Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [133]
When Rhodry did so, his eyes adjusted fast to the pale blue light, streaked in places with fine silver fibers—some new kind of moss, he supposed. They were standing in a circular cavern of living rock under a dome of the same, festooned with blue and silver light. Behind and ahead, to his left and his right, tunnels led off into darkness. Fresh air wafted through, and he could hear water running with the whisper of a distant waterfall. Waiting in the center was a group of three women, dressed in long white smocks, belted high under their breasts. Their long jet-black hair was braided or swept up and piled on top of their heads, kept in elaborate place with combs and pins of red and purple gem-stones. Although they were no taller than Deverrian girls, they moved with such authority that no one would have ever considered them immature.
When Garin spoke in Dwarvish, they nodded, answering briefly in the same while they looked Rhodry over in some curiosity. One of them walked over and reached up a small and slender hand. For a moment he thought she was going to lay it on his chest, but she merely held it in front of him, moving it in a circular pattern as if she were feeling something in the air while she studied his face. Finally she nodded with a certain satisfaction.
“You may travel on,” she said in Deverrian, and her accent reminded Rhodry sharply of Jahdo’s. “I think you be an honorable enough man, Rhodry son of two fathers, or so I hear be true. Bain’t?”
“It is, my lady, in a manner of speaking. I was fathered by one man and raised by another.”
She nodded again, considering.
“Othara do be old,” she said at last. “She will ramble on, no doubt, but I would ask you be forbearing.”
“I will, my lady.”
With a last nod she glided back to the other women. The three of them moved aside, waving delicate hands at a side tunnel, standing in tableau as the men moved through their domain and onward. In the tunnel Rhodry had to crouch again, but mercifully they had only a few yards to travel to a small wooden door. Baeo spoke to Garin briefly, then knocked.
“You’d best go in alone,” Garin said. “She tires too easily to have a lot of visitors at once.”
A young dwarven woman, dressed in brown, her hair pulled simply back and tied with a thong, opened the door and ushered him inside. Although he had to stoop to enter, inside the large chamber, heavily perfumed with incense, he could stand. Here the light shone green and silver, and it took him a moment before he could see. The room swarmed with shadows because it was crammed with things: fine chests, chairs, small tables heaped with oddments of silver and steel, leather sacks, cloth sacks, all bulging and piled in corners or arranged on the chests.
On the far side from the door, in a bed made of wrought iron, an ancient, tiny woman lay propped up on pillows and covered by blankets. Her maid had apparently put some effort into this visit, because Othara wore a fringed scarf round her neck, and her thin, pure white hair was elaborately dressed, studded with at least four combs that Rhodry could see. At the sound of his entry she smiled, and her skin lay so tight and thin upon her face that she was no longer truly even wrinkled. When the maid gestured him closer, Othara turned her head his way. Her eyes were so milky and blank that he knew age had blinded her.
“Is this the man that did bring my son to me?” Her voice creaked like a door in the wind. “Come here. It’s pleasing for me to know what you do look like.”
“Of course, my lady.”
Rhodry knelt at the bedstead and let her touch his face, her fingers moving light and sure as they felt out the shape of it.
“And a handsome lad at that,” she said with a little laugh. “What be your name again?”
“Rhodry Maelwaedd, my lady.”
“I shall call you Rori, because it be much like a dwarven name, and more becoming.” She turned her head toward her maid, standing in a shadowed corner. “Lopa, pour the man somewhat to drink. Men always want drink when they pay visits.”
The maid smiled and rummaged at a little table, gliding over in a moment