The Dreaming Hunt (33 page)

Sha'Li tilted her head first to one side and then the other. Eventually, she announced, “Nope. See it I do not. Ugly as dirt are all flesh-covered land walkers.”

“Are you
crazy
?” Rosana whispered. “He's magnificent.”

A reptilian version of a snort. “Magnificently ugly. Interesting to spar with he might be, though. Fast hands. To watch out for the feet, must I remember. Fast are those, as well.”

Rosana turned in indignation to Sha'Li, gesturing back toward Rynn. “Really? You can look upon that and all you think about is
fighting
him?”

The lizardman tilted her head quizzically once more. “What think you when you watch him?”

Rosana threw up her hands in disgust. “I will never understand your kind.”

Raina grinned. Personally, she'd long ago stopped trying to understand Sha'Li. The lizardman girl had a deep sense of honor, was intensely loyal to her friends, and seemed willing to do whatever it took to wake the Sleeping King. That was enough for her.

“What practice performs he now?” Sha'Li whispered.

Raina turned to look at the handsome paxan again. He'd sat down cross-legged in the middle of the clearing, hands resting on his knees, staring at something across the clearing. Very slowly, cautious hop by cautious hop, a large hare emerged into the clearing. Eyes bright and nose twitching, it approached Rynn.

She held her breath. She'd never seen a wild animal approach a humanoid like that before. The animal stopped right in front of Rynn, stretched up on its hind legs, and very carefully touched Rynn's cheek with its whiskers.

Rynn smiled, and the spell was broken. The hare dashed away and disappeared in the brush. The paxan rose in a fluid motion to his feet and started across the clearing toward his shirt, which lay atop a bush.

Raina and Rosana scampered back to camp giggling while a grumpy Sha'Li headed back to the stream. Raina thought she spied Will glaring at Rosana from between slitted eyelids before rolling over and emitting a loud snore.

*   *   *

“Rise and shine, Druumedar! The rain's lifted, and the day's a-wasting!”

He jolted awake. A rough cottage took shape around him. Right. The breastplate. A journey to learn more about its maker. The two men ate and buttoned up the cottage in efficient silence and then headed out.

They trekked due north through the lilting beauty of Kel toward the front range of Groenn's Rest. The path grew steep and narrow as they climbed out of the misty forests and into the highlands above the tree line. Fog filled the valley behind them, making it resemble a witch's cauldron. So far, his leg hadn't pulled any tricks, which was fortunate. His left shoulder hugged a granite cliff face, and his right shoulder hung in midair above a sheer drop into that cloud-like soup. The trail made a sharp switchback, and now his right shoulder hugged the cliff.

“How much farther?” he grunted. The air was getting thin up here, and his breathing was starting to labor. He'd been down out of his mountains for too long. Going soft, he was.

“Not far,” his guide puffed back. Nice to know Halvar was huffing, too. It was no good suffering alone.

Gunther came from western Waelan where the mountains formed the end of the Groenn's Rest Range. They were gentler affairs for the most part with broad valleys, long, narrow lakes, and easily hiked slopes. But these monsters in the heart of the Groenn's Rest were young and sharp, shoving aggressively toward the heavens. Like the jagged bones of a spine, they divided the southern forests of Waelan and Kel from the northern deserts of Scythia and Shakkar.

Maybe a half dozen switchbacks later—he'd lost count—a broad plateau opened up without warning. Finally. They'd topped the ridge. Triumph surged through him. Not bad for a one-legged old man.

He looked to the north. The distant line of soaring, snowcapped peaks was magnificent. His dwarven soul yearned to climb among them, to plumb their treasures and to feel their heartbeats in the soles of his feet.

At one end of this flat space, an upthrust of granite, maybe fifty feet tall, rose up out of the plateau like a huge, snaggled tooth. Colored veins streaked the rock, running down its steep sides like sparkling ropes of jewels, blue and green and brown. Copper that would be. He could smell it from here.

“The whole mountain wouldn't be that chock-full of copper, now would it?” he asked Halvar.

“What? Eh, no. They's veins of it throughout all the mountains in this region. Hard to mine, though. They run vertical and deep, right down into the heart o' the rock.”

