High Iron Read online

  “I suppose not. And how are they planning to rescue us? Have they shared that with you?”

  “Of course. They just plan on digging in, at night.”

  If he thought this an unworkable plan, he didn’t mention it.

  “I am Hostenback,” he said.

  “Aiman,” I answered. “Aiman Shearer.”

  My name did not seem to mean anything to them. I found it a relief.

  They introduced themselves. The one chained up beside Hostenback was Ferlingas, and the third, on the floor, was Tam Shanter. Shanter seemed quiet and in very poor spirits. He seemed young. Hostenback and Ferlingas, for their parts, seemed to be holding themselves together with defiance, sarcasm, and hope.

  The White Mount dwarves did not keep their voices swallowed up in the backs of their throats quite as much as those of Stenhall did. There were none of the rough -gh’s among their names, as I heard with Maghran and Ghranam. They also did not speak with what so often sounded like, among the Stenhall group, ornery growls. But they were just as caustic, just as often. Hostenback queried me:

  “How did you get captured?”

  I told them about my walk to see Jed, and the kobold ambush. They asked how I had joined up with Stenhall dwarves in the first place, and that led to the long story of the attempted demolition of the railway.

  “And it was you who approached the dwarves of Stenhall, for this?” Hostenback asked. “You yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why was that? Do you speak for Emmervale?”

  “We all speak together. I just volunteered to walk up the mountain.”

  He let it go.

  “And finally,” I concluded, “we were hoping that we would dig you out, and be on our way. And I hope we still will. If all goes well, I will still be able to meet this man Jed in a day or two.”

  Hostenback shook his head.

  “You should have stayed with the group. This companion of yours would have been fine. Away in safety, and with a mount no less.”

  “He would not have known where we had gone.”

  “He would have figured it out. You would have been reunited back in your town at some point.”

  “Perhaps six months from now,” I said.

  “Come,” he said. “This dunter siege can’t last that long. Stenhall won’t allow it.”

  “Well,” I said. “Stenhall volunteered to blow up railroad tracks, it’s true. But apart from that I don’t think they have much concern for Emmervale.”

  They made no answer to this. We were all silent for some time.

  “So tonight,” Hostenback resumed, “is when they come.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “We shall prepare our fond farewells to this elegant place, in that case.”

  “How strong are those chains you are in?” I asked. “I know they’re intended just to keep you from digging—Herrar told us that—but from the sounds of those links, it seems they may bind you to these walls even when your kin arrive.”

  “They will have tools,” he said. “These chains will not slow them down for long.”

  I heard a door groan open, down the hall, and then footsteps. Two kobolds brought food. They were scrawny young ones, and both were chewing on something as they arrived with the iron trays; apparently they felt free to nab anything that looked appealing from our meals. Little of it did. There was bread that was edible, but otherwise the trays were piled with not-too-thoroughly-washed roots and tubers that had been fried in lard that was well past its best days. The kobolds slid two trays through a gap beneath the bars in the dwarves’ cell, and left. One then returned with a clay jug and one more small tray for me. As I inspected the fare, he departed, and then both returned once more with three of the clay jugs for the dwarves.

  I lifted the jug. It smelled of the same lard and bread as my tray, but fermented.

  “Bread beer,” Hostenback said.

  “Do they bring water?”

  “Never. This is it. And from the way the kobolds handle it, and the dunters we see, they seem to think they are being good hosts in sharing it with us. Quite sad.”

  The bread was tough, dense, but the least-worst of the meal, so I concentrated on it.

  “You think they consider this proper food?” I asked.

  “Perhaps,” Hostenback answered. “At the least, it’s clear they don’t want us to starve.”

  “Are there many other dunters here?” I asked. “I saw only one.”

  “We’ve seen only a few. Most seem to be out in the army, or armies. There’s Crotchet; that’s what we call the lord of this manor.”

  “He would be the one I saw.”

  “He welcomed you, eh? And one other, an even older one, we call Auntie Fang. And we’ve seen a flaccid young one who was apparently too dissolute to join the raiders. That seems to be all. There must be other females around, also, but we’ve seen none.”

  “You make it sound like breaking out of here would not be difficult, if you weren’t chained.”

  “It would not be, no. I suppose Crotchet would probably get a shot off, and old Fang too. I don’t think we’d have trouble from the young one, but the older two could at least raise an alarm. But we’d have to mind the kobolds, also. They have quite a fear of their masters and serve them faithfully. But when Herrar and Maghran make it here, we’ll be out quickly.”

  I listened to the dwarves pass around the trays and jugs. I had finished what I wanted of the bread and hoped I would never become hungry enough to eat the food as eagerly as they were doing.

  The light had failed out the little window. The dwarves did not speak, after their dinner, but I knew they were still awake. Time passed.

  “I will not be able to sleep, with your news,” Hostenback said after a long silence.

  “I don’t know at what time they might be here,” I answered.

  I sat with my back to the wall, and eventually dozed. I might have tried to stay awake for longer, but I had had a long day of travel and capture. I nodded off hoping to be awakened by dwarf spades smashing up out of the floor, or through the wall; or by Britta or Jed peering in through the window to tell me to ready myself to leave.

