Chapter 1: The Red Ridges

Even after two centuries—after all the toil and triumph, sweat and blood—the memory of the day he first beheld Quartz Dell remained clear as the mountain waters. How he was greeted by those first companions! So few of them yet remained.

They had known so little, then. . .

If he had known—

Well. . .

"If" was always a dangerous word in the wilds.

And the Ridges were wilds in those days.

Yorvig sat in the shade of a gravel embankment. At this time of the summer, the streambed was dry. The spring melts were long past, and the sun was harsh. He liked to sleep through the heat of the days, rather than sweat and burn. In the mountains, there weren’t as many direct hours of sunshine, but around noon the bright light and heat could be oppressive. For weeks he’d been following the cave runes carved into trees and chiseled on exposed rock along the river, left there to guide him.

Striper curled on his lap, purring like a drill-wheel. He buried his fingers in her thick fur. She was a Long-Haired Mine Runner, a breed of cat raised by dwarves to keep pests away from their workings and supplies. In dwarvish, the phrase was uln rinler, but oftentimes people called the cats the uln rinlen, a play on words meaning “mine captain,” for the cats seemed to view the dwarves as the interlopers. Some said that the dwarves had learned to keep cats from the humans, but Yorvig didn’t care about the distant past. The cat had birthed a litter in the spring, and now he carried the kittens on his back in a wooden cage. Striper ran free, keeping close to him as he trudged, but he couldn’t trust the kittens to do the same.

Dwarves didn’t keep pets—at least, not just for the sake of having them. These cats would live twenty-five years at best, and for dwarves who could live to ten times that age, animals were transient. But if an animal had a use, the dwarves would keep them, and Yorvig had come to enjoy having the little beasts around. It was an awful hassle, carrying the eight kittens. But Yorvig's mother had bred these cats, and he liked them. The cats in his family’s hold had always curled up on them when they slept, purring and kneading with their paws. It made Yorvig feel less alone, so far from anything, so isolated in the wilderness for weeks on end. He had expected to find the claim fifty miles ago or more, but still the runes led on.

Thankfully, he’d come prepared. His gear weighed over two hundred pounds, and for the first two months, it was all he could do to make ten miles a day. Already miner strong, he had hardened even more as the summer wore on.

He could hear the river water swirling around boulders not far away. It was low ebb in the summer, but still it made a din.

“Oi!” someone shouted.

Yorvig sprang from his warm stupor. Striper yowled as her claws came out, trying to cling to Yorvig's pants but failing as he spun, reaching reflexively to the knife at his belt. Then he saw the figure on the gravel embankment, a dwarf carrying deep wooden buckets in each hand. It was Savvyarm.

“Savv!” Yorvig shouted, spreading his arms wide.

Savvyarm laughed loud, then looked over his shoulder. He set the buckets down and slid down the gravel on his buttocks. The two dwarves embraced, slapping each other’s backs. Dust rose from their clothes.

“You nearly missed us!” Savvyarm said, extending his arms to hold Yorvig where he could look at him.

“How? I saw no markers.”

“None? There is a waystone not a hundred yards yonder.” Savvyarm nodded toward the river. Yorvig had followed the dry creek away from the river seeking shelter for a rest. It might have caused him to miss the claim entirely if Savvyarm hadn’t stumbled upon him.

“Where are the others?” Savvyarm asked.

“They did not come.”

“What?” Savvyarm's smile faltered. “You came alone?”

“Ay, yes.”

“That was not—” his friend paused. Yorvig knew what he would have said: a wise choice. “At least you’re here safely,” Savvyarm finished. “I’m sure you’ll hear about it.”

From his brother, Yorvig knew. He’d hear it from his eldest brother who would not hold his words like Savvyarm.

Yorvig glanced at the buckets on the embankment.

“Do you not have mine water?”

“Oh ay, yes, we do, but . . . well, look.”

The two scrambled up the embankment, and Yorvig realized his confusion as soon as he looked in the bucket. There were fish swimming inside—quite a few fish, both silverskins and rilleyes.

“Ah, do you have a fishery already?”

“No, we’re not that far along. But there’s a stream, anyway. It’s why we picked it. Come along!”

Savvyarm picked up his buckets, his biceps barely flexing. At the top of the gravel bank, Yorvig could see the worn footpath running along the top. How close he’d been to missing it! Such a mistake would be easy so far into the wilderness. He would have gone until he realized the runes had stopped, then had to backtrack. He wondered how long he would have wandered.

Savvyarm led them on a quarter-mile trek from the river, following the dry creek—except that as they went, the creek looked less and less dry. Here a dell opened in the mountain, or rather a hollow sank into the ridge. On the north side of the hollow rose a sheer rockface, there was a trickle of water now at the bottom of the creek-bed, but Yorvig could hear running water ahead.

