Dan Willis - The Survivors

“I don’t know what I am,” he said finally. “I’m not sure what I believe.”

“That’s gutless,” Erus declared, taking another drink.

Bradok looked up at the dwarf sharply, intending to protest, even to challenge him to a fight, but the dwarf’s accusing gaze froze the words in his throat. The dwarf’s eyes appraised him for a long time, their depths hard and flat. Bradok wanted to glance away, to look anywhere else, but those eyes held him fast, as surely as a vice. Then Erus blinked and looked away, accepting the fresh tankard the barmaid had mechanically brought him.

“Let me tell you something, Bradok,” he said, taking the fresh drink and tackling it with gusto. “There comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to make a choice. When that happens, you can’t stay on the sidelines; you have to enter the fray.”

“There! You’ve done it again. How do you know so much about me? How do you know my name?” Bradok asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Erus said, setting his cup on the bar and leaning closer to Bradok. “When the time comes that you are forced to choose which side you’re going to be on, I think it would be a good idea if you found out just what you did believe.” Erus reached into the front pocket of his apron and pulled out a steel coin, which he spun on the bar. “Because it’s much easier to make the right choice when you know what your beliefs really are.”

“Easy for you to say,” Bradok said, genuinely confused.

Erus smiled. It was a warm, sincere, friendly look, full of compassion. “Right you are,” he said, taking a small cloth-wrapped bundle from his apron. “Here,” he said, holding it out to Bradok.

Bradok took the bundle hesitantly. From its size and shape, it might have been a pocket watch.

“Take this to the Artisans’ Cavern,” Erus said solemnly with the hint of a wink. “There you will find the shop of Silas, the cooper. You might also find some of the answers you seek.”

He got up off his stool and slung an enormous warhammer over his shoulder. “Be warned, though,” he added. “The time to choose sides is almost upon you. Don’t take too long to make up your mind.”

With that Erus turned and strode to the door, exiting into the dimly lit tunnels without so much as a backward glance.

Bradok scrambled to dig a few silver pieces from his coin purse before he raced to the door and out into the street. The narrow tunnel ran straight to either side for several hundred yards, but Erus was nowhere to be seen. Despate the dwarf’s formidable size, he seemed to have completely vanished.

Bradok opened his hand, looking at the wrapped bundle. A soft linen cloth covered the object, held in place by a length of twine that had been tied on top. He took hold of the loose end of the twine and hesitated. A strange sense of foreboding swept over him, causing a chill to run up his spine. He couldn’t help feeling that he had been handed a piece of some great and terrible destiny, and he wondered if he dared accept his fate.

After a moment, however, his natural curiosity got the better of him, and he tugged on the twine, pulling the knot free. Carefully, he removed the cloth, revealing an exquisite brass device. It looked like an oversized pocket watch with fine etching covering its every surface. Bradok had never seen etching so fine; it seemed impossibly small yet perfectly straight, as if done by the most unwavering of hands. The pattern looked basic at first glance, but as he examined it closely, Bradok saw that it wound over and around itself, like a ball of knotted string.

In the exact center of the top, a purple gem had been set. It was cut to be flat on top, with flat sides around it and, although Bradok had years of experience with every kind of gem known to dwarf, it was a stone he’d never encountered before.

As he turned the device over in his hand, Bradok spotted a small hinge, indicating that the top of the object was covered by a door of some kind. Opposite the hinge, he found a small, hidden clasp. When he pressed it, however, the lid didn’t move. He tried prying at it with his fingernails, but it didn’t budge.

Then something suddenly caught his eye. The purple stone gave off a soft glow. Fascinated, he held it up to his eye. The light from the stone seemed to reflect on certain parts of the etched surface of the top, causing some of the lines to glow. To Bradok’s great astonishment, they formed words across the object’s face, tiny yet readable words.

“A person’s destination depends more on his choices than his direction,” Bradok read. Still puzzling over the strange saying, he slipped the device into his pocket.

He didn’t know why, but for some reason the brass device suddenly seemed more urgent than anything Arbuckle might be plotting. “I guess I’d better find this Silas fellow,” he said to himself.

Undercity, as its name implied, had been built below Ironroot proper. To keep from undermining the stability of the upper caverns, Undercity had been built down and away, gradually curving into a descending spiral. To reach the Artisans’ Cavern, Bradok had to wind his way back up, almost to Ironroot cavern, then along a side passage for almost a mile.

The connecting tunnel consisted of two parts. Along the left side ran a raised walkway, set aside solely for foot traffic. The rest of the wide tunnel contained a divided street set with rails. Metal carts pulled by donkeys moved goods in and out between a loading dock on the Ironroot side and the artisans’ shops below. The carts had been put in as a security measure to control what actually passed into the Artisans’ Cavern. Most of Ironroot’s artisans worked with steel in one form or another, making the cavern a tempting target for thieves.

Bradok watched, fascinated as a donkey pulled a row of three cars up toward the loading dock. The cars were filled with wrapped bundles, and they jumped and jostled each other as they made their way along the tunnel. A train of five cars passed, going the other way, rattling and clanking like armor dropped down a stone stairway. Since the Artisans’ Cavern had been built slightly lower than Ironroot proper, the carts could return under the power of gravity, meaning they moved faster and in greater numbers.

Unlike Ironroot cavern, the Artisans’ Cavern was not natural; it had been painstakingly carved out and provided with multiple ventilation shafts that connected to the surface.

Because of the smoke that perpetually hung over the cavern, the tunnels didn’t have long strings of lanterns for light as Ironroot proper did. The ceiling of the cavern had been built like an enormous chimney, designed to funnel the smoke of the many fires up and out. By law, all chimneys had to be higher than the top of the Ironroot tunnel, lest any smoke get passed to the city above. That left a layer of cleaner air, close to the ground where glow lanterns on short poles were hung. Because of the carts and the system of rails, elevated walkways continued out from the tunnel, keeping pedestrians above the clattering carts. Each of the walkways was brightly lit with glow lanterns every few feet, giving the impression of ghostly lanes hovering above the dark floor.

Bradok exited the tunnel and went left at the first fork he came to. He didn’t know exactly where Silas the cooper might be found, but he knew that most woodworkers would be clustered together down one of the left-hand passages.

A few inquires directed him to a freestanding wooden structure in the corner of one of the deeper side passages. He would have known it even if he hadn’t asked, as it had an enormous barrel for a doorway and a crowd of people milling around it.

Bradok hesitated for a moment. He was a public figure, and it probably wouldn’t be good to get mixed up in whatever had drawn the crowd to Silas’s shop. Still, the memory of Erus’s words, telling him that Silas might have the answers he sought, rang in Bradok’s mind.