  I woke in the morning. Light from the overcast sky entered the cell. I had lay down fully on the ground at some point. As I sat up again, and felt my stiffness from the hard floor, I noticed equally hard dwarf eyes staring at me.

  “Good day,” Hostenback said. “It seems we are still here.”

  I glanced over at them; it was a grim sight. All three sat gazing at me. I stood and looked out the window, as if I might see something. Of course I did not.

  “I don’t know what might have held them up,” I said. “They intended to come last night.”

  “You’re certain this group of saviors exists,” he said.

  “Of course. Come, Hostenback. I could not fabricate a story about Herrar.”

  “You knew of her already. You certainly could have.”

  “She was nothing more than a name to me, before I met her. A few weeks ago I would have assumed that she never left White Mount.”

  Tam Shanter shook his head and grumbled, at this.

  “Perhaps the plan was put off because of your capture,” Ferlingas said. “It may be that your carelessness will keep us holed up here.”

  “And how would that be?” I asked.

  “The rest of the group might be waiting for you. Or searching for you.”

  “You think so,” I said. “Let me ask: Are you telling me that you, if the situation was reversed and you were free while Herrar was imprisoned, would put off the rescue because a man from Emmervale had gone missing?”

  He may have muttered something, to this, but he slouched over and said nothing aloud.

  Breakfast, such as it was, came at midmorning. Down the hallway a door creaked again, and the same two kobolds wandered up with the same food. After we had eaten—I again limited myself to the bread, but now had to drink some of the syrupy beer—the dwarves lay
down and slept.

  “You’ll pardon us, Shearer,” Hostenback said. “We did not sleep last night. Unlike you. Please do let us know if anyone shows up to free us.”

  There was nothing to do during that day, and what became the several following days. I listened for the urban sounds of Red Gorge, but heard little. Occasionally a shot or two was fired, some distance away, and several times I heard the steam and screech of a train.

  The dwarves were not very talkative, even after their anger with me about the first night’s missed rescue dissipated.

  They did tell me the story of their capture, months ago. It was just as Herrar and Maghran had described it: they had been on their way to visit Stenhall when they fell into magic.

  “We were working our way over a crest, quite high in the hills,” Hostenback said. “High enough so that little grew, and there was no cover for any enemies. And of course we were close enough to the lands of Stenhall—or in them, actually—that we thought we would be safe. At one point our path passed next to an outcrop of rock. The mages were there, making themselves invisible before it. They blended into the stones. One moment we were walking, and the next it was as if we had fallen into a sand pit.”

  “That’s what Herrar told us,” I said.

  “Our legs would barely move, and then stopped altogether. As if bogged down in mud. We were awake, well aware of everything, and by then could see the mages.”

  “How many of them were there?”

  “Just two. But after we were immobile, they called more. In order to carry us. They had four of them for each of us. They tied us to stretchers and hauled us down the way we had come, and then eventually here.”

  “You were awake the entire time?”

  “Alert, yes. As we came down the hills the effect wore off, but by then they had bound us. A few days later, we were here. Those Caranniam scum were walking through this city as if they stayed here all the time. Now we know why it suits them well.”

  “I wonder why they did not take you to Caranniam instead.”

  “It was part of the plan to put together that combined expeditionary army, I think. Caranniam wanted to show the dunters that they were good allies, so we were a token of that. Quite a prize.”

  To stanch the boredom I could gaze out the window, of course, but I did not do so very often. For one thing, there was seldom much to see. Two kobolds pulled a rough cart piled with what seemed to be trash, once; that was the height of the entertainment. I heard two or three dunters passing by, at various times, and stood to look at them. But I was reluctant to get up too often because it seemed so unfair to the dwarves, who were chained and windowless while I was free to look out. Hostenback did get in the habit of asking me, after each poor breakfast:

  “Why don’t you take a look and tell us what is new in the world outside today, Mr. Shearer.”

  And I am sure he was doing so as a kind gesture to me, since he knew I was avoiding the view. Nonetheless, nothing was ever new in the world that I could see.

  The dwarves seldom spoke. I wondered if they had been more talkative, weeks earlier, and were now too gloomy to converse. Maghran and certainly Herrar were not eager speakers, but these three made them seem like Bollard and Jed rambling in a tavern.

  We did not see the chief dunter, Crotchet, again, but at one point a pair of others shuffled down the hall past our cells. One was young and heavy; the other, coming behind him, was stringy and old. They were on some errand, it looked like, and the older one was not happy with the younger one’s speed. It leaned forward as they walked and smacked the young one on the back of its head. I realized the smacker was a female.

  “That would be kind Auntie Fang,” Hostenback muttered.

  At this the old dunter stopped, produced something sharp from her clothes, and hurled it at Hostenback. The dwarf made a half-effort to dodge, but the shard of glass struck him. It bounced off. The dwarves looked on, somewhat amused I think. Any one of the dwarves could have torn both dunters apart barehanded, were it not for the chains and bars, and it was going to take much more than a bit of glass to do them any harm.

  “It must be pleasant to carry around shattered trash in one’s tunic,” Ferlingas said.

