The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [123]
Now and then the diggers had a tunnel collapse from above. This dangerous irritation always happened in places that someone or something had hollowed out at some time long before. Loose soil had blown in and the ceilings fallen to fill the hollows and give them the appearance of solid earth until it was too late to prevent the cave-in. The hollows reminded Kov of Deverry root cellars, or possibly, he supposed, they’d once been some type of dug-out dwelling. In one of these circular hollows a Grallag found a shard of reddish pottery that looked as if it had been broken out of a shallow bowl. He handed it to Leejak, who gave it to Kov to inspect.
“Someone has to have lived here,” Kov said. “A long time ago now, though.”
“Good. No ghosts, then,” Leejak said. “Horsekin, most like.”
“Most like, indeed.”
Unless, of course, refugees from Lin Rej had reached the area and wintered there—Kov made a mental note to ask the archivists at Lin Serr, assuming he ever saw them again. Two days later, however, when they reached another once-dug area, he found a coin, or to be precise, a corroded disk, green with silver tarnish. After he polished it up, he could see that it came from no dwarven moneyer. On one side, barely legible, was a human face in silhouette, on the other, letters that reminded him of Deverry writing.
“Of course!” he told Leejak. “The Deverrians came through here on their way from the Western Sea. They must have wintered in this area.”
“Interesting,” Leejak said. “Under that Horsekin fortress, then, what lies? I wonder.”
Kov felt a sudden stab of hope. If ancient wooden structures underlay the mound, their job would be a fair bit easier. He wished that the Dwrgi scouts who’d first spotted it had given a better description—not that they would have been capable of precision, he supposed.
The Dwrgwn had fashioned a ladder out of bits of wood and tree roots. Kov and Leejak would climb out of the tunnel every night for a cautious look around. Kov always took a stick with him to use in place of his missing staff to explore the ground around their tunnel. Some of the Dwrgwn gatherers must have burrowed into the place they called the Long Barrow in the years before the Horsekin had come south to claim it. Sure enough, on one of these expeditions he heard the slight difference in the tapping sounds that announced, “Tunnel below!” to his dwarven ears. He followed it far enough to determine that it ran south. Searching further never turned up an entrance.
“They fill that in,” Leejak said. “Hide it that way.”
“Most likely,” Kov said. “But if this tunnels runs all the way, it’ll save us a fair bit of time.”
On the morrow the Dwrgwn followed his directions. From their new tunnel, they dug a feeder shaft for some hundred yards west. When they broke through into the old tunnel, Kov saw immediately that it was solid Dwrgi work, reinforced with wood beams and a course of stone at the floor. What’s more, thanks to water seepage, on the walls grew blue fungi in a lumpy carpet of phosphorescent tendrils.
The Dwrgi filled the smallest baskets with earth, then carefully transplanted nodes of fungi from the walls to the baskets. Kov took one and, in the blue glimmer, walked on ahead, leaving the pack of chattering Dwrgwn behind him. The silence brought him a warning. Overhead, he could hear a thudding noise. He felt a trembling in the earth around him. He turned back and ran, hissing out a warning, “Silence! Hush! All of you! Danger!”
Mercifully, the Dwrgwn followed orders. In the resulting quiet everyone could hear the thud and rumble on the ground above. Leejak whispered