The Silver Mage (41 page)

The Dwrgwn had fashioned a ladder out of bits of wood and tree roots. Kov and Leejak would climb out of the tunnel every night for a cautious look around. Kov always took a stick with him to use in place of his missing staff to explore the ground around their tunnel. Some of the Dwrgwn gatherers must have burrowed into the place they called the Long Barrow in the years before the Horsekin had come south to claim it. Sure enough, on one of these expeditions he heard the slight difference in the tapping sounds that announced, “Tunnel below!” to his dwarven ears. He followed it far enough to determine that it ran south. Searching further never turned up an entrance.

“They fill that in,” Leejak said. “Hide it that way.”

“Most likely,” Kov said. “But if this tunnels runs all the way, it’ll save us a fair bit of time.”

On the morrow the Dwrgwn followed his directions. From their new tunnel, they dug a feeder shaft for some hundred yards west. When they broke through into the old tunnel, Kov saw immediately that it was solid Dwrgi work, reinforced with wood beams and a course of stone at the floor. What’s more, thanks to water seepage, on the walls grew blue fungi in a lumpy carpet of phosphorescent tendrils.

The Dwrgi filled the smallest baskets with earth, then carefully transplanted nodes of fungi from the walls to the baskets. Kov took one and, in the blue glimmer, walked on ahead, leaving the pack of chattering Dwrgwn behind him. The silence brought him a warning. Overhead, he could hear a thudding noise. He felt a trembling in the earth around him. He turned back and ran, hissing out a warning, “Silence! Hush! All of you! Danger!”

Mercifully, the Dwrgwn followed orders. In the resulting quiet everyone could hear the thud and rumble on the ground above. Leejak whispered to Kov, “What be?”

“Riders. We must be near the fortress.”

Leejak murmured the news to the others in the Dwrgi tongue.

Late that night, under the light of the Starry Road and a half-moon, Kov saw the Long Barrow for the first time. In their new-found tunnel the Dwrgwn found a ventilation shaft, crumbling and filled with dried leaves and the like, but easily cleaned and repaired. With the aid of the makeshift ladder Kov climbed up and stuck his head and shoulders into the fresh air. Not more than a quarter mile ahead, possibly a bit less by his estimate, he saw orange campfires, glowing among the dark silhouettes of tents. Although he couldn’t spot them, he could smell horses and their manure.

Beyond the fires and the tents rose a long dark mound, some sixty feet high. At the top, jagged shapes against the starry night appeared to signify walls made of rough-cut logs. Beyond them he could just discern the uneven roofs of buildings. None of the structures appeared true to the vertical, but whether was because of sloppy building or the mound settling, he couldn’t tell. He climbed back down and told Leejak what he’d seen.

“You got good eyes for dark,” Leejak said.

“All of my people do,” Kov said. “Now, what truly matters is what we find underneath the mound. Let’s hope this tunnel runs all the way.”

“Tomorrow we send scouts. Find out. Eat, sleep now.”

In the morning the scouts came back with good news. The ancient tunnel ran another quarter of a mile, and as it ran, it rose, aiming perhaps for the middle of the mound. It ended in a crumbling wooden door, obvious Dwrgi work. They’d refrained from opening it for fear of making too much noise.

“Did you hear people moving up above you?” Kov said.

“We did,” the head scout said. “Clomp clomp. Hollow like dead log.”

“Splendid!” Kov rubbed his hands together. “I’ll wager that means the door opens into a room of some sort. I’m going to risk taking a look. Better to do it now than wait till everyone’s asleep and quiet.”

Leejak and Jemjek went with him. They hurried up the steep length of the tunnel, which rose, by his well-trained dwarven estimate, some twenty-five feet above ground level. Leejak confirmed that the original diggers must have been aiming for the middle level of the barrow, where gathering parties usually found the burials and their treasures.

The door turned out to be made of planks, mossy and moldy with age, that tore apart under Kov’s bare hands like old cheese. As silently as he could, he dug out a spyhole toward the bottom of one plank, then squatted down to look through. Glowing blue fungi grew in profusion in the chamber on the far side. By their light he could just make out that the walls of this room had been made of timber, whole logs, most likely, judging from the regular pattern of vertical billows under the thick crust of fungi.

