Istu awakened

CHAPTER TEN

'Whoa!' cried Fost, motioning for a halt. Moriana's greyhound squealed in terror as she reined in harshly. In a single fluid movement, she dropped her bow from shoulder to hand and pulled an arrow from her quiver. By the side of the track, Darkwood stood looking on with his habitual smile. He didn't unsling his bow.

Heart racing, Moriana followed Fost's gesture. She expected enemies. What she saw made her heart leap, but not from fear.

A unicorn stag stood on a knoll to the left of the path. The trees grew sparsely there. The great beast stood between two of the black, gnarled anhaks and gazed down at the travellers, one forefoot raised.

Something in the animal's attitude told Moriana the posture was not that of a creature poised for flight. It regarded them with disdain, its eyes huge and amber, set in the capacious skull on either side of the single straight horn. Its hide was a glossy chestnut and its throat and wide chest glowed silvery. A long tail ending in a tuft of auburn was held curled over the animal's back like a manticore's sting.

'Will you shoot, Lady?' Darkwood's smile had taken on the tilt they had come to associate with some private jest. 'Their flesh is a delicacy beyond compare.'

Moriana looked at Fost. His mouth was compressed in a curious fashion as if he tried to suppress a grin. Erimenes swayed at his side.

'Shoot!' the genie urged, his eyes gleaming with spectral blood-lust.

'No,' begged Ziore, floating beside Moriana. 'He's too magnificent!'

Moriana lowered her bow, relaxed the string and slid the arrow back into its sheath.

'She's right. I could only slay such a beast if I starved. Never for sport.'

As if it heard her words, the stag dipped its horn once and vanished as abruptly as it had appeared.

'You chose wisely, Highness,' said Darkwood. 'You'd never have hit him.'

Moriana's mouth tightened. This groundling made jokes at her expense, and she didn't care for it. 'You forget I'm Skyborn,' she informed him haughtily.

'Oh, I know that, Lady, and I know well you could put three arrows out of three through my chest with that monster bow of yours. But skill counts for more in hunting the Nevrym unicorn than cleverness of hand and eye. You'd have missed him, this I know.' His grin widened. 'Even as I'd know you'd next have seen him charging from that clump of blackleaf.' He pointed at a clump of shrubbery twenty yards distant. 'With his head down and blood in his eye. And I know a unicorn's fighting horn will pierce a quarter inch of the finest North Keep plate as if it were parchment.'

Moriana started to protest. Thinking she'd suffered enough, Fost put in, 'They're intelligent. And very cunning.'

'Intelligent? Nonsense. They're mere beasts.' Erimenes sniffed his contempt for such a notion.

'And are the war eagles of the Sky City mere birds?' Darkwood shook his head. 'No, my friend. You've now met the third part of the triumvirate that rules Nevrym.' 'The third?' asked Moriana, intrigued despite her anger.

'We're another.' Darkwood doffed his triangular cap and bowed. 'The last is the trees, of course.' 'The trees?' Moriana scoffed.

'He's telling the truth. Do you think you could find your way to the Tree again unaided?'

'Of course.' She glared at Fost. She was a veteran warrior. Once she'd passed over terrain she knew it by heart.

'Of course,' agreed Darkwood, in an infuriating imitation of the woman's voice, 'provided your intentions were peaceful toward the forest and its various inhabitants. Were they otherwise, your party might wander lost until you died of starvation.' He smoothed straw-colored hair back from his forehead. 'Only foresters can find their way unimpeded by the trees' magic. And where our allies of wood don't want us, we generally don't go.'

'But your people are well armed and prepared for invasion.' Moriana was genuinely puzzled. The many-tiered keep carved into the heart of the Tree was meant to serve as a fortress, its outer walls dotted with arrow slits and its interior honeycombed by well-stocked caches of emergency stores. Most of the humbler dwellings of the foresters were built like birds' nests high up and secure in the embrace of anhak limbs, reachable only by ladders.

