A Mankind Witch (38 page)

Signy wondered why they should treat her any differently. There had been no sign of respect in the way they treated anyone else. Perhaps this was something she could make work for her, and the others. She was still terribly confused about Cair. He was a thrall . . . branded and clearing dung. He was also a captain of raiders, a jarl, by the least comparative reckoning. Yet he'd been content to be her thrall. It was easier to think about this "Alfar" that they flung at her head. Her stepmother had called her that, too. So had the troll-wife. "Why do you call me 'Alfar' all the time?" she said, stopping.

The dwarf shrugged. "You use glamour. We can see through it, of course. But we can see you as you really are, lady. You cannot hide from us."

Glamour. A magical ability to appear as something you were not. But she remained inherently truthful. "I don't, as far as I know, use any such thing. I am myself. I have no skills at any form of magic, although you all seem to think I have. Everything anyone ever tried to teach me went wrong."

"Midgarders' teaching?" said the dwarf with a curious lift to his shaggy eyebrows. "Humans?"

"Who else?"

"And you say that they kept telling you that you were Alfar and could do magic? And you didn't want to?" asked the dwarf, grinning evilly. "You do realize that you were bespelling yourself, don't you? You willed it thus. Alfar magic doesn't work quite like Midgarder spells. Clumsy things. Full of words to focus their puny powers, which mostly come from interbreeding with nonhumans anyway. But few Midgarders have as much Alfar blood as you, lady. Alfar need only the will, not the words and symbols. Those can help of course . . . but not if you do not want them to work. Besides, those thrall bracelets would have channeled most of your power straight to your owner."

"Thrall bracelets?" she asked, fearing that she knew the answer.

"The silver bracelets you tried to sell us. Those who wish to keep Alfar as slaves use them."

The idea shocked her. A slave? She was of the royal house! "You say that you made them. Why do you not put more on me?" she demanded imperiously, holding out her wrists.

The dwarf shrugged. "It is not necessary. You're not a slave here. You can leave if you fulfil your challenge, lady. To the
Alfarblot
that should be simple. We'd have to let you go home. We want no quarrel with your kin. But we have to honor our traditions."

"Let me and my companions go home to Telemark," she said uncompromisingly. The dishonor of having been tricked into a 'thrall bracelet' still rankled.

"Telemark?" said Þekkr, curiously. "Not Alfheim? We have little to do with Telemark. The arm-ring protects it." The dwarf tugged his beard. "Very well. If your Midgarder companions win their challenges they may accompany you over the bridge. Otherwise, we'll just let them go." He seemed to find that funny.

With sudden insight she understood. "You enslave them with hope."

"Of course," admitted Þekkr. "The strongest chains are the intangible ones."

"The sound of a cat's footfall, a woman's beard, a mountain's roots, a bear's sinews, a fish's breath, and a bird's spit," she quoted, remembering the ingredients that had gone into the chain that bound Fenrir, which Odin had sent his servant to fetch from the dwarves.

The dwarf nodded. "
Gleipnir
. The open one, because belief is a strong chain. That was one of ours."

They'd resumed walking and had come to a place where, suddenly, the torch-lit passages opened into a hall with sunlight streaming in through the crystal roof. A stream kept the air moist.

At one time the raised beds in here must have been verdant. Now, straggly and sickly plants sparsely populated them. Þekkr gestured at the beds. "Our skills lie with metals and rare gems. We do not make things grow."

That, thought Signy, was obvious. Someone, once, had set this up as a herbiary. Someone who knew and loved plants. The biggest problem that she could see was straight neglect. "I see," she said neutrally.

It obviously didn't fool the dwarf. He grimaced, which did nothing to improve his ugly countenance. "Yes,
Alfarblot
. We know. But you are good with live things. We are not. Plants should stay dealt with, not need constant fussing. Sjárr and Vitr were all for making them out of bronze and emeralds instead. But they do not cure as well."

"This is my challenge? To make this grow?" She could perhaps do that. The idea made her feel strangely eager, actually.

