A Time of Omens (52 page)

“Oh, I’ve set the Wildfolk looking for them, and I’ll be
along, as well. We’ll find them. Don’t trouble your heart about that.”

About an hour before dawn, Carra was sitting on the
edge of
her bed, wearing a pair of silk dresses that were a gift from the gwerbret’s lady, when Jill came to fetch her. Lightning thumped his tail in greeting as the older woman opened the door.

“You’re not all silver and glowy,” Carra said.

“So I’m not. That was beginning to be a bit of a nuisance, though sometimes it comes in handy, I must admit. How are you feeling?”

“Very well, actually. I’m still tired. I probably could have slept for days if her grace hadn’t woken me.”

“Most like. Carra, there’s somewhat I wanted to ask you, not that you have to answer, mind. How did you meet Dar?”

“At the horse market near my brother’s dun, well over a year ago it was now. He and his people rode in to trade, and I happened to be there with my brother. And he made this horrid jest—my brother, I mean, not Dar—he asked one of the Westfolk men if he’d take me in trade for a horse. And when my brother laughed, Dar came striding up and told him that he wouldn’t sell him the geldings he wanted. And my brother got mad as mad and swore at him, demanding to know why, like.” Carra grinned at the memory. “And Dar said that any man who’d be so cruel to his sister would probably beat his stock half to death. Which wasn’t true, mind. My brother’s a grand man round his horses. But anyway, later that day, when I was wandering round alone at the fair, Dar came up to me, and we got to talking.”

“Ah, I see.” Jill smiled briefly. “Love at first sight?”

“Oh, not at all. I was grateful to him, but he had to court me all summer before I fell in love with him. You see, Jill, he’s the first man I’ve ever met who wanted me, not my brother’s favor or some alliance. Of course, Lord Scraev was lusting after me, too, but he’s so awful, and the way his mouth smells!” She shuddered at the memory. “But even if my brother had found some decent man for my husband, he still would have asked about the dowry. I don’t think
Dar even knows what a dowry is, and I doubt me if he’d care if he did.”

“I agree with you, truly. Tirade you for a horse—the stinking gall! Well, now, it’s time we got on our way. Get your cloak. Otho should be waiting for us. I sent him a messenger last night.”

The great hall was filled with armed men, gobbling bread and downing a last tankard of ale while they stood or sat in quiet packs. Up at the table of honor the gwerbret and two noble lords—vassals, no doubt—were huddled together, squinting at a map by the leaping firelight. Dar detached himself from the group and came over, signaling to ten of his escort to follow. He favored Jill with a respectful bow.

“Good morning, my love,” he said to Carra. “I see you’ve got the dog with you. Good. He’ll be the best sentinel you and the dwarves can have.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine. Dar, you will be careful, won’t you? It’d break my heart to lose you, you know.”

He merely laughed, tossing his head, his hair as dark as Loc Drw in winter, and caught her by the shoulders to kiss her.

With Dar and his men for guards, they left the dun and hurried through the twisting streets of Cengarn. Here and there a crack of candlelight gleamed through wooden shutters, or firelight glittered in a hearth, half-seen through an open door, but mostly the town lay wrapped in its last hour of sleep before the gray dawn broke. They trotted downhill for a bit, then cut sideways through an alley between two roundhouses, panted uphill again, turned down and to the left past a little stream in a stone culvert, crossed a bridge and walked across a grassy common, soaked with dew. When Carra glanced uphill, she found the gwerbret’s dun much farther away than seemed possible and gave up trying to figure out their route. At last they came to a hillside so steep it was half a cliff. Set right into it, between two stunted little pines, stood a wooden door with big iron hinges. Otho was waiting with a candle-lantern.

“Come in, come in, my lady. It gladdens my heart to see you, and my thanks for taking our humble hospitality. Don’t you worry, Jill. No one’ll get near the lass with us to guard her.”

“I’ve no doubt of it, and my thanks to you.”

Carra gave Dar one last kiss, felt her eyes fill with tears, and clung to him, so reluctant to let him go that her heart sank with dread. All she could think was that the Goddess was giving her an omen of coming disaster.

“Please be careful, my love. Promise me you’ll be careful.”

