“You stay close, though. You have no protection of your own against that fear.” Paks thought she had, but wasn’t going to argue the point. She saw Connaught draw breath to send them forward; she wondered why the archers hadn’t shot yet. Then Ardhiel moved, taking from his side the old battered hunting horn he had carried from Fin Panir. He set it to his lips.
Paks had expected nothing like the sound of that horn. It began sweet and tender, swelling louder and louder to a triumphant blast that nearly shattered her bones. Wind swirled into the canyon, a great column of whirling air funneling into and from the horn’s throat. A roiling mass of pink and gold-lit cloud blotted out the hard clear blue of a desert sky. Paks could not see the cliffs—the enemy—or Ardhiel himself. The cloud shimmered, steadied, became a piled and rumpled staircase of gold. Down it came a brilliant shining creature, winged with rainbow colors, so bright she could hardly stand to see it, and so beautiful she could not look away. On its back was Someone in mail brighter than polished silver, wearing a blinding white cloak. He spoke: the language was elven, the voice rang with authority and troubled the heart like elven harps. And Paks saw Ardhiel bow, and move to his side, and saw him mount that fabulous beast, and saw them rise once more into the clouds.
When the clouds blew away, in the last throbbing notes of that horn-call, the enemy was gone, though the rattle of their flight through the rocks echoed from wall to wall. Ardhiel lay unconscious on the ground, smiling, and the horn in his hand showed its true nature: the finest horn Paks had ever seen, jeweled with rubies and emeralds, shining gold.
With no delay, Connaught had them carry Ardhiel back to the others.
“It’s an elfhorn, it must be,” he said over his shoulder. “I’d heard of them, but Gird knows I never expected to see one. Let alone hear one. By the gods, this is a bad place. You were right, Balkon. Bad for an ambush, and I walked right into it. I hope it doesn’t kill Lord Ardhiel. That’ll take some explaining. ‘Old hunting horn,’ indeed. No wonder he wouldn’t play on it for our dancing that night. It makes my skin itch to think of it.”
“It’s Gird’s grace he brought it,” said Amberion. “I wonder why they didn’t shoot at once? They could have gotten us—”
“Or thought they could.” Fallis grunted as his foot turned on a rock. “Damned treacherous ground. Probably a damned kuaknom behind every stone.”
“Kuaknom?” asked Paks.
“That’s what we call them—kuaknom, tree-haters—as elves are tree-lovers. The elves call them iynisin, the unsingers. Remember, it’s the kuaknom that used to be confused with Kuakkganni.”
Paks wondered how anyone could confuse those horrible parodies of elves with a Kuakgan. Confuse with elves themselves, yes—for her mind held the memory of the same beauty, the same grace. “Were they the same as other elves once?”
“Aye,” answered Balkon, before anyone else could. “And some say they are still, the blackheart rockfilth. The elves like to pretend all the kuaknom failed away many years ago. But here we see the truth of that! By Sertig’s Hammer, all the fair-spoken ones would rather have a tongue of silver, though it lied, than tell iron truth at need.”
Amberion shook his head. “Your pardon, sir dwarf, but in this I judge you wrong. The kuaknom parted long ago from the true elves, in a quarrel that began before men—”
“Not long before,” muttered Balkon. “The Kuakkganni—”
“If they are truly men, then it was not before—but it was before other men. And the cause of that quarrel—”
“Was the Tree. Aye, I’ve heard that. But it seems a foolish quarrel to me. Would a dwarf enact rage because iron bends to any smith, or stone to any chisel?” He shook his head, and challenged them all with his look. “No, I deem not, and you know the truth of it. But I call no harsh name on Ardhiel’s head, for his call saved us, and he has paid for that. The best of elves are fair indeed—aye, though we grumble, being made rough and ugly as rock and iron, we honor them for their grace. Well they name their lord the Singer of Songs; the best of them are true songs, well-sung; but we are other, hammered on Sertig’s anvil to bear the blows of the world. Our songs are the ring of steel on stone.” Paks was astonished; she had never heard any dwarf speak so. He bowed stiffly, and was silent thereafter until they reached the men-at-arms, now coming forward in battle order.
