“Not ‘Gegs’!” said Limbeck sternly.
Jarre ignored him. “Now we live for killing! Some of the young people, that’s all they think about now. Killing Welves—”
“Elves, my dear,” Limbeck corrected her. “I’ve told you. The term ‘welves’ is a slave word, taught to us by our ‘masters.’ And we’re not Gegs, we’re dwarves. The word ‘Gegs’ is derogatory, used to keep us in our place.”
He put the spectacles back on, glared at her. The torchlight shining from beneath him (the dwarf holding the torch was unusually short) sent the shadows cast by the spectacles swooping upward, giving Limbeck a remarkably sinister appearance. Jarre couldn’t help looking at him now, stared at him with a terrible fascination.
“Do you want to go back to being a slave, Jarre?” Limbeck asked her. “Should we give in and crawl to the elves and grovel at their feet and kiss their little skinny behinds and tell them we’re sorry, we’ll be good little Gegs from now on? Is that what you want?”
“No, of course not.” Jarre sighed, wiped away a tear that was creeping down her cheek. “But we could talk to them. Negotiate. I think the Wel—elves—are as sick of this fighting as we are.”
“You’re damn right, they’re sick of it,” said Limbeck, with satisfaction. “They know they can’t win.”
“And neither can we! We can’t overthrow the whole Tribus empire! We can’t take to the skies and fly up to Aristagon and do battle.”
“And they can’t overthrow us either! We can live for generations down here in our tunnels and they’ll never find us—”
“Generations!” Jarre shouted. “Is that what you want, Limbeck? War that will last generations! Children who will grow up never knowing anything but hiding and running and fear?”
“At least they’ll be free,” Limbeck said, hooking his spectacles back over his ears.
“No, they won’t. So long as you’re afraid, you’re never free,” Jarre answered softly.
Limbeck didn’t respond. He was silent.
The silence was terrible. Jarre hated the silence. It was sad and mournful and heavy and reminded her of something, someplace, someone. Alfred. Alfred and the mausoleum. The secret tunnels beneath the statue of the Manger, the rows of crystal coffins with the bodies of the beautiful young dead people. It had been silent down there, too, and Jarre had been afraid of the silence.
Don’t stop! she’d told Alfred.
Stop what? Alfred had been rather obtuse.
Talking! It’s the quiet! I can’t stand listening to it!
And Alfred had comforted her. These are my friends…. Nobody here can harm you. Not anymore. Not that they would have anyway—at least, not intentionally.
And then Alfred had said something that Jarre had remembered, had been saying to herself a lot lately.
But how much wrong have we done unintentionally, meaning the best.
“Meaning the best,” she repeated, talking to fill the dreadful silence.
“You’ve changed, Jarre,” Limbeck told her sternly.
“So have you,” she countered.
And after that, there wasn’t much to say, and they stood there, in Limbeck’s house, listening to the silence. The bodyguard shuffled his feet and tried to look as if he’d gone deaf and hadn’t heard a word.
The argument was taking place in Limbeck’s living quarters—his current dwelling in Wombe, not his old house in Het. It was a very fine apartment by Geg standards, suited to be the dwelling place of the High Froman,* which is what Limbeck now was. Admittedly, the apartment was not as fine as the holding tank where the previous High Froman, Darral Longshoreman, used to live. But the holding tank had been too near the surface—and consequently too near the elves, who had taken over the surface of Drevlin.
*Ruler of the Gegs of Drevlin of the Low Realm of Arianus.
Limbeck, along with the rest of his people, had been forced to delve far beneath the surface, seek shelter down below. This had been no hardship for the dwarves.* The great Kicksey-winsey was constantly delving and drilling and boring. Hardly a cycle passed without a new tunnel being discovered somewhere in Wombe or Het or Lek or Herat or any of the other Geg towns on Drevlin. Which was fortunate, because the Kicksey-winsey, for no apparent reason that anyone could see, would often bury, crush, fill up, or otherwise destroy previously existing tunnels. The dwarves took this philosophically, burrowing out of collapsed tunnels and trudging oft to seek new ones.