“Where's the smith I'm needing to speak with about my copper piece? Down there?” He eyed the path dipping away from them on the far side of the plateau, twin to the path they'd just climbed, snaking back and forth across the mountainside.

“Aye, in yon valley.”

He eyed the switchback path warily. His mechanical leg liked going uphill a great deal more than going downhill. Gads. It was going to take a week to make the trek all the way down to the valley floor.

“Follow me,” Halvar said, grinning all of a sudden. He strode over toward that upthrusting tooth of granite and disappeared around its side.

Gunther was not fond of surprises, thank you very much. He stepped around the corner and pulled up short as an opening in the stone face came into view.

A vague sense of déjà vu made him uneasy as he stepped into the cave beyond. His eyes adjusted to the dim light, and as they did, a dwarf-worked chamber came into view. Stone benches ringed the space, and decorative carvings climbed the walls and arched across the ceiling.

“Over here,” Halvar said excitedly.

He sounded like a boy at a circus. Scowling, Gunther stumped toward the back of the space.

“Put your shoulder into this wit' me.” Halvar leaned against a great stone slab.

As Gunther threw his weight against it, too, the slab began to move, slowly at first, and then more quickly as the roller it rested upon set into motion. Dim light fell into a second, smaller chamber, much more utilitarian than the first. It looked like a mine entrance. Several arched passageways opened off the chamber, the tunnels beyond plunging downward into the mountain. Halvar lit a small torch with flint and steel, and Gunther lit a torch of his own off Halvar's.

“This way.” Halvar headed for the tunnel farthest to the right. They descended a set of carved steps for no more than two minutes before Halvar fetched up, announcing, “Here we are.”

Gunther was getting downright grumpy over all this mystery. This had better be good. He stepped to Halvar's left and lifted his torch high, staring at the sight that greeted him. A gigantic pulley stood in the center of the cave, a twisted cable thicker than his arm wrapped around its ponderous circumference. Hanging from the cable was a bucket large enough to hold at least six men, if not more.

Halvar strode up to the bucket, which rested only a few inches above the level of the cave's floor. He reached inside the bucket, unlatched what turned out to be a panel in the side of the thing, and opened it inward. “Well, come on, then. Ye don' wanna
walk
down into the valley do ye?”

Grinning in wonder, Gunther stepped into the bucket. “How does it move?”

“Counterweights. I release this brake over here”—Halvar grabbed a long lever on the far side of the bucket hanging down from the cable overhead and threw it forward—“and off we go.”

With a mighty squeak, the huge pulley behind them began to turn. They barely moved at first but picked up speed gradually until they were moving along faster than he could've run with both his legs intact. He was forced to hold his torch down into the bucket to keep the wind of their passage from blowing it out. The speed stabilized, and they rushed down the mountain in a ride that was nothing short of exhilarating.

Somewhere in the middle of the mountain, another bucket identical to the one they rode in whizzed past them, heading upward. Eventually, their bucket came to a surprisingly gentle stop in a chamber exactly like the one at the top of the mountain, giant pulley and all.

Except this one was filled with hostile-looking dwarves wielding wicked axes and spears. As pale skinned as humans, they had to be terrakin.

“Hands in the air. Come out real slow, or else we skewer ye,” one of the dwarves announced.

“Halvar Langskaag of Kel,” his companion declared, hands raised high over his head as if he believed the threat. Gunther followed suit with alacrity. “An' this 'ere be Gunther Druumedar of the Hauksgrafir. Brought 'im to ye, I did.”

All eyes turned on him. “State yer business, Druumedar.”

Not friendly sorts, these terrakin. Weren't even going to let him out of this cave without interrogating him, were they?

“I, uhh, come in search of information.”

Harrumphs greeted that declaration. “What sort o' information?”

“About a piece of metalwork I found a while back. Folks in the know seem to think you be the ones to talk to about it. That your kind mighta made it.”

“What piece?” the speaker demanded.

“It's a breastplate. I'm wearing it. Gonna put my hand down to unlace my shirt,” he warned the armed crowd. Very slowly, he reached down with his right hand and loosened the laces on his shirt to reveal the top of the ornate breastplate.

“Yorick!” the leader of the bunch called.