The mountain rose high above the dell. In truth, it was not a massive mountain. It was more of an extended ridge, rising only five thousand feet or so. Yet along the crests of the ridges rose hard cluster-spires, balds, and pinnacles of ancient stone where the rain of the ages had washed away the sandstone and left only the jagged teeth of intrusive basalt cones and vents and the odd granite jaw. Such interplays of disparate rock were attractive to prospectors, for it showed that during the cataclysm, mighty forces were at work there forging different materials—the kind of forces and materials that also created ores and crystals and precious gems.

It was this composition of folded ridges and valleys, cut through with rivers full of trout, silverskins, rilleyes and other species, that made up the landscape for scores upon scores of miles. And the rivers were full of banks of tiny garnets and plenty of color in the pan. There were lodes in the mountains, and no mistake. The dwarves had taken to calling this range the Red Ridges for the garnets, but it could as well be called the Green Ridges, for the range was covered in dense forest in the heart of an otherwise sparse and dry country where elves and men had yet to assert dominion and the foul beasts of the firmament were sparse—sparser than some places at least.

They came up a short rise where narrow smooth steps were carved into the stone to make the climb easy. A mountain brook flowed out of the rock, down a short run of sluices, and into a tailings pond. Another stream trickled down a path of boulders heading further up into the dell. The near side of the dell was dammed with tailings, and the water had backed up into the dell beyond, tree trunks rising from dark, still water. Only a small trickle escaped to continue down the gravel creek-bed. A few yards above the sluices, the brook flowed out of a channel carved in the middle of a narrow mine adit. Another dwarf stepped from the mine, a heavy sack over each shoulder obscuring his peripheral vision, and without looking around he walked to the sluices.

The dwarf emptied a sack of crushed rock into the top of the first sluice box. Yorvig didn’t miss the long punch-dagger hanging at the dwarf’s belt. It was long enough almost to be one of the human short-swords. Punch daggers were dwarven sidearms, made of a triangular blade with three sharpened sides, mostly meant for stabbing in tight spaces. Yorvig had a similar though shorter version tucked against his lower back. His rock pick and woodaxe had doubled as his other weapons during the long trek.

Yorvig knew the third dwarf, as he would know each of the dwarves at the claim. It was Hobblefoot, Yorvig's eldest cousin. Savvyarm was not a relative, but a good friend of Hobblefoot's from their apprentice days.

There were five other dwarves here already, or should be.

“Oi!” Savvyarm shouted again. Hobblefoot turned and looked, and his gazed snapped to Yorvig.

“Chargrim!” Hobblefoot shouted. Yorvig grinned. Chargrim was Yorvig's common name. Dwarves were given hidden names by their parents but these were not shared or known except to a husband and wif or a perhaps close siblings. Instead, common names were given for daily use, often due to some characteristic or event. Yorvig had “earned” his moniker after falling into a pit of powdered charcoal the year before his rhundal—his coming of age—and not enjoying the laughter of his companions when he climbed back out. Hobblefoot had been there for it.

Hobblefoot and Yorvig met halfway and embraced, slapping each other on the back. Hobblefoot was a broad dwarf, built like the miner he was, and he wore a thick leather apron.

“Your brother will be relieved to see you.” Hobblefoot glanced down the path. “Where are the others?”

“He came alone,” Savvyarm said.

“What?”

Yorvig sighed.

“They wouldn’t come, not yet, but I was not about to remain. Have you all been well?” Hobblefoot looked a stone lighter than he had before.

"Alone?" Hobblefoot ignored Yorvig's question.

"Alone."

"Your brother will have words about that. It was not a wise choice."

"But you're all well?"

“Ay, yes,” Hobblefoot said. “The winters are harder here than the flats, but we were able to scrape by. It’s not the Kara-Indal.”

“It’s not the Kara-Indal,” both Yorvig and Savvyarm intoned in standard response. The Kara-Indal mountain range lay at least a thousand miles and many generations of dwarves away. None of them, or their great great grandparents had ever seen them, not since the beginning of the Age of Tourmaline. Still, it was a common saying, if anything was ever less than ideal or was—paradoxically—easy.

There was a meow, and Hobblefoot looked down at his leg as Striper rubbed against his shin, her tail arced.

“Well, would you look at this,” Hobblefoot said. “Why am I not surprised?” He looked back to Yorvig. “Come. Let’s take you to your brother!”

