Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [141]
Stretching and yawning Rhodry eased himself free of the shelter. Outside the rain had stopped and the wind risen. When he looked up he could see the clouds rolling and scudding before the nearly-full moon. The stars winked through the drifting gray, then disappeared again, only to return in sheets of sky. He paced back and forth, cold and aching from one night too many spent sleeping on hard ground. He yawned, rubbing his face with both hands, frowning a little at the growth of beard. All his life, Rhodry had hated being bearded. When he thought back to some of the trouble he’d gone through to keep himself cleanshaven on the long road or out in the Westlands, he had to laugh at himself, in fact, but he was definitely hoping that this mysterious Haen Mam would offer a traveler soap and hot water.
Still smiling he glanced at the river, swore, and rose to his feet. Walking on the river as if it were a silver road came a procession of tall, slender women, all dressed in white, with silver kirtles at their waists and silver torcs round their necks. They walked in pairs except for their leader, who carried a spear with a silver point. As they walked, they wept, tossing their heads and whipping their disheveled hair round, sobbing and covering their faces with slender hands. Without thinking Rhodry ran to the bank and called out.
“My ladies, what’s so wrong? Can I be of help to you?”
At the sound of his voice, the woman with the spear turned her head and smiled at him, just briefly, before they vanished, leaving only a faint mist blowing over the silver ripples of the river. Rhodry tried to tell himself that he’d been asleep and dreaming, but no man spends his dreams thinking about shaving. He turned cold, shuddering. He stayed on his feet, walking by the river, until the dawn brightened gray with the first sun.
As he was debating whether or not to wake the others, Rhodry heard a sound so distant that at first he thought it might only be some echo of water over rock. He paused, listening hard, heard it again—a definite ring or clang of metal on metal. He trotted back to their improvised camp just as Garin hauled himself out from under the lean-to.
“Did you hear that?” the dwarf said.
“I did. Like a sword striking a metal boss, in a way.”
They stood together and listened, straining into the wind. Around them the sunlight brightened, and Otho joined them, muttering to himself until Garin cursed him silent. They heard nothing.
“Well, worms and slimes,” Garin said at last. “We were probably just imagining things. The high mountains do that, sometimes, to a man. Go wake your nephew, will you? I’ll start taking down the shelter and suchlike.”
For a few moments more Rhodry stayed by the river-bank and watched the river swirling out of the crack in the cliffs. In the morning light he could see the break more clearly. At the surface it gaped some twenty feet wide, fringed with white water though the river ran reasonably steady in the middle. As it rose it narrowed, closing completely just before the top of the cliff.
All day they waited, while the wind sighed through the valley and sniffed round their camp. The dwarves mostly slept or diced with each other while Rhodry paced back and forth, unable to sit and rest no matter how tired he’d been the day before. Although Garin invited Rhodry to join the game, he preferred to watch rather than get into one of the heated squabbles that seemed part of the amusement. Toward evening, when the sun was sending long shadows through a blue haze, Rhodry walked down to the river and stood studying the white water. Directly inside the tunnel mouth, it seemed, he could see some huge thing clinging to the wall, but because of the boulders