The White Fox (20 page)

He took it and shook it vigorously.

“Hakim Morabbi, Chancellor of the National Academy of Khălese in Tâbesh, at your service,” the elf said, shaking Jack’s hand perfectly normally. “And this,” he continued, when the remaining dwarf failed to introduce himself, “is Bál Thorin, His Majesty’s nephew.”

Bál grunted at them, doing an excellent impression of Lucy on Monday mornings. Jack got the feeling that he resented missing his chance to leave the room with the king.

A moment later, Bál and Hakim made their excuses and hurried off, though a considerable distance apart.

“Come on,” Smith said. “We’ve got to get you sorted out for this afternoon.”

Jack followed Adâ and Lucy out of the chamber, leaving his empty plate behind.

Outside, the dining room was still as busy as before, except that the overflow of refugees seemed to have spilled into here as well, with some chewing meat next to their bags and carts in corners and others having commandeered a table. Smith marched away with surprisingly long strides towards the opposite door.

Just as they were about to follow, Adâ faced them. “Thank you,” she said quietly before bustling off behind the forgemaster.

Jack turned to Lucy in mock shock, but she was clearly not in the mood for jokes, having just been volunteered against her will for a mountain expedition. As Jack followed, he reflected on his mixed feelings about Adâ. He could not suppress the notion that they had been manipulated by her into getting her own way. But, he acknowledged with some surprise, he pitied her.
He
knew what it felt like for someone close to disappear suddenly without a trace, and, he supposed, being put on babysitting duty for two thankless teenagers must have been very frustrating when she was so worried about Sardâr’s well-being.

A few minutes later, having climbed through the innards of the cliff via more flights of stone stairs, they emerged into the light. They were standing on an open air metal platform that seemed to fill a gap in the cliff face, affording them a phenomenal view over the valley. The mining machinery they had seen the day before was working just as it had been, beneath the magnificent grey peaks that brushed the lower cloud banks. Directly below them, another mass of refugees thronged towards the main gate, escorted by a group of the green-tunic guards.

Smith led them along the gangway, which clung to the side of the cliff. Both Jack and Lucy kept well back from the edge. They couldn’t see what was supporting the metal bridge, and neither really wanted to find out that it was nothing at all. A large doorframe was set into the rock at the end of the gangway, and it was to this that Smith moved.

Inside was extremely hot. Jack looked down and jumped backwards in shock. The gangway continued into this chamber, but now it suspended them over a lake of deep crimson liquid. Patches of black rock formed on the surface here and there, and every so often a bubble popped loudly on the surface.

Dwarves, clad in scaly-looking aprons and gloves, were hunched over on high platforms raised above the lake by thick, charred columns of rock. Some funnelled the liquid up in metal chutes, others fed it into what must have been miniature furnaces, whilst still more beat weapons into shape on the anvils above. Rails were suspended by poles from the ceiling, a series of hooks hanging from them. More dwarves added the completed weapons to the hooks and gave them a hefty push, sending them rattling down to the opposite end of the chamber.

“Is this … molten lava?”

“It’s from the mountain,” explained Smith as they crossed the gangway over the pit. “Magma is channelled into this chamber and cools, so we can use it as a natural forge.”

“
This
is cool?” Lucy said incredulously.

Smith chuckled, showing his wide teeth again.

They reached the end of the gangway and passed under another doorframe. As they walked, Jack noticed that there were two massive holes in the rock on either side of the gangway through which the rails swerved together and continued. In the next chamber on the other side of a rock partition, the rails curled around and lined up to form a sort of bizarre department store. He had to look at it more closely to realize that the room was an incredibly huge chamber; where they were standing was only a platform overlooking a massive cavern full of the rails, all with metallic objects hanging off them. Some dwarves stood near the entrance, sorting the arriving goods onto rails. More were standing in the aisles on the lower levels or crossing the further matrix of gangways to reach items on higher rails.

Smith beckoned one over and gave him a series of instructions. The dwarf nodded and scuttled away to look amongst the racks.

“This fortress was the first of the seven that are the strongholds of our kingdom. Our ancestors built this one around the use of weapons … We were a more warlike people then …” Smith glanced over a few documents on textured parchment. “This forge has been here for hundreds of years, and our mechanisms haven’t changed very much. All the major doors are operated by axes. Even the emblem of the royal family is an axe.”

“Well,” said Jack offhandedly, watching several swords appear through the hole in the wall and swirl down to the store, “you’re always ready for a fight.”

“Don’t mention fighting,” Smith replied darkly, still scanning his documents. “Ever since Sardâr disappeared the king has been extremely jumpy. He’s convinced that we’re about to be attacked at any moment. It is understandable, given that he has direct responsibility for so many refugees within this city.”

The dwarf returned, his platform now laden with a multitude of different plates of armor and weapons.

Smith straightened and looked Jack and Lucy up and down. Instinctively, Lucy covered her chest.

“Both of you are too tall for dwarf armor,” he remarked. “Luckily for you we have some spares for other races, usually commissioned and then never picked up by visitors. We don’t get many of those, though.” He siphoned through a few unidentifiable pieces of armor. “Try these on.”

A few minutes later, Jack and Lucy were clad head to foot in dwarf-made armor. It mostly consisted of a thick, scaly hide, backed with leather, which Smith explained was troll skin (this didn’t encourage either of them, particularly after what Jack had heard about grungles the night before). There was a chest plate, gauntlets, a metal-topped helmet, and another pair of protective boots. In addition, they had each been given a rather cumbersome large sword and a round, dull silver shield. The entire thing was absolutely stifling in the intense heat.

“Of course, depending on how long you stay here, we might have to invest in a custom-made suit for each of you,” Smith said, stroking his beard.