The smell of sandstone flowed out of the mine adit, along with the cool scents of underground mineral-laden water, mixing with the smell of fish rising from Savvyarm's buckets. As soon as Yorvig stepped into the comforting security of the dim adit, he could hear the grind and rumble of a waterwheel ahead. The adit continued twenty yards into the mountain before doors opened on each side. Beyond one was a storeroom, and in the other spun a waterwheel ten feet in diameter, with a small pond behind it. Savvy was right—it was not suitable for a fishery. It was too small and the fish could escape through the stream that flowed over the waterwheel. The stream itself bubbled out of a gap in a granite vein in the chamber wall. Thankfully, the gap appeared to angle upward, rather than down. Better to have the water-source up than down, though it may still be an artesian well drawing on a lower aquifer. Or the water above could have carved out chambers or weakened the stone. Wet mines were poor places to live, as necessary as water was. Hopefully it was not extensive.

This was a typical adit for a new mine claim, with the opposing rooms and, when a stream was available, the waterwheel. The wheel could be used for powering machinery, pumping air, and even draining water from any lower levels. It was odd that there was no machinery yet, and Yorvig wasn't sure why they had built the wheel so soon.

At the junction of the chambers, Savvy set down his buckets and Yorvig lowered his pack to the stone. Striper meowed, asking to be rubbed, but Yorvig ignored her. He checked on the kittens in the cage, looked around, and shrugged. He untwisted the little latch and opened the gate. The kittens were curled in a heap in the corner of the cage. They’d made it here. They may as well explore. At first, none of the kittens made to move towards the opening, and so Yorvig left them there to figure it out.

The three dwarves continued on down the drift, past four sleeping alcoves carved into the rock walls. Up ahead, the stratified sandstone was braced with rough-hewn timbers where a seam creased the rock, showing mineral crystalizations and yellow sulfides where water and oxygen must have weathered the stone.

A shaft opened at the end of the drift, and the top of a ladder protruded next to block and tackles for raising loads from below. He could hear the sounds of mining rising up.

“We decided to follow this seam down,” Hobblefoot said. That made sense. At the angle it was moving through the rock, it would head towards the surface of the mountainside above after a few hundred feet, if it continued.

They climbed down the ladder, passing fifty feet further into the stone. At the bottom, an oil wick burned in a clay dish, casting a pale yellow light. Yorvig crinkled his nose at the rancid smell of the lamp. They were burning animal oil made from boiled fat. It almost overpowered the smell of disturbed minerals. Yorvig's eyes were still adjusting from the harsh surface light, but already he could see well enough. There was a hopper attached by an iron hook to the pulley system above. The hopper was half full of broken rock.

“Oi! Sledgefist!” Hobblefoot yelled.

The sound of pick and shovel stopped. The three dwarves, well-dusted, looked up from the back of the drift where they had exposed the lode-bearing seam.

Yorvig's brother Sledgefist turned, his face dripping with the sweat and grime of toil. He saw his little brother and his teeth shone in a smile.

“Hah!” he called, dropping his shovel and striding over. The other two dwarves followed behind, and embraces went round.

“Where are the others?” Sledgefist asked. He grabbed Yorvig by the shoulder, a brotherly gesture but one that displayed Sledgefist's mighty grip. Sledgefist had gained his moniker in his youth back in Deep Cut for his propensity for brawls. That impulse—though not the capability—had mostly left him as he grew toward his prime.

“They didn’t come.”

“What do you mean they didn’t come?” Sledgefist's smile faded.

“They said it was too early, and if they were going to venture this far, they would like to see specimens first.”

“That’s not what they said to me before we left,” Sledgefist snapped.

“Ay, no,” Yorvig said. “But sometimes folk prefer to disagree with me than with you.”

Sledgefist stared at Yorvig blankly for a moment and then grinned, pulling Yorvig back into a hug before pushing him to arm’s length again.

“Then who came with you?

“I came alone.”

“You half-witted mine grub,” Sledgefist said. “You could have died and no one would have known it! I would never have allowed it!”

“I’m here, and you weren’t there.”

Sledgefist squinted.

“Is that limonite?” Yorvig asked. Sledgefist looked back over his shoulder.

“Ay, yes, a plentiful lode for what it’s worth.”

“Is that what you're after?”

“No, not specifically. We'll see better, but at least there will be plenty of use for it ourselves. This ridge-slope is cut through with seams and folds and indicator minerals, all the way to the top.” Sledgefist motioned with his finger. “Lots of activity here. It’s the best spot we saw since we left.”

"Plenty of color in the pan moving up the creek," Hobblefoot said. "The most promising we've seen."

“Don’t worry, cousin,” Shineboot said. It was Hobblefoot's younger brother. “This is the spot. We know that already.”

Yorvig nodded and grinned. He had no reason not to trust them.

“I’ve fish above,” Savvyarm cut in. “Let’s have a welcome feast. We’ll use the last of the salt.”