Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [122]
“Oh. I hadn’t considered that, truly. Well, let’s just say that I prefer the wondering to the finding out that it could cut me in half.”
“Now that’s true spoken.”
“But I tell you, Garin, I owe you a debt.”
“Maybe someday I’ll call it in, silver dagger. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Together they walked back to the shelter, where the other dwarves stood gaping. Mic had a chunk of bread in his hand, Otho some cheese, and the mule was grazing peacefully nearby as the sun brightened.
“Ye gods,” Rhodry said. “It’s dawn.”
“It is,” Mic said. “What was happening to you, all that time when you were gone?”
“It was only a few moments to me. Just time enough to have a bit of a chat with her.”
“Indeed?” Garin rolled his eyes. “I take it that she was this Alshandra female you’ve been telling us about.”
“She was, and I hope to every god and his wife that we’ve scared her off.”
“Scared—you mean she isn’t dead?”
“Jill says she can’t be killed, not in any ordinary way. She’s gone back to her own country, I’ll wager, to nurse her grudges.”
Garin started to speak, then merely shook his head. Mic made a strangling sort of sound, deep in his throat.
“Let’s hope she stays there, then,” Otho snarled. “An elf, that’s what she was. All at once Garin here swears and drops his breakfast, and the next thing I know he’s grabbing an ax and running out into the road to attack some elven sorceress.”
“Nah nah nah,” Rhodry said. “She may have looked like an elf, but she’s not true flesh and blood. Jill says she can take on any form she wants.”
Otho silenced himself on the edge of some other nastiness.
“Get yourself somewhat to eat, silver dagger,” Garin said. “I want to get on the road soon. If the iron bothers her as much as all that, we’ll be as safe as safe in Lin Serr.”
Whether their enemies had spent themselves the night before or whether the sunlight hampered them, Rhodry didn’t know, but whatever the truth of it, they traveled all morning in peace. Toward noon the road climbed hard and fast, but that last effort brought them to the top of a summit. Far ahead of them unrolled a broken plateau toward the distant rise of the white mountains. Rhodry could see forests ahead, striped with open land, but nothing that looked like a city to him.
“Is Lin Serr under the mountains?”
“It’s not,” Garin said. “You’ll see soon now.”
For some miles the road climbed and fell over a series of hills like vast ripples in the earth. They passed through a woodland and across a wild meadow, then climbed to the top of one final ridge to find themselves standing on a raised tongue of grassland, stretching about a mile in front of them. Ahead, at the end of this obviously artificial formation, the land sloped down fast to a huge basin, mostly grass-covered though Rhodry could see a few trees. On the far side pale gray cliffs rose, their tops level with the ground on which Rhodry and the dwarves were standing. At the sight, Otho burst into tears and stood sobbing with his arms hanging helpless at his sides.
“Lin Serr,” Garin said. “Home.”
He clapped his hand on Otho’s shoulder in silent com-fort, then walked on with Mic and Rhodry, all of them moving slowly to allow Otho time to recover himself. The view was one to be savored, anyway, Rhodry felt. A horseshoe of cliffs embraced the parklike basin, with the tongue or spit of land upon which they walked entering it in the center of the open side. Off to the right ran a river, sparkling in the clear mountain air as it curved round the tongue to continue downhill in a deep-cut channel Off to the left, in the basin but even with the end of the horseshoe, stood a tall structure that at first seemed a natural spire, freestanding with the cliff to one side and the vast open basin to the other, though it towered a good fifty feet higher than the cliff tops. When Rhodry shaded his eyes for a better look, it proved to be worked stone, carved like a statue from one living rock, even though it must have been well over two hundred feet tall. The main shaft rose as straight