He could also hear the footsteps that the scouts had described, a hollow clop clop, as if someone were walking back and forth in wooden clogs. What that person was doing escaped him—pacing the floor, cleaning something—they could have been engaged in any number of tasks.

“Anything to gather in there?” Jemjek whispered.

“I doubt it.” Kov got up. “You can take a look, but be careful!”

Jemjek knelt down, leaned forward, and inadvertently nudged the rotted door with his elbow. With a pulpy, squishy sort of noise, it pulled free of the rusted hinges and fell in a rain of moldy splinters to reveal the further room, thick with fungus and rotting logs. Everyone froze as the footsteps above halted. A woman’s voice called out—something in a language Kov didn’t know, but it sounded like a question.

The footsteps began again; the voice repeated the question. Kov waited, half-afraid to breathe, and prayed that none of the Dwrgwn would break and try to run or call out. From above a rough man’s voice murmured. The woman answered, and this time she sounded afraid. Footsteps again. They slowly retreated; then silence.

Kov let out his breath in a soft sigh. “We’d better work fast,” he whispered.

Kov got up, motioned to the others, and led them back to the waiting Dwrgwn before he risked speaking.

“We’ve got wood down here,” Kov told them, “but it’s damp. I don’t know how well it will burn. We’re going to have to take our time and clear out the fungus, then see how far under the fortress we can get. But we must be silent, very very quiet.”

Leejak translated, glaring at each man in turn. Gebval stepped forward and began talking, waving his hands, crossing them in midair as if he were passing shuttles through the warp on a loom. When he finished, Leejak gave Kov the gist of his speech.

“He say he summon water out of wood. Must dig pit for water here. Then he summon it.”

Kov wanted to heap scorn on the idea, but working his pretend magic would keep the spirit talker out of the way.

“Splendid!” he said. “That will be a great help.”

Leejak raised a skeptical eyebrow but said nothing more.

Two of the Dwrgwn took shovels and began to dig an alcove into the side of the tunnel, while the others stood ready with baskets to take the loose earth away. Kov and Leejak walked away to talk where they wouldn’t be overheard.

“That wood,” Leejak said. “Very old. Should be all gone.”

“Agreed,” Kov said. “If I’m guessing aright, the Deverrians built this place over a thousand years ago. Someone else must have been using it since then, repaired it, even, with fresh wood.”

“Then they leave, Horsekin come?”

“Just so, but the Horsekin haven’t been here long. Refugees from the cities of the far west, would be my guess, who might have stayed here for some hundreds of years. I don’t know. If we had time, we might find old coins and things in the ruins, but we have no time.”

“Just so. Bring it down, then get out.”

They returned to the newly-dug alcove to find the Dwrgwn digging a cistern into its floor. Gebval stood nearby, chanting under his breath, waving his hands back and forth. At times he shut his eyes and swayed to some inner rhythm. On his chest the bronze knife glittered, but the glow that fell upon it gleamed gold, too bright and too yellow to originate with the fungi baskets. The hair on the back of Kov’s neck rose in a cold shiver. Gebval called out a sharp order. The Dwrgwn in the cistern clambered out, whispering among themselves.

The last man out pointed to his feet—soaked through up to his ankles. “They’ve hit groundwater,” Kov murmured, but he disbelieved his own remark. Leejak shook his head in a no.

Gebval chanted on and on while the golden light grew brighter, crept up the chain that held the knife, and covered his head like the hood of a cloak. Kov glanced in the cistern and saw fragments of splintered wood floating as the water rose and swirled around. Leejak suddenly swore.

“Get out of here!” he said to Kov, then turned and gave orders in Dwrgi.

Two of the Dwrgwn grabbed Gebval, who continued chanting and glowing, and dragged him along as everyone began running back down the tunnel northward. Utterly puzzled, Kov followed more slowly until he felt what Leejak had sensed—a trembling in the earth. The summoned water spilled over the cistern and began to flow down the tunnel after him as Kov ran, following the others. When they reached the level portion of the tunnel, the water slowed, but it kept on coming.

