing toward the village, yelling orders back and forth. Berwynna and Dougie followed more slowly. Some of the men ducked into huts and came right out again carrying long spears. Metal points winked in the sun as they ran down to the riverbank.

  “What’s all this?” Mic, panting a little from the exertion, caught up with Berwynna. “Where’s Kov?”

  “I ken not,” Berwynna said. “I’ve not seen him since we did cross the river.”

  “No more have I,” Dougie said.

  In the village the womenfolk ran back and forth, collecting children, lining them up, coun
ting them, then shepherding them inside the various huts.

  “I fear me that gartak means monster,” Mic said. “The last I saw Kov, he was walking toward the village.”

  Berwynna’s stomach clenched. When Aethel, who’d stayed behind to pack up his goods, joined them, the first question he voiced was, “Where be the envoy?”

  “He didn’t go with your men?” Mic said.

  “Not that I do ken.” Aethel winced and shook his head. “I do hope and pray that he went not near the river.”

  In the village the spearmen were returning, walking with their heads down, talking softly among themselves. One of them looked up, saw Aethel, and came trotting over. He carried Kov’s staff, sleek and gleaming with water.

  “We find this floating,” the man said. “Yours?”

  “It be not mine,” Aethel said. “It does belong to Kov, the man of the Mountain Folk.” He pointed to Mic. “Like this man, but not this man.”

  “Ai!” The fellow handed Mic the staff. “Gartak come. We find this. Your Kov, no see.”

  Mic stared at the staff in his hands as if he doubted its reality. He kept turning it round and round like an axle in his fingers.

  “Let’s search,” Aethel said. “Mayhap Kov did run away, drop his staff.”

  “We search,” the villager said. He turned and called out in his own language to the spearmen, who stood huddled around the stone pillar.

  The search went on for a miserable hour or two while Berwynna sat on a pack saddle in the hot sun near the mules. Every time she saw someone approaching, her hope flared, and she’d get up, only to sit down again when the news came that they’d found nothing. Finally Aethel himself came back, followed by Mic, Dougie, and the muleteers who’d been helping them cover the ground around the village.

  “It be no use,” Aethel said. “Kov, he be dead. I understand it not! Why did he go down to the water? I did warn him. A fine caravan master I be, losing a man to a beast in the river!”

  “Here, here,” Berwynna said, “it be not your fault.”

  Aethel saw a small stone on the ground and kicked it so hard that it skipped some twenty feet. Mic walked up next, still clutching Kov’s staff. His eyes filled with tears, and with a sob he let them run. Berwynna threw her arms around him and held him while he wept for their cousin. Although she’d not known Kov well, she felt like weeping herself, but even more she felt terrified. For the first time she realized just how dangerous this journey—her marvelous adventure—could become. Dougie, she noticed, was oddly silent, staring at the distant village in something like anger.

  Later, after the caravan had moved on to make its grim night’s camp beside a forest road, Berwynna asked him why he seemed more angry than sad. They spoke in the Alban language to keep their talk to themselves.

  “This is so horrible!” Berwynna said. “Poor Kov, dead! It’s just—just—horrible to think of him being eaten by some ugly thing.”

  “It is that,” Dougie said. “But this whole affair smells of dead fish, if you ask me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did I ever tell you about the silkies, when we were back home in Alban? Men on land, but they change to seals in the water?”

  “You did. Here, do you think these people are silkies?”

  “Or somewhat like.” Dougie frowned in thought. “We’re miles and miles from any seashore, far as we know. But I saw Kov wander away, and I saw two men follow him. All at once they slipped into the river, and then we heard the crone screeching and carrying on. Gartak? Monsters, is it? They may be that. Mayhap they murder the odd traveler or two, for their coins, like, and mayhap they eat them as well.”

  “We should tell Aethel.”

  “Will he believe us? Dare he believe us? He needs their bridge. Your people back in Lin Serr, that’s who we’ll be telling when we get back there.”

  “We’ll have to come this way again because of that bridge.”

  “When we do, not a word about this, lass. Just squeeze out a tear or two for poor Kov, eaten by gartak. If they think we suspect somewhat, we could be next.”

  “Very well, then, not a word.”

  That night Berwynna dreamt of Kov, laughing and talking during the dinner party back in Lin Serr. She woke to find the stars still out in the crisp dark sky and Dougie snoring beside her. She sat up without waking him and looked over the sleeping camp. One small fire still burned, and beside it sat Mic, Kov’s staff cradled in his arms. She wanted to go to her uncle and say something comforting and wise, yet could think of nothing but a futile “It saddens my heart, too.” Finally she lay back down and watched the stars, wondering if Kov’s soul wandered among them, until she slept again.

