The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [162]
Behind him something hissed like a large cat. He spun around to find a woman, her gray hair streaked with white, her face a fine web of wrinkles, standing with her hands on her hips and glaring at him with narrowed eyes.
“Er, excuse me,” Kov said. “Could you perhaps be so kind as to tell me what these runes mean?”
She continued to stare.
“Um, these runes.” Kov pointed to the marks on the stone. “What be they? You tell me?”
“I will not.” She turned and strode away.
Kov watched her as she joined the crowd around Aethel and his blanket of goods. Not a friendly sort of crone, he thought. Some of the men in the crowd turned to look back at him. He decided that he’d best leave the village before someone else took offense.
Just beyond the huts, on the far side of the village from the trading, stood a pair of ramshackle structures much like the tollbooth. Kov walked on through and headed for them, but as he did so, he became aware of the ground under his feet. Like all Mountain Folk, he’d been trained since childhood to stay alert for fissures and possible sinkholes in their underground world. He could tell now that he was walking over a tunnel from the sudden slight sponginess of the ground.
Aha! Kov thought. Those peculiar cratelike things must protect entrances. He took a few steps to one side, then walked back, did the same on the other side. As he walked he thumped the butt of his staff against the ground. He could trace out a wide tunnel, well reinforced, and leading straight for the booth ahead. As Kov watched, a naked little boy came out of the booth. He paused, stuck a finger in his mouth, considered Kov for a moment, then ran off into the village.
Beyond the booth stood another stone pillar, sitting between two willows on the riverbank. Kov trotted over to it. Sure enough, it, too, held runes, but in this case, only two, the same two that were carved on his staff.
“Water!” he murmured aloud. “They must mean water, and that’s the fifth element. I must tell Lady Dallandra—”
Something grabbed his ankles from behind. Kov yelped, twisted around and struck out with his staff, but the water was roiling with creatures—creatures with brown fur. Clawed paws grabbed and yanked. He started to scream, but he hit the water hard enough to knock the wind out of him. His staff jumped from his hand and floated away.
“Hold your breath!” a voice hissed in his ear. “We be going down!”
Kov gasped and got a deep gulp of air just as whatever it was pulled him under. He flailed his arms, tried to kick, but a second pair of claws caught his wrists. Together, the two creatures pulled him fast along through water laced with streams of bubbles. His lungs ached until he was sure they would explode from the pressure of his hoarded air. Just ahead, the water turned black. He thought he was fainting, but the creatures dragged him into a dark tunnel on dry land and, mercifully, into air. Kov emptied his lungs of the fetid air and gasped for breath, panting. His chest ached as badly as if he’d been beaten.
He heard footsteps slapping along the tunnel and sat up, wishing he still had his staff. A pale blue light grew around him and cast his shadow on the dirt wall. When he twisted around to look, he saw a village man coming with two baskets of glowing blue fungus. His baggy brown garment stuck to his body, soaked with water. Kov turned back, expecting to see that his captors were villagers, too.
Instead, he saw a creature, a brown-furred creature, sleek and wet, about five-and-a-half feet tall, with bright black eyes in its intelligent though hairy face. Its arms—or forelegs—ended in clawed paws. As he watched, it shook itself in a shower of water drops, great silver drops that sprayed from its fur as it spun in a circle, around and around, the drops shimmering like flecks of light, cloaking the spinner, then fading away.
A man stood in the creature’s place, a naked man with normal skin, short brown hair, slicked back, and a human face, distinguished by plumed eyebrows and tufts of brown hair at the corners of his mouth. He bent down and