A gray-bearded terrakin jostled through the press of his companions and moved over to Gunther. He bent down to stare at the triangle of exposed copper, tilting his head this way and that. Yorick growled, “Where'd ye get that, outlander?”

If the atmosphere in the room had been hostile before, it was downright murderous now. Swords slipped out of hidden sheaths sewn into coats and tabards, and the party behind Yorick took a collective step closer.

Gunther took an involuntary step back, his backside bumping into the bucket. “I found it in an abandoned mine in the Hauksgrafir. Asked the council about it; and they sent me here.”

“Not the Miner's Guild Council?” Yorick asked quickly in alarm.

“Of course not. The
Kelnor
Council.” Which was shorthand for the anti-Kothite forces who worked out of sight of the Imperial Miner's Guild.

“C'mon, then.” Yorick turned and headed for the exit.

As quickly as the swords had come out, they disappeared. He and Halvar were herded forward through a cave and outside into an altogether unremarkable-looking village. The mountains loomed massive and close, like watchful sentinels.

Gunther fell in beside Yorick, and the rest of the crowd of terrakin drifted off, turning for side streets and doorways as they marched through the muddy village. A smithy came into sight, but Gunther was surprised as Yorick led him past it. “You're not a smith?”

“Aye, but no common smith am I.”

The rest of the terrakin and Halvar peeled off toward the smithy, leaving him and Yorick to continue on alone. Behind him, Gunther heard bellows of greeting.

Beyond the edge of the village, a path turned off the road toward the mountain, ending at a rough wooden door in the base of the granite hillside itself. Yorick led him inside.

A forge stood inside the door, much like the one in Hauksgrafir would have been had it still been intact. But this one was fully equipped and brightly lit, a pile of hot coals glowing in front of a bellows. The smith gave the bellows an absent pull, and the coals flared, white hot.

“Lemme see your breastplate, then,” Yorick said.

He removed his leather armor and outer shirt to reveal the entire bracer.

“Dwarven made, it be.”

“And the makers? Who were they?” Gunther asked.

“Old ones.”

“Did they work in other metals?” Gunther asked curiously.

“Nope. Jus' copper in these hills. Learned how to harden it up so as to make fer nigh-unbreachable armor. Mind if I clean that up a bit?”

“Not at all.” He'd tried to buff the piece himself, but the pale green patina had stubbornly refused to yield to his efforts. With Yorick's help, he unbuckled the breastplate and removed it. While he stretched out the kinks in his shoulders, Yorick picked up the piece and started to hold it out toward the fire.

“Hey, now!” Gunther lurched forward.

Yorick grinned. “Not to worry. Takes a whole lot more than my fire to bother this old copper.”

“So you've seen the like before.”

“Aye. Time or two.”

Gunther subsided, watching as the smith deftly turned the piece this way and that. After a few minutes, he whipped the breastplate out of the fire and dunked it in the quenching pool a few steps beyond the forge. A sizzle and a cloud of steam rose up. Working fast, Yorick clamped the breastplate to his anvil and scrubbed energetically at it with a buffing cloth. The patina gave way to rich, warm copper that turned out to be covered in an intricate pattern of tiny circles embedded in the copper itself.

“What are those?” Gunther asked.

“Pattern left by the hammer blows the smith made. Wildly difficult to master. No one I've ever seen has been able to duplicate the complication and precision of these old pieces. Course, no modern hammer makes a mark on this old copper, anyway.”

“How'd this piece get made, then?” Gunther asked.

“Dunno. Had to be a whale of a strong smith to work it, though.” He turned the breastplate and commenced rubbing it vigorously again. “Good-sized piece ye've got here. Only stuff like this I've ever seen was broken bits and pieces.”

Gunther asked his host, “Have you ever heard of a whole statue clad in the stuff? Bearing an uncanny resemblance to a living dwarf?” He warmed to his topic. “Bigger than life size, but beyond that, perfect, so a fellow could see the whiskers growing in his ears and dirt under his fingernails. Like you'd expect the fellow to up and start talking any second.”

The armorsmith jolted violently, staring. He looked around in alarm and crowded right up close to Gunther, whispering in his ear, “Say no more. Not another word. The Empire will already put ye to permanent death for having
seen
one o' them old statues, but to speak about it—they'll wipe out everyone ye've ever met. Unnerstan'?”