The High Marshals led them swiftly out to the trail the others had found, and the whole company moved down the main valley while it was still light. Here the walls were nearly a bowshot apart. Thelon, sent ahead once more, had found a trail leading out: not where the valley seemed to end, for that was a jumble of house-size stones ending in a twenty-foot cliff, but climbing again over a shoulder of the western wall.
“But it is no trail you could take in the dark, Marshal Fallis,” he reported. “Even the near part will tax the horses; after that it is easier, but the first of the trail going into the canyon beyond is worse. I could not go far enough to be sure they can get down. We may have trailwork to do; I judge you will not want to leave them here.”
“By no means,” said Marshal Fallis. “We had thought of that, when we saw this fertile valley, but we can leave no one behind to suffer attack of the kuaknom. And it is by no means so fertile as it seemed.” For they had found all the valley floor to be sand, dry or wet or boggy; the green growth was sedge, not grass, and only a few trees dared that sandy expanse.
They made their camp near the foot of the trail, watering the beasts in a hole dug downstream. Paks helped with that, for it took two to dig away the sand that slithered into the hole while the horses and mules drank. The High Marshals ordered a line of fires between the camp and the eastern wall, the one they expected the kuaknom to use. Paks wondered briefly if the kuaknom might infest the western cliff as well, but she could see no holes or caves for access. By this time the valley lay in shadow, lit by the sky. Gradually it faded. Paks had the late watch, and she rolled herself in a blanket against the surprising chill. The sand made a comfortable bed. She slept soundly almost at once.
Thelon, the scout, woke her for her turn at watch. Paks stretched, stiff from sleeping in armor and took off her helmet to scratch her head. When she replaced the helmet, she let it sit loosely on her braid as she came to the main fire for a mug of sib.
“Nothing so far,” reported Thelon. “I wandered across the stream—if you can call it a stream—far enough from the fires to see better, but I saw nothing. But it feels strange, and I don’t like it.”
Paks yawned. She took a long swallow of sib, aware of sand sifting through her clothes, itching. “I don’t mind it feeling strange, as long as those kuaknom, or iynisin, or whatever they are, let us alone.”
“Iynisin is the better word,” said Thelon seriously. “Elves are the sinyi, the singers of the First Singer’s songs, and these scum are those who not only refuse to sing, but who unsing the songs, going against the Singer’s will in everything. So, being created as the sinyi are to love trees and flowing water, these hate them, and burrow in stone, fouling bright water with their filth, or choking it—like this one—with stone dust. For the daskin race, the dwarves, it is right to live in stone; they are the dasksinyi, the stone-singers, whose song is stone and its metals. They honor the stone. But these iynisin defile it. So Balkon will tell you.”
“Yes, but he calls them something else—”
“In dwarvish, yes—but dwarftongue is not truesong; for the right names, the truenames of things, ask an elf. The Singer is known by some as Adyan, the Namer of Names—”
“I thought that was different,” said Paks.
Thelon laughed lightly, in the elven way. “Some also say that the god of men should be called the Sorter of Beads, for men worry more of such division, and not right and wrong.” Paks scowled at him, but he held up his hand. “Indeed, you call your god the High Lord, and speak of his Hall as a seat of justice. What is justice, then, but judging and choosing—sorting fact from fact, and laying on one side the true, and on the other side the false? Now I, being but half-elven, have less pride of race than elves: my own thought is that the great king is one only: He Named the first Names, and Sang the first Song, and He rightly judges all things as true or false, good or evil. I would even say that Sertig the Maker is but another name for him—for surely one only came first, and did these things. Now we spend one time singing, and another time fighting, and another time learning or praying—but we are mortal—and even the immortal elves live mostly in one line—we divide, therefore, like a man who says that this mountain is gnomeland on one side, and his land on the other. But it is all one mountain.”