'It's not unknown for Nevrymin to settle their little differences by force of arms. We are individualists at heart and not prone to taking commands of others.' Reminded of this, Moriana recalled that most battles the Nevrymin fought were internecine. That was the key to the seeming puzzle of a jovial king in Nevrym named Grimpeace. It had been Fost who explained this to her.

'He's a friendly man, but he's friendly because we come as friends. He earned his name by the way he imposed order in Nevrym when he acceded to the Tree twenty-three years ago. The Nevrymin all respect the Tree, but they're divided into factions as antagonistic and rivalry-ridden as tenement blocks in The Teeming. North Nevrymin, Central Nevrymin, Eastcreekers, Coastrunners, a score in all. Few of the factions were inclined to pay much heed to the authority of a boy who'd scarcely started to sprout his first growth of beard. They learned what the young king offered was a grim peace, indeed. Since then, banditry and sectional strife in Nevrym have been at an all-time low.

'Then, too,' said Darkwood, all trace of mirth vanished from his blue eyes, 'it isn't unknown for Nevrymin to guide outwoods foes along these ways in defiance of tradition and the trees.'

'What kind of man would do that?' asked Ziore in wonder. Her empathy gave her an appreciation keener even than Fost's of the sacred nature of the compact between men and beasts and trees.

'You've met one, I fancy.' Darkwood's voice turned winter cold. 'Fairspeaker by name.'

But not even the thought of Nevrymin breaking faith with their forest was enough to keep the summer in Darkwood's nature suppressed for long. He warmed and the skin around his eyes and mouth settled into well-worn smile lines.

'But the day's too lovely for talk of that, and we've leagues yet to travel before reaching the North Cape range.' He set the cap on his head at a suitably jaunty angle and started off along the leaf-carpeted path.

'One question, my good man.' Darkwood stopped and regarded Erimenes with his hands on hips. His grin hadn't been dented by the spirit's supercilious tone. 'How do you know the flesh of the unicorn stag is succulent if your folk lack the gumption to hurt them?'

The forester's cheer was the equal of even Erimenes at his most infuriating.

'My good ghost, from the height of your exalted years you must realize that any forest exists in a delicate balance,' he said in the tone of one explaining a simple lesson to a dull student. 'No single population can be allowed to grow unchecked. So we hunt the unicorn stag, and a most demanding sport it is.' His smile showed prominent eyeteeth. 'And they, of course, hunt us. We give them rare sport, too, or so I'm led to believe.'

Their reception at North Keep was less than cordial.

In response to five minutes' pounding on the twenty-foot-tall iron gates, first with Fost's fist and then with the pommel of his sword, a small peephole set four feet off the stone roadbed scraped open. A single bloodshot eye peered forth without any hint of friendliness. 'Go away,' came the growl from within.

'We've come a long ways up the coast road,' said Fost. 'We're in need of food, baths, a good night's sleep. We're prepared to pay.'

The latter phrase usually unlocked the domain of the dwarves. The dark maroon eye blinked once.

'We want nothing to do with your filthy money. The gate's shut for the night. Go away.'

Fost's dog growled. Astride her sidestepping dog a few yards behind, Moriana tightened the grip on her reins. She didn't like the dwarf guard's tone any more than the dogs did.

'My good man, I suggest you open this gate immediately if you desire that your head should keep company with your shoulders. I am a guest of state and your rulers will be little pleased by your insolence to me.'

'Who're you?' came the rude question, the eye swivelling to bear on her.

'I am Moriana Etuul, Queen in exile of the City in the Sky, and if you don't admit us at once…'

The eye withdrew but only to permit heavily bearded lips to appear and spit through the grill.

That for you,' said the eye, appearing again, 'and for all decadent lordlings who oppress the people! And for their running dog lackeys, as well,' he added for Fost's benefit. The peephole slammed shut.

As the clang reverberated down the valley, Fost thought Moriana's hair was about to start smouldering at the roots as Synalon's had done when she was angry.

