Dragon Blood-Hurog 2 (29 page)

"Ward, this is my brother, Yoleg. Yoleg, Wardwick of Hurog." The man he introduced me to was a hand shorter than Axiel, but he outweighed him by five or six stone.

Axiel could pass for human when he wished, but this one could only be dwarven. He wore no beard, so he wasn't much over a century old, just a lad for the long-lived dwarves. Yoleg, I knew from conversations with Axiel, was the heir to the throne.

I bowed. "Prince Yoleg, good of you to come and offer me escort." He bowed to me as well. "Hurogmeten. It is our honor to ride the ways with you and bring you to our father."

Royalty or not, the craft we seated ourselves on looked no more seaworthy than any other I'd seen in the ways. Axiel told me that most of them had been made before the illnesses had plagued his people—so at least two hundred years ago.

I sat on a seat not meant to accommodate a man of my size and pulled the leather harness tight around my middle. Riding the ways was rough, and falling off the raft meant you had to swim for a very long time.

I could feel the pulse of ancient magic as it caught our raft and flung it wildly down a narrow tunnel so fast it was hard to catch my breath. Spray hit my face and left small bruises, like the first touch of frostbite. Sometimes the tunnel was lit with a million stars—dwarvenstones spelled to light the way. But

the dwarves had been weakening for hundreds of years, and in some places the magic had faded and we were engulfed in absolute darkness. There, the sound of the water hitting the rock became almost painful.

There were chambers in the ways, crossroads where Yoleg decided which tunnel to follow. We had to wait until the water calmed and the magic died down before we could set off again. I'd traveled these
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ways before, but each time the sight of the chambers rendered me dumb. One chamber was coated in crystal gems. Backlit by dwarvenstone, emerald columns rose from the ground to cross over our heads. It was difficult to judge distances in caves, but the columns looked colossal, the base of the nearest one longer than our raft.

Another chamber held gray stone carved in countless shapes. Small statues crowded the water's edge and climbed over the tunnel. I could have stayed there a whole day, but we were off again with a rush of

water magic.

As we waited in a place that smelled of mint and glittered with gold, something large bumped our boat twice. Yoleg looked concerned, and Axiel held up a hand for silence. We all crouched motionless until whatever it was gave up and swam off in waves of midnight fins.

The raft came to rest gently against one of a series of docks in a cave I hadn't seen before—although I had been to Dwarvenhame several times. Our raft was alone in a port obviously built for a hundred, and the dock we tied to was the only one I'd have trusted with my weight.

"This is the formal dock," said Axiel, answering my unasked question. "Before we took you as a visitor to my family. But you come tonight as Hurogmeten to petition the king, and that requires we tie up here."

Axiel organized us so that Yoleg led, followed a half-step later by me on his right. Axiel and Oreg flanked me on either side.

Yoleg brought us into a large chamber, irregular in shape but flat floored and walled. Gold and gemstones were conspicuously absent because dwarves don't mix pleasure and business. That this hall in

the Dwarvenhame was barren except for mounds of stone to serve as seats told me that this was very serious business indeed.

Plain-clothed dwarves packed the room in a way that reminded me forcefully of my own great hall yesterday. But there was a stillness that lay over this room that would never be a part of a gathering of wild Northmen. It felt as if the dwarves had internalized some part of the stone of the room into themselves.

On the far side of the room, Axiel's father, Lorekoth the dwarven king, rose from his seat and looked at me as if he'd never laughed at my table or dug through the broken stones of Hurog to pull books tenderly

out of harm's way.

He was young to be king, only four hundred years old, but his father had been one of the first to die of the series of plagues that had nearly destroyed the dwarves. His mane of red hair swept the ground. It was loose because a dwarf only braided his hair to go to war. In his neatly trimmed beard there was a bare hint of gray. King Lorekoth wore plain gray robes trimmed in black. Only the fabrics, silk and linen,

reflected his rank.

"Who comes?" he asked slowly, the only person I'd ever heard with a voice deeper than mine. Axiel said that he could use the deeper tones to conjure fear in anyone listening to him, a useful trick on the battlefield.

