I bowed. "Prince Yoleg, good of you to come and offer me escort."
He bowed to me as well. "Hurogmeten. It is our honor to ride the ways with you and bring you to our father."
Royalty or not, the craft we seated ourselves on looked no more seaworthy than any other I'd seen in the ways. Axiel told me that most of them had been made before the illnesses had plagued his people—so at least two hundred years ago.
I sat on a seat not meant to accommodate a man of my size and pulled the leather harness tight around my middle. Riding the ways was rough, and falling off the raft meant you had to swim for a very long time.
I could feel the pulse of ancient magic as it caught our raft and flung it wildly down a narrow tunnel so fast it was hard to catch my breath. Spray hit my face and left small bruises, like the first touch of frostbite. Sometimes the tunnel was lit with a million stars—dwarvenstones spelled to light the way. But the dwarves had been weakening for hundreds of years, and in some places the magic had faded and we were engulfed in absolute darkness. There, the sound of the water hitting the rock became almost painful.
There were chambers in the ways, crossroads where Yoleg decided which tunnel to follow. We had to wait until the water calmed and the magic died down before we could set off again. I'd traveled these ways before, but each time the sight of the chambers rendered me dumb.
One chamber was coated in crystal gems. Backlit by dwarvenstone, emerald columns rose from the ground to cross over our heads. It was difficult to judge distances in caves, but the columns looked colossal, the base of the nearest one longer than our raft.
Another chamber held gray stone carved in countless shapes. Small statues crowded the water's edge and climbed over the tunnel. I could have stayed there a whole day, but we were off again with a rush of water magic.
As we waited in a place that smelled of mint and glittered with gold, something large bumped our boat twice. Yoleg looked concerned, and Axiel held up a hand for silence. We all crouched motionless until whatever it was gave up and swam off in waves of midnight fins.
The raft came to rest gently against one of a series of docks in a cave I hadn't seen before—although I had been to Dwarvenhame several times. Our raft was alone in a port obviously built for a hundred, and the dock we tied to was the only one I'd have trusted with my weight.
"This is the formal dock," said Axiel, answering my unasked question. "Before we took you as a visitor to my family. But you come tonight as Hurogmeten to petition the king, and that requires we tie up here."
Axiel organized us so that Yoleg led, followed a half-step later by me on his right. Axiel and Oreg flanked me on either side.
Yoleg brought us into a large chamber, irregular in shape but flat floored and walled. Gold and gemstones were conspicuously absent because dwarves don't mix pleasure and business. That this hall in the Dwarvenhame was barren except for mounds of stone to serve as seats told me that this was very serious business indeed.
Plain-clothed dwarves packed the room in a way that reminded me forcefully of my own great hall yesterday. But there was a stillness that lay over this room that would never be a part of a gathering of wild Northmen. It felt as if the dwarves had internalized some part of the stone of the room into themselves.
On the far side of the room, Axiel's father, Lorekoth the dwarven king, rose from his seat and looked at me as if he'd never laughed at my table or dug through the broken stones of Hurog to pull books tenderly out of harm's way.
He was young to be king, only four hundred years old, but his father had been one of the first to die of the series of plagues that had nearly destroyed the dwarves. His mane of red hair swept the ground. It was loose because a dwarf only braided his hair to go to war. In his neatly trimmed beard there was a bare hint of gray. King Lorekoth wore plain gray robes trimmed in black. Only the fabrics, silk and linen, reflected his rank.
"Who comes?" he asked slowly, the only person I'd ever heard with a voice deeper than mine. Axiel said that he could use the deeper tones to conjure fear in anyone listening to him, a useful trick on the battlefield.
I bowed, one ruler to another. "I am Wardwick, Hurogmeten of Hurog Keep, where dragons once more fly."
"Why do you come before me, Hero of Hurog?"
I didn't flinch in embarrassment at the title, but it was a near thing. "I ask repayment of the debt your people owe me. We fight a war above. A great evil has been unearthed to work its magic among mankind. Jakoven, High King of the Five Kingdoms, holds Farsonsbane in his hands."
"Does any person here deny him his debt?" the king asked.
Silence answered him.
"What do you wish of us?"
"I need an army," I said. "What human army could stand against the dark men, the stone men?"
And so the negotiations began. Dwarves, perhaps because they are a long-lived race, do nothing in haste unless dire need forces them. My tired bones told me that the sun had risen again high in the sky before someone mentioned the dwarvenways casually. Another hour passed before I brought them up again.
Stories were told of dwarven bravery, and Oreg and Axiel told tales of my life to match them that were so blown up that several times they bore no resemblance to any memory I had of past deeds. Not that the stories were false … just exaggerated. I had carried a horse two miles in a blizzard—but it was a newborn foal. Blood and severed body parts played a role in most of the stories, each storyteller becoming more and more graphic as the hours trailed by.
In the end I had an agreement that I could transport no more than ten people at a time through the dwarvenways. The list of people who could use them was not long—no one wanted the ways to be common knowledge—but Kellen and his man, all those of direct Hurog descent whom I deemed trustworthy, Alizon, Haverness, Tisala, Stala, and Garranon were among them. Axiel was to come with me because he knew how to use the ways.
"Most gracious king," I said with a bow that was more jerky than I would have wished, but at least my stiff muscles allowed me to rise. "I have a small gift for you, in thanks for this audience."
A gift, the king's note had said, would make it impossible for his courtiers to complain about human manners. An exotic animal, he'd suggested, as his menagerie was famous among his people. It had taken me about five minutes to come up with the perfect animal.
"I have in my lands," I said, "a basilisk, sometimes called a stone lizard. Oreg, my wizard, has enchanted it truly to stone in order to keep it safe. If you have a sanctuary for it, I will have it brought to you. Oreg can dispel the enchantment when and where you wish it."
Silence fell upon the dwarves. Shock rather than contemplation, I thought. The basilisk was the dwarven royal family's animal, a totem second only to the dragon who belonged to no one family, but to all of dwarven kind. Axiel had told me that during our trip here when I explained what I intended to do—I was not such a fool as to give the king a gift that might be an embarrassment, so I checked it out with his son. The king even had the perfect place to release the basilisk, a huge island without a harbor that was reachable only by the dwarvenways.
A slow smile spread across the king's face. "A generous gift, Lord Wardwick. I am honored to accept."
I bowed once more and left before I did anything to undo what we had accomplished today.
"I didn't think that even my father could get them to agree to allow humans to travel freely in the dwarvenways," commented Axiel as we waited for the waters to calm in one of the crossroad chambers. His younger brother wasn't with us because the raft was to await passengers at Hurog.