Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [123]
“The old watchtower,” Garin said to Rhodry. “You can just see the gap ‘twixt it and the cliff. That gap used to be the only way into Lin Serr.”
Blowing his nose on an old rag, Otho stomped up be-side them.
“Humph. The place looks a bit bigger than I’ve been remembering it.”
“Well, the clans keep growing, and so we keep digging it out, a bit here and there,” Garin said. “Let’s go round and walk through the old gate. No need, but we all do it, somehow, for the ritual of the thing. Silly, I suppose, but there you are.”
Once down on the basin’s level floor, Rhodry realized that the circling rise of cliff had to be a constructed thing, not some natural phenomenon. Looking up he could tell that the tops of all the cliffs were perfectly flat and all the same height. As they came closer, he saw that the vertical formations he’d taken for the natural cracks and outcrops of a cliff were actually sculpted corrugations and pyramidal bays marching at regular intervals all round the basin. What he’d taken for caves and erosions seemed to be air shafts and doors.
“You dug the basin out,” he said, and his voice shook a little. “Your people dug this whole thing out, and those cliffs are what? Exposed bedrock?”
“They are.” Garin was grinning at his amazement. “We dwarves are patient sorts. We keep chipping away, a bit here, a bit there, and soon enough, it all adds up.”
“But the river—”
“Flowed underground once, that’s all. No doubt it’s happier, here in the light of the sun.” Garin waved his arm vaguely in the direction of the meadow—no, the lawn really—that covered the basin. “We saved the topsoil, of course. We do like a bit of green and all in a view.”
“Ah.” Rhodry could manage nothing more.
“Digging the first shaft was the hard part,” Garin went on. “Once we had a good start made and room for a good many families to live, well, then! It all went forward smoothly. By the time we had the tower chipped away, the basin was about—” He glanced at Otho. “I was just a lad, then, and I don’t remember it so well.”
“About half a mile across and some thousand people lived round it. The only way in, then, was this,” Otho waved at the ten-foot gap between the spire and the cliffs. “The spire didn’t stand free in those days. It was connected on the other side to rock long gone to make a gate, like.”
As they approached, they were looking at a side of both spire and cliff that was perfectly smooth, offering not the slightest handhold to an enemy. They walked through the deep shadow of the cleft and came out again into the sunlight. Rhodry paused to look back and found that here on what had once been the inside of a fortress the spire sported ramparts, stairs, and little towers, all sculpted out of the rock.
“Look up at the cliffs.” Garin pointed in the general direction. “See how the top fifty feet or so is smooth as glass? Any invaders who thought they could just go up top and avoid the gate would have to climb down on ropes. And if they did, well, then, we could send archers out onto the flat. It would have been less sporting than those contests your people hold at fairs, the ones where they tie chickens to poles for a target. Now, of course, Lin Serr’s open, as you can see.”
“This was dangerous country, then, when you started building it.”
“Any new country’s dangerous.”
“Hah!” Otho snorted. “The very soul of diplomacy, aren’t you, Garin? Why not tell him the truth?”
“Curse you and your ill manners both.” Garin sounded more weary than enraged. “The man’s our guest.”
Rhodry thought he saw the answer to the question of Otho’s ill will toward the elven race.
“You can tell me,” he said. “What was it? Some sort of war between you and my father’s people?”
“Not your father’s people. Your mother’s. We used to live farther west and to the south, but when the invasion started, we moved here.”
“Invasion?” But Rhodry was remembering