Yorvig startled awake.

“Blast! If that’s what the meat smells like, I don’t want any,” he heard Hobblefoot say with disgust. Yorvig lifted his head just as the others came into view around the side of the boulder. He raised his bandaged hand in greeting. His throat was parched, and his tongue felt swollen and stuck in his mouth. How much blood had he lost?

“Chargrim!” Sledgefist exclaimed, the first of the three to regain their composure. He rushed to Yorvig, kneeling next to him and staring, unsure of what to do.

“Are those. . .?” Hobblefoot asked.

“Shit."

Yorvig ignored them and looked to Sledgfist.

“Water, please.”

“Shineboot, fill up the skin!”

Shineboot hurried off. Hobblefoot approached the bodies of the ürsi, covering his nose with his hand. With the river so near, Shineboot returned in moments, handing a waterskin to Sledgefist, who looked at Yorvig awkwardly and then pushed the skin into his uninjured hand. Yorvig filled his mouth, swished, spit, then drank the cold draught in great gulps.

“Are there more about?” Hobblefoot asked.

“Hundreds,” Yorvig said. “But they’re scared of me.” It was an unusual fit of sarcasm, but he didn’t feel like answering questions.

“Is that true?” Shineboot asked.

“No,” Yorvig shook his head. “Just those. . . so far.”

“Slag, they stink. Drop them in the river,” Sledgefist said to the other two over his shoulder.

“Give me a hand,” Hobblefoot answered. Sledgefist frowned but stood and took one of the dead ürsi by the foot, as if he didn’t want to get any closer than he must. He and Hobblefoot dragged the ürsi away toward the river. Shineboot frowned, wrinkling his nose. The goblins were a bit shorter than the dwarves, perhaps three and a half feet, sinewy in frame. Their grey skin was suppurated and shone as if oily. They wore scraps of leather and hide. The short spears they’d wielded were solid, with iron heads.

“Gah,” Shineboot said. “I knew they were supposed to stink, but that’s foul.”

Hobblefoot and Sledgefist returned, their hands wet where they’d washed them in the river.

“We’ve got to get you back to the claim,” Sledgefist said, looking at Yorvig’s hurt leg. “Could you walk with a crutch?”

“I can try. Here.” Yorvig reached out his good hand, and Sledgefist took it, helping him to his feet. He felt dizzy again. He tried to put some weight down on his injured leg, but the pain seared, worse than when he’d been stabbed. Sledgefist steadied him.

“We’ll make a litter,” Hobblefoot said, picking up Yorvig’s axe from the ground and heading into the trees.

They sacrificed a bit more of Yorvig’s rope, but the dwarves had a litter built with speed. Hobblefoot and Sledgefist placed Yorvig atop it and bore him up, heading back to the claim.

"The fires," Yorvig said. "Tend the fires."

"We'll take care of it," Sledgefist answered. Shineboot hurried to place more wood on the fires and followed after.

At the claim, Sledgefist bathed Yorvig’s wounds again and re-wrapped them with fresh wool, as the dressings Yorvig had tied were stained with ürsi blood and stank. That done, Sledgefist put Yorvig in his own sleeping alcove. That night, the pain became intense, far worse than at first. His leg and hand throbbed, and the slice on his ribs tore open if he moved. So, Yorvig lay in silence, wincing and clenching his teeth, trying not to move. Sleep eluded him. He saw the glow of daylight arrive down the adit drift. Soon he heard tools: the sounds of saw and axe, then the blows of hammer and chisel on stone. He couldn’t see, but he tried to imagine what was happening based on the sounds—anything to distract him from the pain and the nausea that was growing in his belly. Striper the cat kept jumping up to lay atop him, and he kept swatting her away. It seemed every time he came to himself, she was there, a furnace of heat.

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Then, the light of day vanished. They had made a door. He heard Sledgefist, Hobblefoot, and Shineboot speaking in low tones. Their words sounded strange. Sledgefist came and gave Yorvig a drink, and laid a full waterskin next to him.

“Hobblefoot and I are going out. Shineboot will stay here and bar the door until we return.”

Yorvig managed a nod. Exhausted, he drifted for a while between waking and sleeping, brought out of jumbled dreams by spasms of pain. Shineboot came to check on him, like floating eyes in the dim light of a pine-resin candle. The smell of the pine was overpowering. Yorvig rolled and vomited bile over the edge of the alcove. Shineboot lurched backward. Yorvig lay back, his brow damp.

It seemed only the next moment that Sledgefist was there, saying something and pushing something towards Yorvig’s face.

“Here, here Char, you have to eat.” It was a thin-sliced piece of meat. The smell was nauseating.

