Thornhold - Elaine Cunningham [117]
Whatever came of this venture, she would handle it as she always had: her own way.
* * * * *
It took Ebenezer the better part of two hours to round up his kin and get them headed out of the shop. “Like herding cats, it is,” he grumbled as he shoved the last of them out of the door. The look of pure, desperate gratitude that Alice sent him brought a wry grin to his face. The Stoneshafts were a handful, and no mistake. He only hoped that Bronwyn’s mysterious “friends” had pickaxes big enough to chop through this particular problem.
Once the dwarves were out on the street, the problems compounded. Bronwyn’s shop was on the Street of Silks, a nose-in-the-air piece of town where folks thought their shoes too good to sully with walking. Fancy carriages rattled past, drawn by teams of horses.
“Lookit the size of them mules,” marveled Benton, a cousin who’d never been out of the tunnels before his capture.
“How’d they get four of ‘em to go in the same direction?” demanded Tarlamera, whose only experience with mules involved small, dusty pack animals nearly as stubborn as herself. The clan had kept a few for hauling back the gems and ore from the outermost mines.
That image suggested a solution to Ebenezer. “Miners, ho!” he hollered. “Tunnel size, seven. Fall in by clan rank.”
His clan scuttled into place with an alacrity born of long practice. A size seven tunnel meant that three dwarves could march abreast, and clan rank was easy enough: oldest first. Every dwarf knew where he ranked in comparison with any other dwarf so they found their places readily enough. The only break with tradition was when Ebenezer took his place at the head. Not a dwarf argued with him for that honor, though, seeing as he was the only one who’d ever been to the city before.
He marched them down the Street of Silks, past shops brimming with the fashionable doodads that humans seemed so all-fired fond of. These the dwarves passed without missing a step, but as they neared the Jester’s Court, the scents drifting from the Mighty Manticore inspired wistful sighs from some of his kin. Ebenezer had some knowledge of the tavern owner, a half-dwarf but a good sort for all that. Coopercan, his name was, in honor of a backside as big as a barrel. When Coop settled down to keeping tavern, he’d kept some of his dwarven ways. There was no mistaking the smell of rothй roasting on a spit, stuffed with mushrooms and the tasty black rice that grew wild in the marshy hollows hidden among dwarven mountains. Coopercan always seemed to have a rothe roast going, and there were few scents that could get a dwarf to drooling betterthan that.
“Hoy, brother!” shouted a gruff female voice. “I’m-a coming up.”
Ebenezer lifted his hand to his lips to hide his smirk. He’d been too long among humans, if he found humor in the usual dwarven method of “asking permission.”
Tarlamera huffed up to his side. For several moments they marched in silence as he waited for her to speak her mind. “We gotta go back to the clanhold,” she decreed.
He’d been afraid of that. Knew it was coming. Even so, he tried to scoff away the notion. “And how might you be planning to do that? There’s not enough of us left to take back the tunnels, much less hold them secure. The men that stole you away in the first place would be back, and the second harvest would be all the easier.”
The dwarf woman scowled and folded her arms. “What are we to do, then?”
“There’s dwarves in the city,” he told her. “Bronwyn has friends what can find us work. We’ll fit in, make our way. Make a life.”
Tarlamera glowered. “Seems to me like you’re putting too much weight in that human’s say-so. Mountain dwarves in a city? What kind of life is that?”
“Better’n the one ‘that human’ stole you from, I’ll tell you that for free,” he shot back.
She shrugged. “There’s that. But all I got to say is- Almighty Clangeddin by the short hairs!”
Ebenezer pulled up short, startled by his sister