A Sea of Skulls (Arts of Dark and Light Book 2)

by Vox Day

  There were two tracks, and very occasionally they saw a line of carts traveling the other way. These rare incidents were cause for celebration, as they broke the monotony, if only for a few moments, and it became the custom for someone to share with everyone from their stock of alcohol, be it Lodi’s keg of mushroom wine, Yori’s rather more expensive spirits made from fermented moss, or Orin’s eye-watering rotgut that he vowed up and down was made from crushed quartz.

  Only Myf refused to partake on such occasions. At first, her refusal to talk to anyone inspired some annoyance in the others, particularly Orin, but on the third day, when Lodi left the passenger area to use what passed for the facilities, he came back to see that Myf had commandeered his seat and was whispering quietly in Raldrizena’s ear, who was now sitting in Myf’s seat. He shrugged and sat down next to Raldri, for whom he had a fair amount of sympathy, given that the young dwarf’s position was even less enviable in some ways than his own.

  The days passed by slowly, but not as tediously as Lodi had expected. With the exception of Myf, they took turns telling stories about themselves, and both Yori’s tales of business deals gone awry and Orin’s scarcely credible recountings of unlikely get-rich-schemes and risky wildcatting ventures that were inevitably ruined by the peculations of one of his devious partners proved to be reliably entertaining.

  His own recollections of the siege of Iron Mountain, his efforts to free captured dwarves from slavery, and his own subsequent enslavement were also very well-received; Raldrizena, for one, couldn’t seem to get enough of hearing about the bloody sands of the Amorran arena. Yori and Thori didn’t believe him at first, until he lifted his tunic and showed them some of the scars various gladiators had left him as mementos.

  Only Orin didn’t enjoy hearing about the siege of Iron Mountain. As Lodi described the vicious battles in dark tunnels against goblin sappers, or the desperate stand of the Kingsguard on the terrible day when South Gate was breached and one in three dwarves of the Guard fell that day before the Troll King’s forces were beaten back, the black-bearded dwarf’s face gradually turned sickly green.

  “Buck up, old fellow,” Yori encouraged him. “It’s not like you’ve anything to fear. There’s hardly a war on!”

  Even Myf turned to look at the yellow-bearded dwarf in astonishment. It turned out that he had been so occupied with meeting their manufacturing orders, working day and night for nearly three straight months, that he had no idea the sky doors had been sealed. And it wasn’t until Lodi told the rest of them about his encounter with the tremendous army of orcs, some of which was quite possibly, even now, right over their heads, that the younger dwarf truly began to appreciate the situation.

  Lodi had to admit, however, that Yori’s reaction was not quite what he would have anticipated.

  “Thori, do you know what this means?”

  His twin nodded glumly. “We could have started the crew on making battle axes three weeks ago.”

  Yori waved him off. “No, it’s perfect! We’re going to be right there at Iron Mountain! While there is a war on! They’re probably handing out production contracts as fast as the king’s scribes can scribble them! Don’t you see? This is like hitting a pure vein of silver! No, it’s like stumbling upon a fountain of gold!”

  Thori glanced at Lodi, a worried expression on his face. Lodi only chuckled. It was hardly news to him that whether wars were fought above ground or below, the vultures would always take their pound of flesh. He leaned towards Orin.

  “You see, lad? We all does our part, right?”

  Everyone else in the cart appeared to be unsettled by Yori’s naked greed, so Lodi reached under the seat and pulled out the bag containing Raldri’s Grag stones. Grag was one of the more popular Dwarven gambling games, and the five dwarves had been playing it since the second day. They were playing for small stakes, by general agreement, but by the score on the slate toteboard Raldrizena was keeping for them, Orin already owned a small percentage of Yori and Thori’s business. Lodi himself was up twelve unsam of silver, while Raldri was modestly down.

  “Whose turn is it to toss?” Orin asked. The tosser rotated every round, as he was not permitted to bet.

