Earth Deep (Dwarvish Dirty Dozen Book 6) by Aaron D. Schneider & Michael Anderle

Author:Aaron D. Schneider & Michael Anderle [Schneider, Aaron D. & Anderle, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing
Published: 2023-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You all right, sis?”

Tomza raised one hand from a thick tree bole to flash a rude gesture at her brother. The ride on the backs of the wosealf skinchangers had not been long, but they had woven through dense timber and bounded over many rough hillocks. By the time Bella and Hukka had deposited them at the edge of a glade, the dwarfess was gray in the cheek, and her brow was too sweaty for the cool air in the trees’ shadows.

“Fair enough,” Ober replied, remembering having similar feelings the last several times he’d ridden on worcsvines or blotferows. The young dwarf might have pondered why he found clinging to Bella’s heaving form less strenuous, not to mention less frightening than riding a beast that had been domesticated by his ancestors over a millennium ago, but what lay beyond the tree line commanded his attention.

Gathered like a group of canvas-backed primeval beasts was a collection of covered wains. They’d formed a rough circle around a central fire pit that showed signs of recent use, though only a small mound of smoldering embers remained, trailing thin wisps of smoke that vanished the second they rose above the treetops.

There were no signs of the wains’ owners or the beasts that drew the wagons other than the grass around the wagons being stripped.

The peculiar scene was made even stranger by the prickling in Ober’s mind. It set the spirit sharing his skin to snuffling and rumbling.

“Wains with no wain dwarfs,” Ober muttered as he moved to keep watch without being exposed. “Something is going on here.”

“Why do you think we brought you?” Hukka growled as he stalked up in elfin form. “The wandering stonehearts are not unknown to us. Perhaps you know why they are here.”

Ober thought “not unknown to us” was a delicate way to describe how the savagelings had butchered and eaten every dwarf in their territory, even the heretical ones. Since that had happened within the living memory of the short-lived humans in the Vale, it made the statement seem darkly amusing. Before he could comment further, he heard soft footsteps. The other wosealf sibling was nearby.

“We know they should not be here,” Bella whispered from behind a tree to his right. “The wanderers come in the early spring and are on their way south again well before the first frost. To find them this far north at this time is strange.”

Ober nodded, but the truth was that being Vale-born, he knew very little about the movements of the heretical nomads. Wain dwarfs avoided the dwarvish settlements they came across. Imperial edicts technically gave them protection, but even in the most civilized cities in Central Wyrmspines, it was weak at best. In the far wilder Vale, a wain dwarf caravan that came to a dwarvish settlement or attracted the attention of a garrison was asking for trouble they were unlikely to survive.

That did not speak to why these wain dwarfs were here. Ober’s frown deepened as he scanned the perimeter of the glade.

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