Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [126]
“Well, old grudges die hard and all that.”
Yet Rhodry found the story disturbing, as another dishonor that his human kin had bred in their passing.
Eventually Garin came back, shaking his head in disgust.
“Rhodry, lad, my apologies. I’m afraid my people are a stubborn lot all round, but I’ve made them see reason in the end.”
“Well, here, I can always just camp—”
“With those creatures prowling round after you?” “Er, well, truly, I’d forgotten about that.”
“Imph. I haven’t. Mic, Lam and Baro here are going to take the mule up top and find a farmer to stable him till we see what’s going to happen. We may need the creature again, for all I know.”
With extra hands to help they got the mule unloaded and the packs distributed. By then their supplies were so low that the packs were light, and Rhodry could just sling his over one shoulder for the climb up. As they all puffed and panted up switchback after switchback, he was glad of it, too. Finally they reached the top and a landing of worked pale stone, long enough for a warrior troop of some hundreds to assemble if they needed to. Garin walked over to a big bronze gong hanging in a wood frame near the doors, picked up the stick chained to it, and struck hard. The boom echoed round the silent basin for a long time.
“The doorkeeper will get round to letting us in sooner or later,” Garin remarked.
While they waited, Rhodry had a chance to study the stone doors, firmly shut, that nestled under the overhang of living rock. Some twelve feet high and eight wide, both doors were divided into panels, each a bas relief portrayal of some event in the building of the city. He found the earliest one at the bottom right-hand corner of the right-hand door and hunkered down for a better look. A band of ragged refugees stood on the plain that would become the city. He realized that he’d been half hoping for, half dreading, a portrayal of his own ancestors.
Suddenly from deep inside came an answering stroke of a gong. Rhodry got up and moved out of the way just as the doors opened smoothly outward, with not so much as a creak or groan, to reveal a vast natural cavern, stretching on and on into a blue-lit dimness.
“Well, here we are, lads,” Garin said briskly. “Come along.”
As they walked into the dimness of the entry hall, it took Rhodry’s eyes some moments to adjust. Off to either side he could see worked stone openings, the mouths of tunnels, apparently, leading various ways, and he could hear water running over rock at some distance. In the spill of sunlight from the open doors he could see that the floor was paved in slates and that directly ahead lay a huge decorative roundel, worked in different colors of slate into a complex and coiling maze. All at once Otho strode forward and stepped onto the beginning of the maze. While the others watched in dead silence the elderly dwarf began to walk, weeping convulsively as he did so, quickly and without the slightest hesitation, as if even after hundreds of years of exile he still remembered the pattern.
When he reached the center he fell to his knees, kissed the floor, then sat back on his heels, flinging out his arms as he cried out one phrase or sentence in Dwarvish. Garin answered him, other voices answered as well, shouting from the tunnels, echoing from the far side of the entrance hall. As the outer doors slid shut, the blue light of phosphorescence brightened in the cavern. Figures emerged out of the murk, standing quietly round the edge of the cavern, huddling in tunnel mouths, hundreds of them, Rhodry realized suddenly, all come to see their kinsmen come home.
Otho rose. While he retraced the path out of the maze, Garin caught Rhodry’s arm and whispered to him.
“His brother—Mic’s father—is the fellow over there in the white tunic, waiting to receive him. They’ll have a lot to say to each other, I wager, and then of course well have to go talk