The Silver Mage

by Katharine Kerr

  “Ambuscade? I see that unhappy thought has occurred to you, too. Let’s hope it occurred to Voran or, more likely, to Brel.”

  “Just so. Here, I’d best fetch our horses. We need to be ready to ride out.”

  “So we do. I sincerely hope I can stay away from Bren. I don’t need him recognizing me.”

  Fortunately, Bren, newly shaved, trimmed, and dressed in decent clothing, rode next to the prince at the head of the line of march, while Laz and Faharn could lurk at the rear among the servants.

  On the second day, another slow crawl up hills and through twisting ravines, the prince gave orders that the fighting men should arm, ready in case of an attack on their line of march. A contingent of fifty horsemen, horse archers among them, moved back to the rear of the line to guard the supply wagons. Around noon, Laz noticed that the forest was thinning out around them. A road of sorts appeared, a dirt track lined with underbrush that the Mountain Folk set about widening with their axes. When the army stopped to rest the horses, scouts on foot spread out through the trees. They returned to report that they’d not seen any sign of farms or settled land.

  “It’s too bad the prince wouldn’t believe that I can turn myself into a raven,” Laz told Faharn. “I could scout for him.”

  “Indeed,” Faharn said. “You don’t suppose Bren was lying about this place, do you?”

  “I don’t. Who would want to farm in this kind of country? Don’t forget that we’re climbing up to a plateau.”

  “That’s right. A much better place to put a royal palace.” Faharn thoughtfully spat onto the ground. “Royal. Huh!”

  “I share your skepticism. Where do you think the Boars are going, anyway? Not all the way to Taenbalapan, surely!”

  “I doubt it, too.”

  Faharn considered, rubbing his jaw in thought. “Most likely,” he said at last, “they’re heading to that fortress that the dragon saw a-building. From what he told Prince Dar, it’s properly sited to provide safety for a retreating force.”

  “How wise of them!” Laz said. “And may the gods curse them all for their wisdom!”

  For some days, Kov and the Dwrgwn had been burrowing south in the hopes of bringing a wyrd more substantial than a curse upon the Horsekin fortress. They had marched through the virgin forest rather than tunneled under it, because they would have had to dig far too deep to avoid the impacted roots of the tall trees. Once they reached the forest verge, traveling on the surface became too dangerous. On a slight rocky rise Kov stood and looked south, a long way south over a landscape of scrub grass and stunted, twisted trees growing only beside narrow streams. If his straggling party of Dwrgwn tried to march across it, any mounted Horsekin patrol would spot them from miles away.

  They took shelter underground, but the digging proceeded slowly. They found the topsoil thin over a layer of rocks—bedrock, fortunately, but an oddly random scatter of large rocks, a few boulders, and a lot of loose gravel.

  “I don’t understand this terrain,” Kov said. “I’ve seen somewhat like it before, up to the north of Lin Serr, but I don’t know what creates it. It looks like something swept up a lot of mountain rocks, carried them along for miles, and then dropped them, but it would have happened a long long time ago.”

  “Giants with brooms,” Leejak said with a shrug. “I care not. Cursed nuisance now.”

  “That’s certainly true.”

  Rather than try to move several tons of rock to the surface, the Dwrgwn twisted their tunnel around the biggest obstacles and used the small scatter to line the floors and brace the bottom of the walls. As much as they’d hated marching, they loved digging. They worked hard, efficiently, and relentlessly, but still, Kov considered they’d done well if they made a mile in a day. Since he had no idea how far ahead the fortress lay, he could only hope they’d reach it before the war ended.

  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 to Kov, “What be?”

  “Riders. We must be near the fortress.”

  Leejak murmured the news to the others in the Dwrgi tongue.

  Late that night, under the light of the Starry Road and a half-moon, Kov saw the Long Barrow for the first time. In their new-found tunnel the Dwrgwn found a ventilation shaft, crumbling and filled with dried leaves and the like, but easily cleaned and repaired. With the aid of the makeshift ladder Kov climbed up and stuck his head and shoulders into the fresh air. Not more than a quarter mile ahead, possibly a bit less by his estimate, he saw orange campfires, glowing among the dark silhouettes of tents. Although he could
n’t spot them, he could smell horses and their manure.

  Beyond the fires and the tents rose a long dark mound, some sixty feet high. At the top, jagged shapes against the starry night appeared to signify walls made of rough-cut logs. Beyond them he could just discern the uneven roofs of buildings. None of the structures appeared true to the vertical, but whether was because of sloppy building or the mound settling, he couldn’t tell. He climbed back down and told Leejak what he’d seen.