  Meanwhile the young dunter, still hurting from the strike from Fang, looked back at her, crossly, but did pick up pace.

  The dwarves would stand and take few steps around their cells at regular intervals.

  “We’ll tighten up like knots of scrap iron if we don’t keep moving,” Ferlingas told me.

  The chains were long enough to allow them into a rude alcove that held their latrine, also. This may have made the dungeon relatively luxurious, as such things went in Red Gorge. For my part I had a hole in a corner near the outer wall.

  Our kobold jailers provided some diversion. In addition to those who brought food, we occasionally saw others passing down the halls with loads of firewood, bottles, sacks, various other things. One of them seemed to be a tinker, several times hurrying past us with a toolbox and a hammer in his hand.

  “These creatures keep busy even if few dunters are left,” I said once.

  “Indeed,” Hostenback answered.

  “They may do most of the work around here.”

  “Especially with the absences. But I believe the dunters run them quite hard all the time, no matter what.”

  “Do you know any of their language?”

  He snorted at this.

  “I have had no inclination in my life to learn the dog-men’s tongue, no.”

  But I tried to. They often came in pairs, and the ones who brought our food always did, and I listened to them speak. As usual, their speech sounded to me, at first, as nothing more than strings of yelps, snarls, and menacing growls; but if I paid close attention I could sort out words.

  Ragan, or something close to it, seemed to mean either “over there” or “put;” they said it when they were discussing the delivery of our meals as they nodded and pointed. Simple enough.

  One benefit to eating the same food every single meal was that the three words for it were not hard to grasp. Shinga was clearly the bread beer; rach or something like it was the bread; and the greasy roots were approximately arangrang.

  I decided to test my learning on the third day. The two porters stopped at the dwarves’ cell first, as they always did since that’s the direction they came from (on their way out of what I could imagine was a marvelous kitchen).

  As they bent down with the dwarves’ trays, I moved to the hallway bars of my cell. I reached my hand out through the gap between them, and said:

  “Ragan.”

  The two of them went silent and stone-still. Both stared at me. The dwarves glanced over, also, but the kobolds ignored them. Their eyes bore into me as if I had called them by name.

  “Shinga,” I then said.

  They stood still a moment longer and then blew up with laughter. They bent over, and shinga actually sloshed out of the jug as one clutched it to his side. The laughter sounded like a pack of dogs on fire.

  One of them finally got control of himself, straightened up, and walked over.

  “Zhirnga,” he said. He seemed to be correcting me. “Zhirnga, rafa.”

  “Rafa,” I said, and pointed to myself.

  “Rafa,” he repeated.

  I pointed at the dwarves and asked him:

  “Rafa?”

  He shook his head and said:

  “Shenken.”

  He thrust the jug between the bars and the two of them walked away. I had wanted to ask him what he called himself, but he didn’t turn back around.

  Hostenback said:

  “I don’t know why you waste your time with that growling.”

  “I never know whom I may need to talk to,” I said. I did not point out to him that the kobolds’ speech, in terms of being a growl, was not so far removed as the accents of the dwarves from Stenhall. Perhaps he would have agreed with me had I said so. In any case he and the other shenken just ate their food
quietly.

  After dinner each night, for three nights, the dwarves rolled their eyes (to the extent that I could see them) and brought up the planned rescue again.

  “I suppose you believe tonight may be the night,” Hostenback said on one of these evenings.

  “Again, their intent was to get us directly. Get you, rather.”

  “Well, I am going to sleep tonight, rather than keep vigil.”

  “I just hope they have not been harmed,” I said.

  “I suppose I must, too,” he said. “Pardon my flippancy. If Herrar and other dwarves are really out there, I do hope they are taking care of themselves. They are far from home. And on the wrong side of this miserable city.”

  One morning, after my customary look out the narrow window, which as usual revealed nothing, a racket down the hall announced the approach of Auntie Fang. I heard her screeching, plus the whiny voice of the flaccid young dunter, and also yelps from a kobold. I reflected that it was truly sad I had been down here long enough to pick out these three noises accurately before I could even see them.

  Auntie had the kobold by an ear, pulled downward, and was pushing and kicking him along the hall. Each kick meant that his ear was stretched, of course, and he craned his head to try to provide some slack. She was repeating something over and over, following it with kicks in rhythm. Meanwhile the laggard young one shadowed her, imploring her with something. His voice was always a whine, but his speech now seemed more pathetic than usual. Was he begging on behalf of the kobold? Did he own it?

  The three of them came to the door of the dwarves’ cell. Auntie looked at them, thought a moment, and then kicked the kobold a few more times to get him down to my door. She produced a key, opened the door, and threw the kobold in. She was strong enough to launch him into the air a bit, and he landed with a thump at my feet.

  She slammed the door shut and left. She and the young one shrank down the hall noisily, something like the creaky dunter locomotive I had seen.

  The kobold rolled over, looked at me in apparent fear, and backed away. He slid back on his behind without getting up. I could see that Auntie’s grip on his ear had done real harm; the skin was angry red, and seeping some blood. She had not been too far from ripping it off.