The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [165]
The door swung back to reveal a blaze of light, but not sunlight. Candles gleamed inside a long narrow chamber. On every wall, in every corner, ornaments glittered and multiplied the light. Gold, most of it: pieces of jewelry, small statues, masks, caskets, coins all gleamed with gold, heaped up on the floor as high as Kov’s waist, piled on shelves set into the walls. In among the gold Kov saw precious stones, rubies being the most common. Painted pottery jars, vases, and bowls all overflowed with more gold and gems. As his captors marched him past, Kov got brief glimpses of the ceramics, all of them beautifully decorated with animals and birds painted in realistic colors. The painted masks displayed faces that had to be Horsekin, the same pale skin, manes of black hair, and tattoos.
At the far end of the room, in a plain wooden chair, sat a Dwrgi woman dressed in a long, baggy garment that glittered with golden ornaments, a solid covering of abstract oval shapes, overlapping like fish scales. Beside her chair, in a basket roughly woven of reeds, sat an array of pyramidal crystals, some white, some black, all about six inches high and of a shape to fit comfortably on a man’s palm. Despite the nearly overwhelming glitter of so much gold, they struck Kov as important, imposing, even. Dweomer, he thought. I’ll wager there’s something sorcerous about them.
As they approached the woman, his captors bowed. Two of the men shoved Kov to his knees at the foot of her chair. For a Dwrgi, her gray hair hung long, reaching to her shoulders in thick curls. Her plumed eyebrows, also gray, had been combed straight up into fan shapes.
“So, you’re the captive?” she said to him in surprisingly good Deverrian. “Your name?”
“Kov of Lin Serr.”
“Ah, the fabled city! I’m sorry, Kov, but we can’t allow anyone to find out about us. They’d hunt us like animals and steal what we’ve gathered.” She inclined her head toward the treasure heaps of gold behind him. “The Evil Ones hide the sun’s blood among the dead. We bring it back to the land of the living.”
“You’ll forgive me,” Kov said, “for not knowing how to address you. Priestess and holy one? Queen of great majesty?”
“She who gathers.” The woman smiled briefly. “You may call me lady. You’ll never learn my name.”
“Very well, then, my lady. Who are these Evil Ones? The Horsekin?”
“That’s the name that Deverry men have given them.”
“I can assure you that I wouldn’t tell them so much as the color of the sky. They’re the bitter enemies of my people.”
“Oh, I know that. I also know that your people love the sun’s blood more than anything else in the world.”
Kov tried to imagine talking his kinfolk out of looting this chamber. He failed. “How do you know so much about us?” he said.
“I lived with a Deverry clan as a slave for too many years.” Her voice turned flat and hard. “They called themselves Boars, and they were all pigs in a sty, sure enough. I can promise you that you’ll be better treated than I was.”
“Except I can never leave.”
“Except for that. And you won’t find refuge in a river, like I did.” She smiled again. “I suppose they thought I’d drowned. They saw me throw myself in, you see, but no woman ever climbed out again.”
“You swam away.”
“Of course. Now.” She leaned back and tented her fingertips while she considered him. “I use the word slave because I don’t know another for a worker who may not leave. But I have work for you that I think me you’ll come to love. This chamber holds the gatherings of many a year. Long before I was born my folk gathered. I have daughters who will gather after me. Tell me, Kov, what do you think of our little treasures?”
“They’re beautiful and wondrous. I’ve never seen anything like this chamber.”
“Does it fill you with the lust for sun’s blood?”
“I could never deny it.”
“This is only one of several such chambers in our city. And you’re in a city,