The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [77]
Clakutt shrugged, looked away, his face twisted in sorrow. “My gran, she did tell me it had to happen.” His voice wavered badly. He shrugged again and picked up a pottery jar from the floor. “Be it that I look inside this?”
“Good idea.” Kov had no desire to force him to say his opinion of the Scour aloud. No doubt it would be dangerous to do so, if Lady heard of it. “Lay it down on its side first and bang on the bottom. That’ll scare out any spiders or suchlike.”
As they continued working, Kov found himself thinking over Lady’s remark about Earth and Water blending. Apparently, the Dwrgwn knew about the abstract elements and their relationships. As a boy, Kov had been taught such things under the rubric of natural philosophy, an important study among the Mountain Folk. Fire and Water were the pure forms of the elements. Fire begat Air, and Water, Earth, with Earth and Air being mixed or impure forms. So did that mean that the Westfolk and the Mountain Folk were impure peoples somehow? They both lived far longer than Horsekin or, he suspected, the Dwrgwn, who were in theory at least pure peoples. Could it be that purity was more a drawback than a boon? Deverry folk, the Children of Aethyr, lived lives as short as those of the Horsekin. Was Aethyr a pure or impure element? In all his studies, Kov had rarely heard Aethyr mentioned, much less its properties.
Kov wished he could consult with his old teacher, Loremaster Gwarn, an impossibility at the moment, of course. With a sigh, he turned his mind back to the work at hand. When he began to tally up the coins in the hoard, he remembered that he’d never asked Lady about the promised scribe. That’s what you get for letting your mind run off after vagaries, he told himself. Better to stick to practical matters, just like Father always said. He did find a bit of wood, and Jemjek had a little knife. They counted up the coins in twelves and notched the wood for each lot.
Because of the scribe, at dinner that night Kov mentioned how much he wanted to talk with Lady again. When, the next day, one of her servants summoned him, he assumed she’d gotten his roundabout message.
“She’s in the council chamber,” the young Dwrgi lass said. “I’ll take you there.”
Kov followed her through winding tunnels that led down, deep into the complex to a big chamber, where the only light came from baskets of bluish-green fungi much like those of Lin Serr. Dressed in plain pale linen, Lady sat on a high-backed chair placed between two large light baskets. Beside her stood a tall Dwrgi with gray hair at his temples and a bristly mustache that covered his entire upper lip. Around his waist a leather belt with a gold buckle clasped his brown tunic. Kov noticed a long knife in a sheath dangling from the belt, which he took to be a mark of some sort of position or rank. He was proved right when Lady introduced him.
“Our spearleader,” Lady said. “His name is Leejak.”
Kov made Leejak a bow, which the spearleader returned.
“We’ve had troubling news from our gatherers in the north,” Lady continued. “The Horsekin are building a fortress.”
“Troubling, indeed!” Kov said. “How close is it?”
Lady shot Leejak a sideways glance. “Far away, I think,” she said.
“Huh, not far enough!” Leejak said. “Maybe ten days by tunnel. We do have tunnels that lead that way, you see. This fortress, it be south of the barrows where we do gather.”
“That’s not much of a distance for men who ride horses above ground.” Kov decided that giving Leejak an honorific would sweeten their relationship. “Does my lord agree with me?”
“So our spearleader told me,” Lady broke in. “Now, they do build it in a place we call the Long Barrow, or on top of it, I should say.”
“It’s a grave site, then?”
“I think so. We’ve not gone gathering there, because it lies on the wrong side of the river. Besides, a mound that large—it could well be haunted or suchlike.”
“They be putting stone walls on top of the barrow,” Leejak said. “We did call you here because your people do ken much about building with stone. How