  “You got good eyes for dark,” Leejak said.

  “All of my people do,” Kov said. “Now, what truly matters is what we find underneath the mound. Let’s hope this tunnel runs all the way.”

  “Tomorrow we send scouts. Find out. Eat, sleep now.”

  In the morning the scouts came back with good news. The ancient tunnel ran another quarter of a mile, and as it ran, it rose, aiming perhaps for the middle of the mound. It ended in a crumbling wooden door, obvious Dwrgi work. They’d refrained from opening it for fear of making too much noise.

  “Did you hear people moving up above you?” Kov said.

  “We did,” the head scout said. “Clomp clomp. Hollow like dead log.”

  “Splendid!” Kov rubbed his hands together. “I’ll wager that means the door opens into a room of some sort. I’m going to risk taking a look. Better to do it now than wait till everyone’s asleep and quiet.”

  Leejak and Jemjek went with him. They hurried up the steep length of the tunnel, which rose, by his well-trained dwarven estimate, some twenty-five feet above ground level. Leejak confirmed that the original diggers must have been aiming for the middle level of the barrow, where gathering parties usually found the burials and their treasures.

  The door turned out to be made of planks, mossy and moldy with age, that tore apart under Kov’s bare hands like old cheese. As silently as he could, he dug out a spyhole toward the bottom of one plank, then squatted down to look through. Glowing blue fungi grew in profusion in the chamber on the far side. By their light he could just make out that the walls of this room had been made of timber, whole logs, most likely, judging from the regular pattern of vertical billows under the thick crust of fungi.

  He could also hear the footsteps that the scouts had described, a hollow clop clop, as if someone were walking back and forth in wooden clogs. What that person was doing escaped him—pacing the floor, cleaning something—they could have been engaged in any number of tasks.

  “Anything to gather in there?” Jemjek whispered.

  “I doubt it.” Kov got up. “You can take a look, but be careful!”

  Jemjek knelt down, leaned forward, and inadvertently nudged the rotted door with his elbow. With a pulpy, squishy sort of noise, it pulled free of the rusted hinges and fell in a rain of moldy splinters to reveal the further room, thick with fungus and rotting logs. Everyone froze as the footsteps above halted. A woman’s voice called out—something in a language Kov didn’t know, but it sounded like a question.

  The footsteps began again; the voice repeated the question. Kov waited, half-afraid to breathe, and prayed that none of the Dwrgwn would break and try to run or call out. From above a rough man’s voice murmured. The woman answered, and this time she sounded afraid. Footsteps again. They slowly retreated; then silence.

  Kov let out his breath in a soft sigh. “We’d better work fast,” he whispered.

  Kov got up, motioned to the others, and led them back to the waiting Dwrgwn before he risked speaking.

  “We’ve got wood down here,” Kov told them, “but it’s damp. I don’t know how well it will burn. We’re going to have to take our time and clear out the fungus, then see how far under the fortress we can get. But we must be silent, very very quiet.”

  Leejak translated, glaring at each man in turn. Gebval stepped forward and began talking, waving his hands, crossing them in midair as if he were passing shuttles through the warp on a loom. When he finished, Leejak gave Kov the gist of his speech.

  “He say he summon water out of wood. Must dig pit for water here. Then he summon it.”

  Kov wanted to heap scorn on the idea, but working his pretend magic would keep the spirit talker out of the way.

  “Splendid!” he said. “That will be a great help.”

  Leejak raised a skeptical eyebrow but said nothing more.

  Two of the Dwrgwn took shovels and began to dig an alcove into the side of the tunnel, while the others stood ready with baskets to take the loose earth away. Kov and Leejak walked away to talk where they wouldn’t be overheard.

  “That wood,” Leejak said. “Very old. Should be all gone.”

  “Agreed,” Kov said. “If I’m guessing aright, the Deverrians built this place over a thousand years ago. Someone else must have been using it since then, repaired it, even, with fresh wood.”

  “Then they leave, Horsekin come?”

  “Just so, but the Horsekin haven’t been here long. Refugees from the cities of the far west, would be my guess, who might have stayed here for some hundreds of years. I don’t know. If we had time, we might find old coins and things in the ruins, but we have no time.”

  “Just so. Bring it down, then get out.”

