High Iron

by Tim Craire

  “The city has been taken,” Arken told me.

  “That’s what it looks like,” I said. “Even from the entrance.”

  We eventually stopped in the rail yard which I had seen weeks earlier. I got down from the horse. All the crates and cannons were cleared out now, of course, and it must have been one of the broader expanses of open air in the city. A good place for a conquering army to congregate.

  Hundreds of kobolds poured in. Some embraced members of the group that had returned from the expedition; others engaged in mock bite-fights with them, which was apparently one way young male kobolds greeted each other. Others were passing around jugs of what I guessed was zhirnga. I pitied them that they thought that stuff was special enough to celebrate with.

  Korf advanced through the center of the yard, and the crowd respectfully drew away to give him room. Then one local kobold walked up to him. It was Wukk’s companion, of the group who had taken me captive. It looked as if he had been a leader here while we were away. He was larger than average, I noticed, and wore a metal armband over his right elbow.

  He did something then which I had never seen, but which seemed normal for the kobolds: he licked Korf’s face. Korf just nodded at this, saying nothing.

  Wukk’s companion then began a report.

  “He says that the remaining dunters are mostly locked up,” Arken told me. “He says many jails and dungeons have been put into use for this. He says it must seem—ironic? It must seem ironic for the dunters that the abundance of jails they built are now being used against them. It sounds, Aiman, as if the dunters locked up these kobolds often.”

  “They did.”

  “So that has changed around. Other dunters, he is saying, have been placed in irons. And they are not being fed. We have gathered our grain and our animals into a few captured manors and a few yards where they can be guarded. Dunters are left to fend for themselves. Those few who can still move about are trying to catch rats and other such creatures they can find in the ditches around the city.

  “And now he speaks of the return of the dunters who are away. All roads and alleys into the city are guarded, now. Our next work will be to build walls. We will take apart many of the dunter manors to do this. This is a large city, but we are many. And we are used to hard work. That is what this kobold tells Korf,” he concluded.

  Korf turned to the crowd around him, made a fist, and shouted something. They all cheered.

  “Red Gorge City is now ours, he says,” Arken said.

  “I didn’t need translation for that.”

  Korf turned to us and approached. I was still taller than he was, of course—he had not literally grown—but he seemed a larger leader now than when we had met him back in the Kurtenvold.

  He spoke to me with his hands on his hips.

  “Are you glad now that you came in here with us?” Arken translated.

  “Indeed I am,” I said.

  “And now you should go. Your family must be waiting for you.”

  “They are.”

  “Chief Korf says you will always be welcome here,” Arken relayed. “You could bring back your comrades who visited us in the Kurtenvold.”

  “The dwarves?” I asked.

  “I believe the Chief was referring to your companions, the man and woman.”

  “Very good,” I said. “Arken, there is one thing I have to ask before I go.”

  “What?”

  “One of the dwarves I was with asked me to do this. Maghran, the one who spoke for us. The one who handed over the stone of arovis. And the axe.”

  “Yes?”

  “On his behalf, I want to ask for that axe back,” I said.

  I waited while Arken translated this for Korf. The big chief listened and then stood still a moment, ruminating.

  Korf then spoke to me, but he did so in a loud voice so that all the kobolds around him could hear.

  “This man has asked a question, he is saying,” Arken told me. “Maghran, brother to the ruler of Stenhall, has requested, through this man here, that I return my axe to him.”

  “That’s right,” I said. I hadn’t expected Korf to know exactly who Maghran was.

  “This is the dwarf who came to visit my people in our warren, and who paid me for the release of a prisoner. He paid me with arovis.” Korf now took the axe and raised it in the air. “He had to pay the additional price of this dwarven axe,” Arken relayed.

  Korf turned around with it. The kobolds watched him, waiting. He turned back to me and spoke again, loudly:

  “Tell Maghran and Stenhall,” Arken continued, “that I am pleased to do so. Tell him that Korf and the other kobolds who rule Red Gorge City are glad to send back his axe. And that we wish him well, and we hope to confer with Stenhall soon.”

  He raised the axe high in the air. He turned it once in the sun, so it glittered, and then handed it to me.

  The crowd around him went absolutely berserk. They jumped, they howled. It was even louder than the scene underground in their warren outside Kurtenvold, weeks earlier, when he had obtained the axe in the first place—and this despite the fact that we were now outside, not in an enclosed space. They seemed to understand that while it took a great leader to haggle a prize axe away from a dwarf, it took an even greater one to hand it back.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “They melted away,” Jed was telling me.

  “Melted? It was that easy?” I asked him.

  He and Britta and I were standing once again by the fence outside the paddock between our farm and Britta’s, just as we had so many weeks ago before we set out on our journey which had become so long. Our farms were still well-tended, even after all this. The land had ignored the fighting and the marching armies.

  “The dunters just picked up and headed west,” Jed said. “They apparently woke up to find themselves without food, and also without some of their weapons and nearly all their gunpowder. They were not in the mood to attack us with swords and knives.”

  “We wondered if we might have to push them out,” Britta said. “But they drifted away on their own.”

  “Drifted? Did they march out in any order?”

  “They did not. Their mob just broke up and headed west in clumps. We’ve been watching them. Some did not apparently even head toward Red Gorge; they went north, up to the borderlands between White Mount and Stenhall.”

  “Where they came from in the first place,” I said.

  Britta nodded. “Long ago. I can’t imagine they’ll find much there. But most will wander into Red Gorge City, or try to, in fits and starts. They won’t be welcomed, from what you have told us.”

  “They will not be, no,” I said. “I’m surprised they did not at least march together back toward their city. Even if it were just a mob.”

  Jed shrugged.

  “They had a hard enough time organizing themselves even when Caranniam and Varenlend were guiding them. And now they’ve lost that, and lost virtually all their possessions also. It’s no surprise they are adrift.”

  “Jed,” I said. “You almost sound sorry for them.”

  “Please,” he said. “We can’t joke about those murdering fools. But it should come as no surprise that they are wandering now. They’ve had their servants and virtually all their supplies taken from them. What would you do? If you had nothing?”

  I smiled. He had realized the answer as soon as he asked the question.

  “Indeed,” he said. “What would we do if we had nothing. Well, the dunters aren’t up to it, I know. But we would walk down from the hills and rebuild our home, wouldn’t we.”

  Also by Tim Craire

  The Pennants of Larkhall - Prince Harlan ascends the throne of Larkhall when his father falls beside him as they fight to save a village from a horde of northerners. Harlan instantly inherits the invasion and its imminent siege of his castle; meanwhile his kingdom is disintegrating from a blight which swallows entire farms and will starve his people even if they repel the siege.

&nbs
p; Tropic of Labrador

  Three stories:

  -2080 brings dustbowls and mass migration northward -- but on the bright side, there's also the Fourth Annual Jellyfishburger Cook-Off on the warm beaches of Labrador!

  Plus:

  -In the 2020s, a real football fan doesn't just support his team; he seizes it

  -A national security agent running out of people to spy on hires an expert