She plucked a weed and absently shredded it between her fingers, reducing it into three stems and plaiting them. The dwarf looked at her. And at the plait. "No," he said, "That is just a little repayment our guests could do for us." He pointed to an archway. "Come, I will show you your challenge."

He led her down the passage to a small cavern opening out onto the bleak landscape.

What Signy saw there made her blood run cold. She could face axe-wielding trolls or a view of Hel and its freezing mists, but this frightened her.

It was a tambour frame, with a half-finished piece of Nué gold-thread embroidery on it. From here, halfway across the chamber, she could see that it was set with perfect, neat little stitches.

She knew that from close up, it would be a blur.

"Our last guest left with her work unfinished," said the dwarf. "Considering that Alfar lasses are so good with their fingers, and that you want to return to Telemark of all places—I thought it would be appropriate."

Signy looked at the untidy plait in her fingers and realized that she'd entrapped herself. And then she looked at the tambour frame, seeing the stitching and the cartoon, really seeing them properly and not just as a terrifying task, and absorbing what the picture being stitched was of.

It was a grove of young oaks. In front of them sat various magical creatures of the woods, all staring intently at a slab of stone . . . and at a fissure in the great rock beyond it, which had smoke issuing from it.

She was horrified to realize that she recognized the fissure.

The temple, so ancient, blackened and smoke-impregnated and filled with carvings that looked as if they'd been old when Odin was a boy, was not there.

However, on the altar stone, the great arm-ring was in its correct place. That part of the embroidery had been finished. The arm-ring shone with the finest of gold thread. The embroidery was masterful, and that part was perfection itself, down to the shadows.

She'd seen it lying on the stone, just like that, gleaming as if from some inner light.

In this embroidery it was, however, aggressively unadorned. Simply a plain band of heavy hammered and polished gold without the runes.

She looked at the cartooned outline of the rest. And blushed, despite the situation.

The scene was bluntly erotic. The cartoon had not minimized the huge phallus. The male did not look human . . . in other details as well.

"A family portrait, perhaps," said the dwarf, sardonically.

"It's been stolen," she said, slowly.

"What? Your ancestor's picture?" said the dwarf. "I promise you it's ours. The artist got that far with our gold."

"I mean the arm-ring. It is the arm-ring of Telemark, isn't it?"

"What else could it be?" said Þekkr. "And it can't be stolen any more than you could pick up a country and slip it in your pocket. It has too much magic hammered into the metal."

"The altar stone is empty. I saw that myself," insisted Signy.

"Ho! It's a neat trick, if you can do it," said the dwarf, and vanished himself. She heard him snigger, but could not see him.

That evening Cair found his way back to the chamber—somehow the passages had led back there. There were a fair number of other "guest workers" in the labyrinthine workshops of the dwarves, but once they'd been called to the kitchens to get their food, the others had all gone their way, walking as if they were going somewhere—and then they had just not been in the passage when he turned a corner. Cair was tired of the tricks. Tired of his attempts at making glass, too. He'd had some success once he remembered that glassmakers added potash to lower their melting temperatures. He'd been quick enough to remember that they'd used arsenic to clarify their glass. He recalled finding it amusing at the glassworks in Oran, that a poison should lurk—apparently harmlessly—in fine, transparent drinking glasses.

He'd burned himself several times today, but not quite as badly as his clever mouth had. Why had he picked on glasswork? He was a dabbler. A man of wealth and power who had found science more amusing than philosophy or religion, the other fields open to a man who wanted slightly more intellectual pastimes than drinking and fornication. Too late he'd established that there was a big difference between watching and doing it yourself, under pressure.

He saw that Erik and Manfred were back already, organizing bedding for themselves.

"I got our saddlebags back," said Erik. "Yours and the princess's too. Trust you to organize a cushy job, Cair." He didn't sound angry or suspicious about it, anyway. "I'm working furnace bellows."

"And I am carrying ore to the smelters," said Manfred. "So what sort of 'challenge' have they given you, sailor from Lesbos?" He seemed to find that title funny.

"An impossible one, naturally," said Cair, sitting down, and stretching out his tired limbs. "I have to make a bird out of cold iron."