'Why, that horrid upstart, that, that groundling! How dare he take that tone with me!'

'He's got three inches of iron and a foot of anhak between you and him,' pointed out Fost. 'That's how he dares.'

'Small good that protection will do him when I loose my wrath upon him.' She let reins fall and raised her hands.

'No, no, don't start flinging salamanders or deathspells or anything like that,' Fost said quickly, waving his arms in hope of breaking her concentration. 'And why not?' she demanded.

He pointed upward. Forty feet above the poorly kept road two grotesque figures squatted in alcoves set on either side of the gates. Spindly limbed with squinty eyes and oddly spurred elbows and knees, they regarded the travellers over ludicrously attenuated noses and mouths thrust out to form. lipless tubes. 'And what might they be?' She eyed them with distaste.

'Old dwarven caricatures of true men,' he said. 'The mouths go to funnels in a room dug out of the rock. The dwarves keep a pot of lead bubbling by each in case applicants rejected for entry react the way you were about to.' Moriana dropped her hands to her sides.

'We'll have to find lodgings in the Outer Town. It's only a few miles away on the other side of the mountain.' 'But it's getting dark!' 'All the more reason to start now.'

When they got to the Outer Town they got some insight into the nature of the recent developments in the Realm. The moons hung high in the sky when they came around the tip of Northernmost, the mountain cradling the dwarvish citadel of North Keep. Built on a slate beach butting up against the western face of the mountain, the Outer Town was an odd conglomeration of black dwarf masonry, scattered cosmopolitan edifices of Imperial dome and column marble, prim Jorean geometry, pastel stuccoed Estil, and shanty-town. The streets were paved with rubble and indifferently repaired. Though the dwarves ruled the Outer Town, it was primarily a place for the gangly Other Folk to stay while doing business. The dwarves weren't noted for their hospitality, though Fost had hoped they would invite Moriana to stay in their keep because of her royal status. For the most part, the Others entered North Keep solely to strike bargains and were ushered forth with varying degrees of politeness when the deals were done.

A smell of fish and less identifiable refuse hung in the pitted street in front of the inn Fost chose. A faded clapboard sign portrayed a flatfish grinning with drunken goggle-eyed delight.

'The Happy Flounder,' Erimenes read as the pair dismounted and tied reins to a sagging hitchrail. 'I believe they take fancifulness too far in naming these establishments.'

The innkeeper was a young dwarf with a thready beard and a premature bald spot on the top of his head. He was skinny for a dwarf but had the usual protruding eyes. He examined his prospective guests with suspicion. 'What do you want?' he rapped. His prominent nose wrinkled.

'Lodgings for the night, possibly longer,' Fost said hurriedly. Moriana was getting a dangerous glint in her eye. 'But who knows? We may spend some time sightseeing in this quaint and hospitable town of yours.' Sarcasm was lost on the innkeeper, as it was on most dwarves. 'Vouchers?' he demanded, in a tone of bored antagonism. Fost had no idea what the dwarf asked for and told him so.

'Well,' the little man said, folding his arms across his chest and tilting his fringe beard disapprovingly upward. 'I must accommodate you even if you can't pay, unless I want a drubbing from the damned militia, may their barracks roof fall on their pointed heads.' He drummed blunt fingers on the counter and turned to peer through a door leading to a muddy yard in back. 'I suppose there's room for you in the kennels.'

'We haven't any vouchers, whatever they are,' said Moriana, 'but will you accept this as payment for room and meals?' She held up an emerald from the pouch Sternbow had given her.

The innkeeper goggled more than usual. He snatched it away with deft fingers, held it to the dismal light of the guttering taper, scratched it along the table, and finally bit it. 'By the tunnels of Agift,' he murmured. 'I do believe it's real.'

He pulled in a breath that swelled his barrel chest until Fost thought the jerkin would burst. He looked from the emerald to Moriana, and an avid light danced in his immense dwarf eyes. Then the glint faded and he expelled a heartfelt sigh.

