Scree does not clatter under a duergar. I spent a late-winter morning on the slope above Candlow listening to seven of them cross loose slate below me, and all I heard was my own coat. They set the whole foot down at once, felt sole first, and test each stone before they trust it. Where they pass, the pieces lie as they were, dark sides still down. The quarrymen find them by the opposite of noise: a stretch of hillside where the jays have stopped. A duergar stands about four feet six inches, ash gray from scalp to boot, with square hands that hang to the knee when it stoops. The one I watched longest wore a rust-orange waxed leather jerkin studded with iron rivets over a gray wool shirt. The top of its right ear was gone, cut off flat as if by a chisel. Smoked glass goggles sat pushed up on its forehead although the sky was low and white. Kellan Throop, who drives mules for the Candlow quarry, calls it Half-Ear and says it has used the same cut for years. He is the only person I met who has spoken with one. He reports that they answer in a Common with every word for warmth taken out.
At the thaw the galleries under the slope run with meltwater and the gray folk come up to air their stores. They eat cave fungus, smoked bat and pale fish from the flooded drifts. Wherever they rest a pack on a rock they leave a ring of pressed grit the width of a dinner plate, and trackers follow these from ledge to ledge. Every March Candlow washes its doorsills with lime, the whole sill and a hand up each post, because a duergar will not step across white in daylight. The wash is renewed after any rain. A sill left gray is taken to mean the household wants company.
By summer they nearly vanish from the surface. The glare drives them under. Between June and August I saw one in the open, at Isenmas Pass, crossing a dry gully at a crouching run with the goggles pulled down and its teeth bared. Its face was set like a fist. They are not cowardly in light, only furious about it. A man at Isenmas who whistled at one was followed for two miles, without a sound, at exactly his pace, and nobody on that road whistles now. Throop says they sleep standing, one shoulder against the rock. I have no means of verifying this, and nobody I asked has watched one sleep.
In October I measured their stride on the Isenmas scree, laying a carpenter's rule beside fresh prints in lime dust. All seven in the party came to the same figure, uphill and down: twenty-two inches.
- Classification
- Gray dwarf, deep-mine humanoid
- Habitat
- Deep mine galleries and cut cliffs
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 4 ft 6 in tall
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Galleries beneath the mountains
- Binomial
- Lapicida cinerea
- Diet
- Cave fungus, smoked bat, blind fish
- Temperament
- Sullen, patient, grudge-keeping