  “Mine,” Thori answered, and Orin handed him the leather sack containing the stones with a wink and an expectant grin. Yori was too cautious and Thori was too eager, and the two of them were usually the first two players out. Grag was a simple game; the object was to score as close as one could to thirty-three without going over. There were sixty-six stones in the sack, each with a point value between one and ten carved into each side, which the tosser threw to each player, one at a time. The highest score won; a tie went to whichever player required more stones to make up the total. If the number of stones was the same, both players flipped over the stone of their choice and the lower number won.

  Six jokers of varying values complicated matters slightly, and each round required at least a copper to buy in. With each stone tossed after the second round, a player could call “deeper”, which would increase the ante by one level. There were seven levels; the deepest was diamond, but here on the cart they were yet to go beyond three, which was silver.

  Orin gave the sack a good shake, long enough to ensure the stones were well mixed, reached into it and expertly flicked four stones onto the floor with his thumb. Each one landed neatly face down in front of the player for whom it was intended, from Yori to Lodi. Lodi’s first stone was marked with a five; his second was also a five. When his third stone came up five, the others groaned. A run of three meant that the player could force the other players to flip over one or more of their stones. In practice, this usually meant that the other players would cave, which gave the round to the player with the run.

  Yori, on thirty, caved immediately. Thori, on twenty-four, also scooped up his stones; it was considered bad form to turn them over and see what one would have had. Raldri eyed Lodi, then shrugged and tapped the floor with his foot. He was only on fourteen, so he had a fair chance of turning over better stones than he had. When Orin glanced at him, Lodi held up two fingers, so Orin leaned forward and turned over Raldri’s first two stones.

  Now the young dwarf was on eleven, three less than Lodi. He smirked and called deeper. Orin flipped two more stones at them. Raldri’s stone showed a crown versus a six for Lodi, making it twenty-one to twenty. Lodi raised his eyebrow at that, then called deeper himself. Two more stones and it was twenty-six to twenty-four. Raldri stared at his five stones, then held up his hand. He was standing pat, so Lodi winked at him, called deeper again, and tapped the floor. Now they were playing for gold and Raldrizena was clutching her new husband’s hand so tight his fingers were bright red. All he needed was anything between a three and a nine.

  Orin tossed the last stone. It landed near Lodi’s small toe; an anvil was carved into it. Eleven points. That put him at thirty-five and he was bust!

  Lodi clapped his hands once and grimaced in mock disappointment as Raldri and his wife whooped triumphantly. Going deeper down to gold had put him down and Raldri up, which had been his intention as soon as he saw the twins withdraw. Now that he was safely returned from the Overworld, a gold coin or two made little difference to him. But it might spare a young couple a fight or two over money; he’d seen how hard Raldrizena took her husband’s petty losses over the course of their journey. They were only four days out now, and if the stones were kind, perhaps the lad would be able to buy his wife a little treat at the next station.

  But you couldn’t simply hand a dwarf charity; that would be an insult to his pride and his dwarfhood. You had to make the lad earn it, and if that meant slapping him down a few times in the process to see if he was dwarf enough to get back up, so much the better.

  He looked up and saw Orin stifling a grin. It didn’t surprise him that the shabby gragsnagger knew what he was doing. The black-bearded dwarf wasn’t just slick with the stones, he was damn good with the odds too. Lodi figured the dwarf would make himself a fortune in the b
arracks once they arrived at Iron Mountain if he didn’t get himself killed in one way or another.

  Then, without warning, the cart began to slow. It was a gradual, gentle reduction in speed, with the train slowing to a speed little faster than a walk, until at last it halted entirely. The seven of them sat there, unsettled but not scared by the unexpected silence, until at last Raldri got to his feet and opened the door, went to the rail, and leaned out over the track.

  “We’re not moving,” he announced unnecessarily.

  Lodi pushed himself to his feet. He had a bad feeling about this. Everything had gone smoothly, much too smoothly, if the last two decades of his life were any guide. He looked back at the other carts, and by the flickering of their glowlamps, he could see that their passengers were up and moving about in confusion too.

