Through Stone and Sea - By Barb Hendee & J. C. Hendee Page 0,8
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.
A large iron vessel, like a shallow, wide bowl on legs with a domed lid, rested atop a short stone pedestal. The lid’s handle was insulated by a wood fitting, and slots around the lid’s top let dim orange light escape.
Chane lifted the lid, its handle warm even through the wood, and the light erupted into the room.
A smattering of thumb-size glowing crystals rested inside the basin in a bed of steaming sand. Unlike the sages’ cold lamp crystals, these looked raw and rough, as if taken straight from the earth, and gave off heat as well as low light.
Chane was too near collapse to puzzle over small wonders in a strange new culture. He lowered the lid and fell across the bed. The jarring impact made his eyes pop for an instant. The mattress was as stiff and hard as bare ground beneath a blanket. Wide as it was, the bed was too short. Still, he closed his eyes, drawing his feet up to lie curled sideways. The last thing that came to him