The trembling grew to a shaking. A cacophony of cracks, rum blings, thuds, and distant booms drowned out the murmur and splash of water. The Dwrgwn darted through the rough doorway from the ancient tunnel into the feeder shaft they’d constructed earlier. Gebval looked around him and then fainted, falling into the soft earth. His impromptu attendants picked him up again and ran, dragging him along. Panting and gasping for breath, Kov made it through to the new tunnel. The Dwrgwn who’d dug the cistern picked up their shovels and began forking dirt into the breach that led back into the tunnel leading to the fortress. Others pitched in, desperate to divert the swelling tide of groundwater.

The noise from overhead grew louder, resolved itself into the thunder of horses’ hooves and screaming from Horsekin throats. Beyond that, distantly, the cracks, booms, and rumbling went on and on. The earth around them shook as if it were trembling in fear. Kov ran back north to the closest ventilation shaft and climbed a quaking ladder. He clung to the rough wood as if he were riding a bucking horse and stuck his head out to look back.

The fortress was collapsing. Kov stared in utter disbelief as the log palings began to lean inward, slowly at first, trembling, groaning, then faster, until they fell, slamming against the roofs of the buildings inside. The buildings shook, then began to sink, tip-tilted like children’s blocks. All around the mound Horsekin ran and swarmed like ants when a careless farmer plows up their hill. Dust rose up in huge pillars like smoke, and indeed, smoke mingled with the towering dust. Kitchen fires, most likely, had spread and caught the wooden walls.

From right below him a voice called out—Leejak. “Get down! Run!”

Kov followed orders and splashed off the ladder into water halfway up his calves. The Dwrgwn were streaming past, rushing back north, carrying their spirit talker as well as the remaining supplies and tools. Kov and Leejak brought up the rear, splashing through the water that flowed relentlessly after them. Apparently the attempt to block the entrance into the ancient tunnel had failed. Still, as they ran, gasping and sweating, Kov realized that the flood was slowing, turning shallow, losing the race.

Under the next ventilation shaft the Dwrgwn slowed and stopped on reasonably dry ground. In the pale light that filtered down from above to meet the blue glow of the fungi baskets, they clustered around Leejak and began to all talk at once, panting between words and phrases. The spearleader held up both hands for silence while he, too, gasped for breath. At last the chatter stilled, and Leejak could speak.

“Very good,” he said. “Kov, Mountain Man, what happens there?”

Kov nearly blurted out the truth, that he had no idea, but he decided that he’d best come up with some sort of explanation.

“Gebval summoned all the water out of the wood,” he began, then realized he’d stumbled on the answer. He paused often, allowing Leejak to translate. “He also summoned water from some sort of spring or underground stream. That water was the reason the wood was so damp to begin with. The wood was so rotten that the water and the fungi were holding it together. As the fungi dried, and the water ran out, the wood couldn’t bear its own weight, much less the weight of the buildings above. It fell. Meanwhile, the groundwater kept rising, sweeping the dirt out from under the fortress.”

“Gebval!” two of the Dwrgwn began the chant. “Gebval, Gebval!”Others chattered among themselves.

Leejak silenced them with a hiss and a growl. He pointed up, reminding them that the enemy still lurked above.

“They say Gebval killed fortress,” Leejak said to Kov. “I like this not.”

“Well, he did, truly,” Kov said.

“Say it not! I tell more later.”

By then Gebval himself had roused to the acclaim. With help he stood and leaned against the burrow wall, a pale, drained little figure, as if his act of dweomer had sickened him, but malice still glittered in his dark eyes as he looked Kov’s way. The northern Dwrgwn gathered around their spirit talker and turned to glare at Kov as well. Jemjek, Grallag, and Leejak stepped in front of Kov to protect him. Grallag hefted a spear. The other two growled so viciously that the northerners moved back and away.

Kov suddenly realized that if Gebval had brought down the fortress, the northern Dwrgwn would see him, the Mountain man who’d done nothing, as fit only for sacrifice. His three protectors were outnumbered, but Leejak’s authority held—at least for the moment. The other Dwrgwn ostentatiously turned their backs and set off marching down the tunnel, heading back north toward the forest and the bridge. Leejak, Grallag, and Jemjek spoke briefly to one another, then with a gesture to Kov to follow, set off more slowly after the others.

“Tonight,” Leejak said to Kov, “I give you spear, food, blanket. You escape. Go up shaft. I trust these not.”

“No more do I.” Kov swallowed heavily. “But what will happen to you?”