A Companion to Wolves by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

Author:Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette [Bear, Elizabeth & Monette, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-07-20T21:00:00+00:00

Isolfr found himself returning to the trellwarren whenever he was not needed, not merely to escape the miasma of pain and unhappiness and muted fear that overhung the camp, but because it troubled him. He did not see beauty in trellish patterns, or in the way they worked metal, or in the terrible angles and proportions of their dwelling place, but he could not deny that he saw purpose. “They intended this,” he said to Viradechtis, running his fingers over a strange design, sinuous and jagged, wreathing an archway in the depths of the warren. “They work metal. They must have some language, mustn’t they?”

Viradechtis cocked her head. She was uninterested in what trolls did when they were not dying under her claws and teeth, but she listened to Isolfr uncomplainingly as always.

“Could we talk to them, do you think?” he said, ducking through the archway. “Could we negotiate?”

That word, Viradechtis knew, having heard it a great deal in the recent tension with Kerlaugstrond. Her answer was emphatic: a vivid, brutal memory of the stench overlying Ravndalr, jumbled with images of the trellherig and other places where they had arrived too late and could only be witnesses to what the trolls had done.

“Point taken, sister,” Isolfr said, and then he frowned, forgetting his train of thought, peering into a corner well back from the doorway. Viradechtis stayed close as he advanced cautiously into the room—a storeroom, it looked like, if trolls stored anything, but possibly a prison or a shrine or something he did not know enough about trolls to imagine.

“They didn’t intend that,” he said, and only when he jumped at the echoes of his own voice did he realize he’d spoken out loud.

There was a hole in the corner, between floor and walls, the sort of hole a giant mouse might chew—but not in solid rock. “Are there stone mice, do you think?” he said to Viradechtis, picturing them briefly, little granite beasts with bright quartz eyes.

The stench is making me light-headed. He needed to leave soon, he knew, but he stepped just a little closer. Those were worked edges, and not worked by trellclaws or the crude tools the trolls had. He did not—quite—reach out to touch the lip of the hole, but he did ask Viradechtis what she smelled.

Troll, she reported dryly, and then, cautiously investigating the edges of the hole—which he was relieved, in an odd way, to find unnerved her as much as it did him—oldness, anger. Not-troll.

But more specific than that, she could not be.

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