The Silver Mage (25 page)

T
he strange white bird circled overhead, then flew off, heading southwest. Kov watched it, a silver glint against blue sky, until it passed out of sight. He ached with envy of its wings. Behind him, his swimming teacher clambered out of the water. The were-otter turned, spun fast around, and in a swirl of blue light, changed back into man form.

“Was that a crane, do you think?” Kov asked him.

“It were not,” Jemjek said. “I know not what it may be, but the seeing of it did trouble my heart somehow.”

“Just so,” Grallag said. “We best be going back inside.”

Since there was no arguing with his strong-armed Dwrgi guards, Kov agreed.

Kov was never allowed to go outside alone. During the day, he could walk wherever he wanted inside, though at night, Grallag slept in front of the entrance to his chamber. For days now, he’d been exploring the complex around the treasure chamber and studying the walls and the ceilings in the hopes of finding a ventilation shaft, or even a chink or crack, that an enterprising dwarf could use for an escape route.

Unfortunately, the Dwrgwn were almost as clever as the Mountain Folk when it came to burrowing. They had laid a pale mud-plaster over the smooth walls, which they’d reinforced with a course or two of stone where the walls joined the hard-packed earthen floors. Stout beams supported the ceilings and kept the doorways of the various rooms trim and true. All the ventilation shafts had bronze grids embedded into the ceilings over their openings. Kov admired their skill even as he cursed it.

Although he’d never found an open shaft that might function as a way out, he had seen a surprising number of empty rooms and dusty hallways. A few pieces of derelict furniture, a dropped tunic, covered in years’ worth of dust, a blackened stone beneath a vent that spoke of a cooking fire—here and there he saw signs that these rooms had once been lived in. Had there been a plague or some sort of war? He wondered, but when he asked the various individuals he knew, they all shook their heads and professed to know nothing about those signs of life.

Kov had also been asking those Dwrgwn he’d gotten to know, whether his guards or the other diners at the communal meals up in the village, about the heaps of treasure lying so carelessly in the big chamber.

“What I wonder,” Kov would say, “is why gathering is so important to you all. It’s not like you do anything with the treasure. You don’t trade it or wear it or keep it in your private chambers.”

“We do much love to visit it,” ran the usual reply. “When we be ill, we do go there and then feel well. When we be sad, it does make us happy.”

On the day that Kov saw the unusual white bird, he went up to the communal meal early. After he’d fetched his usual plate of boiled fish and spelt porridge, he sat down next to a young woman, Annark, whom he found attractive despite her thick half-moons of eyebrows, mostly because she seemed more intelligent than most Dwrgwn. When he asked her why she loved the treasures, she gave him the answer he needed.

“It be the mist lights,” she said. “See you not them? The beautiful blue haze from the gold, and the lights dancing from the jewels.”

Kov was too surprised to respond.

“The blue does rise from the gold,” Annark continued, “like mist on the river. We do waft it to ourselves, we do roll in it, and our own blue shadow, it does draw strength. See you it not, Kov Gemmaster?”

“I can’t, alas, but I can feel it.” Suddenly he saw an important truth. “All of my people can, and that’s why we love gold so much. We breathe in the mist and soak it up through our hands.”

She smiled and returned to stripping the bones out of a fish with her long delicate fingers.
Our own blue shadow?
Kov thought.
I wonder what that may mean!
His heart ached to consult with Dallandra about these mysterious folk and the even more mysterious mist rising from their stolen treasures.

Kov had recruited his swimming teacher for his work in the chamber of gold, one Jemjek, a young Dwrgi man who had the muscles necessary for all the lifting and hauling ahead. An unexpected recruit had volunteered as well, a boy named Clakutt, just ten years old, with bright dark eyes and slender hands that could reach into the narrowest clay jars and bring out their contents. When together, they all spoke an odd mix of the Mountain dialect of Deverrian and the few bits of Dwrgi that Kov knew. No one had offered to teach him their language in any systematic way, leaving him to pick up what he could here and there.

