The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [107]
“This place be safe.” Leejak informed Kov. “We do rest here.”
“Are we near the fortress, then?” Kov said.
“Not far, but not right next, they tell me.” He gestured at the Dwrgwn from the northern village. “We reach edge of barrow land. South edge, that be.”
This chamber, Kov realized, must have served the Dwrgi grave robbers as a way station, a place to rest and free their treasures from the original wrappings. He walked over to the littered scraps and idly poked through it with one booted foot. Black hairy spiders scuttled away, but he found nothing else of interest. On the far side of the chamber stood a wooden door, roughly made of axe-split planks. When Kov shoved it open, the smell of fresh air greeted him, and a shaft of sunlight that revealed another tunnel leading north.
“That doesn’t look very promising,” Kov said to Leejak. “I want to climb up to that vent and look out.”
“Good thought.”
This vent, however, lacked a ladder, and Kov was far too short to reach it. Leejak turned and whistled, then held up two fingers. Jemjek and Grallag trotted over to join them. After a few words from the spearleader, they hoisted Kov up. He stood on Jemjek’s shoulders and stuck his head—very carefully—through the moldy wooden grating.
Through a scant cover of long grass he could see westward to a stand of trees. Between the trees, water gleamed.
“There’s a river ahead,” Kov told Leejak. “And I can just see some kind of boat—ye gods, it’s a barge!”
As the barge glided downriver, it winked into and out of view through the trees. Kov caught glimpses of its cargo.
“It’s carrying stone blocks,” he said. “We must be near the fortress, all right. But that river’s going to cause us a cursed lot of trouble.”
Carefully he extricated his head from the grating, then let Grallag haul him down. Gebval was standing in the open doorway, glaring again, his hand on the hilt of the bronze knife. Kov restrained his urge to make a rude gesture.
That night Leejak questioned the northern Dwrgwn, extracting every bit of knowledge they had about this stretch of country, then passing it on to Kov. As Kov had suspected, the tunnel system never crossed under the river. Even a skilled crew of Mountain men would have been hard pressed to make such a crossing waterproof and thus safe. Instead, the tunnel system turned north and ran parallel to the river until it reached the rich pickings of the barrow fields. While the Dwrgwn could have transformed and swum across, Kov could not. Even more to the point, in otter form they’d never have been able to carry their digging tools, earth-moving baskets, and other such supplies.
“We go north little ways,” Leejak said. “Find ford, cross there.”
The northern Dwrgwn immediately objected, not that they had any other plan in mind. They voiced idea after idea, all of them unworkable or even merely silly. After a long evening of squabbling, which on several occasions nearly led to blows, everyone finally agreed with Leejak’s original idea, thanks to Gebval, who finally made himself useful by delivering the opinion that Leejak was right.
Kov found himself remembering the constant arguing among his own kinsfolk. Among the Mountain Folk, the arguments arose when individuals refused to change an idea or budge an inch from a position—the vices of Earth, he supposed. The Dwrgwn, on the other hand, suffered from the vices of Water, endlessly flowing, always changing, unless the rare individual like Leejak could finally contain their ideas in a vessel made of hard thought.
In the morning they set off again, heading north through the tunnels. At each ventilation shaft either Leejak or Kov would climb up and look at the river, which stubbornly flowed deep and fast at the edge of the view. On the third day, however, they found a surprise: a bridge. Just at sunset Kov spotted it, a ramshackle affair of planks laid on pilings, thrown up hastily out of timber so green that the roadbed was already pulling apart. Judging from the stumps of trees he saw all along the bank, whoever had built the bridge had cut their raw