Arcanum Part 54

He went back into the stable for his crossbow, and the quiver of bolts, and strapped on his sword, making sure his knife was on his belt too. All that effort for one kid. He dragged the door mostly shut behind him and stalked down the narrow street, all too aware that he had a shadow.

Buber went back to the same tavern on the corner of the market square. He poured himself a beer and let it settle while he went through to the back room. There wasn't much: pickled eggs, pickled vegetables, a jar of what looked like boiled fruit. The shelves were unsurprisingly empty. Certainly no sausage, or sauerkraut. Nor, apparently, plates.

He sat in the morning sunshine, behind the dusty windows, with his open jars and ate his fill. He'd not had to hunt or forage for it, so that even though it was mostly disagreeable stuff that was still hanging around after a long, hard winter, he didn't mind. The beer helped, too.

All the while, he was watched.

Perhaps this was a tactic the boy used often, standing there and staring but not crossing that thin line between being a pain in the arse and an outright criminal. Even this far up into the mountains, outside of any palatinate's control, people had a code of law and they stuck to it. No barbarians here.

It was meant to be intimidating, but it didn't stir Buber to either fear or anger. A little while longer, and he'd be gone. He finished up, wiped his hands on his breeks and fixed the stoppers back on the jars.

The boy followed him all the way back to the livery. Buber left the doors wide open while he fitted the saddle and fastened the bridle. He unhooked his weapons and tied them on, then put the saddlebags over the patient beast's back.

He was ready, and he'd not had to exchange a single word. One last look around, to make sure he hadn't left anything, one last pat of his pocket to make sure his purse and shell bracelet were still there.

They were, and there was no reason to stay a moment longer. He led the horse out and they walked side by side up the alley to the space behind the gatehouse.

The boy, from following him, darted in front and stood between him and the open gate, the bridge visible beyond.

"You can't just leave."

Buber considered his options. "Out of the way."

"You have to take me with you."

"No, I don't. Now, get out of the fucking way, before I make you."

The boy hopped from foot to foot, the cut on his leg now hidden behind a clean pair of breeks. "Take me with you, or..."

"Or what? You're no use to me, boy. You're too stupid to learn that what you want isn't what you need." He mounted up, putting his foot in the stirrup and heaving himself onto the saddle. "This isn't some sort of fairytale that mothers tell their children, complete with happy ending. Do you know why that is?"

"N ... no," the boy stammered.

"Because all the fairies are fucking dead, and you're a complete shit. You want to be king of Ennsbruck, the big man in town? Well, you are, until a bigger, uglier shit wants to take it from you. Good luck."

He dug his heels in, and the horse trotted forward. The boy had to dodge aside or get trampled. A moment of shadow as he passed under the gatehouse, and then he was on the bridge. The mountains were ahead of him, behind him, and to his left.

People. That was the problem. Maybe he'd have better luck with the dwarves.

Across the bridge, left towards the pass. Ennsbruck's black walls slowly receded, and he began to relax, just a little. He looked around once, to make sure. The road behind him was empty.

Then it was lost in the trees, and his path went onwards. After a while, he dismounted and walked, his long legs eating up mile marker after mile marker. He wasn't concentrating on anything but each foot fall, but he still heard the racket ahead while he was far off, the sound of many voices all shouting at once.

He stopped, listened, and decided they were stationary. Leading his horse off the path again, he tied it to a tree, and stalked off, weapons ready to see who it was.

They were trying to light a fire, and arguing over the best way of doing so. Getting a flame didn't seem to be a problem from his hiding place, Buber could see sparks and puffs of white smoke but nothing to show that they'd caught so much as a pile of kindling alight.

The men themselves looked odd. Not just because of what they wore, which seemed ill-fitting, but because they all had a way of moving that made them look drunk. They stumbled, dropped things, and were all talking at the tops of their voices, growling and barking orders at each other that none paid the slightest attention to.

There was an awful lot of beard going on, too. Germans didn't do beards: neither did the Franks, and the effete Italians shaved all the time.

