“We were playing a game. I coughed,” Wistala said. “I think it frightened her.”
They patted Iatella on the cheek, and her eyes fluttered open. She claimed no memory of what caused her to faint, and picked up her crystal and fled.
Ragwrist entered next, and the same questions were asked and answered. The dwarves wandered back out, leaving her and Ragwrist alone. “No matter. The bargain was easily struck. You have been ‘freed’ by the generosity of King Fangbreaker, Wistala,” he said, untying the azure band of silk.
“Dare I ask the price?”
“I kept it low, saying that his good opinion would one day be worth more to me than any gold, and he looked pleased, though I think sometimes dwarves wear those masks as much to hide their emotions when bargaining as to keep out the light. I or others may visit you at any time, though the dwarves, as always, hold the right to decide who will be admitted to their city, and you are free to fly as you will. But I wonder. He told me to strike off your collar, by the way. All that effort wasted.”
“Ragwrist, you are good to run this risk,” Wistala said, quietly.
“Ha!” he said, patting her shoulder, and her scales were happy to have a memory to replace the embrace of King Fangbreaker. “You still hold Mossbell’s lands, should true Hypatian law ever be reestablished across Whitewater. It’s the land I’ve got my eye on. So having let you know my true motive, will you take this last opportunity to turn back? This is no arguing council of dwarves. If Fangbreaker senses a threat, he will deal with you . . . harshly.”
Wistala ran her tongue along her teeth. “Then I will share the fate of my family.”
She crossed the Ba-drink in splendor, on the dwarves’ largest cargo-barge, pushed and pulled by smaller barges filled with lines of rowers.
The blue silk stood in place of her collar, the long sash tied loosely so as not to grate on her scales more than was unavoidable. Her little triangular diadem of the librarians dangled at the front of her fringe, sparkling in the mountain sun.
King Fangbreaker stood beside her as they approached the Thul’s Hardhold and Tall Rock. Tall Rock stood sheer-sided all around where it met the finger of water, but Thul’s Hardhold climbed more gradually like some sort of fantastic staircase. Only to the east, where it faced Tall Rock across the Titan bridge, was it as sheer as its companion.
Sheer or not, the sides of the rock were cut with galleries and balconies, precarious outer stairways, even gardens beneath jutting stonework houses holding still more balconies and galleries.
And every one was lined with cheering crowds of dwarves, dropping dried flowers (or bits of torn paper or waxen wrapping if they could not afford flowers) as they passed across the water between the Hardhold and the Rock.
“Not a dwarf lives that doesn’t aspire to a balcony of his own so that he might take fresh air and skylight,” King Fangbreaker said, waving vaguely to the crowds. “We value it more than the elves, since many of us see so little of it. Some add gold leaf to the railings, but I prefer the natural look of traditional sedimentary stonework, don’t you?”
“I’m overcome,” Wistala said, flowers and bits of paper catching all over her scales and gathering in the folds of her wings. The rock walls to either side seemed to be coming together at the top, closing like a pair of vast jaws. But it had to be a trick of eye and distance, she’d seen their shape from across the Ba-drink.
“Now, a tour of what your advice gave me the courage to break loose, like a gem in a mine wall,” Fangbreaker said as the barge docked. They tied to a wharf next to a cave with water flowing out of it. “Had we taken the royal barge, we might have gone right in, but I fear all you would have to do is scratch your ear and you’d capsize it.”
More dwarves threw themselves on their faces and another firework shot up between the sheer cliff faces as King Fangbreaker hopped onto the wharf. The cheering didn’t stop until he took a short set of stairs up and entered a wide gallery. Court officials—at least, that was what Wistala guessed them to be, for they wore cockades of purple—met him on the stairs, approaching with a sort of permanent, cringing bow and rose only to speak quietly into his ear.
“Yes, yes, I’ll attend to that later,” he said, passing through the herd of bent dwarves. They clustered and swirled about him so that Wistala was reminded of bloodsucker bats in the hotforests around Adipose attempting to latch on to a fast-moving bullock.
Fangbreaker led the swarm around corners and came to a cavern bridge inside, where a narrow crack leading up to the top of the Hardhold inside had its walls thick with mosses and clinging ferns. Water ran down the sides of the rock in a thousand tiny trickles to a sea of ferns below.