'I cannot but tell you that a stone such as this would pay for my finest accommodations for a fortnight – possibly longer, depending on the water of the stone.'

Moriana shrugged it off. The Zr'gsz had been generous paymasters. There were many more where this one came from.

'For however long, then. I doubt we'll stay more than a couple nights at most.'

'I cannot change this with any currency you'd want to have.' Sweat stood out on his high, broad foreheadforehead. It cost him great anguish to tell them this.

'Don't bother.'

He came out from behind the counter, waddled to the door, stuck his head out into the noisome, muggy night. Nothing stirred in the streets except a fat yellow-striped tomcat roving in search of ship's rats on shore leave.

'You're strangers to North Keep,' he accused.

'Not altogether,' said Fost. His fingers played with his sword hilt. The publican's nervousness made him uneasy.

'But you don't know how things have stood in the dwarflands since the revolution, that much is clear.'

'Revolution?'

'Of the proletariat. Since the Worker's Party seized power a year ago, the use of money and barter are outlawed. Outlanders are compelled by law to convert their negotiables into credit vouchers before dealing with dwarves.'

'Who's head of state now?'

'Maanda Samilchut is the Party Chairman.'

Fost frowned but said nothing.

'Normally I'd have to report your presence to the Militia headquarters on Exchange Square – er, pardon me, it's Liberation Plaza now. But, by your leave, I think I might overlook this procedure.' Moriana nodded assent. The innkeeper sighed with relief and mopped his brow with a gray linen kerchief. 'I take it you'd prefer accommodations above ground, gentles?'

When the thick wood door of their second-floor room shut behind the now overly solicitous innkeeper, Fost dropped onto the low bed and broke out laughing.

'What's so funny?' asked Moriana, lowering herself more cautiously onto a bandy-legged stool.

"'Maanda Samilchut is Party Chairman,'" he quoted. 'Up till a year ago, North Keep was a republic; the President for Life was Maanda Samilchut. Before that it was a parliamentary democracy, and the Premier was Maanda Samilchut. And just before that, the dwarves had a constitutional monarchy, with, as self-crowned queen, Maanda Samilchut.' He fell back across the bed and rubbed his eyes. 'Need I go on? Dwarves have devilishly long life-spans.'

Sitting as much at ease as he could on a chair built for someone with legs a quarter the length of his, Fost batted idly at the fly circling his head and studied the bust of Chairman Samilchut in its alcove on the wall.

'How much longer will they keep us waiting?' Moriana stopped pacing a groove in the worn stone floor long enough to ask.

'A while longer, I suspect. The folk we're dealing with are bureaucrats as well as dwarves, and both groups tend to have cosmic sense of time.'

Over by the wall the two satchels had been laid side by side so that Erimenes and Ziore could carry on their perpetual squabble in relatively soft voices. Though every now and then a voice rose in a crescendo of indignation, for the most part their quarreling blended in with the incessant murmur of North Keep.

The North Cape Mountains lacked the size of the Mystics or the Ramparts, but they were second to none in ruggedness. Taking the coast road along the western face of North Cape had spared Fost and Moriana from struggling through the sawtoothed range until the road forked inland to the southern gate of North Keep. Northernmost was the tallest mountain in the North Capes, home to that peculiar, industrious, delving, grasping race, the dwarves.

The dwarves were the miners and smiths of the Sundered Realm. Their metalwork, especially blades and armor, were renowned throughout the world. The Thailot were more skilful artificers, the Estil unsurpassed in civil engineering, but in matters involving stone or stone worked with the principle of fire to become metal, the dwarves were unexcelled.

No one knew where they came from. Some said they had lived in their mountains, which like them were short and craggy and inhospitable, when humans first arrived on the Southern Continent twenty-two thousand years before. Others claimed they predated the Hissers; still others maintained they were descended from a troupe of freaks imported to entertain a Northern Barbarian lord in the sixteenth century before the Human Era. So the stories went.