"Doesn't sound impossible," said Manfred with some interest. "I know more about blacksmith work than a prince should." He grinned. "I ran tame in the smithy in the castle at Carnac. Smithing is still reckoned near-noble work among the Celts, no matter what they think among the Franks. We're primitive and proud of it."

"The catch is that it has to fly and sing," said Cair, sourly.

"Hmm. Tricky little devils, aren't they," said Manfred. "I'm supposed to get into a cave . . . The entry is a hole the size of my fist. The rock around the hole is slightly chipped and pitted. They said that the last challengee was a troll who hit it with a mattock for forty years. They said I'd have to do a powerful lot of ore carrying to sweat down enough. They seem to find it very funny," he said with a dead straight face that Cair had learned meant he didn't find it in the least amusing.

"Mine is a rock that even Manfred could not lift, if I told him that there was strong drink underneath it," said Erik. Cair read something in that tone, too. Erik very carefully wasn't saying something. The tall Icelander came and sat next to him. And wrote on the cave floor with a piece of charcoal, Pulley.

Cair nodded. And rubbed it out. "They're fine artisans, but their equipment is a little primitive," he said, reaching for the charcoal.

"Magic," said Manfred stretching his limbs. "Which I know you don't believe in, my skeptical friend. But it makes them lazy."

Cair nodded. "It certainly makes people's wits weak, my trusting friend from Brittany," he said. He wrote Explosive for Manfred on the cave floor. Even if they were watched—as seemed likely, considering, the Frankish words and alphabet should disguise things well. Also, perhaps as a measure of their power, the dwarves seemed to care little if their "guests" did try to escape or explore. That was a lot more frightening to Cair than physical chains had been.

"Weapons drill again?" Brother Uriel seemed surprised.

Juzef shrugged. "What else can we do, Brother? Like praying, extra drills do no harm. Besides, unless I'm mistaken we're doing two things with them. The first is to frighten a bit of respect into Vortenbras's hangers on. And the other is, I suspect, to inspire several of your 'secret Christians' with a strong desire to join the order. Just making a judgment on the number of young men who have found an excuse to speak to me, the interest in being a knight in the service of Christ may be bigger than their interest in being a monk in the service of Christ. I've told them about having to eat cabbage and live in chapter houses in Prussia, and fight howling demons from outer darkness, but not even the cabbage could put them off."

"You make a jest of God's work, Ritter. You are also part of a monastic order."

Juzef Szpak was feeling in a poor mood for being lectured. "Many a good thing has been done with a light heart, Brother. And I think it's up to God to judge whether my jests serve him better than your moralities. They see that our swords and our faith are not jests, for all that they outnumber us twenty to one. They intend to murder all of us, if we do not manage to leave before Yuletide. Yet my men drill calmly. It frightens them and impresses them. And maybe I will be able to get you and the clerics away if the weather lifts. If not, we'll go down fighting. I'd hoped the secret Christians among the locals would have been prepared to help us get away. Instead they seem prepared to fight next to us, but they think that our getting away is hopeless."

"What of the prince and Hakkonsen? We know that they still live."

Juzef shrugged. "At the moment I can't get my own contingent of men out of Kingshall, let alone go looking for them. I am not looking forward to telling my superiors that we lost them, but my duty to you and the Empire is still to be done."

Francesca frowned at the letter from the Emperor. She usually avoided frowning—there was nothing worse for leaving lines on your face. But this handwriting . . . Why, oh why, did the Emperor insist on doing any correspondence he considered vital himself?

She knew why of course. She had employed enough spies herself to know the answer to that. But it would make it easier to read if he did have someone he really could trust and who could write properly! Well. The content and orders were explicit enough. She sat and penned the letters to the necessary people. It was probably going to be expensive. Looking out of her windows she was sure that it was going to be cold. But she'd better go herself. She pinched her chin thoughtfully, and sat and wrote one more letter to a Fleet Captain Lars McAllin of Vinland. He could be useful. Probably also expensive, but if the Emperor wanted his nephew in one piece . . .

She tinkled a delicate glass-and-silver bell.