The Shadow Isle (46 page)

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.”

“Except I can never leave.”

“Except for that. And you won’t find refuge in a river, like I did.” She smiled again. “I suppose they thought I’d drowned. They saw me throw myself in, you see, but no woman ever climbed out again.”

“You swam away.”

“Of course. Now.” She leaned back and tented her fingertips while she considered him. “I use the word slave because I don’t know another for a worker who may not leave. But I have work for you that I think me you’ll come to love. This chamber holds the gatherings of many a year. Long before I was born my folk gathered. I have daughters who will gather after me. Tell me, Kov, what do you think of our little treasures?”

“They’re beautiful and wondrous. I’ve never seen anything like this chamber.”

“Does it fill you with the lust for sun’s blood?”

“I could never deny it.”

“This is only one of several such chambers in our city. And you’re in a city, Kov. It stretches far beyond the ugly little village by the bridge. We build those villages to fool everyone into thinking we’re naught but poor savages.”

“They do their work quite well.”

Lady smiled and leaned back in her chair. “But look at the disarray, ” she went on. “It aches my heart, as the men of Deverry say, to see the disorder. You’re a man of the Mountain Folk. You know the value of these things. You shall bring order into the gatherings.”

“Sort them, you mean?”

“Just that, and tell a scribe their worth, piece by piece. I see you as an honored servant, not a slave. You shall have a nice chamber and all the fish you can eat.”

“Fish? Only fish?”

“And porridge. We do cook porridge.”

“How splendid!”

“I doubt me if you’d like our other foods—worms, leeches, and the like.”

Kov felt his face turn cold—no doubt he’d paled.

“I thought not,” Lady said. “Well, we’ll see if our food gatherers can find fruits and suchlike in the summers for you. Your task will take years, more years than I have left, no doubt, and you and my granddaughters shall finish it. The Mountain Folk live long lives, or so I hear.”

“Did your men kidnap me just because I come from the mountains? ”

“They did not. They took you because you were measuring out our streets and chambers.”

One of the men spoke briefly in their language.

“That, too,” Lady said. “And because you were puzzling out the runes in the village. We keep our secrets no matter what the cost.”

The cost to others,
Kov thought. Aloud, he said, “Has it ever occurred to you to put a fence around your village, then, so strangers can’t wander into it?”

Lady stared at him in a wonderment that was nearly comical. “It hasn’t,” she said at last. “But we shall do so. I believe the gods have sent you to us, Kov.”

Kov’s first impulse was to assume she was lying about the fence. No doubt they needed an excuse to grab and enslave the occasional traveler. Yet she was looking at him with such a sincere admiration that he doubted his own assumption. None of these people had ever thought to sort their treasures, either, not even to put like with like the way any dwarven child would have done.

“Now that you’re here,” she continued, “we needed to find important work for you, somewhat much grander than digging tunnels. It’s our good fortune that you come from Lin Serr.”

“
Your
good fortune, no doubt.”

“But not yours?” She laughed, a low chuckle that reminded Kov of ferret sounds. “If you have kin at home, my heart regrets your captivity for their sake. As for your sake, if what I’ve heard about the Mountain Folk is true, soon our gatherings will become your kin and your love and your life. I think me that in time, you’ll be happy here.”

She’s probably right,
Kov thought,
and that’s the worst thing of all.
Already he could feel a longing in his fingers to touch the gold, to run his hands through it, to pick up handfuls of it and squeeze it in tight fists. He’d grown up listening to every adult he knew talk about metals and jewels, whether precious gold or cold iron, the rare diamonds or the more common opals and turquoises. He’d learned the lust from them, he supposed, for the treasures of the earth. Lady was smiling at him as if she could read his thoughts.

“I was told,” she said, “that the Mountain Folk have a name for gold, what we call the blood of the sun. Is it a secret name?”

“It’s not. ‘Dwe-gar-dway, the perfection of Earth of Earth.’ ”

“A lovely name, and I shall remember it. Now, while we prepare the binding ceremony, you’ll sleep up in the village. Once it’s done, you’ll see more of the city.”

“Binding ceremony? What do you mean, binding ceremony?”