Their patron was Ungrid An, the dwarvish goddess, one of the few members of the Three and Twenty to belong to a particular race. She was a harsh, dour goddess personifying fortitude, determination and sheer hard labor. She was also goddess of political upheaval representing both repression and rebellion, which helped account for the odd political climate in North Keep.

Keep and mountain were actually inseparable. Like the Nevrymin, the dwarves made their capital inside the dominant physical feature of their domain, but unlike them they didn't work upward from ground level only. Over uncounted millennia the dwarves had burrowed deep into the roots of the mountains, some said for thousands of feet below the surface.

Fost started to rise to offer Moriana his stool. She motioned him back and went around the paper-strewn miniature desk and sat in the absent functionary's chair. Fost grinned, partly in acknowledgement of her small defiance and partly because she looked silly with her piquant face framed by her knees.

He turned to study the bust again. It had been carved recently. He could tell because Samilchut wore a severely cut tunic with a high buttoned collar. Last year at this time, her representations had been draped in a graceful toga that left one massive deltoid bare, in imitation of Jorean state garb.

Moriana started tapping her fingers on the desk. Fost allowed himself to focus on the spirits' debate.

'- obvious to anyone with the least knowledge of etiology that this couldn't possibly -' '- piffle! That doctrine was decisively refuted by -'

He sighed and let the faraway sounds of thousands of dwarves at work in the bowels of the mountain, that strangely rhythmic pulse of North Keep, drown them out again. Their argument grew more and more abstruse with each passing day. If they followed their usual pattern, in a short while they'd degenerate to name calling and, with luck, fall into silent sulking for a blessed interval until one or the other said something and started the argument afresh. 'Ahem.'

Fost jumped, blinking away the drowsiness that had been coming on him. The obvious target of the guttural throat clearing sat behind the desk holding steepled fingers to her lips.

'You certainly took your time,' Moriana said to the stumpy woman in the shapeless black gown who stood glowering at her from the office doorway. 'You have a favorable reply for us, I trust?'

A smile shoved up the tips of the official's thin, dark moustache. Inwardly Fost groaned. All too well he recognized the unpleasant triumph of a bureaucrat presented with the opportunity to put the dagger to a member of the public displaying inadequate respect for the nobility of the petty functionary's calling. If Moriana read the same message she showed no sign. Given her background, Fost doubted she did.

'No.' She had a fine baritone, Fost noted. 'Worker Samilchut has no time to spend on discarded royalty – or self-proclaimed royalty – who try to disturb the peace of North Keep with bizarre tales and schemes.' 'She won't even talk with us?' Moriana stared in disbelief.

'Not at all.' The official consulted the sheaf of papers in her hand. 'Further, I must advise you that even if all you claim is true, you can still expect no help from the dwarves. For we sympathize with the so-called Dark Ones, as we do with all those who rise up to cast off the yoke of feudal oppression.'

She snapped her fingers to summon guards to escort the visitors out. Moriana was too stunned for words, which was probably fortunate. Fost took her by the arm, helped her from the chair and led her past the smirking official into the corridor.

Both had to bend down almost double to follow their escorts, militiamen in brown corslets topped by flat-bottomed iron hats resembling inverted pie plates. Each guard carried a lead-tipped cudgel in one hand and a lantern in the other, with short-hafted throwing hammers at their belts. Dwarves hurrying in the opposite direction either flattened against the walls or backpedalled until they came to a cross corridor they could pop into.

Fost and Moriana stood blinking in brilliant sunlight as the massive iron western gate slammed shut behind them. Fost yawned, gazing out over the Outer Town and the oily gray heaving of the North Cape harbor. With the hooked tip of the Cape itself shielding the bay to north and east, and the added protection of a long stone breakwater projecting south from the rocky, gull-decked headland, the harbor should have provided decent anchorage. It didn't. The breakwater was too short and too low, disappearing completely just before high tide each day. After a southwesterly gale, the dwarves made handy sums dragging ships off the stone docks and refurbishing staved-in hulls. Fost suspected the arrangement wasn't exactly coincidental.

