Although he’d never found an open shaft that might function as a way out, he had seen a surprising number of empty rooms and dusty hallways. A few pieces of derelict furniture, a dropped tunic, covered in years’ worth of dust, a blackened stone beneath a vent that spoke of a cooking fire—here and there he saw signs that these rooms had once been lived in. Had there been a plague or some sort of war? He wondered, but when he asked the various individuals he knew, they all shook their heads and professed to know nothing about those signs of life.

Kov had also been asking those Dwrgwn he’d gotten to know, whether his guards or the other diners at the communal meals up in the village, about the heaps of treasure lying so carelessly in the big chamber.

“What I wonder,” Kov would say, “is why gathering is so important to you all. It’s not like you do anything with the treasure. You don’t trade it or wear it or keep it in your private chambers.”

“We do much love to visit it,” ran the usual reply. “When we be ill, we do go there and then feel well. When we be sad, it does make us happy.”

On the day that Kov saw the unusual white bird, he went up to the communal meal early. After he’d fetched his usual plate of boiled fish and spelt porridge, he sat down next to a young woman, Annark, whom he found attractive despite her thick half-moons of eyebrows, mostly because she seemed more intelligent than most Dwrgwn. When he asked her why she loved the treasures, she gave him the answer he needed.

“It be the mist lights,” she said. “See you not them? The beautiful blue haze from the gold, and the lights dancing from the jewels.”

Kov was too surprised to respond.

“The blue does rise from the gold,” Annark continued, “like mist on the river. We do waft it to ourselves, we do roll in it, and our own blue shadow, it does draw strength. See you it not, Kov Gemmaster?”

“I can’t, alas, but I can feel it.” Suddenly he saw an important truth. “All of my people can, and that’s why we love gold so much. We breathe in the mist and soak it up through our hands.”

She smiled and returned to stripping the bones out of a fish with her long delicate fingers. Our own blue shadow? Kov thought. I wonder what that may mean! His heart ached to consult with Dallandra about these mysterious folk and the even more mysterious mist rising from their stolen treasures.