“It won’t get back to Orzammar through me,” the dwarf explained with a grin. “I’m not going back, or didn’t you understand that part?”
“They’re dead,” Katriel explained hesitantly. “They . . . have a ceremony before they enter the Deep Roads, a funeral. They say good-bye to their loved ones, pass on their possessions, and then they go and they don’t come back.”
Rowan blinked in surprise. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”
Nalthur chuckled ruefully. “To clear our debts. To clear our names. To clear our houses’ names.” His face went grim. “Orzammar politics are more deadly than the Deep Roads, by far. Best to have left it behind, really.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Maric sighed.
“That so?”
Loghain frowned. “I don’t think you need to explain that, Maric.”
“No, it’s fine,” Maric shook his head. He held out a hand to the dwarf. “My name is Prince Maric Theirin, and these are my companions.” He introduced each one of them in turn.
The dwarf stared at Maric quizzically, and then shook his hand in an awkward way as if he had never performed the gesture previously. “Human royalty, eh?”
“Sort of.” Maric smiled. “I am fighting to regain my family’s throne. That is, in fact, why we’re down here.”
The tale took surprisingly little time to tell. Nalthur listened to it quietly enough, nodding his head empathetically. “We dwarves do things much the same, when it comes time for the Houses to contest the throne,” he admitted. “Though there’s rarely any of this bystanding business you speak of. No House is neutral in the Assembly, not ever. In Orzammar, things are solved quickly and with as much bloodshed as we can stand . . . and then a little bit more.” His grin was sardonic, as if sharing a private joke. Seeing that none of them got it, he shrugged. “Which is all well and good, I suppose, but if it’s Gwaren you were headed to, you were going the wrong way.”
“What!” Loghian shot up, shocked.
Nalthur put his hands up. “Now, now, big fellow, no reason to get upset over it. You were headed north. Didn’t you figure that was the wrong direction?”
“We can’t tell such things underground,” Katriel explained. She knew that dwarves could, their vaunted “stone-sense” being as much a part of their religion as it was a matter of practicality. A dwarf who didn’t have stone-sense was truly blind and considered a figure of pity, rejected by the Stone that had birthed them.
“Oh,” the dwarf seemed surprised, looking askance at Loghain and Maric as if his opinion of them now had to be revised to include such a sad handicap. Then he shrugged. “Well that explains it, dust to dunkels. You’re actually closer to Gwaren here than you were, though there’s not much there to see. The sea’s gotten into the outpost, last I heard.”
“We need to get to the surface, actually,” Maric said.
“Ah! Of course!”
“If you could direct us there . . . ,” Loghain suggested.
Nalthur grinned. “We can do better than that. We can take you! By the Stone, anyone who’s willing to journey through Ortan thaig deserves some respect. We’ll not send you back out there alone.”
Rowan’s eyes went wide in surprise. “You would do that?”
“We don’t want to keep you from your dying, or anything,” Maric said.
“Hah!” The dwarf clapped Maric on the back, just about knocking him off his seat. “To tell the truth, it gets a bit dull killing the darkspawn, day after day. There’s always more of them. An endless sea of evil to drown ourselves in, yes?” He shrugged and belched loudly once again.
Maric paused, suddenly churning something over in his mind. “So you don’t just fight darkspawn?”
“We cannot go back to Orzammar. What else is there to do in the Deep Roads?”
“You could probably survive out here a long time, if you wanted to,” Rowan said.
The dwarf snorted. “We’re dead men. What would be the point in that?” He waved his hand irritably. “There’s honor to be found in slaying the darkspawn, anyhow. If we’re to find our peace, we’ll do it fighting like true dwarves, fighting to take back what was once ours. Even if we never can.”
Maric smiled slowly. “How do you feel about fighting humans?”
Nalthur looked at Maric curiously. “You mean up on the surface?”
“I imagine there’s far more of us up there, yes.”
“Under the
“Unless we’re already too late, we could use your help at Gwaren,” Maric said earnestly. “I don’t know what I could repay you with. I’m not King yet. I might never be. But if you and your men are looking for their deaths, I can at least offer you a glorious battle with something other than darkspawn.”
“Deaths on the surface,” Nalthur said without enthusiasm.
Maric sighed. “I suppose dwarves just don’t go up there, do they?”
He snorted. “Ones without honor, perhaps.”
Rowan arched an eyebrow. “Aren’t you already exiled from Orzammar? What honor do you have to lose?”
The dwarf considered the idea, his face twisted into an unpleasant scowl. “We’ve none to gain, either. It’s not
