The Tempering of Men (15 page)

So he helped Kari up, half-hauling, half-bracing, and supported Kari in a lurching, precarious progress toward the svartalfar, Kari cursing vividly under his breath with every hopping step. When they were still about ten feet away, the svartalfar pulled back and Kari said, “All right. Help me down again.” Brokkolfr did and then retreated out of the way—beside the torch, kindling a second from it—while Kari, who, sitting, was actually a little shorter than the svartalafar, said, “I am Kari Hrafnsbrother, of the Franangfordthreat. In the names of the smiths and mothers, I greet you.” He was panting a little with pain, but Brokkolfr judged it a very respectable speech.

The second torch flared as Brokkolfr waved it, casting better light, and now he saw the svartalfar clearly. The closer and smaller also seemed to be lower-status, judging by the simpler embroidery on its robes. It came a step or two toward Kari, the hems of its layered garments sweeping the rock underfoot, and said something resonant and complex in a language Brokkolfr did not understand.

Kari blinked. And then, haltingly, he answered. Brokkolfr could tell by the pauses and stammering that Kari barely knew what he was saying, and knew even less how to say what he meant. But whatever he got out seemed to satisfy the alf. Brokkolfr brought the torches over and crouched down beside Kari.

The alf turned its head, the long twig-crooked nose showing the direction of its attention. Whatever it said, Brokkolfr could not have missed the tone of query. The larger one made a sound in return that sounded like agreement.

The first cleared its throat. “I … am the apprentice Realgar,” it said. “The journeyman is Orpiment. We are in service to Mastersmith Antimony.”

It hesitated, and Brokkolfr tried to remember if realgar was a metal or a mineral. A mineral, a poisonous one, he thought, one from which red pigment and arsenic could be derived. That would make the svartalf a male, if he understood the way they assigned their names. Or kennings, for maybe their names weren't something they shared with just anyone. That was how it was in the stories, anyway.

The alf cleared its—his—throat again. “What are you creatures doing here? Surface creatures do not come so deep.”

Kari and Brokkolfr exchanged a look, and Brokkolfr didn't need the pack-sense to know Kari was as disconcerted as he was. “Exploring?” Kari said. “We didn't know … we didn't know any svartalfar had stayed. No one mentioned it.”

“Stayed?” Realgar said, his eyebrows drawing together sharply. The other one, Orpiment, said something, and the two alfar began an unmistakable argument. Brokkolfr glanced at Kari, who shook his head. Whatever of the svartalfar language he'd managed to pick up, they'd already exhausted his knowledge.

“What did he ask you?” Brokkolfr whispered.

“I'm not exactly sure,” Kari whispered back. “They pronounce things differently than Tin and the other svartalfar I met. But I know he was asking about weapons and whether we intended to fight them. I said no.”

“Good,” Brokkolfr said, and couldn't help adding, “You need to get out of those wet clothes.” Shoulder to shoulder with Kari, he was almost being shaken by the allover tremors wracking the other man's body.

“You want me to strip right now?”

“Not ideally, no, but I don't want you to die. I'm a fisherman's fifth son. I know about cold water.”

“It'll certainly persuade them we're not a threat,” Kari grumbled, but he dragged his jerkin off over his head. Brokkolfr went to work on his boots, feeling gingerly around Kari's injured ankle. He pulled the laces out completely on that side, stretching the soaked, chilled leather wide.

Kari took a sharp breath but made no other complaint. “Sorry,” Brokkolfr muttered. Even through the wool of the sock, he could feel the heat and tautness of the injured flesh. Immersion in icy water had tamed the swelling, and it would also have numbed the pain.

But that would not last.

“Do it,” Kari said, and Brokkolfr gritted his teeth—his own teeth, as if what he was about to do could cause him pain—and pulled Kari's boot from his foot as smoothly and easily as he could.

“Ow,” Kari said on a long exhale when he was done. Even in the torchlight, Kari's face shone pale through sweat.

“It's over,” Brokkolfr said. “Maybe if I strap it up we can limp out of here.” Making it worse. Making it more likely that Kari would be permanently crippled—

“Your companion,” said Orpiment. “It's injured?”

“He is,” Brokkolfr said, wary. He had hoped, he realized now, to pass through this encounter in Kari's shadow. It unsettled him to be required to make an accounting.