“As careful as I can be. I promise.” Gently yet firmly he pried himself free of her arms. “Here, I’ll have my own men with me, and Rhodry ap Devaberiel as well, and if somewhat happens to me in the middle of all of them, well, then, it’s my Wyrd and there’s not one blasted thing anyone can do about it.”

“I know.” She forced the tears back and made herself smile. “Then kill a lot of bandits, will you? I keep thinking about that poor woman.”

“I’ll promise you twice for that, my love. Farewell, and I’ll see you the moment we ride home.”

In the brightening dawn he strode off, his men trailing after, while she waved farewell and kept the smile on her face by sheer force of will as long as he might turn back and see. Otho cleared his throat, then blew out the candle in his lantern with a thrifty puff.

“We’d best be getting in. Town’s waking up.”

“Just so,” Jill said. “Very well, and, Carra, try not to worry. I’ll be traveling with the warband, you know.”

“I didn’t, and truly, that does gladden my heart.”

Jill strode off uphill, her tattered brown cloak swirling about her, and turned once to wave before she disappeared among the houses. Something drifted free of the cloth, a thing as pale as a moonbeam, and floated up in the rising wind. Without thinking Carra darted forward and snatched it: a silver-gray feather, about a foot long. She gaped at it while Otho muttered under his breath and Lightning whined, as if agreeing with the dwarf.

“My lady, we really must get in off this street.”

“Of course, Otho, my apologies. But this feather! It’s really true, isn’t it? She really can turn herself into a bird.”

“Well, so she can. You didn’t realize that? Humph, what are they teaching you young folk these days, anyway? Now let’s get inside where it’s safe.”

Carra tucked the feather into her kirtle, then hurried after him through the wooden door.

“Inside” turned out to be a tunnel, made of beautifully worked stone blocks, that led deep into the hill. Here and there on small ledges, about six feet from the ground, heaps of fungus in baskets gave off a bluish glow and lit their way. The air, startlingly cool, blew around them in fresh drafts. After a couple of hundred yards, they came at last to a round chamber, some fifty feet across, scattered with low tables and tiny benches round a central open hearth, where a low fire burned and a huge kettle hung from a pair of andirons and a crossbar. Automatically Carra glanced up and saw the smoke rising to a stone flue set in the ceiling, and there were a number of other vents up there, too, that seemed to be the sources of the fresh air. Three doorways in the walls opened to other tunnels leading deeper into the inn. At one of the tables, two men, a little shorter than Otho but younger, muscle-bound, and heavily armed, sat yawning and nodding over metal cups of some sort of drink.

“Everyone else is abed,” Otho said. “But I was tired enough when I finally got here yesterday to sleep the night away.”

He turned and spoke to the two men in still another language that Carra had never heard before. Both jumped up and bowed to her, then spoke in turn.

“They’re the guards for this watch, my lady. Just finishing their breakfast and all. Now, you have a seat over here by the wall. I’ll fetch you somewhat to eat.”

Next to a wooden chest, Carra found a wooden chair with a cushioned seat and a proper back, a low piece, but comfortable. With a canine sigh Lightning flopped down at her feet and laid his head on his front paws. Otho bustled at the hearth, came back with a bowl of porridge, laced with butter, and a hunk of bread, then bustled off again to fetch a tankard of milk sweetened with a little honey.

“Jill says you should be having plenty of milk, for the child, you see,” he said.

While Carra ate, Otho opened the chest beside her and pawed through it, finally bringing out a miscellaneous clutch of things—two oblong wooden trays, a sack that seemed to be filled with sand, some pointed sticks, a bone object that looked like a small comb—-and arranged them on the table. The pale white river sand got itself poured
into the trays; he used the comb to smooth it out as flat as parchment With a stick he drew lines on one surface from corner to corner to divide the tray into four triangles. Then, on the outer edges, that is, the bottom of each triangle, he found the midpoint and connected those, overlaying a diamond on the triangles so that the entire surface divided itself into twelve.

“The lands of the map,” he announced. “This is how we dwarves get our omens, my lady, and if ever a man needed an omen or two, it’s me. See, each one is the true home of a metal. Number one here is iron, two copper, and so on. The fifth is gold, and that stands for a man’s art, whether if’s the working of stone or of metals, and nine is tin, for our religion, you see, because like tin the gods are cheap things more often than not.”

