WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Dionysus
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◈ The Wizard's Memoir ◈
Chapter 18: Dwarf
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Etran snapped his fingers and quickly drew a magic circle.
He moved without hesitation, like a master craftsman struck by inspiration, finishing a work in a single sweep. He was so fast and precise that he seemed to be stamping it out rather than drawing it.
“Oh...”
After completing the magic circle in an instant, Etran crossed his palms. Then he spread them apart as if tearing a large sheet of cloth. The magic circle split into thirty-three circles that filled the space around him.
“Oooh!”
Even Olivia and Dahlia, who had seen this several times, found it fascinating. For a dwarf unfamiliar with magic itself, it was something else entirely. Childlike cries of wonder followed one after another.
Etran arranged the disks of magic circles in the air and slowly moved them around.
Under the midday sun, the magic drawn in light shimmered, half transparent. With his serious expression amid those circles, the boy looked every bit a great magical genius.
“Hmm... I thought so...”
But the genius didn't look satisfied. He rested his chin on one hand and moved the circles into different positions.
Everyone but Etran knew nothing about magic, so they couldn't tell what the problem was. In fact, even a reasonably skilled mage would have struggled to understand his concern.
Etran puzzled over it for a while before dismissing the magic when someone announced that the food was ready.
Rolf was on cooking duty today.
They took turns cooking whenever they ate outdoors. Honestly, they only called it “cooking” for lack of a better word. It was really just taking a turn stirring the pot. Today was no exception. Oats, barley, turnips, potatoes, sausages, and the like had been thrown into an iron pot and brought to a rolling boil. It was an adventurer's mixed stew.
“So today's the last day of this blasted slop.”
“No, it isn't. We'll have to eat it again on the way to Northern Ridge.”
“Waaah!”
With a light sprinkling of freshly ground salt and some hardtack or cheese to taste, it made a decent enough meal.
“It's a good thing the weather's cool.”
Etran emptied his bowl and swallowed his disappointment. Better to be a little hungry than to fight over the bits stuck to the bottom of the pot like the dwarf and the halfling.
“The farmers might disagree.”
The Northern Highlands had short summers and short rainy seasons. Potatoes were therefore the staple food in spring and summer, while oats took their place in autumn and winter.
“Do dwarves farm too?”
“Not on the same scale as you humans.”
They grew barley most of all, but it all went into making beer. What they actually cooked and ate were potatoes, cabbages, turnips, buckwheat, and so on. Even those had increasingly been bought from humans in recent years. The saying that humans were the backbone of the Alliance, and that their strength lay in their overwhelming food production, was the plain truth.
“Huh...? Then we won't get anything tasty in Graystone either? What about livestock? You raise livestock, don't you?”
“We can at least serve you some chicken.”
“Chicken? Did you say chicken?! Well, that's not bad...”
The two short races shared a curious bond over their appetites.
“What do you mostly do if you don't farm?”
“Logging, sewing, beekeeping. But our main work is metalworking. Our Graystone clan is mostly blacksmiths. Graystone pickaxes! Graystone hammers! You've heard of them at least once, haven't you?”
Everyone shook their heads. Grom worked their lips with the expression of someone chewing gravel. They seemed to be chewing up and swallowing a few curses too.
“A blacksmith village... That's good. Maybe we should get our equipment fixed up while we're there.”
Olivia muttered while examining their mace and shield. Neither needed replacing yet, but it was best to do it while it was cheap. Grom proudly thumped their thick chest.
“Don't you worry about that either! I've got ten cartloads of blacksmiths who look up to me as their big brother!”
“Me too! Me too!”
“Give me that sausage you're holding, and I'll consider it.”
Olivia's party cheerfully cleaned up and set off along the winding road again.
Like a typical dwarf, Grom never held back when boasting about their home and clan. They promised to provide meals and lodging with the full dwarven treatment. Adventurers to the core, everyone in the party grew excited about a new place, new encounters, and new opportunities.
But what greeted them a day later was a little different from what they had imagined.
@
Place names came about in surprisingly simple ways.
The King's City had a king, the Northern Highlands were mountainous lands in the north, and the Triangular Peninsula was shaped like a triangle. In much the same way, Graystone village had plenty of gray stones.
“Is this granite?”
Someone touched a rock lying beside the road. They didn't know much about masonry, but it seemed like good stone. Far to the south, where marble was common, even the groundwater came out cloudy. Here in the north, the ground was granite, and even the streams ran clear.
“Didn't dwarves live underground?”
“Making generalizations makes you a nasty human.”
Just as humans didn't spend all their time farming in fields, dwarves differed from region to region. Some clans lived underground, while others lived above it. The Graystone clan belonged to the latter group.
“It's all so small and pretty.”
On their first visit to a dwarf village, they found plenty of fascinating things to see.
Humans built houses from earth and wood, but dwarves built entirely from stone. Their houses were rectangular boxes, so straight and neat that they looked as though every line had been measured with a ruler.
Heavy snow might have seemed dangerous, but the dwarves were so hardworking that they never let more than a foot pile up. The buildings were also sturdy, with everything from the pillars to the foundation stones made of granite.
To add a truth that nobody mentioned, dwarves hated heights so much that they couldn't build tall roofs.
“Anyway, they will feed us, right?”
Dahlia muttered while rubbing their belly. Olivia's party dropped their stones and turned their attention in one direction. Grom was shouting, their beard bristling.