  His captors had shoved Kov into a small, damp underground room with only a basket of glowing fungi for company and a stout wooden door, barred from the outside, to keep him in. From the smell of the place, previous captives had relieved themselves in the dirt beside one wall. He sat with his back to the opposite wall and wondered if he were going to be allowed to starve to death or perhaps die of thirst. At least, as a man of the Mountain Folk, he was used to being underground in dim light. A Deverry man would have gone mad, he supposed, shut up in a place not much larger than a grave.

  After what seemed to him to be most of the day, he heard footsteps approaching with the slap of bare feet on damp ground. Someone lifted the bar and shoved open the door to reveal a cluster of Dwrgi faces, all of them in humanoid form, peering in at him. A young female, dressed in the same odd tabardlike garment as the males, held up another basket of light and looked him over. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared back.

  Finally she spoke, at some length, in a language he’d not heard before but which reminded him of the chattering of squirrels and excited ferrets. One of the men stepped forward and pointed at Kov.

  “You get up,” he said. “We go some place better.”

  “It could hardly be worse,” Kov said.

  Everyone laughed, and the female grinned in approval.

  “They stop looking for you,” the spokesman went on. “Your friends go away now.”

  Kov did his best to reveal not a trace of feeling. “I suppose they think I’m dead,” he said.

  “They do. Come with us.”

  When Kov stepped out of the room, the pack surrounded him. They half-led, half-shoved him through a wide tunnel that twisted, turned, branched off, doubled back, split, re-formed, and twisted some more. The vast majority of people would have been hopelessly lost, but thanks to a childhood spent in Lin Serr, Kov could memorize the entire route. For its last fifty feet or so, the tunnel sloped uphill, ending in a wooden door, reinforced with strips of iron. Along its bottom edge yellow light shone. Kov assumed that they were about to come out into the open air, about half a mile, by his reckoning, from the village.

  The door swung back to reveal a blaze of light, but not sunlight. Candles gleamed inside a long narrow chamber. On every wall, in every corner, ornaments glittered and multiplied the light. Gold, most of it: pieces of jewelry, small statues, masks, caskets, coins all gleamed with gold, heaped up on the floor as high as Kov’s waist, piled on shelves set into the walls. In among the gold Kov saw precious stones, rubies being the most common. Painted pottery jars, vases, and bowls all overflowed with more gold and gems. As his captors marched him past, Kov got brief glimpses of the ceramics, all of them beautifully decorated with animals and birds painted in realistic colors. The painted masks displayed faces that had to be Horsekin, the same pale skin, manes of black hair, and tattoos.

  At the far end of the room, in a plain wooden chair, sat a Dwrgi woman dressed in a long, baggy garment that glittered with golden ornaments, a solid covering of abstract oval shapes, overlapping like fish scales. Beside her chair, in a basket roughly woven of reeds, sat an array of pyramidal crystals, some white, some black, all about six inches high and of a shape to fit comfortably on a man’s palm. Despite the nearly overwhelming glitter of so much gold, they struck Kov as
important, imposing, even. Dweomer, he thought. I’ll wager there’s something sorcerous about them.

  As they approached the woman, his captors bowed. Two of the men shoved Kov to his knees at the foot of her chair. For a Dwrgi, her gray hair hung long, reaching to her shoulders in thick curls. Her plumed eyebrows, also gray, had been combed straight up into fan shapes.

  “So, you’re the captive?” she said to him in surprisingly good Deverrian. “Your name?”

  “Kov of Lin Serr.”

  “Ah, the fabled city! I’m sorry, Kov, but we can’t allow anyone to find out about us. They’d hunt us like animals and steal what we’ve gathered.” She inclined her head toward the treasure heaps of gold behind him. “The Evil Ones hide the sun’s blood among the dead. We bring it back to the land of the living.”

  “You’ll forgive me,” Kov said, “for not knowing how to address you. Priestess and holy one? Queen of great majesty?”

  “She who gathers.” The woman smiled briefly. “You may call me lady. You’ll never learn my name.”

  “Very well, then, my lady. Who are these Evil Ones? The Horsekin?”

  “That’s the name that Deverry men have given them.”

  “I can assure you that I wouldn’t tell them so much as the color of the sky. They’re the bitter enemies of my people.”

  “Oh, I know that. I also know that your people love the sun’s blood more than anything else in the world.”

  Kov tried to imagine talking his kinfolk out of looting this chamber. He failed. “How do you know so much about us?” he said.

  “I lived with a Deverry clan as a slave for too many years.” Her voice turned flat and hard. “They called themselves Boars, and they were all pigs in a sty, sure enough. I can promise you that you’ll be better treated than I was.”