  “Better have a look,” he said.

  “You can’t get off!” Yori protested and he reached out to grab Lodi’s tunic. “If it starts up again, you’ll be left behind!”

  “Better me than you, friend.” Lodi chuckled as the dwarf released him. “Besides, I got me a feeling that we ain’t going anywhere.”

  “Why do you say that?” Raldrizena demanded, but Lodi had already joined her husband outside the compartment.

  “What do you make of it?” he asked the younger dwarf, who was leaning over the rail and peering down into the darkness below.

  “Not a damn thing. There isn’t enough light to see anything. You’d think they’ve got an engineer along?”

  “Easy enough to find out.” Lodi jerked his thumb towards the rear. Go back and see if anyone in the other compartments knows what’s up. I’m going to check something.”

  “What’s that?”

  Lodi followed the rail around to the front of the cart. Without any glowmoss on the tunnel walls nearby, it was like staring into the mouth of the void. He could sense the huge open space extending for miles before him like a demon’s gullet leading down towards its fiery belly, but he could not see it.

  His own gut was telling him something, but he couldn’t think what it was. Then a thought struck him. He didn’t know how the tunnel-train operated, but he knew it operated on heat. Previously, when he’d stood at the fore of the cart, he’d felt a slight heat coming up from the rails on which it ran. Sometimes there was even the faintest of glows in a line that indicated the track. But now, he could see nothing, and he couldn’t feel any warmth radiating upward either. Well, there was only one way to check.

  He took a deep breath, jumped down from the cart, and knelt down in the middle of the track, hoping the train wouldn’t suddenly spring to life and crush him. But there was little chance of that, for as he feared, the central ridge, a rounded iron tube wider than his leg, was barely warm. There was still a lingering remnant of heat there, but whatever magic or thermal energy had powered it already appeared to have vanished.

  He stood up and placed his hands on his hips, looking up at the cart, wondering what under the Earth they were supposed to do. The carts had no form of self-propulsion, and they could hardly drag them along until they reached another downhill section of track. Even if by some miracle they could, unless the track came to life very slowly, they’d run the risk of failing to get on again before the train picked up speed and left them behind.

  It wasn’t as if they were going to starve. They had sufficient supplies to reach the next station; this close to Iron Mountain there were several stations less than a day apart. What concerned him was what might have caused the system failure. Aside from the siege, when the entire tunnel had been collapsed for ten leagues in order to keep the orcs from finding it and exploring it, he had never heard of the tunnel-train going out of order before. It had few moving parts and the technology developed by the legendary Dworris the Digger had been old before Lodi’s great-grandfather was born.

  “Better not be damn orcs again,” he muttered as he climbed back aboard the cart. He’d had about enough of the cursed creatures. He saw Raldri and the two twins were talking in low voices with a strange dwarf outside the compartment. As he slipped under the railing, he grunted, and they turned towards him in near unison.

  “This is Khurzo,” Yori introduced the stranger. “His brother is the station-master three stops back.”

  “The rail is cold,” Lodi said. “That’s why the train ain’t moving.”

  “It’s cold?” Khurzo gasped. “That’s not supposed to be possible!”

  “Jump off and see for yourself.” To his surprise, the dwarf nodded and did just that. Lodi shrugged and turned to the others. “Get the lasses to packing as much food and water as they can in whatever we can carry. Then have them make torches from whatever they can find. I got my axe and another knife in stowage. Any of you got any weapons? Or armor?”

  Raldri had a long knife, but Yori and Thori were unarmed. “We can open one of the crates, take out the pickaxes,” Yori suggested.

  “We can’t do that? They’ll lose a third of their value if they’re scratched! How can we say they’re new if they’re all blunted and banged up?” Thori said.

  “We can’t sell anything if we get caught unarmed by cave goblins, Thori,” his brother pointed out. “We’ll be dead.”

