Referring, of course, to the old – and quite true – adage about appropriate responses to attack, Nietzsche: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster . . . for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
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Daylight had grown to three solid hours at a time when the lady Grfaldn sent for me. Tili came with the message, leaning around the door into the small forge which had been given to Dval. He waved me away from the bellows, and I followed the tiny girl down the halls.
There was a lovely scar on her arm, a good four centimeters across and eight long; I was quite proud of it. There didn’t seem to be any redness around it, and she said it didn’t even itch any more either. Dval and I had ignored the fact that her arm, cloven clear to the white bone, would obviously have to come off and had carefully stitched each layer of muscle. She was already using it, if only carefully.
Thumping sounded from away outside the cavern. Biri (whose name I had finally learned) dived into the tunnel and sped off, dodging the debris unthinkingly. (I couldn’t do it that fast, but enough trips back and forth with buckets of water etc., and you get pretty good at avoiding the bruisers.) Two minutes later we heard his triumphant cry echoing down the blackness, and the … boots, as it happened, coming toward us.
The reek of the entrance greeted us before we caught sight of the rusty, tired glow from the broken stone doors. Burnt wool, burnt meat … I thought of the feud and swallowed acid. Against sense, we ducked into the full unmoving mass of it, out of the clean carnivorous wind. The sound of our boots thumped clearly, nearly masking the moan, more a heavy breath than any real sound, from the young dwarf. I didn’t dare try to comfort him.
It was true, I thought, setting my feet carefully on the thick, wind-cleared snow crust. I didn’t know the first thing about ironwork. I did, however, know the first thing about slaughter; the faces of Beebo and Lara and Tom presented themselves as I’d last seen them, talking over our poisoned dinner.
On a frosty bright day I found myself holding the muzzle of a wicked-looking goat while Dval shoed it. Its partner waited for its own turn, still harnessed to the cart they’d pulled here, watching Pan-eyed through the open dwarf-door. Goats have split hooves. Their shoes would have been funny-looking if the front edges hadn’t been so sharp.
Oboy.
Dval pulled me out of bed early the next morning, and handed me a toothbrush. When I came stumbling back out of the privy he was cutting meat into a pot, and paused long enough to hand me a knife of my own and some vegetables. By the time I was through chopping, he was already working on some dough, taking starter from a covered bowl set on a shelf a calculated distance from the hearth.
The wool blanket was scratching my cheek when I woke up, rasping in time to my shudders; I had chilled down again in the night, in spite of the fire. Folding the blanket and smoothing the bed seemed to be the thing to do in this very neat room; I had no such habit at home, nor Shannon either.
The hammer in his hand smoked slightly, the dull red fading back to rusty black. The bar of metal in his tongs was also fading, from cherry to fresh blood, which I couldn’t help but think was wrong. And he did not look happy to see me.
