Jaleigh Johnson - The Howling Delve

Wrong. . wrong, all wrong. Was he dreaming? Then …

"Watch out, you!" A terrific weight slammed him from behind, knocking him to the ground as another trunk fell past his vision.

"That the last of them, by the bloody gods?" shouted a second, muffled voice.

"All clear." The crushing weight fell away, and Kall saw a man peering down at him, haloed by a sea of leafy green. The man's eyes were large and startlingly blue against a dirt-smothered face, and his ears curved as if the tips had been threaded through a needle. On rare occasions, Kall had seen half-elves in Esmeltaran, but never one so large as the figure staring at him now.

"Six young oaks! Six of Nine Hells, that's what you're in for," said the muffled voice again, this time at Kall's elbow.

Kall shrieked as a head burst up from the loose dirt where only a few breaths ago a tree had swayed. A hand followed to wipe the dirt out of a black beard on a pitted, distinctly human face.

"Garavin drew the map," the half-elf said, a bit defensively.

The head and the arm weren't having any of it. "Which you strayed from by a full thirty steps! Look, you." The human's other arm burst up, spraying Kall with more dirt. He flapped a crude drawing in front of the half-elf's blue gaze. "Any more off and you'd have taken the Weir!"

As the pair continued to argue over him, Kall started to slide backward, groping for a weapon, a stick, a rock, anything.

His hand closed on a branch that had been torn away from one of the falling trees. He raised it, and fire licked along his ribcage. Gasping, Kall dropped the branch and fell back, clutching his side.

Immediately, the half-elf crouched over him, his hands probing along Kall's flank. Feebly, Kall tried to push him away, but the man only grinned and muttered, "Cease." His brow furrowed as he examined Kall's wounds. "Get Garavin," he said to his companion. "I think the boy slipped through Alinore's gate."

"Wouldn't be the first," the bearded man grumbled. Instead of hauling himself the rest of the way out of the dirt, the man disappeared back into the earth, pulling his drawing with him.

"What is your name?" the half-elf asked when they were alone. "Who attacked you?"

"Kall," Kall said before he thought better of it. He jerked his head to the south, but kept his eyes fixed on the stranger. "The mountains-they're in the wrong place."

The half-elf nodded. "If you were lying in Esmeltaran's countryside last night, I daresay they are. Those are the Marching Mountains, not the Cloud Peaks. You've come a long way in a short sleep, Kall."

The Marching Mountains-Kall summoned a mental map. He'd crossed the lake, the Wealdath. . the Starspires, by the gods … all those miles. His mind boggled. "How?" he asked.

"My sister's fault, entirely," said a new voice, rough and engulfed by a deep, canine bark.

Kall looked up and saw the animal first, a lumbering bronze mastiff with folds of flesh dangling off its ribs and paws the size of a man's fist. Matching its stride-barely-was a dwarf with skin the color of dead leaves and a full, matching beard that fell nearly to his knees. As the dwarf bent over, Kall could see the hair was as wire-hard as the spectacle frames wedged in front of the dwarf's brown eyes.

The human whose head and arm Kall had glimpsed earlier trailed behind him, dirt-covered and oddly tall and gangly next to the dwarf. In profile, the man's face tapered and curved so prominently that Kall could have hung a cloak from his chin. Gesturing animatedly, he tried in vain to slide his parchment drawing under the dwarf's thick nose. The shorter figure's attention was entirely fixed on Kall.

"My name is Garavin Fallstone," the dwarf said in an oddly formal accent. He extended a hand. When Kall only continued to stare uneasily at the group, a corner of the dwarf's mouth turned up. "Ye need fear no attack from me or any of mine," he said, his voice quiet but still rough as a boot scrape. "Laerin"- he nodded to the half-elf-"would have been about telling ye the same thing, had I not interrupted." He deftly plucked up the human's parchment, folded it, and slid it away in a pocket of his brick-colored vest. "The other here is Morgan, and the dog's Borl. They're not brigands, at least not right now."

"Delvar," Laerin said, as if that should explain everything.

"Means we dig." Morgan glared at the half-elf. "Anyways, some of us dig, and some of us come within a druid's death of slaughtering thousand-year-old trees!"

"Laerin knows the difference between a young oak and a considerably more established Weir," the dwarf interjected smoothly. "No true harm was done. Morningfeast for one more, if ye please, Morgan."

"I'll see to it." Morgan continued to glare at the half-elf as they strode off together into the trees.

"Do ye have brothers?" the dwarf asked incongruously as he took a seat on the ground next to Kall.

A memory of himself and Aazen on the sparkling lake flashed before Kall's eyes. Mutely, he shook his head.

"Neither do I. I took my time growing accustomed to Morgan and Laerin. Ye'll want to do the same." He smiled. "Though I'll make a wager ye give yer parents enough headaches for ten brothers."

Kall glanced sideways at him. "You're trying to get me to talk," he said.

"Aye," Garavin agreed, still smiling easily. "I'm needing to know if ye have family looking for ye. If so, I can save them the worry and send ye back through the grave-don't mind the expression, it's really a portal. But Morgan tells me ye've been in a fight, and more than a small scuffle. If that's true, and ye've trouble of another sort following ye, then I'm needing to know how many of my diggers to pull out of the ground to defend ye." The smile disappeared, but the dwarf's voice was gentle and matter-of-fact.

