The Howling Delve
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Kall shrieked as a head burst up from the loose dirt where only a few breaths ago a tree had swayed. A hand followed to wipe the dirt out of a black beard on a pitted, distinctly human face.
"Garavin drew the map," the half-elf said, a bit defensively.
The head and the arm weren't having any of it. "Which you strayed from by a full thirty steps! Look, you." The human's other arm burst up, spraying Kall with more dirt. He flapped a crude drawing in front of the half-elf's blue gaze. "Any more off and you'd have taken the Weir!"
As the pair continued to argue over him, Kall started to slide backward, groping for a weapon, a stick, a rock, anything.
His hand closed on a branch that had been torn away from one of the falling trees. He raised it, and fire licked along his ribcage. Gasping, Kall dropped the branch and fell back, clutching his side.
Immediately, the half-elf crouched over him, his hands probing along Kall's flank. Feebly, Kall tried to push him away, but the man only grinned and muttered, "Cease." His brow furrowed as he examined Kall's wounds. "Get Garavin," he said to his companion. "I think the boy slipped through Alinore's gate."
"Wouldn't be the first," the bearded man grumbled. Instead of hauling himself the rest of the way out of the dirt, the man disappeared back into the earth, pulling his drawing with him.
"What is your name?" the half-elf asked when they were alone. "Who attacked you?"
"Kall," Kall said before he thought better of it. He jerked his head to the south, but kept his eyes fixed on the stranger. "The mountains—they're in the wrong place."
The half-elf nodded. "If you were lying in Esmeltaran's countryside last night, I daresay they are. Those are the Marching Mountains, not the Cloud Peaks. You've come a long way in a short sleep, Kall."
The Marching Mountains—Kall summoned a mental map. He'd crossed the lake, the Wealdath . . . the Starspires, by the gods ... all those miles. His mind boggled. "How?" he asked.
"My sister's fault, entirely," said a new voice, rough and engulfed by a deep, canine bark.
Kall looked up and saw the animal first, a lumbering bronze mastiff with folds of flesh dangling off its ribs and paws the size of a man's fist. Matching its stride—barely—was a dwarf with skin the color of dead leaves and a full, matching beard that fell nearly to his knees. As the dwarf bent over, Kall could see the hair was as wire-hard as the spectacle frames wedged in front of the dwarf's brown eyes.
The human whose head and arm Kall had glimpsed earlier trailed behind him, dirt-covered and oddly tall and gangly next to the dwarf. In profile, the man's face tapered and curved so prominently that Kall could have hung a cloak from his chin. Gesturing animatedly, he tried in vain to slide his parchment drawing under the dwarf's thick nose. The shorter figure's attention was entirely fixed on Kall.
"My name is Garavin Fallstone," the dwarf said in an oddly formal accent. He extended a hand. When Kall only continued to stare uneasily at the group, a corner of the dwarf's mouth turned up. "Ye need fear no attack from me or any of mine," he said, his voice quiet but still rough as a boot scrape. "Laerin"— he nodded to the half-elf—"would have been about telling ye the same thing, had I not interrupted." He deftly plucked up the human's parchment, folded it, and slid it away in a pocket of his brick-colored vest. "The other here is Morgan, and the dog's Borl. They're not brigands, at least not right now."
"Delvar," Laerin said, as if that should explain everything.
"Means we dig." Morgan glared at the half-elf. "Anyways, some of us dig, and some of us come within a druid's death of slaughtering thousand-year-old trees!"
"Laerin knows the difference between a young oak and a considerably more established Weir," the dwarf interjected smoothly. "No true harm was done. Morningfeast for one more, if ye please, Morgan."
"I'll see to it." Morgan continued to glare at the half-elf as they strode off together into the trees.
"Do ye have brothers?" the dwarf asked incongruously as he took a seat on the ground next to Kall.
A memory of himself and Aazen on the sparkling lake flashed before Kall's eyes. Mutely, he shook his head.
"Neither do I. I took my time growing accustomed to Morgan and Laerin. Ye'll want to do the same." He smiled. "Though I'll make a wager ye give yer parents enough headaches for ten brothers."
Kall glanced sideways at him. "You're trying to get me to talk," he said.
"Aye," Garavin agreed, still smiling easily. "I'm needing to know if ye have family looking for ye. If so, I can save them the worry and send ye back through the grave—don't mind the expression, it's really a portal. But Morgan tells me ye've been in a fight, and more than a small scuffle. If that's true, and ye've trouble of another sort following ye, then I'm needing to know how many of my diggers to pull out of the ground to defend ye." The smile disappeared, but the dwarf's voice was gentle and matter-of-fact.
"They don't know where I've gone," Kall said. "At least, I don't see how they could."
"Or they would have followed by this time," Garavin said, nodding. "By 'they,' I take ye to mean the trouble and not the family?"
"I have no family."
"I see." Garavin said, as if he'd heard the same raw-voiced statement many times before. "The choice is yer own, then." He pointed to Alinore Fallstone's marker—weed-grown, but in all other ways identical to the grave Kall had fallen asleep beside in Amn. "It's not truly a grave, ye see. I never had a sister, but if I did, I'm relatively certain she'd be appreciating the jest." Kall almost missed the wink Garavin shot him. "As I said, it's actually a portal. There're several hereabouts. A traveler in a rush can fly the Weave all the way to the Great Rift if he uses his head and knows where to set his feet."