As Jack tried to loosen his tunic slightly under the armor, he had the painful inkling that this might be necessary.

After thanking Smith excessively, they followed Adâ out of the forge and into the open air. The fifty-foot drop to the rocks below did nothing to ease their light-headedness.

The journey was extremely strenuous.

To the south of the colony-city of Thorin Salr, an ancient flow of lava had cleaved a gap between the high rocks. There, a trail of volcanic rock, dulled in color over the aeons, rose. It wove steeply up from the valley, cutting into the edge of the mountain as it climbed. The sparse vegetation found in Thorin Salr became less and less prevalent and eventually ceased altogether.

Each time they reached a bend in the trail, they were afforded a view of the surroundings. The mountainous valley was directly below, falling farther and farther with every glimpse. To the north, the mountains gave way to hills and then rocky, grassy plains that looked like they could have recently been used as arable land. To the east and south, the massive effigies of rock disappeared into the mist, with the dull grey mass of the sea in the distance.

The search party had, in accordance with Jack’s request, featured himself and Lucy. Accompanying them were Hakim and Adâ, three dwarf soldiers, and, much to the surprise of them all, Bál. They could only assume that the king had commanded him to go. His attitude was one of sullen resentment from the moment they had left.

Jack, for one, was extremely uncomfortable. Apparently, the armor he wore hadn’t been designed for elves. It was particularly height restricting, so that the bottom edge of the breastplate cut into his diaphragm, and the boots reached only halfway up to his knees. The helmet did not well accommodate pointed ears, and he had removed it several times to feel deep, sore grooves in them. On top of all this, the temperature was tangibly increasing as they climbed higher.

Lucy wasn’t particularly happy, either. Her parents “not believing in exercise” (although she had considerable natural talent at netball), she was having serious difficulty keeping up with the rest of them. Every so often, Jack had to wait two minutes for her to struggle up the slope to join them, by which time the rest of the group were two minutes ahead. In addition, she seemed to have decided that being concussed by a falling boulder was preferable to helmet hair.

In the first stages of the journey, Hakim had hung back to talk to Jack. Jack quickly gathered that he was feeling a little guilty about Sardâr’s instructions.

“This mountain,” he had said, “is supposed to be a relic of an ancient epoch. According to legend, a malevolent dragon was slain here by the patriarchal dwarf hero Rofhæle. The beast’s body fell into the heart of the volcano, and its spirit was fused with the mountain itself. It’s an old dwarfish superstition that when the mountain erupts it is the ancient dragon taking revenge on the descendants of its murderer.”

Jack nodded, genuinely interested. He had always enjoyed myths and legends at school, and a small part of him—the seven-year-old part—was revelling in this opportunity to almost live one. But for now, what concerned him were the matters immediately at hand. “What’s up with Adâ?”

Hakim smiled slightly and lowered his voice. Adâ’s long dark plait was swaying down the back of her travelling cloak some twenty feet ahead. “She’s going through a tough time. Sardâr left without telling anyone, not even her. She’s normally perfectly amiable, but I must admit, I don’t envy you two being escorted around by her in her current state …”

After at least an hour of trekking, they reached the end of the trail and halted. A doorframe, like the ones leading into the forge, had been set into the rock here, carved with numerous runes and symbols. In stark contrast to the cool mountainous air, the gap in the rock exuded heat like the breath of a sleeping beast; the hint of extreme incandescence far below was augmented by the fiery glow.

Hakim felt the scorching air with his outstretched hand, then turned to talk to Adâ. He whispered something in her ear. She appeared to consider for a moment before nodding.

“Right, let’s go,” Hakim said finally. He headed into the cavern with the four dwarves and Adâ. With a growing sense of foreboding, Jack followed.

The heat became steadily stronger as they descended. Jack was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. It was claustrophobic in the dark narrow tunnel, with people clustered closely together and only a menacing orange light to show the way. Even Lucy’s attitude of bad-natured rebellion was gone, replaced by a lurking fear that was hard to identify.

Finally, after what seemed like days, the tunnel widened, and the red glow became more pronounced. Hakim rounded a corner and disappeared, and Jack followed.

The heat hit him like a blast of boiling water. He’d felt nothing like it before. It was like all the sunburnt weeks of August rolled into one, with midday at the equator thrown in for good measure. His eyes were forced shut by the wall of inferno heat, so it took him a moment to gauge their new surroundings. They were standing on a small crag of rock, suspended about halfway up the volcano. Before them, expanding outwards for what could be miles, was a pit of crimson liquid. There was no scraggly skin on top of this; instead it bubbled and frothed like a stormy river. Thick walls of steam rose and coiled into the air like snakes, disappearing into the distant, gold-tinged blue, which was the ring of sky above. Indistinct and cloudy, the arms of the rocky cliff face reached around the fiery pit and met in a rough circle on the other side of the crater over a hundred yards away.

Strangely, the wave of heat seemed to have little to no effect on the dwarves. Jack was already sweating profusely, and Lucy’s normally straight hair was becoming more and more bushy by the second. Adâ maintained a look of serenity, slightly offset by the flush of scarlet that had flooded her face the moment they had entered the cavern.

Hakim bent down, examining the edge of the rock.

Jack moved over to him, careful not to look down. “What’s the matter?”

“Something’s not right,” he said and looked up at Jack, gesturing to the edge below him.

Down a sloping ridge of rock, there was the beginning of what once must have been a bridge—a pair of basalt grey rams on pedestals, flanking a stone walkway. Only a few feet protruded over the pit, where it had been broken off unevenly. Jack knelt down to look more closely. It was at least five feet thick underneath. Whatever had taken a chunk out of this bridge must have been absolutely enormous.