you can haul the rest of these stones by yourselves,” Deor said, sparking off a new outburst of good-tempered abuse. “Stand aside, Thain and Summoner!” he hollered over the voices of his mates. “I’m rolling down this rock-slide!”
Earno and Morlock backed away to the far side of the trench. Deor appeared suddenly in the sphere of light cast by Morlock’s torch, picking his way swiftly down the steep slope of rocks. Surprisingly few of them shook loose under the oblique impact of his heavy dwarvish boots, and Earno realized that the rocks in the trench wall had been fitted together to form a solid, though temporary, construction. It was anything but a rock-slide; Earno would have called it painstaking salvage work. For the dwarves, taking such pains was apparently a matter of instinct.
“A dark morning for us all, Guardians!” Deor said in greeting. “But perhaps not so bad as it might have been. Come along, if it suits you; the Eldest would no doubt like to hear your news.”
They followed him down the trench, toward the site where the gate had been. Deor was an interesting study to Earno. He seemed to be as hurt and grieved by the destruction about them as Morlock was. But he was challenged and invigorated in a way that Morlock was not. His eyes dripped tears he did not even attempt to hide. But he moved with a quick decisiveness, cracking jokes like nuts. From what Earno could see of the other dwarves—and hear, as the air above them resounded with the ringing consonants of the Dwarvish language—they were reacting much as Deor was. Morlock, in sharp contrast, seemed to become more silent, if that were possible, and more somber with each step.
Finally they reached a space beyond the rubble. Earno spotted the stone table at which Deor and his companions had been sitting the previous evening. It looked strangely isolated, without the slope of the mountain above it. The whole area had been burned with fire and stank of blood and venom.
In the middle of the bleakest space stood the Eldest and Vetr, his eldest son. They carried long spears, virtually twice their own height; beside them on the ground lay three dead dwarves, one of them a beardless child. The child, Earno realized, was Ny, the wordless dwarf-lass who had been his guide. Beyond them, asprawl over the small hill that stood above the road leading south, stretched the torn fuming corpse of the dragon they had slain at the cost of their lives.
The Eldest was drawing on the venom-stained ground with the butt-end of his spear, twirling the long metal shaft in his fingers as if it were a stylus. He looked up at the approach of the newcomers. “Khuf! Douse that torch!” he commanded. “No fire at the vigil of rokhleni!”
Morlock ground out the torch without a word.
“A moment from you all,” Tyr requested curtly, and turned back to Vetr. “So: you see it. We can only begin to build the new gate out of the wreck of the old. We will need more stone. The gate, which should have been the strongest point in the perimeter, had become the weakest. In recent centuries the fortifying stone had all been hollowed out for storerooms and guest chambers.”
Vetr grunted. He seemed dismayed. “Same must be in other gates.”
“Not all,” Tyr corrected him. “The Helgrind Gate, certainly: much trade with Haukr has gone through the Runhaiar. Northgate, too: the Ranga trade led us to weaken ourselves there. But the High Gate over the Coriam Lakes must still be strong enough to stand, among others.”
“Then?”
“Those chambers, in the weakened gates, must be cleared out, of course. Then: filled up with stone, gravel, debris from the mines—anything that can give weight to a wall. But the new Southgate will be different. We will cut down to bedrock and rebuild the shoulder of the mountain, fusing stone to stone. And we will timber the new terminal chamber with a web of maijarra wood. Let there be no honeycombing of the walls; we have already spent too many lives with such economy.”
Vetr said nothing. But his shadowy face turned toward the dark mountainside above them. There the dragons still wandered, spreading fire among the black pine forests.
“Let them come,” said Tyr, understanding Vetr’s gesture. “I mean it, Vetrtheorn! The work must be done as it ought to be done. To work in a panic, to content ourselves with a flawed job that would fail us when