I bowed, one ruler to another. "I am Wardwick, Hurogmeten of Hurog Keep, where dragons once more fly."

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"Why do you come before me, Hero of Hurog?"

I didn't flinch in embarrassment at the title, but it was a near thing. "I ask repayment of the debt your people owe me. We fight a war above. A great evil has been unearthed to work its magic among mankind. Jakoven, High King of the Five Kingdoms, holds Farsonsbane in his hands."

"Does any person here deny him his debt?" the king asked.

Silence answered him.

"What do you wish of us?"

"I need an army," I said. "What human army could stand against the dark men, the stone men?" And so the negotiations began. Dwarves, perhaps because they are a long-lived race, do nothing in haste unless dire need forces them. My tired bones told me that the sun had risen again high in the sky before someone mentioned the dwarvenways casually. Another hour passed before I brought them up again.

Stories were told of dwarven bravery, and Oreg and Axiel told tales of my life to match them that were so blown up that several times they bore no resemblance to any memory I had of past deeds. Not that the stories were false … just exaggerated. I
had
carried a horse two miles in a blizzard—but it was a newborn foal. Blood and severed body parts played a role in most of the stories, each storyteller becoming more and more graphic as the hours trailed by.

In the end I had an agreement that I could transport no more than ten people at a time through the dwarvenways. The list of people who could use them was not long—no one wanted the ways to be common knowledge—but Kellen and his man, all those of direct Hurog descent whom I deemed trustworthy, Alizon, Haverness, Tisala, Stala, and Garranon were among them. Axiel was to come with me because he knew how to use the ways.

"Most gracious king," I said with a bow that was more jerky than I would have wished, but at least my stiff muscles allowed me to rise. "I have a small gift for you, in thanks for this audience." A gift, the king's note had said, would make it impossible for his courtiers to complain about human manners. An exotic animal, he'd suggested, as his menagerie was famous among his people. It had taken

me about five minutes to come up with the perfect animal.

"I have in my lands," I said, "a basilisk, sometimes called a stone lizard. Oreg, my wizard, has enchanted

it truly to stone in order to keep it safe. If you have a sanctuary for it, I will have it brought to you. Oreg

can dispel the enchantment when and where you wish it."

Silence fell upon the dwarves. Shock rather than contemplation, I thought. The basilisk was the dwarven

royal family's animal, a totem second only to the dragon who belonged to no one family, but to all of dwarven kind. Axiel had told me that during our trip here when I explained what I intended to do—I was

not such a fool as to give the king a gift that might be an embarrassment, so I checked it out with his son.

The king even had the perfect place to release the basilisk, a huge island without a harbor that was reachable only by the dwarvenways.

A slow smile spread across the king's face. "A generous gift, Lord Wardwick. I am honored to accept."
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I bowed once more and left before I did anything to undo what we had accomplished today.

"I didn't think that even my father could get them to agree to allow humans to travel freely in the dwarvenways," commented Axiel as we waited for the waters to calm in one of the crossroad chambers.

His younger brother wasn't with us because the raft was to await passengers at Hurog.

"He didn't think he would, either," said Oreg with a pleased smile. "I suggested to your father that if Ward started with a big enough demand—one that really would cancel the debt owed to him—then the rest of the dwarves would be more than ready to give him this small concession."

"The best part," I said, "is that your father will be taking the basilisk off my hands and Oreg will quit asking me where we can release it."

Tychis was waiting for us at the bottom of the first flight of the stairs to the dwarvenways where Oreg's wards to keep out casual visitors held him at bay. Even fleshed out a bit he looked like a half-starved wolf—a cold, half-starved wolf. I don't know how long he'd been there, but he was pale and shivering.

"What'd Ciarra do?" I asked, briskly wrapping him in my cloak. "Tell you to find me and then let you fend for yourself?"

He bridled at my criticism of Ciarra, though he pulled my cloak around him. "She said it was necessary for you to come as quickly as you could."