"They don't know where I've gone," Kall said. "At least, I don't see how they could."

"Or they would have followed by this time," Garavin said, nodding. "By 'they,' I take ye to mean the trouble and not the family?"

"I have no family."

"I see." Garavin said, as if he'd heard the same raw-voiced statement many times before. "The choice is yer own, then." He pointed to Alinore Fallstone's marker-weed-grown, but in all other ways identical to the grave Kall had fallen asleep beside in Amn. "It's not truly a grave, ye see. I never had a sister, but if I did, I'm relatively certain she'd be appreciating the jest." Kall almost missed the wink Garavin shot him. "As I said, it's actually a portal. There're several hereabouts. A traveler in a rush can fly the Weave all the way to the Great Rift if he uses his head and knows where to set his feet."

"I don't know anything about that," Kall said. "I came here by accident."

"By falling asleep in a cemetery, weeping atop a stranger's grave." Garavin rummaged in a pouch that rode at his hip. He pulled out a vial of milky liquid that Kall recognized immediately. "Most folk of Amn haven't that much sentiment in them, and more's the pity." He held the vial out to Kall. "Drink it all."

Kall took the vial but did not drink. "I wasn't weeping." In truth, he remembered little about the previous night and his sleep, but he wasn't going to admit that to the dwarf. "How did I get here?" he repeated.

Garavin's keen eyes glinted like twin agates. "Drink and I'll tell ye."

Kall shrugged and drained the vial, feeling the warm liquid course down his throat. The fire that had burned in his ribs since the night before gradually began to cool, and Kall took his first easy breath with a sighing pleasure. He stopped, wary, when he noticed Garavin watching him closely.

"Ye're quite trusting," the dwarf remarked lightly.

"I'm not. ." Kall started, then hesitated, his eyes going dark as they regarded the dwarf.

But Garavin waved away his suspicion. "No, no. Forgive my rudeness. I did want to see to yer wounds, but I have an awful curiosity. If I had a sister, I'm knowing for a fact she would have remarked on it. I found myself wondering what ye knew of the Art, one so young and full of Amnian blood. Yer eyes rounded at my talk of portals, yet ye took the healing potion as if ye knew exactly what it was."

"I know what magic is," Kall said sullenly. "Enough, anyway. I asked how it brought me here."

"So ye did, and my apologies again, for prolonging the mystery." Garavin stood and walked to the false grave, toeing aside dirt and dead branches to reveal a loose circle of stones. "Ye'll have to picture it-the portal in Amn is a mirror to this one, though with a different trigger. I'm guessing about here's where ye were lying." He put a boot in the circle. "Tears are the key to yer mystery-or a few drops of water, whatever's handy. If a body-a living body, mind you-steps in the circle and sheds three or four tears, or a thimbleful of water, the portal will activate, and he'll be somewhere else in the next eye blink." The dwarf smiled, clearly pleased with himself. "Most folk won't be shedding any tears over the grave of someone who never existed, and a good thing, considering how the portal stands in the open. Keeps folk from stumbling into countries they didn't mean to."

"What if it rains?" Kall asked curiously.

The dwarf chuckled. "Ye've an active mind. The portal is sunk beneath the grass blades, so it cannot easily be seen. The rest we leave to luck and hope that no one will be walking about in a cemetery during a storm or crying atop the grave. Ye have the unfortunate honor of beating our odds this time."

Kall crouched outside the circle. From a distance, the stones appeared to be ordinary rocks, but up close, he recognized the same symbol he'd seen carved next to Alinore's name. "Who put the portal here?" he asked. "You?"

Garavin shook his head. "No, lad. I haven't the Art, either. I only drew the map. That's what I do. I make maps and scout tunnels and hunt up knowledge-for myself, and those who need it done."

Kall looked in the direction Morgan and the half-elf had gone. Garavin followed his gaze. "When I need them to, my diggers-those two, and others ye haven't seen-dig. We're always needing more tunnels, it seems." He gave a mock wince. "At times, they dig in the wrong places, but no one's perfect."

"If the portal's a secret, why are you telling me about it?" Kall asked, suspicious again.

"Because yer eyes are asking, and yer mouth will follow once I get ye to the camp for morningfeast, so I thought I should get a head start on the day." Garavin turned, his wide, muscled body rolling like a loaded wagon. "If ye've enemies out searching, it's not wise-for either of us-to send ye through the portal just now. Eat with us, and we'll talk some more."

Kall wasn't sure. He watched the dwarf and the huge dog, which was sniffing around the packages Kall had unearthed in the cemetery.

Garavin whistled, and the dog's head came up. It fell into step beside its master. The dwarf set an unhurried pace through the trees, as if appreciating both the forest and his place in it.

Kall opened his mouth to ask another question, but Garavin, anticipating him again, tossed back over his shoulder, "The forest is named Mir. Ye're breathing Calishite air now."

Kall smelled the camp before they reached the site. The scent of cooking sausages and the sharp, starchy tang of potatoes made his stomach burn.

They broke through a tree line, where the land dipped into a wide-lipped oval bowl of tamped down grass. At the bottom swirled half a dozen people, dwarves and humans in equal number, with more spilling out of a square, two-story hut. The trees curved up in tense green spires around the scene.

"How many are there?" Kall asked as they descended. There were more figures coming out of the hut than seemed possible for it to hold.