“Thul’s Garden,” King Fangbreaker said, passing over a short wide bridge. Wistala tested it with a sii. “Oh, come now, Oracle,” Fangbreaker said. “This is dwarf work of the highest order. We could stack dragons all the way to the sky above on this little bridge.”
There were dwarves in blackened steel at the opposite end of the bridge, with tufts of purple-dyed fur at boot-top and helmet lining. King Fangbreaker used the guards to shake off the courtiers, the way a whale of the Inland Ocean’s cold north might use a rock to scrape barnacles from its belly.
Wistala passed over the short bridge, her head already in the passage beyond before her tail-tip left the gap behind.
He went up another short, wide flight of stairs, luckily for Wistala, then turned a corner where dwarves in soft leather shoes opened a set of double wooden doors. Wistala just squeezed through into a room about the size of the presentation tent where she’d awaited the dwarf that morning.
A huge, polished black table that looked like it had been carved out of the mountain itself stood in an oval of curved marble walls. There was a great deal of writing chiseled into the walls, and more on columns that had evidently been added to the room. Wistala counted twenty oddly shaped chairs around the table, draped in black velvet so that their spikiness was softened and hidden.
“Oh, the years I sat at this table, arguing over nothings,” King Fangbreaker said, gripping the table as though he wished to lift and overturn it. “Motions, countermotions, oppositions, reconciliations, none of them worth a pot of passed water. The war with the de-men was being lost on the darkroads, and all we could do was sputter at each other. Until—after your words—I took control.
“I said what was needed was a King with the Old Powers to forge our divided houses into a single spear.” He pointed with a finger at a notch in the table. “That’s where Barzo put down his fist in a Rock of Opposition. So I whipped up my sleeve-ax and cut it right off. Arterial blood all over the meeting notes. The others fell into line once I rolled his head down the table. Gnaw, what a day. Felt light as a feather after. Follow me.”
As she bowed to let him pass back to the doors she lifted one of the velvet coverings to the chairs, wondering if they hid bloodstains, and was aghast to see green dragonscale. She suddenly realized what the unused velvet hid—dragon claws, opened and digits bent so the dwarves might lean in comfort against stiffened sii and saa.
She gulped down a sickening mixture of sadness, rage, and regret, and fixed her gaze on Fangbreaker’s back. One short jump and—
But these chairs had stood around this table since long before Fangbreaker, most likely.
The king brushed more of the soft-shoed dwarves aside. “Oh, it’s as if I’ve no staff at all,” he grumbled, and led her to a tall, narrow hall, sort of an echo of the garden they’d bridged before.
There were paintings all over the smoothed wall, some old and flaking, some almost unrecognizable, but he led her to a new one, so broad it partially covered two others of dwarves linking arms, or shaking hands, or pointing in various directions and talking.
The new painting depicted some sort of ghastly underground fight in hip-deep water, with canoes like hollowed-out trees filled with dwarves firing crossbows at blighters and other hominids with what Wistala took to be exaggerated evil features.
“The Battle of Domlod,” King Fangbreaker said. “I wasn’t actually riding the outside of one of the ramkaks, mind you, which is a fine way to get your head knocked off, but artists do insist on their frills and flourishes for dramatic effect. Lost my leg but won the war, and the de-men will be giving us no more trouble on the darkroads.”
He let her admire it for a moment, and as they stood in silence one of the black-armored guards, this one with a purple half-cloak covering his shoulders, approached noisily and spoke in Fangbreaker’s ear.
“Oh, I lost track of the time,” King Fangbreaker said. “If the barge is already out, let’s not keep the crowds waiting. Come, Oracle. By the way, do you have a name?”
“Those close to me call me Tala,” Wistala said. “I would be glad to hear it from you, King.” For the best place to strike an enemy is close enough to gut, as Father used to say.
“Very well, Tala, up the Hall of Invention and to the balcony over Thul’s tomb.”
They passed along another wide hall with many short antechambers, each filled with devices of metal and steel and cable, some even in motion, though whether it was to amuse or accomplish something Wistala could not say. She saw daylight ahead at the opening of a very finely wrought gallery atop a huge slab of solid red granite that read THUL in both Elvish and Hypatian scripts. There were other icons and scriptings, as well, though she did not know the tongues.