On the morrow, when they returned from a swimming lesson, Kov took his helpers into the chamber of gold. As it always did, the sight of all the treasure, heaped as casually as dirty laundry but glittering in the light from their candles, turned his breathing heavy with excitement. He could feel sweat beading his back and the palms of his hands. Although he could regain control of himself with one deep breath, he wondered if some day, perhaps soon, he would stop wanting to gain control. It was the mist from the gold, he supposed, muddling his thinking. He wiped his hands dry on his brigga and turned his mind to the work ahead.

“Now, our first task for today,” Kov told his two helpers, “is clearing one of the corners.”

“Why?” Jemjek said.

“So we’ve got a place to put things?” Clakutt broke in.

“Exactly. Carry everything in that corner there,” Kov said, pointing, “into this clear space where I’m standing. Then we’ll start putting all the coins in the empty corner while we move things from the next one. Jewelry pieces without gems in that one, I think. And so on around the room.”

“But we leave any coins we find in that corner?” Clakutt said.

“Just so. Good lad!”

Kov picked up a gold coin, glanced at it, and nearly swore aloud. Since the death masks were of obvious Horsekin work, he’d been expecting Horsekin coins, but the coin bore Westfolk runes on one side and a roughly stamped Westfolk face on the other. He found another coin—again, Westfolk work. He picked up a golden brooch of a horse with wind-tossed mane and realized he’d seen one like it back home in Lin Serr, displayed as a treasure from the Seven Cities. The more he examined the objects in the chamber, the more he realized that the vast majority of them had to be ancient workmanship, so delicately done of such pure metal that they made the beautiful crafts of the nomadic Westfolk look like the efforts of children.

Twice looted!
he thought to himself. The Horsekin in those barrows must have been buried with the spoils of war before the plague wiped out their fellows back in the Seven Cities. Vaguely he remembered that the Horsekin stripped the flesh of their dead fellows from their bones, ate it, and then buried the bones in tidy bundles, bound with leather thongs to keep the ghosts from walking. Or so he’d been told—the story had the spiteful feel of mere legend about an enemy.

“Jemjek?” Kov said. “Have you ever gone gathering?”

“Once,” Jemjek said.

“Did you see any bones in the mound?”

“I did. All stacked up like winter firewood, they were.”

“Were they tied in bundles?”

“They were not, not no more, but there were stains on them from thongs or ropes. Rotted clean away, if you do ask me.”

Spiteful or not, part of the tale held true.
What a lovely lot they are, the savages!
Kov thought.

“Kov?” Clakutt came trotting over. “What be this?”

The boy handed Kov something that looked like a length of rope braided from fine strands of gold. As thick as his thumb, the “rope” had been twisted into a semicircle about eight inches in diameter, with a solid gold sphere for a finial at each end, leaving an opening about two inches across.

“I’m not sure,” Kov began then paused, running through his memory. “Wait! I heard somewhat once. I think it’s called a torc. A very long time ago the men of Deverry wore things like this around their necks.”

“They did?” Clakutt’s eyes narrowed in thought. “They must have had truly skinny necks to get them on.”

Kov laughed. “When the jeweler finished braiding this rope, it would have been a straight piece. He must have bent it very carefully around the person’s neck. Then they’d never take it off.”

“But how did it get off, then, to get here?”

“Well, I suppose you could bend it one more time without breaking it.” Another detail rose in his memory. “Or an enemy might have cut the person’s head off and pulled the torc free.”

Clakutt wrinkled his nose and growled in disgust, a throaty sound so animal that it startled Kov. He’d started thinking of the Dwrgwn as just a different variety of Mountain Folk, he realized.
A mistake,
he told himself.
Don’t fall into it again.

At the end of the workday, the crone, Marmeg, who’d once been Kov’s captor, came to fetch Clakutt, her grandson. For the boy’s sake, Kov decided to be polite to her, even though he’d not forgotten the kicks and insults she’d given him during the night he’d spent tied up and helpless in her hut. When Clakutt launched into an excited recital of the day’s work, she laid one bony hand on the boy’s shoulder and scowled at Kov.

“You know,” Kov said, “your grandson’s unusually intelligent. I’m truly pleased he wants to help.”

