NOVEL NEXT Chapter 4: Day of Deliverance
“Good waking, little cousin,” Hobblefoot said. The dwarf was leaning against the drift wall, smoking a pipe. He must have been rationing his hill-smoke fiercely to have any left. Yorvig had smoked the last of his halfway through his trek to the claim. As if hearing Yorvig’s thoughts, Hobblefoot explained:
“I saved the last bit just for this morning.”
“Why this morning?”
Hobblefoot pulled the pipe from his mouth and smiled.
“Have you forgotten the day, little cousin?”
Yorvig did not like being called “little cousin.” No matter how kindly it was meant, there was something patronizing about it. Still, it was a common phrase and there was no use trying to change the familial expressions of their folk, and going against them could only cause trouble. One did not want such trouble in a mine—especially not a claim in the wilderness.
“Why? What day?”
“It’s Day of Deliverance.”
Centuries ago, Auntie Tourmaline and Uncle Salt led their folk out from slavery to the humans and into the Waste where neither ürsi nor human dwelt. They called them Auntie and Uncle out of affection, for they were great leaders. The humans pursued them, of course, hunting the dwarves as they fled through those low dune-like ridges of multi-hued sands. The landscape undulated with color as if painted by a feather in variegated strokes. Neither the dwarves nor the pursuing men fared well in that inhospitable place where the sun bore down like hot lead and the ground burned their feet.
Then the dwarves found Deep Cut, a dry canyon opening in the waste. With the humans on their heels, they fled down over rough sandstone and shale. There they found fissures into the deeps where the humans dared not follow. Down they climbed through passages of sandstone until they came at last to the vast underground lakes, as if all the moisture of the world had sunk down, away from the sun, carving its way through the sandstone until it came to rest on a bed of granite in aquifer lakes. On those deep cool shores the dwarves rested, given sight by the Miner’s Eye that grew of its own there, tracing up the cavern walls with its blue-green light. As if by a miracle, the lakes were full of the eyeless fish of the dark, and they ate and rested beneath the desert waste.
Their folk had found salvation beneath a land no one else wanted.
But water and fish were not all they found. Though few precious metals were to be had near Deep Cut, huge swaths of anthracite coal lay buried there, and beds of salt hundreds of feet deep. After digging a shaft through the granite, they found something else: an oil of the earth, bottled up as if under pressure, spraying out from beneath the rock, black and rich. Alas for those who first found out that it could burn. With those gifts of the deep, the dwarves had harnessed steam, and so cultivated the land again in the folds and terraces of the canyon, pumping water to irrigate. In Deep Cut their folk thrived and replenished their numbers over the centuries, where Auntie Tourmaline and Uncle Salt closed their eyes and lay entombed.
And on this day, the day they reached the underground lake and ate their fill of fish, they celebrated their exodus year after year.
They celebrated with fried fish and pipe-smoke and beer, ale, mead, or whatever liquor was at hand. Except for Hobblefoot’s last hill-smoke, their group of prospectors had only one of those elements: fish.
Yorvig and the others gave up work for the day and headed out to the river, first to net from the weir, and then to use hooks and lines and worms to see what they could catch as the morning wore on. Perhaps the memory of their folk smiled on them, for by the time the sun glared down from on high with its garish light, they had enough fish to each feast their fill, including an eel that had found its way into the weir.
The dwarves had set a wide, flat piece of sandstone outside the adit and used it as a base for their cookfire, but they ate inside the adit to stay out of the sun, leaning against the rough stone walls, facing each other in two lines, their legs crossed beneath them. They ate from carved wooden trenchers, picking the flesh off the bone with their fingers and sucking the juice from ring-slices of the eel. They used some of Yorvig's salt, for they had no other seasoning, and nothing but spring water to drink. The night before, Warmcoat had soaked needles of white pine in a bucket of water to give it a little tang, a little extra flavor They closed their eyes and pretended that they drank ale, the froth flecking their beards as the sound of the stone flutes and bronze-stringed harps undergirded the songs of their folk in a home far away and full of their kin.
“What are we going to name our claim?” Savvyarm asked as he sucked the juice off of his thumb and then his forefinger.
“Name it?” Sledgefist asked.
“Shouldn’t we strike first?” Shineboot asked.
“Should we?” Savvyarm asked back.
“Well, aren’t claims and mines often named after what they produce? Like Ironhold and Bronzepass?”
“We don’t call Deep Cut the ‘Salt Cut.’” Savvyarm said.
“No.”
“And then there’s Spindle’s Gulch.”
“Alright, alright.”
“Quartz Dell,” Warmcoat said. The others looked over at him.
“Where’s Quartz Dell?” Hobblefoot asked.
“Here. We should call it Quartz Dell.”
The dwarves looked around at each other. Shineboot shrugged.
“Quartz Dell,” Savvyarm said, quietly. “There is an awful lot of quartz.”
“Once we strike,” Shineboot said, “will we go back to Deep Cut, do you think? I mean, once we’ve enough.”
“I hear that East Spire is nearly grown to a colony, now,” Hobblefoot answered. “Deep Cut is mined out, but for coal and salt.”
“It’s home, though,” Shineboot said.
“But the air is often foul,” Sledgefist said. It was true. The smoke of the coal-fires and burning oil could be seen for tens of miles across the Waste, rising from vents and shafts cut for circulation. “Let the tillers and the tinkers have it. I like these mountains. It’s good stone, and there’s good air here. It’s no Kara-Indal, but it’s good rock and good air.”
“It’s no Kara-Indal,” the others muttered under their breath.
“I supposed it matters where the maids are,” Hobblefoot said.
“Ay, yes,” Sledgefist answered. “It matters that.”
“We could stay here,” Warmcoat said, lending a few more of his few words.
“What, and start a colony?” Hobblefoot squinted at the dwarf. Warmcoat shrugged.
“I don’t know about a colony,” Savvyarm cut in. “But Sledgefist is right. The air is good here, above and below the rock.”
They did not mine for the rest of that day. It was tradition not to mine on the Day of Deliverance. Even so, dwarves do not sit still and rest easily, and lacking intoxicating drink or enough food to eat themselves to bursting for hours on end, the dwarves took to mending and honing and sharpening. Even for Yorvig, who had only just arrived, clothes needed needle and thread, tool blades needed attention, boots needed cleaned and oiled. If they did not strike in another year, they would have to return to Deep Cut empty handed, if only to resupply. But they had pooled their wages for a whole year just to afford the supplies they already had. If this claim didn’t pay, it would be years before they could realistically look for another.
They all knew it. How could they not? Yet no one would breathe the possibility. Not at least until they’d endured a long winter to come. Until then, they would hope—hope that they found enough food to give themselves enough strength to mine, to find something of worth, something that they could take back to Deep Cut.
They worked with their hands in companionable silence, leaning against the sides of the drift, letting only the comforting sound of whetstone or stropping leather reach their ears. No doubt, they all had their own thoughts about what was to come. Yorvig was thinking of the seam high in the rockface only a few hundred yards away.