A Guile of Dragons (14 page)

“No, don't trouble to introduce yourself, Summoner. I know you as well as I need to. And if anyone but my youngest son had brought you here I would have had the gate thrown shut in your face.”

That answered Earno's question, at any rate: Morlock was clearly the foster son of the Eldest himself. That put the Arbiter's comments to Morlock, back at the Rangan colony, about “your father” in an ambiguous light. But he had no time to think of these things now.

“I can't guest here under these terms,” Earno said, and would have continued.

“Yet you will,” the Eldest forestalled him grimly. “You can reach no settlement in a day's walk, you have no provisions or steeds, and in simple fact, I will not allow you to leave.”

“You are an imposing host,” Earno observed, confident in his ability to leave if he chose. “But we have horses.”

“
They
are not yours,” the Eldest shouted. “I know the Ranga breed, horses and lower animals, too well.”

Then Earno understood the Eldest's puzzling attitude, at least in part. Somehow Tyr had heard of the events at the Rangan colony. He was simply venting his anger at Earno—whom, however, he seemed to resent for other reasons as well.

“I've promised not to speak of this matter to you, Tyr syr Theorn,” Earno said. “But I can at least say that Morlock has a plan for settling it which may meet with your approval.”

“Eh. Morlock always has ideas. You have not seen how badly some of them work out.” The dwarf's gray hand went to the red stone on his chest, then fell away. “Don't mistake me; he's clever, my youngest son. But he will never be wise. This idea he had of joining your Graith—look what has happened there. I could not believe my eyes when I saw the thains in Lernaion's escort, with their silken cloaks, their soft manners and their hard words. May my son never be like them! But still: what has he gotten for his faithful service but rags on his shoulders and bruises on his face? To say nothing of the shame of serving the enemy of his
ruthen
father.”

“
Ruthen
?”

“Given. Natural-born. However you say it. I mean old Ambrosius, of course.”

“He is honored in these halls,” said Earno, remembering the shield at Southgate.

“Except by Morlock, who defends the Graith (and
you
), greatly to his own disgrace. Oh, I grant him his integrity. But I disagree with his choice. And in any case it does not look well. His
ruthen
father . . .”

“The north is one of the Wardlands, now. When Merlin impaired the Guard, he betrayed the north as well.”

“Well, you must be content with your victory, as we must be with our dissent. The end of this matter is that you are welcome here, Summoner, even if you are disliked.” Tyr paused, as if steeling himself to something. “Moreover, since you may need to return many times, as your peer Lernaion has, you should know that you will always be welcome here, with or without my youngest son. But if you had come, this time, without him— it would have been otherwise!”

“You're not very generous.”

“I might have been, had my son been better treated in your service.”

“He is not in
my
service—”

“Put that aside! He is under obedience to you. Hereabouts, that means you have obligations to him.”

Earno saw it differently. “He must take care of himself.”

“That is very true, but also not very generous. Think on it, Summoner. The lass outside will take you to your rooms.” Then the ancient dwarf turned his face and looked out the window, into the darkness of full autumn night.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

Fire and Thunder

T
he meal that night had a festive air about it. It was held in the High Hall of the East, a tremendously difficult place to reach, at least for Earno. He found himself disturbingly prone to be out of breath, even after many days of travel through the mountainous north, and there were many stairs to climb in Thrymhaiam. When he finally reached the hall, trailing his little dwarfling guide, he felt as if he had climbed a mountain. As, in fact, he had. For when his guide led him to the Eldest's table he saw that, just beyond it, was a bank of high windows.

Delighted, Earno went to them immediately. He had not realized how high they had climbed. Far below them he could see the tops of clouds. The steep dark sides of Thrymhaiam's mountains disappeared in a deep valley filled with mist. Across the narrow valley another range of mountains lifted up, their peaks miles distant and already crowned with snow. Above them, the somber moon Chariot glowed. The whole scene, however, was lit by the second moon, Horseman, which had risen eight days ago. It was invisible from where he stood, since he had no view to the west, but it caused the high range opposite to glow with a thin bluish light. Coming after hours spent in the corridors and staircases of the Deep Halls, the view gave him a heady sense of breathing room.

“Is that the Haukr yonder?” he asked his guide. But, in turning around, he found that the little dwarf-lass had gone and it was Deor standing beside him.

“Yes,” the dwarf replied. “That is the Haukr. Magnificent mountains, those. You were missing your guide, little Ny, I guess.”

“I was,” Earno admitted.

“She's gone to stand as gate-guard with the other cwens. Then she'll have to get something to eat. But she'll be back later, I expect. A quiet lass, not like some.”

“How high are we, really?”

“Not so high. That valley down there is actually a gorge several miles deep. We're not even at the peak of this mountain, which is one of the lowest of Thrymhaiam. It's the gorge that gives the sense of height. We call it Helgrind—‘deeper than the sea,' in your language.”

“That sounds familiar, for some reason . . .” the summoner said slowly. Then he heard a voice behind him chanting:

“O what is higher than the tree?

And what is deeper than the sea?

“Or what is heavier than lead?

And what is better than the bread?

“Or what is sharper than a thorn?

