The Shadow Isle

by Katharine Kerr

  “Except I can never leave.”

  “Except for that. And you won’t find refuge in a river, like I did.” She smiled again. “I suppose they thought I’d drowned. They saw me throw myself in, you see, but no woman ever climbed out again.”

  “You swam away.”

  “Of course. Now.” She leaned back and tented her fingertips while she considered him. “I use the word slave because I don’t know another for a worker who may not leave. But I have work for you that I think me you’ll come to love. This chamber holds the gatherings of many a year. Long before I was born my folk gathered. I have daughters who will gather after me. Tell me, Kov, what do you think of our little treasures?”

  “They’re beautiful and wondrous. I’ve never seen anything like this chamber.”

  “Does it fill you with the lust for sun’s blood?”

  “I could never deny it.”

  “This is only one of several such chambers in our city. And you’re in a city, Kov. It stretches far beyond the ugly little village by the bridge. We build those villages to fool everyone into thinking we’re naught but poor savages.”

  “They do their work quite well.”

  Lady smiled and leaned back in her chair. “But look at the disarray, ” she went on. “It aches my heart, as the men of Deverry say, to see the disorder. You’re a man of the Mountain Folk. You know the value of these things. You shall bring order into the gatherings.”

  “Sort them, you mean?”

  “Just that, and tell a scribe their worth, piece by piece. I see you as an honored servant, not a slave. You shall have a nice chamber and all the fish you can eat.”

  “Fish? Only fish?”

  “And porridge. We do cook porridge.”

  “How splendid!”

  “I doubt me if you’d like our other foods—worms, leeches, and the like.”

  Kov felt his face turn cold—no doubt he’d paled.

  “I thought not,” Lady said. “Well, we’ll see if our food gatherers can find fruits and suchlike in the summers for you. Your task will take years, more years than I have left, no doubt, and you and my granddaughters shall finish it. The Mountain Folk live long lives, or so I hear.”

  “Did your men kidnap me just because I come from the mountains? ”

  “They did not. They took you because you were measuring out our streets and chambers.”

  One of the men spoke briefly in their language.

  “That, too,” Lady said. “And because you were puzzling out the runes in the village. We keep our secrets no matter what the cost.”

  The cost to others, Kov thought. Aloud, he said, “Has it ever occurred to you to put a fence around your village, then, so strangers can’t wander into it?”

  Lady stared at him in a wonderment that was nearly comical. “It hasn’t,” she said at last. “But we shall do so. I believe the gods have sent you to us, Kov.”

  Kov’s first impulse was to assume she was lying about the fence. No doubt they needed an excuse to grab and enslave the occasional traveler. Yet she was looking at him with such a sincere admiration that he doubted his own assumption. None of these people had ever thought to sort their treasures, either, not even to put like with like the way any dwarven child would have done.

  “Now that you’re here,” she continued, “we needed to find important work for you, somewhat much grander than digging tunnels. It’s our good fortune that you come from Lin Serr.”

  “Your good fortune, no doubt.”

  “But not yours?” She laughed, a low chuckle that reminded Kov of ferret sounds. “If you have kin at home, my heart regrets your captivity for their sake. As for your sake, if what I’ve heard about the Mountain Folk is true, soon our gatherings will become your kin and your love and your life. I think me that in time, you’ll be happy here.”

  She’s probably right, Kov thought, and that’s the worst thing of all. Already he could feel a longing in his fingers to touch the gold, to run his hands through it, to pick up handfuls of it and squeeze it in tight fists. He’d grown up listening to every adult he knew talk about metals and jewels, whether precious gold or cold iron, the rare diamonds or the more common opals and turquoises. He’d learned the lust from them, he supposed, for the treasures of the earth. Lady was smiling at him as if she could read his thoughts.

  “I was told,” she said, “that the Mountain Folk have a name for gold, what we call the blood of the sun. Is it a secret name?”

  “It’s not. ‘Dwe-gar-dway, the perfection of Earth of Earth.’ ”

  “A lovely name, and I shall remember it. Now, while we prepare the binding ceremony, you’ll sleep up in the village. Once it’s done, you’ll see more of the city.”

