The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [73]
The naked man pointed at the sky and called out—from his height Rori could just hear his voice without understanding the words. Another man stepped out of the trees, a short, stocky fellow clad in a loin wrap. He tipped his head back to look up. They’d spotted the dragon, perhaps, though Rori could assume that he looked like some sort of large bird at his distance. He banked one wing and headed back southwest. Those otters—or shapechangers—or whatever they were! The sooner Dallandra heard about them the better.
The strange white bird circled overhead, then flew off, heading southwest. Kov watched it, a silver glint against blue sky, until it passed out of sight. He ached with envy of its wings. Behind him, his swimming teacher clambered out of the water. The were-otter turned, spun fast around, and in a swirl of blue light, changed back into man form.
“Was that a crane, do you think?” Kov asked him.
“It were not,” Jemjek said. “I know not what it may be, but the seeing of it did trouble my heart somehow.”
“Just so,” Grallag said. “We best be going back inside.”
Since there was no arguing with his strong-armed Dwrgi guards, Kov agreed.
Kov was never allowed to go outside alone. During the day, he could walk wherever he wanted inside, though at night, Grallag slept in front of the entrance to his chamber. For days now, he’d been exploring the complex around the treasure chamber and studying the walls and the ceilings in the hopes of finding a ventilation shaft, or even a chink or crack, that an enterprising dwarf could use for an escape route.
Unfortunately, the Dwrgwn were almost as clever as the Mountain Folk when it came to burrowing. They had laid a pale mud-plaster over the smooth walls, which they’d reinforced with a course or two of stone where the walls joined the hard-packed earthen floors. Stout beams supported the ceilings and kept the doorways of the various rooms trim and true. All the ventilation shafts had bronze grids embedded into the ceilings over their openings. Kov admired their skill even as he cursed it.
Although he’d never found an open shaft that might function as a way out, he had seen a surprising number of empty rooms and dusty hallways. A few pieces of derelict furniture, a dropped tunic, covered in years’ worth of dust, a blackened stone beneath a vent that spoke of a cooking fire—here and there he saw signs that these rooms had once been lived in. Had there been a plague or some sort of war? He wondered, but when he asked the various individuals he knew, they all shook their heads and professed to know nothing about those signs of life.
Kov had also been asking those Dwrgwn he’d gotten to know, whether his guards or the other diners at the communal meals up in the village, about the heaps of treasure lying so carelessly in the big chamber.
“What I wonder,” Kov would say, “is why gathering is so important to you all. It’s not like you do anything with the treasure. You don’t trade it or wear it or keep it in your private chambers.”
“We do much love to visit it,” ran the usual reply. “When we be ill, we do go there and then feel well. When we be sad, it does make us happy.”
On the day that Kov saw the unusual white bird, he went up to the communal meal early. After he’d fetched his usual plate of boiled fish and spelt porridge, he sat down next to a young woman, Annark, whom he found attractive despite her thick half-moons of eyebrows, mostly because she seemed more intelligent than most Dwrgwn. When he asked her why she loved the treasures, she gave him the answer he needed.
“It be the mist lights,” she said. “See you not them? The beautiful blue haze from the gold, and the lights dancing from the jewels.”
Kov was too surprised to respond.
“The blue does rise from the gold,” Annark continued, “like mist on the river. We do waft it to ourselves, we do roll in it, and our own blue shadow, it does draw strength. See you it not, Kov Gemmaster?”
“I can’t, alas, but I can feel it.” Suddenly