Then the penny dropped, and Buber eased himself from cover.

His sudden appearance made the men scurry for their discarded packs: every one of them had an axe or a hammer. Buber slowed down and held his hands out wide. No, he wasn't going to put down his sword or his bow, but he wasn't going to use them unless he had to.

He approached them slowly. They were all short, some well below his shoulder, but he expected that. They were now silent, as was he. He wasn't at all sure they'd understand him if he spoke. His actions would have to speak for him.

They parted and stood around him as he crouched down next to their lamentable attempt at a fire. He tutted, and sorted through the wood, discarding the green timber and the stuff that was thoroughly rotten, until only the dry wood remained. Breaking it into smaller lengths, he piled it up, leaving a hole in its centre.

That, he filled with crumbling bark and dry leaves from under the canopy.

Caught up in the ritual of fire-making, he pulled out his knife. Hands stiffened around axe-hafts, until he picked up one of the sticks and started to cut it into curls with strong, steady strokes of the knife-blade.

He was done. His own flint was back in his saddlebags, so he mimed to his audience the sharp, short motions of raising a spark. One of them reached into a pocket and handed him a small tin and a rough metal rod.

Buber wasn't quite sure what to do with them. He popped the lid of the tin off with a thumb and sniffed the dark grey powder inside. It smelt of stone. The rod was hard, and he scraped his knife across it. Fat orange stars, brighter than the day, crackled and smoked thin trails through the air.

He didn't want to look stupid any more than his hosts did, so he did what he thought was best: put a generous pinch of powder on the kindling and tried to light it with sparks from the rod.

The result was slightly more enthusiastic than he'd anticipated, and the hairs on the backs of his hands crisped with the wash of heat as a puff of acrid, sulphurous smoke billowed out.

He coughed, and kept on coughing, even while he remembered to feed the nascent fire with sticks and more bark. Then it caught properly, a tentative tongue of fire licking out and tasting the broken branches above.

A little longer, and he was able to sit back on his haunches and let the flames do the rest. Buber took a moment to study the onlookers: there were as many of them as he used to have fingers shaggy haired, bearded men, alternately staring at the fire and scowling at each other.

He hadn't made a mistake: their dress, their weapons, the way they looked. Another foot off their height, and they'd be dwarves. Which is what they were, or at least had been once.

"Peter Buber," he said. "The Prince of Carinthia sends his regards."

They looked as one to the man-dwarf-thing who'd handed him the tinder box.

"You speak German?" asked Buber.

"Yes."

They looked miserable. Not just unhappy, but defeated. There was something of himself in their slumped, sullen expressions.

"You were trying to light a fire. Now you have one." He hadn't heard of dwarves ever having problems making a fire before, but he conceded that dwarvish hearths burnt black rock, not green wood. "If I could share it with you, I'd be grateful."

The spokesman spokesdwarf grunted his assent. "You know who we are?"

"I think I've worked it out. If it makes you feel better, I could pretend I haven't."

"What's the point, human?" He kicked the ground, perhaps wishing it was honest stone.

"I need to get my horse. We've lots to tell each other, so don't go away."

He almost sprinted down the road and into the forest. He found his bemused horse, and led it back out.

"They've grown," he told it, patting its neck. "They've grown and they don't know why."

He wracked his memory for the other preternatural characteristics of dwarves: fierce, untrusting, greedy almost to the point of evil, expert miners and smiths, cunning makers of machines. By gaining height, what had they lost?

The pillar of white smoke was starting to fail by the time he returned, and he fed the fire with more wood, placing green timber around it to dry it out. They'd have done better collecting the resin-rich branches of the local pines, which burnt hard and fast. He'd point that out to them later.

As he squatted by the fire, he held his hands out to its heat. An instinctive gesture. He wasn't cold.

The German-speaking dwarf looked and frowned. "Your fingers. You lack many of them."

"Most of them ended up in the belly of some beast or other. A couple I lost to a sword-blow. That was ..." He put his hands in his pockets. Again, instinctive.