  “Binding ceremony? What do you mean, binding ceremony?”

  “Oh, it’s naught that will cause you pain, unless cutting a lock of your hair will cause such, which I doubt.” Lady smiled in a way that was almost kindly. “Don’t let it trouble your heart.” She leaned forward in her chair and spoke in her own language.

  The Dwrgi pack surrounded Kov again and led him away. The audience had ended. They left the Chamber of Gold through a different door to a different tunnel, which once again twisted, doubled back, and in general became part of a maze. This route, however, did lead up to the ground above and back to the shabby village. Kov’s captors led him out into a starry night perfumed with the smell of fish grilling over a wood fire. In the glowing light of the fire he saw the crone who’d first spotted him. She was hunkering down and poking the coals with a stick.

  “Food,” one of the males said to Kov. “For you, and this hut. We chain your leg.”

  “Very well.”

  Kov stopped walking and stood head down, slump-shouldered, as if he were weighed down with defeat. As soon as they stepped a little away, he bolted forward at a dead run. He managed to get some twenty yards before they fell upon him, wrestled him down, and shackled his left leg to a long iron chain.

  “Bad slave.” One of the men was grinning at him. “Now you eat and not run no more.”

  Since they fastened the other end of the long chain to a ring in the stone pillar in the center of the village, Kov decided that he might as well sit down and eat. For the time being he could run no more, most certainly, but he had every intention of finding a way to do so, and as soon as possible. He could only pray that he could escape before this mysterious binding ceremony.

  Someone handed him a plate of grilled fish fillets, accompanied by a ladleful of porridge, and a thin split of wood to use as a spoon. While he ate, he looked downriver, where he could see the dark bridge looming over the starlight-speckled water like the shadow of some huge monster indeed.

  Kov spent a restless night in the hut with only the crone for a guard. The shackle, however, served better than a whole squad of axemen to keep him where he was. Whenever he heard the crone snoring, he would sit up and test the iron band for weaknesses. If he’d had a decent set of dwarven tools, he might have managed to pick the crude lock, but with only a splinter of wood for a weapon, he never managed to defeat it. On each try, the sound of the chain clanking would wake the crone; she would swear at him in a mix of several languages and then sit up, ready to shout an alarm, until he lay down and pretended to sleep.

  Eventually he did nod off, only to wake suddenly at dawn to a crowd of villagers just outside his door. They were chanting a loud repetition of six syllables, one of which sounded like a click of the tongue. The crone rose from her blankets and nudged him with a foot in his ribs.

  “Up, Mountain Man,” she said. “Ceremony is now.”

  Kov let fly with a few choice oaths of his own. He crossed his arms over his chest and lay where he was. They can just come and fetch me, he thought. The crone kicked him again, then stuck her head out of the door and yelled, most likely for help, since three burly fellows arrived and stomped into the hut. They grabbed Kov, peeled the blanket off him, and carried him outside with the chain clanking behind. They laid him dow
n by the stone pillar, then stepped back.

  A few at a time, a crowd gathered, standing well back but forming a rough circle with Kov and the pillar in its center. As he considered them and their pinned-together tabardlike garments, it occurred to Kov that they dressed as they did in order to slip out of their clothes and dive into the water as fast as possible. They lived in fear, these people—like most misers, he thought. All that gold, heaped up and stored where no one could even see it! Yet, of course, it would be his job to correct that situation, his for the rest of his life, hundreds of years that would warp his very soul. I will not end up like Otho, Kov told himself, not all bitter and greedy, I won’t, I can’t let myself!

  One of the burly fellows who’d carried him out stepped forward, grabbed him, and hauled him up to prop him against the pillar. Kov considered sliding back down, but the crowd in front of him was parting, murmuring, to let someone through. Dressed in her glittering scales of gold, Lady blazed like a tiny sun in the fresh dawn light.

  “Welcome to our river,” she said, and she smiled. “Soon you will be one of us, bound to the water as we are.”

