Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [177]
“The great secret! Not in the Otherlands, but in my next life!”
“Just that. It’ll be a challenge, lad. It’ll be a struggle.
Nothing so great as what I’m offering you is given for free. Will you forswear the Darkness and turn to the Light?”
Sarcyn hesitated for one bare heartbeat.
“I will, O Master of the Aethyr. I will.”
And then he wept, curling up like a child upon the floor and sobbing, beyond all words and thought alike.
Although Nevyn had insisted that he was capable of riding off and bringing back a dangerous prisoner on his own, neither Jill nor Rhodry had been willing to let him. Now, however, they understood why the dweomerman had refused to let any of Blaen’s men accompany them. In silent awe they sat on a long stone bench near the wall of the enormous cavern and watched the dwarven market-fair. At least a hundred yards in diameter and easily twice that high, the cavern was lit by shafts of sunlight streaming in from far above. Directly across from them, water trickled down the rock and collected in artificial basins. Every now and then a dwarf would fill a bucket at a pool and take it away again for some domestic purpose. Out in the center of the cavern, some hundred or so of the mountain people haggled and traded. Most of the stuff for sale was food spread out on rough clothes: mushrooms, bats, root crops furtively tended up on the surface, game hunted equally slyly.
“It’s a hard life these people have,” Jill remarked.
“Huh. They deserve it.”
“Oh, here, my love. Try to take it with good grace.”
Rhodry merely scowled. When they’d ridden up to the dwarfhold door, one of the guards had held a small dagger up in front of them. It had blazed with light as soon as it had come near Rhodry and inspired a vast flood of cursing and shouting. Only Nevyn’s intervention kept the dwarves from making Rhodry wait outside. Although every now and then someone would stroll over and say a few pleasant words to her, Rhodry they ignored, as if he were a wolf or some other dangerous pet she kept.
Wearing a rough brown dress that came to her ankles, a tiny woman, no more than three feet high, came over. In a sling at her hip she carried a baby. Since Jill had no idea of how long these people lived or how fast they grew, she couldn’t tell the child’s age, but it sat up straight and looked around as alertly as a human child of about a year old.
“Ah,” the woman said. “You must be the lass who came with the Master of the Aethyr.”
“I am, at that. Is your babe a lad or a lass?”
“A lass.”
“She’s a precious lambkin, truly.”
At the praise the baby dimpled and cooed. Although she had a low forehead under a mop of curly black hair and her nose was thick and broad, she was so tiny, yet so vital, that Jill longed to hold her.
“Can I ask you somewhat?” Jill went on. “Why do so many of your folk speak Deverrian?”
“Oh, we trade with the farmers in the foothills. They’re a peaceable lot, and they keep our secrets in return for a bit of our silver. There’s naught like precious metals for making friends—or bitter enemies.”
With the last she gave Rhodry a pointed look.
“Please,” Jill said, “what’s so wrong with my man?”
“He made the talisman of warding glow, didn’t he?”
“He did, truly, but what does that mean?”
“Well, you know.” The woman considered for a moment. “Actually, I don’t know. No one much does, I wager. But we have a rhyme, an old rhyme.” Here she rattled off something fast in her own language. “It means, when the Warding Blade glows, an enemy is nigh.”
“Ah. I see. I guess.”
The woman nodded, then wandered on, clucking to her baby.
“I wish to every god that Nevyn would get himself back here,” Rhodry snarled.
His wish was granted in a few minutes when the dweomer-master emerged from a tunnel on the far side of the cavern. With him came the dwarf named Larn; behind them strode two warriors with axes and Sarcyn, who walked all bent and stiff like a very old man. Jill and Rhodry rose