"Hard?"

"Yes. Yes, it was."

"And your magicians?"

Buber looked at the iron pot supported by an iron tripod placed over the fire he'd made, and at the wisps of steam rising from its black lip.

"That's not what hunters do. Did. They could have healed me, but then enchanted creatures would've been able to feel me, and either run from me or attack me." He shrugged. "It wasn't what was wanted. Not then."

"Why are we like this?" the dwarf asked suddenly. "Why are we ...?" It was his turn to struggle with his words.

"Tall."

"Yes. Tall. Big. Long-limbed, ungainly, tottering, fumble-fingered, poor-sighted. Why are we becoming like you?"

"I can't tell you why." Buber breathed out. "Well, maybe I can. Ragnarok. The twilight of the gods. They've gone, and they've taken the magic with them. No more spells, no more unicorns, no more wood and water spirits, no trolls or dragons or anything else with a spark of magic in them. And no more you, so it seems."

"Who told you this?"

"The last sorcerer. Sorceress."

The dwarf snorted.

"I know, I know," said Buber. "If it had been one-eyed Wotan it would have been better. More believable. It happened anyway, just like she said."

"What of the unicorns?"

"They just melted away. Too much magic, I suppose. I don't know about the dragons. Big, flightless lizards? I don't know. We've had problems of our own."

One of the other dwarves put dried meat and mushrooms in the now-boiling pot. He glared at Buber, then stalked away.

"Problems, human? Compared to ours, they're nothing."

The huntmaster thought about getting angry. "Not nothing, no."

The dwarf looked sideways at Buber. "The extinction of your entire race?"

"No. But still not nothing. Let's not get into a pissing contest: I doubt you want my sympathy any more than I want yours."

"True."

They contemplated the fire together.

"What brings you out of Farduzes?" asked Buber.

"Do you know what it's like," said the dwarf and he growled at the indignity "to live underground for your whole life, and then to become scared of the weight of rock above you? Of feeling afraid of being buried? Of even having to duck through doorways you once strode through? We are not dwarves any more. We are short, ugly men."

"You're all leaving?"

"In groups. Like this one. When it becomes too much to bear."

"So what do you plan to do?"

The dwarf stared into the heart of the fire. "Survive, I suppose. The best we can. It will be difficult." He leant closer. "Our women are losing their beards."

"Losing their beards." Buber nodded. It was clearly significant. "The people the humans at Ennsbruck, have gone as well. Left what they couldn't carry and gone down the valley. They told me to ask the dwarves why."

The dwarf pulled at his beard. "There might have been something said. About closing the pass. Forever."

"They didn't look pleased." Buber picked up a branch from the wood pile and poked the fire. "They scrabbled a sort of existence through farming. Take away the trade they relied on for the extras, and they had no reason to stay."

"They have somewhere to go, human. More than we do."

"You have Ennsbruck now. It's empty, and it's just down the road. You may as well take it." Buber thought of the boy-thief, and of how he would react to the arrival of these short, dark, angry men-things. "You'll have shelter and stone walls to protect you while you get used to living above ground."

The dwarf pulled at his beard again. "That has merit. I can suggest it to the others. It is a small place, though."

"There aren't that many of you."

"It's not us I'm thinking about."

"How many?"

"You don't get our secrets from us that easily, human."

"The Prince of Carinthia," said Buber, "wants to hire you. Whoever will come. There are tunnels under Juvavum, dug by dwarves in Roman times and filled with dwarvish machinery that puts water into every house. The prince wants them working again, and we don't know what we're doing."

"Dwarves don't work for humans."

"You did for the Romans. You fought for the Romans."

"That was a long time ago, and our honour is still tainted."

"I usually find that putting food in your children's bellies commands a higher price than honour." Buber shifted uneasily. He didn't want to have to either run or fight, but there was room enough for only one person to wallow in righteous self-pity, and he'd got there first. "I said I'd put the offer to the Lord of Farduzes."

"The pass is closed, human."

Chapter end