“He will heal,” said Realgar. “But the cave ice he damaged was the result of centuries of growth. How will you make reparations to the cave for that?”

“Reparations to the … the cave?”

The cave is alive? The cave is a living thing? The cave has … property rights?
Brokkolfr shook his head as if he could shake the confusion out of it.

“It can be healed,” Orpiment said—to Realgar rather than to the wolfcarls, which made Brokkolfr wonder if the journeyman was taking their side.

Realgar glared at Orpiment. The alf's eyes sparked torchlight like gems secret in the caverns beneath his bushy brows. “A crude attempt could be made,” he said. “But such shaping is never as intricate as the natural state of the stone.”

“Hsst!” Orpiment said. He lapsed back into the alfish speech, as rapid as a drumbeat now, and after a few halfhearted protests Realgar looked chastened.

Kari nudged Brokkolfr, and Brokkolfr realized that he was staring. He dropped his eyes, glancing at his werthreatbrother instead. The expression on Kari's face wasn't censure, though—it was suppressed excitement, like the face of a man holding the throw of knucklebones. Brokkolfr tilted his head in a question; Kari, having skinned himself down to his breechclout, gave him a subtle little headshake as warning.

“I'll tell you later,” he murmured. “I'm not sure—”

If he had been about to say more, it was interrupted. Orpiment's lean tree-limb of an arm reached out, spanning the space between them, and touched Brokkolfr lightly on the shoulder. Brokkolfr froze, feeling the long jeweled fingers like a skeleton hand, aware of how close those filigree-reinforced talons lay to his throat.

“You must come with us to the mastersmith,” Orpiment said. “Antimony will know what to do with you.”

“Take my shirt and vest,” Brokkolfr said to Kari. He slithered out of them quickly and all at once, brushing the svartalf's hand aside, so the shirtsleeves still stuck through the holes in the jerkin. Kari took shirt and vest without a word and struggled into them.

Brokkolfr turned to Orpiment and said, “I need to bind my friend's ankle. And he cannot walk far.”

“We shall carry him,” Orpiment said. “Have no fear.”

*   *   *

Carry him they did, on a stretcher made from their staffs and Realgar's embroidered outer cloak or robe. Brokkolfr had never seen svartalf undergarments before. Under his mantle, Realgar's hunched body was clothed in a mud-colored shift of some fabric more sheer and smooth than lawn. It clung revealingly, leaving Brokkolfr uneasily assessing the power of the svartalf's haunches and thews, the sharp-angled lever arms of his joints. His torso swayed between his limbs with each step, as dwarfed by their strength as a frog's.

Brokkolfr knew that the svartalfar were terrible in war, for all they often looked like bundles of elaborately embroidered rags swaddled up around an awkward collection of sticks. But now, observing ropy muscle and forearms cabled as if with twisted wires of steel, the ease with which this hunched creature carried half the weight of a grown man through cramped tunnels, Brokkolfr found himself with a new appreciation of the svartalf as a dangerous animal.

Brokkolfr could tell when they entered a settled area by the lanterns along the walls and the jeweled and delicate carvings that began to sprout on every side, a garden of stone run riot. In a human house, those carvings would have been on wood and they might have been fantastical beasts or traceries of vine and fruit and flower. Here, though, what work had been done had been done with respect for the stone itself—polishing, opening, showing the layers with delicate incisions.

The floors had been leveled, the spaces opened, and the light the lanterns provided was amplified and reflected through the use of lenses and mirrors to an extent Brokkolfr had never imagined. He thought of the glass prisms in the decks of ships, to bring light below: this was to that as a palace was to a croft.

Bright, clean, warm, and beautiful—the alfden was nothing like a trellwarren, which calmed Brokkolfr's hammering heart a little. In fact, some breaths brought him the scent of familiar flowers and the wet warmth of growing things, leaving him wondering—did the svartalfar grow food underground? And if so, how did they go about it?

