Barb Hendee: Through Stone and Sea

From the outside, the building had looked as if it would barely accommodate the entryway. But beyond the next arch was so much more. The opening was likely positioned where the building's frontage met the mountainside. It revealed a wide corridor heading deeper into the mountain, into this … temple . Even thinking that word left Chane unsettled with every step across the entryway's mosaic floor.

Colored thumbnail tiles created the image of a stout, dark-haired, and bearded dwarf bearing a tall char-gray staff. He wore a burnt orange vestment, somewhat like the elder shirvêsh. In the image, the figure appeared to step straight toward Chane out of the floor along an open road leading away from a hazy violet mountain range in the background.

Chane raised his eyes and quickened his pace to catch Wynn and their host, already a good way down the corridor.

Other dwarves in burnt orange vestments, male and female, appeared now and then. All nodded, waved, or spoke in their own tongue, some yawning as if just roused. They went varied ways through side arches and heavy wide doors along the broad main corridor.

Chane had encountered few dwarves in Calm Seatt, a city so named to honor these stout people who had helped build its castles and major structures. He had not yet grown accustomed to the sight of them. His homeland's folklore spoke of such beings as diminutive creatures of the earth found only in wild and remote hidden places. In truth … well, the lore was so far off the truth.

Though shorter than humans, most dwarves looked Wynn straight in the eyes. What they lacked in height, they made up for in breadth. Chane had once seen a dwarf turn sideways to get through a shop door in Calm Seatt. It had been a tight fit.

He trailed Wynn and Mallet until the corridor met with a wide archway opening into a cavernous round chamber. Wynn stopped there, looking back for him, but Shade trotted straight in, sniffing about a bright floor of octagonal marble tiles.

"This is the temple proper of Bedzâ'kenge … ‘Feather-Tongue,' " Wynn explained. "One of the Bäynæ."

Chane immediately halted, not nearing the opening. There was a reason he had made it across the outer threshold.

He could just make out the chamber's far wide and curved wall beyond the arch. Strange characters of harsh strokes, as in the door's tablet emblem, were carved in what he assumed was Dwarvish. The engravings were sparse and austere, arranged in spaced vertical columns.

On the road to the seatt, Wynn had told him of the dwarves' oral tradition. What little they wrote was "carved in stone," or sometimes metal, and only when the meaning innately deserved the implied permanence. Interaction with human culture had led to some use of paper, parchment, and other portable records, but old tradition remained dominant.

Chane noticed six engraved symbols over the chamber's entrance.

Each pattern was octagonal in shape, its tangled carved lines too complex for single letters. They looked similar to a few finely lined ones among the chamber's engravings.

"Chuoynaksâg Víônag Skíal … Skíalâg Víônag Chuoynaks ," Wynn uttered.

Chane's gaze dropped to her slightly smiling face.

" ‘Remember What's Worthy of the Telling; Tell What Is Worthy of the Remembering,' " she added, and then glanced at Mallet. "Yes?"

The old dwarf pursed his lips, trying not to laugh, but chuckled out, "Close enough … though it is better in my tongue."

Wynn rolled her eyes and waved Chane forward. Reluctantly, he drew closer, gazing past her to where Shade padded around the chamber's most prominent feature. On a round platform at dead center stood a gargantuan stone statue, perhaps two or more stories tall.

A dwarf, with a full beard and flowing hair framing serene features, had his eyes open in fiery joy. He appeared to look into the distance, but his lips were slightly parted, as if he were about to make some proclamation of import. In one hand he gripped a long staff, taller than himself, which appeared made of solid iron. His other hand was outstretched, palm upward, as if offering something—but that hand was empty.

It was the same figure as in the entryway's mosaic floor.

Once again, every muscle in Chane's body tightened. Perhaps he had not yet entered a sacred space.

Wynn and the shirvêsh raised their hands in unison, with palms pressed together. They touched fingertips briefly to their foreheads, then their lips, and finally opened their hands, palms up like the statue. When they spoke, Shirvêsh Mallet uttered Dwarvish, though Wynn echoed him in Numanese. Their voices resounded, far less like a prayer, and more like orators beginning a tale, loud and clear for all to hear.

"Thanks be to Bedzâ'kenge, poet eternal among the Bäynæ. … Thanks be to Bedzâ'kenge, preserver and teacher of heritage, virtue, and wisdom."

Chane did not follow their example—neither of them noticed; then his vision flickered.

His arms felt heavy and his legs weighted. Weariness surged over him like a sudden illness. Normally he would be in dormancy by now—and was the wide chamber growing brighter around that towering statue?

Only two oil lanterns hung from iron hooks on the chamber's walls, yet there was far too much illumination for those. The statue appeared to brighten amid a widening fuzzy pool of light.

A tingling sting grew on Chane's skin. He inched carefully closer, peering into the chamber's heights.

Shield-size polished metal disks hung in the chamber's upper reaches amid complicated clusters of interlaced iron half hoops. Attached cables ran from these through rings in the ceiling and the side walls. They came down to be tied off at waist height upon ornate iron fixtures.

Chane lurched back, much to the puzzled glance of Shirvêsh Mallet.

The temple chamber was filling with sunlight . Those cables adjusted the angle of the high polished panels. Somewhere above, light entered from the outside to be reflected into the temple's interior.

"Wynn … ?" he rasped anxiously.

She glanced into the chamber's growing glow, and her happy expression melted in alarm.

"Are the rooms far?" she asked Mallet. "I'm sorry to be poor guests, but we're ready to drop."

"Of course," answered the old dwarf, puzzlement on his wrinkled face softening with sympathy. "This way."

He led them into a side passage that curved around the temple chamber. Twice they passed openings into that sunlit space.

Chane kept to the way's outer wall, as far as he could from that light. They finally veered away down an intersecting wider corridor illuminated only by sparsely placed oil lanterns. Chane's steps became more sluggish.

They met no one along the way, and the shirvêsh turned down another narrow passage lined with stout oak doors. He finally halted and opened one, ushering Chane inside, then pushed open another across the hall for Wynn.

"Find me in the meal hall at Day-Winter's end," he instructed, and then grinned with large yellowed teeth. "High-Tower's letter did not speak of your pending research. I am anxious to hear what you seek."

Wynn nodded tiredly, and the shirvêsh headed back the way he had brought them.

Chane stumbled into a sparsely furnished room containing a very wide and low bed with no foot-or headboards.

"Don't worry about joining us for dinner," Wynn mumbled tiredly from the door. "Rest—I'll come for you later."

Chane nodded as she closed the door.

Dropping his two packs, he unbuckled his sword and leaned it against them. He carefully laid his cloak over the room's single stool, made from a whole round of a tree trunk. The ancient scroll he had taken from the ice-bound castle's library was still stored in its inner pocket. But he left it there and stumbled toward the bed. One strange object stopped him.