And what is louder than a horn?

“O heaven is higher than the tree,

and hell is deeper than the sea.

“O sin is heavier than lead,

the blessing's better than the bread.

“O hunger's sharper than a thorn

and shame is louder than a horn.”

The voice was Morlock's. He joined them at the window, smiling a rare crooked smile.

“You are in peerless voice tonight, Thain Morlock,” said Earno, almost inclined to like him. “But in the Westhold we sing: ‘the thunder's louder than a horn.'”

“Well, perhaps your horns in Westhold are louder than we have here,” Deor suggested. “Then, too, some people are afraid of thunder, which is a great shame.”

“Why?”

“It's the lightning that kills. Thunder is just noise.”

The meal began shortly thereafter with the entrance of Tyr. Many of the Eldest's immediate family had already settled at the long black table, and the rest did so as he appeared, resplendent in blue clothes, that odd fiery-red gem still on his chest. The summoner was guided to a low-slung seat on the left hand of the Eldest's chair. On the summoner's left sat Deor, and there was a succession of younger dwarves, some almost beardless, farther down. Facing them was a line of considerably older dwarves, all densely bearded. From the fact that Morlock was placed with them and for some other reasons Earno guessed that these were the sons of Tyr. This guess proved to be correct. They were a grim lot, hardly saying a word after they gruffly introduced themselves. The younger dwarves (guests? descendants?) were much more talkative; Earno wondered why this was so.

The exception was the Eldest, who plied him with questions about the new religion of the Kaeniar—the Way of the Two Powers.

“It is not really new, as I understand,” Earno said. “It is a sorcerer-cult of the Anhikh. They believe that the universe is the accidental by-product of the conflict of the two primal powers, Fate and Chaos.”

“Yet Morlock tells me these shrines are springing up all along the shore of the Narrow Sea—in Kaen, not Anhi.”

“Morlock knows a good deal,” conceded Earno. “He may have been talking with Illion, who was in Kaen this past summer.”

“Morlock was there himself, I think. But he does not know what his Graith intends to do about it, anyway. I won't ask you, since you'd obviously rather not talk about it. I'm glad to know you're aware of this, though. From all I hear, the Kaeniar are bad, but the Anhikh are worse. I'd hate to be facing them across the Narrow Sea.”

Earno nodded. “The children of Kaen have never been our friends. But we must think long and hard before we permit a conquering power in the east.”

“And they actually believe that these primal forces live—where is it?”

“In Tychar,” Earno recalled, “the winterwood.”

Tyr grunted incredulously. “Astonishing what some people will believe.” He turned away to make a libation before his father's deathmask, which was on a stand beside him.

Next to Earno, Deor was leaning over the table, reminding Morlock of some cousins of his—some
harven
cousins.

Morlock nodded. “I remember them.”

“The ones that were always setting you on fire?”

“Yes.”

“They took over the trading house on the Broken Coast. In five months they had doubled our best trade year.”

“I'm not surprised,” Morlock said. “They were very convincing. I was just short of adulthood, you remember, and they had me believing it was my own, um, fluids that were causing the fires.”

A couple of Morlock's
harven
brothers laughed belatedly at this, surprising Earno. Morlock turned to the one beside him and said, “Vetr, do you still oversee the Ranga trade?”

The one called Vetr nodded wordlessly. Deor said, “Ah, here it comes.”

“Deor and I looked in on the travellers back from Ranga.”

Vetr shook his head gloomily. “You should not have done, Morlocktheorn,” he said with difficulty. Earno realized belatedly that he could barely manage Wardic, the realm's common speech. “They are diseased, badly diseased,” he added, after some thought.

“They are sick, yes, but . . . It reminds me of an illness I've seen in the south, along the Narrow Sea. It comes from a poison that the Kaeniar use.”

Vetr smiled. “No Kaenish here, Morlock.”

“The lizards the poison comes from might be. The traders say they saw none, but they ate mostly stored food and I was thinking . . .”

Vetr nodded. Slow in speech, he was far from slow in thought. “The stores. Haukr stores, our stores. They must be checked.”

“I don't think much of your idea, Morlock,” Tyr interjected. “Thrymhaiam has been eating stored food since summer. The only dwarves that fell sick were in Ranga when they did so.”

Morlock shrugged.

“Has anyone else caught the disease?” Earno asked “Anyone in Thrymhaiam?”

“No—unless we have,” said Deor.

“They were poisoned,” said Morlock, not stubbornly, but as a matter of fact. “That's their disease. We won't fall sick from talking to them.”

Earno thought of Lernaion and his escort being poisoned by stored food in Haukr. Or: a plague fever sweeping out of the north to decimate the Wardlands. That was a kind of destruction by fire he had not anticipated. But the conversation around him was turning in different directions, which was just as well.

“Naeth couldn't bring himself to finish the shaft,” a young dwarf called Laen was saying, “because it cut through this ‘lovely' formation. The work still isn't done. He should be a farmer!”

“No, no,” said Deor, as if this were too harsh a criticism for anyone. “Not a miner, though, you're right.”

“I learned lode-seeking from Naeth,” Morlock observed.