“What kind of pig-choir nonsense is that?! No entry? No entry?!”
Their expression made them look ready to kill someone, but there was no need to worry. By dwarven standards, this was a “somewhat heated complaint.”
“How should I know?! The damn village chief decided it! Stop shouting already!”
“The chief? Get that bastard of a chief out here! No, I'll go there. Tell the chief to stay put!”
“...Whatever the chief's faults, let's not throw insults around.”
“I'm about to lose face in front of these longlegs, and you think I care about the chief? Move!”
People said that elves were surprisingly strict about social rank, while dwarves were surprisingly egalitarian. Apparently, it was true. Even when Grom waved their short arms and legs and shouted, “I'm the chief as of today!” the response was lukewarm. Still, the chief couldn't ignore that. A dwarf with a snow-white beard came rushing out, huffing and puffing.
“We can't allow outsiders into our sacred cemetery! Especially humans and halflings!”
“Is that a cemetery? How is it a cemetery when there isn't a single body left?!”
“We'll catch the thief! Ourselves! With our own hands!”
“What a joke! How are you going to catch the thief when you don't even know how the bodies were stolen?”
“What help could those beardless weaklings possibly be?!”
Olivia tapped Etran's side. He understood a moment later and quickly began casting. Though he hadn't practiced it for this purpose, it was the same parade of magic circles he had rehearsed several times on the journey.
Snap!
Dozens of magic circles rose above his head. The dwarves, who knew nothing about magic, all stared with their mouths open. It was a magical feat that few besides Etran could perform so easily. A wild reaction followed.
“Woooah...!”
“A mage! It's a mage!”
The dwarf villagers had remained calm when a human adventuring party appeared and when Grom protested with veins bulging in their neck. Now they finally made a fuss. Grom alone stood with their hands on their hips and bellowed, “As if I'd just bring anyone along!”
@
Perhaps it was thanks to Etran's magic, or perhaps it was thanks to Grom's tireless protests. Either way, Olivia's party barely managed to enter Graystone village. They were also allowed to inspect the ancestral cemetery under the watch of Grom and the other militia members. The mood, however, remained unfriendly.
“...This isn't a dwarven welcome, is it?”
Whenever Olivia's party passed, windows slammed shut with a Bang! Etran looked embarrassed, and Dahlia grew dejected. Grom cleared their throat awkwardly.
“It wasn't this bad before. I think the incident has put everyone on edge.”
Still, a few dwarves showed an interest in them, like Grom did. One was the militia member assigned to guide and watch them.
“You human friends really are tall. Isn't it scary being so high up?”
With a beard only a handspan long, this was a “young” dwarf. In human terms, the dwarf was probably around Etran's age. Perhaps that explained the lack of prejudice toward other races and mages.
“Are you keeping that halfling around to eat later?”
“Wh-what?”
“I'm joking. Joking. Halflings don't taste good.”
There was so little prejudice that this dwarf could probably befriend an ogre. Still, it meant they could get information without anything being added or left out.
“I heard about what happened that night too. Let me think. Was it Brundal?”
The incident had taken place twenty days earlier. The first witness had been a night watchman on duty during the third watch. In other words, it had been deep in the night, when even the moon was sinking.
“Apparently, the watchman thought a wild animal had come down from the mountains and didn't think much of it. That happens from time to time. When the fourth-watch guard came to take over, the watchman warned the cemetery keeper.”
“And the cemetery keeper?”
“Acted in a very dwarven fashion.”
That meant ignoring it and going to sleep. Or being too drunk to wake up in the first place. Olivia grumbled, “What's that supposed to tell us? It's no help at all.” Still, they had something else to rely on.
“Can you sense anything like traces of magic or lingering mana?”
“...Is that a thing?”
Olivia and the other weapon wielders looked disappointed. Heroic novels really did come up with all sorts of strange ideas.
But an incident was bound to leave traces, even without magic. Etran quietly looked around the ancestral cemetery.
Perhaps dwarves had different values from humans. The cemetery lay in the mountain's shadow, where not a ray of sunlight reached.
It might have been a matter of cost, except that every headstone and grave marker was magnificent. Some bodies had even been preserved in stone sarcophagi rather than buried. That was all firmly in the past, of course. They were empty now.
“I thought so...”
“Thought what?”
Etran examined the dug-up ground and checked the broken coffin lids.
“From the end of the third watch until sunrise, there are less than three hours by daytime reckoning. It's impossible to rob hundreds of graves in that short a time.”
“That's why it must be magic!”
“Not just any magic. Necromancy.”
Etran found something in the dirt. It was solid evidence to support his theory.
“As you can see, these weren't broken from the outside. They were broken from within. Here's a hinge. See which way it's bent?”
The group put their heads together and examined the little hinge. Just as Etran had said, it was bent outward.
The other coffins, whether nailed shut or weighed down with stones, were no different. A close look revealed that the broken pieces had scattered outward. That couldn't have happened if someone had smashed them from outside with an axe or hammer.
Grom cautiously raised a possibility they hadn't considered because it defied common sense.
“The bodies got up on their own...?”
Perhaps it was because they were in a cemetery, but the wind felt eerie. Etran brushed the dirt from his hands and gave a simple conclusion.
“We need to find a Sorcerer. That's our culprit.”
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