  They returned to the newly-dug alcove to find the Dwrgwn digging a cistern into its floor. Gebval stood nearby, chanting under his breath, waving his hands back and forth. At times he shut his eyes and swayed to some inner rhythm. On his chest the bronze knife glittered, but the glow that fell upon it gleamed gold, too bright and too yellow to originate with the fungi baskets. The hair on the back of Kov’s neck rose in a cold shiver. Gebval called out a sharp order. The Dwrgwn in the cistern clambered out, whispering among themselves.

  The last man out pointed to his feet—soaked through up to his ankles. “They’ve hit groundwater,” Kov murmured, but he disbelieved his own remark. Leejak shook his head in a no.

  Gebval chanted on and on while the golden light grew brighter, crept up the chain that held the knife, and covered his head like the hood of a cloak. Kov glanced in the cistern and saw fragments of splintered wood floating as the water rose and swirled around. Leejak suddenly swore.

  “Get out of here!” he said to Kov, then turned and gave orders in Dwrgi.

  Two of the Dwrgwn grabbed Gebval, who continued chanting and glowing, and dragged him along as everyone began running back down the tunnel northward. Utterly puzzled, Kov followed more slowly until he felt what Leejak had sensed—a trembling in the earth. The summoned water spilled over the cistern and began to flow down the tunnel after him as Kov ran, following the others. When they reached the level portion of the tunnel, the water slowed, but it kept on coming.

  The trembling grew to a shaking. A cacophony of cracks, rum blings, thuds, and distant booms drowned out the murmur and splash of water. The Dwrgwn darted through the rough doorway from the ancient tunnel into the feeder shaft they’d constructed earlier. Gebval looked around him and then fainted, falling into the soft earth. His impromptu attendants picked him up again and ran, dragging him along. Panting and gasping for breath, Kov made it through to the new tunnel. The Dwrgwn who’d dug the cistern picked up their shovels and began forking dirt into the breach that led back into the tunnel leading to the fortress. Others pitched in, desperate to divert the swelling tide of groundwater.

  The noise from overhead grew louder, resolved itself into the thunder of horses’ hooves and screaming from Horsekin throats. Beyond that, distantly, the cracks, booms, and rumbling went on and on. The earth around them shook as if it were trembling in fear. Kov ran back north to the closest ventilation shaft and climbed a quaking ladder. He clung to the rough wood as if he were riding a bucking horse and stuck his head out to look back.

  The fortress was collapsing. Kov stared in utter disbelief as the log palings began to lean inward, slowly at first, trembling, groaning, then faster, until they fell, slamming against the roofs of the buildings inside. The buildings shook, then began to sink, tip-tilted like children’s blocks. All around the mound Horsekin r
an and swarmed like ants when a careless farmer plows up their hill. Dust rose up in huge pillars like smoke, and indeed, smoke mingled with the towering dust. Kitchen fires, most likely, had spread and caught the wooden walls.

  From right below him a voice called out—Leejak. “Get down! Run!”

  Kov followed orders and splashed off the ladder into water halfway up his calves. The Dwrgwn were streaming past, rushing back north, carrying their spirit talker as well as the remaining supplies and tools. Kov and Leejak brought up the rear, splashing through the water that flowed relentlessly after them. Apparently the attempt to block the entrance into the ancient tunnel had failed. Still, as they ran, gasping and sweating, Kov realized that the flood was slowing, turning shallow, losing the race.

  Under the next ventilation shaft the Dwrgwn slowed and stopped on reasonably dry ground. In the pale light that filtered down from above to meet the blue glow of the fungi baskets, they clustered around Leejak and began to all talk at once, panting between words and phrases. The spearleader held up both hands for silence while he, too, gasped for breath. At last the chatter stilled, and Leejak could speak.

  “Very good,” he said. “Kov, Mountain Man, what happens there?”

  Kov nearly blurted out the truth, that he had no idea, but he decided that he’d best come up with some sort of explanation.

  “Gebval summoned all the water out of the wood,” he began, then realized he’d stumbled on the answer. He paused often, allowing Leejak to translate. “He also summoned water from some sort of spring or underground stream. That water was the reason the wood was so damp to begin with. The wood was so rotten that the water and the fungi were holding it together. As the fungi dried, and the water ran out, the wood couldn’t bear its own weight, much less the weight of the buildings above. It fell. Meanwhile, the groundwater kept rising, sweeping the dirt out from under the fortress.”

  “Gebval!” two of the Dwrgwn began the chant. “Gebval, Gebval!”Others chattered among themselves.