At the moment, a dozen craft chanced the unseasonal southeasterly blow. Largest was a lethal and lean war-dromon flying the red and black flag of the Tolviroth Maritime Guaranty company.

'If,' Moriana said, speaking with the slow deliberation of anger, 'if and when I am restored to my throne and powers, I will come back to this North Keep and repay the dwarves for their friendliness and hospitality. By pulling their damn mountain down around their hairy ears!' 'No, you won't,' Fost said louder than he intended. 'What did you say?' she snapped. With that look in her eyes, his only defense was the truth.

'I said you'll do no such thing. Even if you – and humankind -loses this new War of Powers, life in North Keep will go on pretty much as always. Forever, if the Vridzish have any sense. Northernmost is a fortress no amount of mining, bombarding or ramming will bring down. The dwarves can and will fight for every inch of every tunnel with the ferocity of a cornered weasel. In the days of the Barbarian Dynasty, somebody estimated that there were more miles of passageway in their Keep than there were miles of Realm roads on the entire continent. They go down for miles.

'And I'd think even the Hissers' pet Demon would think twice about going down too far in the shafts of Northernmost Mountain. There are things lurking in the roots of these mountains that are only a little younger than the planet. Some of the things living there the dwarves made peace with; others they keep at bay with sheer ferocity and arts not even you can guess at. If they get loose aboveground, not even the Hissers are going to want the Realm.

'Other than that, I'd imagine you can just stroll in and take over anytime you please.'

'Quite impressive,' complimented Erimenes. 'You display hitherto unsuspected depths of erudition.'

Fost had the uncomfortable feeling Moriana was trying to decide whether to cinder him or merely turn him into a newt. A gull wheeled overhead, crying down mockery on both man and dwarf. Abruptly, Moriana laughed.

'Come along,' she said, grabbing Fost's arm. 'Let's get back to the inn before dark. I'm tired of watching the proletarian regime in action.'

The gradually opening door brought Fost awake with all senses wire-taut. A greenish dawnlight spilled across the floor from the partially shuttered window. Outside, a handcart creaked and thumped over the potholes in the street.

A hesitant footfall sounded; another. Fost lay still, forcing himself to breathe with the metronomic regularity of a sleeper, while he mentally estimated distances. In a leap he came to his feet, broadsword snatched from the scabbard hung at the bed's head post.

'Eek!' The innkeeper cringed back against the doorpost, eyes popping, trying to pull his head into the collar of his jerkin. He looked like a frightened turtle. 'P-please, gentles. I meant no harm!'

Fost became acutely aware that he stood naked in the middle of the floor menacing a three-foot dwarf with a sword nearly as long as the dwarf. Moriana stirred on the bed, wondering drowsily why her nude body was so precipitately uncovered. 'Fost, what's – oh!'

His initial fear dissolved into embarrassment. He resorted to the old masculine position: blustering rage.

'What do you mean by this, sneaking into our rooms? Come to murder us in our beds, no doubt!'

If the dwarf shook any harder, pieces of his body would come rattling to the floor. 'No, no!' he moaned.

'Aha! You voyeuristic scoundrel! Come to peep at the Princess Moriana in her nakedness, then, are you?'

'But the princess is so skinny and malproportioned, gentle sir. Why would I do that?'

Moriana cleared her throat. The conversation was clearly out of control.

'Just what is it you want, innkeeper?' she asked, sitting and making no effort to cover herself.

The dwarf glanced at Fost, who was still standing with sword menacingly pointed, then made the effort to calm himself.

'It's the militia. They're searching all over town. You must flee at once.' 'But why? What do they want from us?'

'Because of the news,' the dwarf choked out. 'The Sky City has stopped!'