As Realgar and Orpiment carried Kari in, Brokkolfr also noticed that the few other svartalfar they encountered seemed to go out of their way to take no notice of the surface-dwellers suddenly in their midst. One or two stared, and the obvious guards at a great door drew aside, nodding—but no words were spoken and no questions raised. Remembering what Kari had said about the Iskryne alfar, the trellqueen, and granting of permission, Brokkolfr thought he understood. The other alfar would assume that either Realgar and Orpiment had permission for their actions or they were on their way to secure it. And so there would be no questions unless it turned out not to be so.

A tidy way to run a town. If everyone could be counted on not to take advantage.

Alfar, he concluded, were even less like men than he had always been told. He caught Kari's eye, wishing that like Amma he could simply reach into Kari's imagination and plant these ideas there. But Kari looked even more white-faced and drawn than before—Brokkolfr grimaced in sympathy as he imagined how the improvised litter and the uneven steps of the svartalfar were jolting Kari's ankle—and Brokkolfr glanced away.

At last, Orpiment turned off the seeming thoroughfare and—still carrying the front of Kari's stretcher—led the little party down a vaulted side-corridor. Brokkolfr wondered if the patterns in the stone were signage. He thought he glimpsed repeating motifs, but that could be artistry as easily as tavern signs. And if this was a
young
svartalf colony, new in the past year, he wondered what glories would populate an old, established one.

Although he was beginning to think that maybe this was not such a new colony. What had the alfar said when Kari pleaded ignorance that they had remained behind?

Maybe they had been here all along, living under the feet of men, and men had never known it. If they grew food here, need they ever come to the surface? And he'd thought he and Kari had gone deeper into the caves than earlier explorers. Maybe there were svartalf warrens everywhere.

He thought about Isolfr and the fragility of the truce between elves and men, and he caught himself dry-swallowing.
Careful, Brokkolfr. This could end badly indeed.

At last, they turned aside once more—three more svartalfar passed them in the interim, Brokkolfr burning up under the eyes of each one—and entered a tunnel the walls of which were inlaid with copper and silver between the flowstone. The flowstone itself Brokkolfr took as a sign that this passage was part of the natural caverns and not hewn from the living bedrock as so many of the others had been.

Also, the floor here was waterworn, and though many feet had since polished it, Brokkolfr could make out the eroded shapes of eddies and ripples. They proved a blessing: the descent was steep, and Brokkolfr, though perforce hunched by the low roof, used them to brace his boots against so he did not slide down and send both svartalfar and Kari tumbling. His toes jammed up into the ends of his boots, and he bit his lip to keep from swearing.

Orpiment glanced back over his shoulder. “Fear not, surface-dweller. We are nearly to my master's apartments.”

“I'm sorry,” Brokkolfr said. Cool air dried the sweat on his chest and back. The alf must have heard his labored breathing and interpreted it correctly. “I did not mean to complain.”

The alfar were sure-footed, at least, and even managed to keep Kari's litter somewhat level. Kari himself seemed to have given himself up to pain. He lay back in his borrowed shirt, eyes half-closed, and pulled the slack edges of Realgar's robes over himself as best he could.

Brokkolfr's aching calves and toes—and the hunch of his back—were grateful when the descent ended.

If Orpiment and Realgar's master was a smith, there was here no stench of the forge or clatter of hammers. Instead, a trickle of water flowed down a petal-toned limestone abutment and the floor around it had been leveled with imported slates. The svartalfar paused with their burden, and Brokkolfr paused behind them.

“Mastersmith Antimony!” Orpiment called, after a glance from the apprentice. “It is Realgar and I! We have come to beg your advice.”

Brokkolfr had not seen a door since the one that was guarded, and he did not see one now. Perhaps svartalfar simply did not go where they were not invited.

But the scrape of a foot and the swish of fabric came from within, and then around the edge of the flowstone came one of the more elaborately arrayed svartalfar Brokkolfr had ever seen. He had seen mastersmiths before, even Tin in her formal gowns, with her inlaid teeth and her embroidered robes that puddled on the floor all around her. But nothing like this.

Antimony—and now he could not for the life of him remember if antimony was a metal or a mineral, and of course there was no cue to wolfcarl eyes in an alf's face or body what its sex might be—wore ivory woolens that draped in folds like the very flowstone from arms that spanned wider than Brokkolfr's, though the alf scarcely reached his chest. Embroidery in shades of blue and rose and purple trimmed every fold, and around the hem, heavy fringes swung.