"Tychis?" My sister's voice preceded her. "Are you down here?" She turned the corner and saw the four of us. Ciarra looked more respectable than she had as a young girl, wearing dresses now instead of torn-up hunting leathers—but I suspected that when she was eighty-five she would still light up a room with her energy. "Ah, there you are, Ward. Nice of you to tell people where you're going. If it hadn't been for Tosten and me, Uncle Duraugh would have been sending out search parties." I scowled at her a bit. It had been a long time since I had to tell anyone where I was going. Seeing my expression, Tychis shuffled over until he was between Ciarra and me.

Ciarra bounced down the stairs and hugged him. "Don't worry about that one," she said to Tychis as she pointed at me rudely. "He hasn't raised a hand to me since I lost his favorite hunting knife when I was about your age."

I huffed with indignation. "What she doesn't tell you was that she lost my knife climbing up a tree to see if

the eagle in the nest had any hatchlings. Stupid bird almost knocked me out of the tree when I went up to

get her—I still have scars from the talons on my back. If she'd bothered to ask, I'd have told her that eagles don't have hatchlings in the winter."

I'd done the right thing by giving her Tychis. He had a place here—and someone to take care of.

"Tychis, go tell Beckram that we found Ward and he'll be up shortly." Ciarra pulled off the wrap she was

wearing and tugged my cloak off of him. "Here, take this. It's not as warm, but it won't make you fall down the stairs, either. After you've found Beckram, go sit by a fire until you're toasty." Tychis bowed correctly and then barreled up the stairs, clutching Ciarra's wrap so it didn't fall on the floor.

"I have to watch him," she said when he was gone. "He's so anxious to please, he won't tell me when
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he's had enough."

I kissed her forehead. "Thank you. I knew you'd handle him if anyone could." She smiled and shook her head. "I'll be happy when I convince him that we have every intention of keeping him fed, and all that the hoard of food he's hidden does is attract rats. Oh, that poor boy, Ward. He doesn't talk much, but you can see the life he led 'til now." Ciarra turned to Axiel and stretched out her hands and caught his. "How lovely to see you again, Axiel."

After the greetings were done, Ciarra turned to me. "Alizon arrived last night on a boat from Cranstone with a small cadre of Oranstonians." She laughed when I groaned. "Serves you right, you old hermit." Oreg took himself off to sleep. Axiel accompanied Ciarra to check in on the new baby, while I trudged up the stairs toward one of the newly finished rooms next to the library where Alizon was holding court.

When I got there, the door was shut and my cousin Beckram was leaning casually against the wall facing

Tychis.

I stopped and stood quietly where I was, recognizing the relaxed pose Beckram used to defuse tense situations. One glance at Tychis's defensive stance told me who the tension was coming from. Beckram saw me, but gave no outward sign; instead he explained obliquely what the trouble was. "So you think I should have let that Oranstonian lord in there yell at you for doing as you were told?"

"I'm a bastard," Tychis said.

"You aren't the only bastard here," replied my cousin. "That's no reason to let a man cut down a boy."

"There are other bastard Hurogs here," Tychis agreed. "I seen 'em. They work in the stables, or fight in the Guard. They don't live in the keep—except maybe for Oreg, and he's a wizard. So what do you want

from me?"

"You and I have fourteen brothers and sisters who were not children of my mother," I said. Tychis didn't start, just moved until he could keep an eye on Beckram and me. I half expected to see tears, but he was just pale. I suppose children who survived the streets learned not to cry.

"I was unable to do much for my family until my father died," I continued. "By then most of them were adults." One by one, I named them off to him and told him what Hurog was doing to help them. Most I'd

given money to, several I'd given land. I'd paid for schooling and doweries, for a fishing boat, for arms and a good horse.

"Of them all," I said, "you are the only one I know of who was not born on Hurog. You were abandoned to fight for yourself on the streets for the king to pick up on a whim. My father owed you more than that. Later we'll talk of what you want out of life. But know this, Tychis. As long as I hold Hurog, no blood of my blood will ever stand alone. When you are a man, I expect you to stand up for your family as Beckram has. Now, Ciarra is in her room with Axiel, who is a half-dwarven prince. As a matter of fact, I think he might be a bastard, too. If you are quiet, Ciarra'll get him telling stories for you."