Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [81]
But the gnome stayed close ahead, quietly warning Arvid of every twist and turn, every steep slope. Down they went, and down, this way and that. Arvid knew the city sloped down above them; Gird’s Hall and the High Lord’s Hall were on a hill. A stench came to his nose.
“Defilement,” the gnome said from the darkness ahead. “The mageborn cleft the stone to carry away their filth, long ago in your time; they dirtied clean stone, being too lazy to carry it away to the fields. The dwarf opened too close to it—”
“Sewers,” Arvid said, in Common. “Our name for such tunnels. If this is at all like other mageborn work I’ve seen, there will be a place to walk alongside. Is there an opening?”
“It is poison!” the gnome said.
“Not if we do not drink of it. Or have open—alas, I do have an open wound, and you are wiser than I.”
Past the stench, farther and farther. His knees hurt; his shoulders complained; his hands felt raw. He could feel warm blood trickling from the bandage he’d tied on his arm; he could scarcely bear weight on that hand. He tried walking in a crouch, one hand up to ward his head from the stone above, but that hurt as much after a short time. He was more and more tired of this, and afraid of being trapped. He forebore to ask the gnome how much farther, for fear of hearing an answer that would wrench a complaint from him.
Then he smelled freshness in the air and saw dim light ahead … and then more light, defining the surface on which he crawled, the gnome’s shadow on it clearer and clearer. Was it daylight already? It could be. He stayed on hands and knees until at last the rock above him receded. The gnome waited, hand out to help him rise, and he needed that help.
Morning sunlight blazed on the open land around him—not the city or its walls. They had come out the side of a hill that rose above them to the north and cut off the view to the west as well; to the east he saw a patchwork of fields and woods below.
“Where are we?” he asked. When he glanced at his injured arm, blood soaked the bandage he’d applied, glistening in the light.
“A half-day’s walk from Fin Panir,” the gnome said, “over the land, that is. It is shorter, under the ground, but you, my lord—you are sore wounded. I know where clean water is, and herbs for your wound.”
“I must go back,” Arvid said. “I must tell them—”
“Not now,” the gnome said. “Stone comforts me,” he said in response to Arvid’s look of surprise. “We were under stone for hours; though it could not restore my strength completely, it removed the taint of the drug he used.”
Arvid felt the bright sun fading, the light going gray, and the next he knew he was lying on half his own cloak, with the other half pulled up to form a shade. Footsteps neared, a slight crunch on the pebbles, and then the gnome handed him a bowl. “Drink, my lord. It is good water.”
“Thank you,” Arvid said.
“And now I will clean your wound. Close your eyes; I must move the shade.”
Instead, Arvid turned his head and watched as the gnome took down the shade and laid that half of the cloak flat. On that he set the carafe, a pile of herbs whose clean sharp smell tickled Arvid’s nose, and one of Arvid’s small knives, gleaming in the sun.
The wound, revealed, oozed blood and looked already swollen. The gnome, gently enough, bathed it with water and what had been, Arvid realized, his own handkerchief, the lace-edged one he used to prove solvency from time to time.
“It’s not that bad,” Arvid said, though he never liked seeing his own flesh torn.
“A clean slash,” the gnome agreed. “But needing to be purified, and I have no numbweed or even ale.”
“Be at ease,” Arvid said. “I have felt worse.”
The gnome, he decided, could have taught the healers he’d used before a thing or two about wound cleaning; he had to use every technique he knew not to cry out before the gnome had the wound packed with herbs and rebandaged. But