  “Never,” Kov said. “I cannot escape you, but I’m a man of earth, and earth will dam up a river when it’s stubborn enough.”

  Everyone in the crowd gasped aloud, and Lady’s smile disappeared.

  “Think of the gold, Kov,” she said. “The gold will be yours as well as ours, you know, for those who belong to a river own the fish in it.” She stroked the front of her dress. “We have so much gold, and you shall have a share of it.”

  The dazzle from the golden scales got into his eyes, and through them, he felt, into his brain. He wanted to touch it, to stroke the dress itself, not the woman underneath, to feel those golden scales under his fingertips. With a shake of his head, he shut his eyes. He heard her chuckle to herself.

  “They say that the lust for the sun’s blood runs strong in the blood of the Mountain Folk,” she said, “and I think they speak the truth.”

  Kov crossed his arms over his chest and kept his eyes shut. He could hear the dress jingle as she walked up to him, then felt her fingers touch his hair. She separated out a lock; then he felt the sawing of a small knife. The lock of hair came away in her hand, and she stepped back again.

  She spoke first in her own language, then in Deverrian. “Look at me, Kov, because what I am about to do with this hair concerns you greatly.”

  The urgency in her voice opened his eyes. A man in a green tabard was handing her a small glass vial filled with some sort of liquid. When she held it up to the sun, he could see that it was oil. Solemnly she stuffed the lock of his hair into the vial, then stoppered it. The man in green took it from her with a bow.

  “Should you try to escape from our river,” Lady said solemnly. “I shall burn this hair, and your soul shall burn within you. Better you should stay among us!”

  A man in a yellowish tabard stepped forward, bowed, and knelt down. With a small key he unlocked the shackle from Kov’s ankle.

  “Let the dance begin!” Lady called out.

  The villagers answered her call in their own language. Someone out of sight began to pound on a drum; a flute player joined in. All those in the circle began a solemn dance, moving a few steps in one direction, bobbing their heads, then moving back in the other, yet they always moved more steps deosil than widdershins, so that the circle did make progress around the pillar. As they danced, Lady chanted in her own language, swaying back and forth, first calling out, then murmuring softly, moving her hands in the air as if she were weaving some sort of ensorcelment.

  It should have been impressive, but Kov was remembering Dallandra, with her beautiful face and cold-steel eyes, picking up his staff and talking about the dweomer upon it as casually as she would have told him that coltsfoot herb would ease dropsy. With as little fuss she could call forth rain out of a clear sky. She would have no need of stamping feet and silly chants to bind a man to her. There’s no true dweomer here! he thought, not that I’d better let them know I know it. At last the music ended, the dancers stopped, and Lady stood smiling at him, her face flushed, her eyes wide under their fan-shaped brows.

  “You may have the freedom of our river,” she said.

  “My humble thanks, my lady,” Kov said. “I shall serve you always.”

  Her grin widened into triumph. Apparently she couldn’t tell a lie when she heard one, either. Kov silently worked a small spell of his own, not that real dweomer lay behind it. Earth is stubborn, earth is slow, he told himself, rocks will stop the river’s flow. He now knew, deep in his heart, that the threat to his soul would come not from her and her people, but from the gold itself, all that gold, piled up, glittering, waiting for him like a pouty lover.

  “Since I belong to the river now,” Kov said, lying solemnly, “I crave a boon. I wish to learn to swim.”

  “You don’t know?” Her smile vanished into a wonder almost comical. “Well, then, by all means, you shall learn! The very best of our young men shall teach you.”

  “Well and good, then.” Kov bowed as low and as humbly as he could. “My heartfelt thanks!”

  Learning to swim would take him away from the underground chamber for at least some part of the day. Kov intended to be a slow learner, positively clumsy, in fact, to have access to the sky and air for as long as possible while he schemed out a way to escape, far from the golden treasure’s spell.

