Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [145]
Dwarven servants, all young men, waited to take the baggage and lead them inside to a great hall where fires crackled in two hearths of slabbed stone, one on either side of the square room. The walls were made of massive oak planks, scrubbed down and polished smooth, then carved in one vast pattern of graved lines rubbed with red earth. Looping vines, spirals, animals, interlace—they all tangled together across each wall, then swooped up at each corner to the rafters, before plunging down again in a riot of carving. At one hearth a small boy turned a spit where an entire side of beef was roasting; at the other stood tables and benches, scattered hospitably over the water-polished plank floor. At the far end a wooden staircase swept up into shadows.
“Show them chambers,” Angmar said to the servants. “And bring them what they need as to water for wash and suchlike.” She glanced at her guests. “When you do assemble here again we will begin our eating.”
“My thanks, my lady,” Garin said. “Is Enj in residence here?”
“Not this day, no, though I do think he will appear as soon as soon. All his life has he dreamt of the searching of high mountains for a great wyrm and of the seeing of such fly. If he do not know that his hour has come, then he be no son of mine.”
Rhodry’s chamber turned out to be square and spare, a mattress upon a wooden floor and naught else, though when Rhodry begged water for shaving a servant did bring him a stool to put the basin upon and a silvered bronze mirror as well as a chunk of soap, herbed with bergamot. The water itself came in a big iron pan, so hot that the servant wrapped his hands in rags to carry it, and the water stayed warm enough for all the time it took Rhodry to rid himself of ten days beard. He was just finishing when the dwarves knocked on his door and let themselves in.
“Just like an elf,” Otho said. “Shaving a perfectly good beard away. You people have no sense, you know.”
“Hum.” Garin looked round. “More than a bit plain, this room. We’ve fared a good bit better in ours, I must say, with proper beds and shutters at the windows and suchlike.”
“It’ll do,” Rhodry said. “Silver daggers are used to taking what they get.”
“I should hope it’s dawned on you by now that the silver dagger doesn’t mean one cursed thing up here.” Garin gave him a grin. “Our people think you carry it because it’s a nice piece of work and naught more.”
Rhodry laughed.
“It hadn’t occurred to me, truly. But of course you’re right, and it’s a relief as well, knowing that.”
They went downstairs to the great hall and a meal set for them and Angmar alone, strong ale and beef, mostly, though an elderly servant brought in a scant ration of bread apiece before retreating as if he were afraid they’d ask for more. Rhodry and Garin shared a trencher at one side of the table, the other two dwarves at the other, while Angmar ate alone and sparingly in her chair at the table’s head. Outside the wind rustled and whistled. Shutters banged in distant windows, the front door creaked, candles guttered on the table and in the sconces, while from outside came the slap and murmur of waves on the shore.
Rhodry thought on occasion of making conversation, but whenever he glanced Angmar’s way, she seemed so distant,so wrapped in brooding, that he found nothing to say. In the shadowed light she seemed too young to have a grown son, though no doubt as a dwarven half-breed she had a life span as uncertain as his own. While he never would have considered her beautiful—and he suspected that such a soft compliment