“What. . . the meat?”

“It’s from the beasts you killed. We brought it back to finish smoking here.”

“It could have ruined it.” He’d worked so hard for that meat. For a moment, the horrible thought came to him that they were smoking the dead ürsi, but he realized it was an insane thought.

“Hobblefoot and I brought it back in one trip, on a pole between us. It will be fine. We’d already built the smoke hives here in the dell.”

“It may bring more of the—”

Yorvig retched again over the edge of the alcove. Sledgefist stepped back, grimacing, but he did not flee like Shineboot. Instead, he brought water in a rough wooden bowl and cleaned Yorvig’s beard, then forced him to drink clean water from the flask. After, Sledgefist stayed a while with his rough miner’s hand on his brother's shoulder. Sledgefist was often there during the times when Yorvig woke from wherever it was he went. Always there was the stiff throbbing of pain.

He heard Sledgefist and Hobblefoot speaking in hushed tones further down the adit.

“I’m sure the blades were vile,” Hobblefoot said.

“He will come through.”

Yorvig felt like he had heard that last bit many times over. “He will come through.” Yet he heard it as one far off and disinterested. His leg was throbbing. His hand and side had faded to a dull ache, except when he moved, but his leg felt afire. Striper was on his stomach, again. A sense of stir craziness came on him, a trembling unease and an urgency to rise. He had to get up, and get up now. It was a matter of life and death. He swung his legs out of the alcove and sat up. Striper yowled and leapt away. He was lightheaded. Sledgefist was there in a moment.

“Lay back down, brother,” he said, putting a hand on his chest.

“No,” Yorvig snapped. “No! Help me up.” He was struggling to rise.

“What is it?”

“My leg, we have to. . . unwrap it, now.”

“Sit down then, I’ll do it.”

Dwarves carved their sleeping alcoves just high enough to allow them to sit up with their legs over the side. Sledgefist took out his knife and cut away the knot of the bandage, then began to unwrap. The cloth was stained, and the last couple wraps clung together and to the wound. Yorvig gritted his teeth at the pain as it peeled away. There was a smell. He saw the strength of it pass over Sledgefist’s face. His brother looked up at him. Yorvig tried to lean over and raise his leg so he could get a good look. It was a struggle.

“It’s fouled,” Sledgefist said. It was unusual for dwarves to suffer fever or infection, but the ürsi blades must have been filthy. His calf was swollen, the skin looking like some kind of damp scaled fish-flesh. The wound itself was closed with thick, moist clots.

“Give me your blade,” Yorvig said. He was breathing hard.

“Why?”

“You’ve got to stab it.”

“You’re not thinking right, Chargrim. Let’s lay you back down.”

“No.” All Yorvig knew was that his leg was going to pop, and he needed it to pop. He reached down, grasped the swollen side of his calf with his thick calloused palms, and squeezed with what miner’s strength yet remained to him. The wound split apart, and white pus drained, squirting and then flowing down his shin. Sledgefist recoiled back as Yorvig squeezed again and again, moving his grip around his leg. It hurt, but the throbbing pressure was relieved, and it no longer felt like his leg would burst.

“Bring water,” he said. Sledgefist hurried away. Yorvig pressed the wound until some blood came, mixed with a clearer liquid. His brother returned with a bucket of cold spring water, and Yorvig bathed the wound, wiping away the clots and film. It was open deep into the flesh, but now he could see the red meat of his leg. His toes tingled, and he wriggled them, making sure they still moved. At last, exhaustion caught up with him, and his burst of energy departed. He lay back in the alcove.

“A cold cloth,” he said. His brother came back again with a clean rag, wet from the spring. He tried to lay it on Yorvig’s forehead, but Yorvig took the cloth from him and instead draped it over the wound on his leg. The cold felt good.

In minutes, he was asleep, and he slept longer and deeper than he had in a long time. When he awoke, he knew he had actually rested. His mind felt clearer, and there was hunger again. He reached up and petted Striper where she lay curled on his belly. One of her kittens, now practically full grown, had wedged itself between his left arm and the stone. Striper purred as he stroked her thick fur. The fur had grown thicker since he’d noticed it last, a sure sign of the approach of cool weather.

There is no time under the stone. There are only things and doings. There is waking and sleeping, working and celebrating, giving birth and dying, building and looking upon beauty, and preparing to destroy. If they must, the dwarves counted the time by the passage of the new moons; many preferred the night sky with its jewel-like stars to the brazen light of day when they walked the surface at all. Dwarven eyes needed little enough light, especially when given days, weeks, months, or years to adjust to the dark beneath rock. As it was, Yorvig had no sense of how long he lay there in the alcove.