  Laz, of course, had no need of the Dwrgi Folk’s bridge. In his hunt for Faharn and his men, he flew over the Dwrvawr a good many miles to the north of the village, where the river ran through a high plateau of tumbled boulders in dry gullies, expanses of patchy brush and dry grass, bordered by hills so sharply ridged that it seemed they’d been cut with knives. An incessant wind blew down from the north, bringing a chill with it at night.

  The wind caused him a great deal of trouble. After some days of flying, Laz had gained control of his blunted wings under normal circumstances. As long as he flew with steady strokes straight ahead, or glided on a rising thermal, he could control his motion as well as he always had. Landing, however, or making tight turns presented difficulties. Those maneuvers required a perfect camber that, with damaged wing tips, he couldn’t always achieve. He would just manage to get the right angle to land or turn when a gust of wind would tumble him, squawking, from the sky. When he attempted to land, a wind gust would fling him backward. At times he even dropped his sack of belongings, which generally came untied during its fall. He would have to land as best he could, transform back to man-shape, and laboriously pick everything up and repack it with his damaged hands.

  After some days of this aggravation he decided to risk the tunnel working. Half spell, half ritual, Laz had pieced it together on his own from hints that he’d found in the ill-fated Hazdrubal’s teachings and the Pseudo-Iamblichos Scroll. At first he’d had no particular goal in mind, other than his usual curiosity about what would happen if he tried such-and-such a bit of dweomer. In human form, he’d gotten no results worth speaking of. In raven form, when he existed on the etheric as much as on the physical plane, he’d opened a long tunnel to and through the astral to—somewhere. At first he’d not recognized the strange roads he’d opened, misty tracks that led him through landscapes that seemed real but that changed at whim. In the library of the temple of Bel in Trev Hael he’d found a copy of the Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid and at last understood the treasure he’d unearthed by accident.

  The mother roads, the fabled mother roads that could take a man or a raven anywhere he wanted to go—they were a prize worth running risks for, Laz had decided. He’d used them to travel to the ruins of Rinbaladelan, then back to the temple of Bel up north of Cengarn. The summer just past, the working had nearly killed him. He’d opened a tunnel above the temple and used it to rejoin his men in the forest. Just as he’d come free, the tunnel had closed behind him with a snap like the jaws of some great beast.

  Thinking about his narrow escape still mad
e him shudder. He had no idea why the tunnel had closed so suddenly, very nearly leaving him on the astral. Had he not escaped, he would have died. Worse yet, he might have been trapped on the astral with no hope of rebirth. As he perched on a dead tree, out in the Northlands barrens, remembering the risk gave him pause. He knew now how deadly a dweomer working could turn, when the sorcerer understood only some of its properties.

  Yet, in the end Laz decided that the rewards of the mother roads outweighed the risk. They had a peculiar property that made them useful for more than one reason. Since they were driven by thought, they responded to thought. On a sunny morning, once the Dwrvawr and its water veil lay well behind him, Laz opened a tunnel through the higher worlds. He knew that he had only a few moments to travel before his physical body began to dissolve into a stringy mass of etheric forces, so he flapped hard, flew fast, faster, panting for breath, his wings aching, until he saw at last a pale brown meadow, where a dead river flowed in a sluggish stretch of thick silver water. Nearby stood a tree, half of which burned with perpetual fire whilst the other half bloomed green in full leaf. Beyond that tree lay forest, dark, tangled, and forbidding, where he’d never dared venture.

  Laz landed on the riverbank to rest and to examine the sack he carried in his talons. It appeared to be whole and unharmed, though he decided to wait to open it to see what had happened to the objects inside until he was safely back on the physical plane. Sometimes they survived these trips; sometimes he found only a strange mass of fibers and a greasy sort of ectoplasmic slime, which tended to evaporate fast in actual physical air, leaving a stink of decay behind it.

  As soon as he recovered his strength, Laz pictured Faharn in his mind, brought back every memory of him that he could, and combined them into an image of Faharn, still based on memory. He visualized Faharn’s neatly braided mane of black hair, glittering with silver charms in the sunlight, his cornflower-blue eyes that marked him as the member of a clan with slaves among its ancestors.