The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [74]
She smiled and returned to stripping the bones out of a fish with her long delicate fingers. Our own blue shadow? Kov thought. I wonder what that may mean! His heart ached to consult with Dallandra about these mysterious folk and the even more mysterious mist rising from their stolen treasures.
Kov had recruited his swimming teacher for his work in the chamber of gold, one Jemjek, a young Dwrgi man who had the muscles necessary for all the lifting and hauling ahead. An unexpected recruit had volunteered as well, a boy named Clakutt, just ten years old, with bright dark eyes and slender hands that could reach into the narrowest clay jars and bring out their contents. When together, they all spoke an odd mix of the Mountain dialect of Deverrian and the few bits of Dwrgi that Kov knew. No one had offered to teach him their language in any systematic way, leaving him to pick up what he could here and there.
On the morrow, when they returned from a swimming lesson, Kov took his helpers into the chamber of gold. As it always did, the sight of all the treasure, heaped as casually as dirty laundry but glittering in the light from their candles, turned his breathing heavy with excitement. He could feel sweat beading his back and the palms of his hands. Although he could regain control of himself with one deep breath, he wondered if some day, perhaps soon, he would stop wanting to gain control. It was the mist from the gold, he supposed, muddling his thinking. He wiped his hands dry on his brigga and turned his mind to the work ahead.
“Now, our first task for today,” Kov told his two helpers, “is clearing one of the corners.”
“Why?” Jemjek said.
“So we’ve got a place to put things?” Clakutt broke in.
“Exactly. Carry everything in that corner there,” Kov said, pointing, “into this clear space where I’m standing. Then we’ll start putting all the coins in the empty corner while we move things from the next one. Jewelry pieces without gems in that one, I think. And so on around the room.”
“But we leave any coins we find in that corner?” Clakutt said.
“Just so. Good lad!”
Kov picked up a gold coin, glanced at it, and nearly swore aloud. Since the death masks were of obvious Horsekin work, he’d been expecting Horsekin coins, but the coin bore Westfolk runes on one side and a roughly stamped Westfolk face on the other. He found another coin—again, Westfolk work. He picked up a golden brooch of a horse with wind-tossed mane and realized he’d seen one like it back home in Lin Serr, displayed as a treasure from the Seven Cities. The more he examined the objects in the chamber, the more he realized that the vast majority of them had to be ancient workmanship, so delicately done of such pure metal that they made the beautiful crafts of the nomadic Westfolk look like the efforts of children.
Twice looted! he thought to himself. The Horsekin in those barrows must have been buried with the spoils of war before the plague wiped out their fellows back in the Seven Cities. Vaguely he remembered that the Horsekin stripped the flesh of their dead fellows from their bones, ate it, and then buried the bones in tidy bundles, bound with leather thongs to keep the ghosts from walking. Or so he’d been told—the story had the spiteful feel of mere legend about an enemy.
“Jemjek?” Kov said. “Have you ever gone gathering?”
“Once,” Jemjek said.
“Did you see any bones in the mound?”
“I did. All stacked up like winter firewood, they were.”
“Were they tied in bundles?”
“They were not, not no more, but there were stains on them from thongs or ropes. Rotted clean away, if you do ask me.”
Spiteful or not, part of the tale held true. What a lovely lot they are, the savages! Kov thought.
“Kov?” Clakutt came trotting over. “What be this?”
The boy handed Kov something that looked like a length of rope braided from fine strands of gold. As thick as his thumb, the “rope” had been twisted into a semicircle about