Through Stone and Sea - By Barb Hendee & J. C. Hendee Page 0,7
say?”
“Belaski,” Chane rasped.
Shirvêsh Mallet nodded, giving Chane’s maimed voice no notice, and ushered Wynn onward.
“Let us be off, child, and find you rooms.”
The two led the way toward the open arch across from the doors, and Chane’s attention wandered around the surroundings.
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.
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.