  “You don’t think it’s cave goblins, do you?” Raldri sounded nervous. “Or orcs?”

  “I don’t think anything,” he said. “I know we can’t stay here. What we can do is gear up and walk to the next station. It’s been a while since we passed the last one, so it can’t take us more than thirty-six hours, and probably won’t take more’n eighteen. But one thing I learned above is that you don’t go nowhere without being ready for trouble.”

  At first, the twins and Raldrizena resisted the idea of leaving the false safety of the cart. Myf, he was pleased to see, no sooner heard his instructions than she went about the preparations he’d ordered, although she was as silent as ever as she did so. The dwarves on the carts farther back were slow to go about it, judging by the sounds that echoed off the rock walls of the tunnel, but the longer the train sat motionless in the darkness, the more dwarves seemed to decide that they couldn’t simply sit there and wait for it to start moving again.

  As Myf was tying a second skin of water to the backpack he didn’t remember her having, he caught her arm. Her eyes were wide in the yellow glowlight, and for a moment, he almost forgot what he’d intended to tell her. “Look, I know keeping your mouth shut is important to you for Hublok Otek knows what reason. But I promised those folk that I’d bring you back to your kin and I aim to do that. Now we don’t know what’s out there in the dark, but if we run into something, and my gut tells me we’re going to, you need to listen to me. And that means you’ve got to talk to me. Can you do that?”

  She looked down at the floor. He wasn’t certain in the light, but he thought perhaps her cheeks might have reddened somewhat. “We can… it is permitted to speak to the Skyburned in cases of emergency, and I have been placed in your charge. I am correct in thinking this may be one?”

  Skyburned? That was a new one on him. He pursed his lips. “An emergency? I don’t truly know, lass. But I seen a fair amount o’ brouhahas in my day, and one thing I know is if you wait until you’re sure, you’ll wait too long.”

  “I have seen–” she stopped herself. “I know you are a great warrior, Lodi, son of Dunmorin. And you are a good dwarf, though you are Burned. I will obey you. And I will speak to you since you tell me I must.”

  He stared at her, and for the first time her innocent emerald eyes met his. Something twisted inside him, something broke, as if a very old scar had finally given way. And he decided, as he looked into her unblinking gaze, that he would die before he would permit anything to happen to her.

  “All right, you do that,” he said gruffly. Then he turned his back on her and stalked out of the compartment to see what the twins were doing with their damned pickaxes.

  By the time the other compartments were packed and ready to leave, more than an hour had passed, and eve
n Raldrizena was now convinced that the train wasn’t going anywhere. Every male dwarf was armed, many of them with the shiny new pickaxes that Yori had mournfully distributed, muttering darkly under his breath each time he ran his fingers over the runes inscribed with the prospective owner’s name. They were thirty-six strong, plus another ten paslhas who joined Raldri’s wife and Myf in the middle of their loose formation.

  Lodi, Orin, and another veteran of the great siege took the lead; Boru was forty years older than him, and he had been traveling to Iron Mountain with his great-axe and a full suit of plate armor, complete with helm. They both slung their axes around their backs and carried torches, as did every fifth dwarf behind them. Raldri and the twins brought up the rear; Lodi didn’t know them well, but he had enough sense of their character that he trusted them to keep the others moving.

  “Is this what soldiering is like?” Orin asked after they’d been walking for a while. He was panting a little, as they were laboring up an incline that seemed considerably steeper than any they’d climbed on the train.

  “You bored?” Boru asked.

  “I don’t know, I suppose. I mean, we’re just going from nowhere to nowhere in the dark.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much what it is,” Lodi growled. “Except it ain’t so boring when a bunch o’ screaming orcs is trying to chop you to bits.”

  “I suppose boring ain’t so bad,” Orin said after a moment’s reflection.

  “No, it ain’t,” Boru agreed, huffing and puffing in his heavy armor. “Dammit, Lodi, I may have to take this off if we got to keep going up instead of down!”