“Otho! What an awful thing to say!”

“Oh, you people can swear by your gods all you want, but it’s little good they do for you, for all your sacrificing and chanting and so on. But each land is the home of a metal but the last, number twelve here, right above one, so it all circles back, like. And that one is the home of salt, not a metal at all. And that land stands for all the hidden things in life, feuds and suchlike, and the dweomer.”

“This is fascinating. How do you tell fortunes with it?”

“Witch. I’ll show you.”

Otho took the second stick, held it over the second tray, then turned his head away and began to poke dots into the sand, as fast as he could. When he was done, he had sixteen lines of dots and spaces to mull over.

“Now, these are the mothers, these lines. You take the first lines of each to form the first daughter, and the second lines for the second, and so on. I won’t bother to explain all the rules. It’d take me all day, and you’d find it tedious, no doubt. But here in the land of iron, well put the Head of the Dragon, just for starters.” Deftly he poked a figure into the waiting sand, two dots close together and below them three dots vertically for the dragon’s body. “And humph, I can’t resist looking ahead. Oh, splendid! The little Luck goes in the land of salt. That gladdens my heart, because it means the omens won’t be horrible. They might not be good, mind, but they won’t be horrible.”

Carra leaned on the table to watch while he muttered to
himself in a mix of several languages, brooded over the lines of dots, and one at a time poked corresponding figures in the lands of the map. When he was done he stared at the map for a long time, shaking his head.

“Well, come on, Otho, do tell me what it means.”

“Not sure. Humph. That’s the trouble with wretched nonsense like telling fortunes. When you need it the most it’s the least clear. But it looks like everything’ll work out right in the end. You see, I just sent off letters to my kin, asking if I could come home again. I got into a spot of trouble in my youth, but that was… well, a good long time ago, let’s just say, and I’ve got some nice little gems that should do to pay a fine or two if they want to levy one.” He paused, chewing on the ends of his mustache. “Now, it seems like they’ll take me back, but this I don’t understand.” With the stick he pointed at the third land. “Quicksilver with The Road in it. Usually means a long journey and not one you were planning to make, either. It troubles my heart, it does.”

Carra leaned forward for a better look, but The Road was a simple line of four dots and not very communicative.

“It wouldn’t just mean the journey you already made, would it? To get here, I mean. I—”

A hiss, a spitting sound like water drops on a griddle—Carra jerked her head up and saw one of the young dwarves, his sword drawn, walking slowly and ever so steadily toward the table. Otho suddenly hissed, as well, an intake of breath.

“Don’t move, my lady. Still as stone, that’s what we want.”

Wrapped in such a false calm that Lightning never barked or moved, the dwarf reached the table, slowly raised his sword, hesitated, then smacked it down blade-flat onto the planks not a foot from Carra’s elbow. Carra jerked back just as something under the blade crunched—and spurted with a trickle of pale ooze. The second guard came running and swearing; Otho hurried round the end of the table to look as the young man lifted his blade and turned the crumpled, long-legged creature over with the point. All three men muttered for a moment.

“See that brown mark on what’s left of its stomach? Looks like a stemmed cup? We call that the goblet of
death.” Otho turned to her. “This particular creature’s a spider—well, it used to be, I should say. Big as your fist. Poisonous as you could want. Or not want.”

“Yen! That’s disgusting!” She looked up at the ceiling and shuddered, half expecting to see a whole nest of them ready to drop. “How common are they?”

“They’re not common, my lady. You almost never find them in civilized tunnels and suchlike. They’re shy, like most wild things. Find ’em hiding under rocks in the high mountains, if you find them at all.”

“Then how, I mean, why—” She fell silent, seeing their answer in their faces. “Someone brought it here, didn’t they?”

“They did.” Otho was staring up at the ceiling. “And whoever dropped it down through one of them vents is long gone, I’ll wager. There’s another floor up there, a gallery, like, so a workman can get up and clean out the air vents. Anyone could climb up there easy. No one would ever see ‘em.” He turned and snarled something in Dwarvish at one of the young men, who rushed off. “I’m sending him to get the landlord and wake this place up. If we make a big fuss about it, whoever this was won’t dare to make more mischief. Don’t you worry, my lady. Safety in numbers and all that.”