At that her look softened, though not so far as a smile. Over the next few days, every time Kov saw Marmeg, he made a point of praising Clakutt and his mental abilities, which quite truthfully stood far above most of the Dwrgwn he’d met. Finally, when she came to fetch him, Marmeg brought Kov a flat basket laden with oatcakes. He’d won her over, but even as he thanked her profusely, he wondered why he’d cared to change her low opinion of him.
I may be stuck here for the rest of my life,
he thought.
No use in keeping old enemies or making new ones.

His success came in handy the very next day. In the middle of the afternoon Kov discovered, carelessly wrapped in a twist of half-rotted linen, a pair of fire opals and a palm-sized brooch of obviously dwarven workmanship, displaying a silver hound, couchant, wound round with bands of interlace. He could place it as a style popular for trade goods some forty or fifty years past.

“This is a very different-looking thing,” Kov said.

“It be so,” Clakutt said. “It be not gold.”

“Very good! This was made by my people, the Mountain Folk.” Clakutt’s lips formed an O, and he nodded in wonder.

When Marmeg came to fetch the boy, Kov asked her on a whim if she knew anything about this unusual piece, mostly because she was the oldest Dwrgi he’d ever seen. To his surprise, she remembered it.

“It did come from a trader from the Far West,” she told him. “Varc or Ferrik or some such name he had.”

“Verrarc,” Kov broke in. “I met him once, when I was but a child. He came from Cerr Cawnen.”

“They all do, what traders we do see. But truly, Verrarc was his name. My man did take this bit of work and them there moonstones in trade for an old book he had, a nasty looking thing, all beaten and torn, but Verrarc, he were fair taken with it.”

“A book?” Kov said. “Do you remember what it was?”

“Just some book.” She shrugged in profound indifference. “None of us kenned what its marks did mean.”

“I see. Does anyone else have any old books around here?”

“They may well. There used to be a fair number of books around here, before the—” She stopped speaking and looked away, her toothless mouth working.

“Um, before the what?” Kov said.

“I forget what I did mean to say.” She gave an elaborate shrug. “I be old. I do forget things.”

“Before the Great Scour, you mean?” Clakutt said.

Jemjek, who’d been idly listening, caught his breath with a gasp. Marmeg turned to Clakutt and hissed, then let go with an angry flood of Dwrgic words. Clakutt crossed his slender arms over his chest and glared up at her.

“But he be one of us now,” the boy said in Mountain dialect. “The dweomer did make him so.”

Marmeg hesitated in mid-tirade, then spoke normally, still in Dwrgic. Clakutt nodded and looked at Kov.

“She says, you might be asking Lady what we do mean by the Scour. If Lady does tell you, then all be right and proper.”

“Very well, then.” Kov gave Marmeg a conciliatory smile. “I’ll do that. I want to talk with her about another matter, as well. She told me that we’d have a scribe for the work, and I’ve not seen hide nor hair of one.”

“Scribe?” Clakutt quirked an eyebrow. “What be that?”

“A person who can read and write.”

“I know not of such a thing among us.”

Then why,
Kov thought to himself,
did she promise me one? Just like the wretched woman, her and her grand ideas!

Kov hadn’t seen Lady in some days. That evening, at the communal meal up in the village, he asked various people where she might be, but no one seemed to know or care. “Down some tunnel or other,” was the usual answer to his questions. “She does come and go as she wills.” He reminded himself that life among the Dwrgwn was—
well, fluid,
he thought.
Their minds run this way and that like water, too.
He wasn’t truly surprised that few—if any—of them could read.

Yet, apparently, Lady heard that he wanted to see her. The very next morning she came to the treasure chamber and stood just inside the door to watch them work. That particular day she went barefoot. Her long gray hair fell to the shoulders of her simple cloth tunic, fastened with brass pins, such as all her folk normally wore.

Humble clothes or not, she was still Lady and
the
lady of this peculiar underground city. Kov, Clakutt, and Jemjek all bowed to her. She acknowledged them with a wave of her hand, but said nothing. Finally, after some little while of watching, she motioned to Kov to follow, then stepped into the tunnel just beyond the door.

“I did hear that you wished to ask me a question,” she said.

“I did, my lady.” Kov decided that it would be safer not to mention Clakutt by name. “I don’t mean to give offense in any way, mind, but I overheard one of the children mentioning this, and I’m curious. What’s the Great Scour?”