“Oh, it’s naught that will cause you pain, unless cutting a lock of your hair will cause such, which I doubt.” Lady smiled in a way that was almost kindly. “Don’t let it trouble your heart.” She leaned forward in her chair and spoke in her own language.

The Dwrgi pack surrounded Kov again and led him away. The audience had ended. They left the Chamber of Gold through a different door to a different tunnel, which once again twisted, doubled back, and in general became part of a maze. This route, however, did lead up to the ground above and back to the shabby village. Kov’s captors led him out into a starry night perfumed with the smell of fish grilling over a wood fire. In the glowing light of the fire he saw the crone who’d first spotted him. She was hunkering down and poking the coals with a stick.

“Food,” one of the males said to Kov. “For you, and this hut. We chain your leg.”

“Very well.”

Kov stopped walking and stood head down, slump-shouldered, as if he were weighed down with defeat. As soon as they stepped a little away, he bolted forward at a dead run. He managed to get some twenty yards before they fell upon him, wrestled him down, and shackled his left leg to a long iron chain.

“Bad slave.” One of the men was grinning at him. “Now you eat and not run no more.”

Since they fastened the other end of the long chain to a ring in the stone pillar in the center of the village, Kov decided that he might as well sit down and eat. For the time being he could run no more, most certainly, but he had every intention of finding a way to do so, and as soon as possible. He could only pray that he could escape before this mysterious binding ceremony.

Someone handed him a plate of grilled fish fillets, accompanied by a ladleful of porridge, and a thin split of wood to use as a spoon. While he ate, he looked downriver, where he could see the dark bridge looming over the starlight-speckled water like the shadow of some huge monster indeed.

Kov spent a restless night in the hut with only the crone for a guard. The shackle, however, served better than a whole squad of axemen to keep him where he was. Whenever he heard the crone snoring, he would sit up and test the iron band for weaknesses. If he’d had a decent set of dwarven tools, he might have managed to pick the crude lock, but with only a splinter of wood for a weapon, he never managed to defeat it. On each try, the sound of the chain clanking would wake the crone; she would swear at him in a mix of several languages and then sit up, ready to shout an alarm, until he lay down and pretended to sleep.

Eventually he did nod off, only to wake suddenly at dawn to a crowd of villagers just outside his door. They were chanting a loud repetition of six syllables, one of which sounded like a click of the tongue. The crone rose from her blankets and nudged him with a foot in his ribs.

“Up, Mountain Man,” she said. “Ceremony is now.”

Kov let fly with a few choice oaths of his own. He crossed his arms over his chest and lay where he was.
They can just come and fetch me,
he thought. The crone kicked him again, then stuck her head out of the door and yelled, most likely for help, since three burly fellows arrived and stomped into the hut. They grabbed Kov, peeled the blanket off him, and carried him outside with the chain clanking behind. They laid him down by the stone pillar, then stepped back.

A few at a time, a crowd gathered, standing well back but forming a rough circle with Kov and the pillar in its center. As he considered them and their pinned-together tabardlike garments, it occurred to Kov that they dressed as they did in order to slip out of their clothes and dive into the water as fast as possible. They lived in fear, these people—
like most misers
, he thought. All that gold, heaped up and stored where no one could even see it! Yet, of course, it would be his job to correct that situation, his for the rest of his life, hundreds of years that would warp his very soul.
I will not end up like Otho,
Kov told himself,
not all bitter and greedy, I won’t, I can’t let myself!

One of the burly fellows who’d carried him out stepped forward, grabbed him, and hauled him up to prop him against the pillar. Kov considered sliding back down, but the crowd in front of him was parting, murmuring, to let someone through. Dressed in her glittering scales of gold, Lady blazed like a tiny sun in the fresh dawn light.

“Welcome to our river,” she said, and she smiled. “Soon you will be one of us, bound to the water as we are.”

“Never,” Kov said. “I cannot escape you, but I’m a man of earth, and earth will dam up a river when it’s stubborn enough.”

Everyone in the crowd gasped aloud, and Lady’s smile disappeared.

“Think of the gold, Kov,” she said. “The gold will be yours as well as ours, you know, for those who belong to a river own the fish in it.” She stroked the front of her dress. “We have so much gold, and you shall have a share of it.”