Chapter 9: The Wilds Delight in Cruelty

Yorvig strode down the slope, hurrying away from the cliff adit as if his mere presence would alert the others. If worse came to worse, one or the other set of brothers would leave the claim. That seemed likely. He paused. What if it was Sledgefist who decided to leave, and not Hobblefoot? Was Yorvig going to walk away knowing what wealth the cliff contained?

That dilemma would come later. It may not even come to pass. There was still a chance they could resolve their problems.

Yorvig woke early and hungry. Angry voices rose up the shaft as he stepped into the adit drift. He hadn’t planned on mining that day. They needed food. Shineboot had gathered some fish from the weir the night before, but it wasn’t enough for dwarves who were working so long and hard. They needed meat and lots of it if they wanted to survive the coming winter. Amethyst and gold could not feed them in the wilds.

There was large game in the Red Ridges, but none of them were hunters. It didn't matter; they had no choice. Whether or not the others wanted to help him, Yorvig would do what he needed to survive, and if he could save the others, he would. They would not drag him down with their stubbornness. He’d tried to help Shineboot with a better system to transport ore and waste, but that was all, not without a full belly. Sledgefist and Hobblefoot could argue themselves into a grave. Yorvig wasn’t going to help them dig it.

He didn’t bother to tell anyone he was going. If he succeeded, he’d return. They weren’t going to help him. They could slowly starve fishing the river for weeks, maybe months yet. There was nothing else left in the dell. The foragers had been setting snares, but they had stopped catching anything before Warmcoat and Savvyarm left.

After walking to the river Kithlug, Yorvig paused and looked upstream and down. Either way was as good as another as far as he knew. He’d come here from downstream, and if he had to range afield, he may as well see something new. So he headed upstream. Passing a young cedar sapling, he cut it down and stripped its branches and bark. He hated to cut rope, but he sliced a foot off the end of his rope and re-knotted it. Then, he pulled apart the twists of the short piece and tied them together into a length of twine. He cut grooves into the end of the cedar branch, and then wrapped his dagger handle to the end of the shaft with the twine, knotting it off securely. He tested it against another tree, both a thrust and a slash, and it held. It would be better if he had time to melt some pine resin and coat the twine, but he wanted to be able to recover his dagger from the spear without a mess.

There were plenty of animal tracks near the river, but most were old, baked into hardened clay near the river’s edge. He had no experience as a tracker, and he could tell little about the tracks themselves, but he knew nothing had left those imprints in dried clay.

The river wound through a narrow gap between two ridges, and then a vale widened out, nearly a mile longer than it was wide. He still saw nothing besides birds high above. Something large crashed through the undergrowth, fleeing from him before he even knew it was there. He flinched, startled. Whatever it was, it was big and afraid of him. He felt foolish. Already, the realization was rapidly dawning on him that he had no hope of sneaking up on an animal and spearing it.

The vale eventually narrowed, and the river passed through another gap between narrow slopes. On the far side of the river, a thirty foot rockface dropped abruptly down from a ridge where the flowing water had gouged it over the ages, or where the cataclysm had broken it apart. On the near side, there was enough room for a game trail to lead between the broken slopes of the ridge and the flowing water. Driftwood further up the slope told Yorvig that the river must overflow its course in the springtime, or during heavy rain.

Something snorted. He’d been distracted looking at the silty soil as he walked, but he jerked his head up just in time to see five massive beasts leap away up the trail ahead of him. They’d been heading toward him down the trail. One had antlers nearly as tall as Yorvig and spreading five feet across. He knew there were creatures called deer or elk in these forests, though he wasn’t sure of the difference. They looked kind of like goats in a way. He’d seen smaller ones from time to time on his trip to the claim, but he had not seen any this size. A single one could feed them for weeks, maybe a month on tight ration.

And there was no way that he could catch one. They had loped away faster than Yorvig could ever dream of running, and he felt sure they had barely tried. He set the butt of his makeshift spear on the silt and leaned against it. The ground along the game trail was well trampled. Some of the tracks must belong to these creatures. Most of the tracks looked like they had been made by something like a goat—a cloven hoof. This must be the easiest way from whatever lay beyond this narrows to the vale he’d left behind.

This was the problem with prospecting. You had to figure out everything. In a colony like Deep Cut, all a miner had to do was mine. There were cultivators and planters and goatherds and shepherds working below and above ground. The branching canyons around Deepcut were carved and honeycombed with houses and stoneholds, terraced with gardens, cultivated with water pumped from underground by giant wheels and engines driven by steam. You could stand on the surface above the canyons of Deep Cut and see only painted sand and cracked clay, a windswept waste haunted by jackals and snakes. But peer over the edge and life thrived. Variegated colors like a prism shone from polished minerals in exposed layers and the hanging flowers grown to feed the teeming honeybees. The bees themselves were cultivated in hundreds and thousands of skeps, so that the air hummed with energy. Vining vegetables of many varieties hung down the sides of the canyon.

There was no shortage of food in Deep Cut. They even raised sheep and goats in pens and pastures, and the pigs they had learned to keep from the humans. Fungus and fish were farmed in the deeps below the canyons. Each dwarf did what each dwarf did, normally as their fathers had done before, and purchased or traded for food and other necessities. No one admired the goatherds or planters for their labor, but they were needed, and without them the many workings of the deep would grind to a halt. Of this Auntie Tourmaline had reminded their folk from the lessons of the Crippled King, the Ancient Father.

The dwarves had at first thought the barren landscape on the surface of the Waste was a problem. Now they knew it was a blessing. Not only was the land they mined unwanted by the various human kingdoms, even the ürsi could not survive there. And though Deep Cut was now fabled as wealthy among the caravans that came to trade with them, no one had ever attempted to march an army against them in the harsh conditions, and if they did, they would find only pits of death.

Yorvig straightened up. Pits of death. It was true, he was no human or accursed elf to run in chase of these beasts on the surface of the land. He was a dwarf. This could be solved with the tools of a dwarf. And like a dwarf, he needed to plan and prepare, for once he did this, time would become critical.

The stew-hall in Deep Cut was full of smoke and the thick scent of sour ale. The old prospector sat across from Yorvig at a gneiss table. The sleeves of his shirt were patched, a different type of cloth on each side. It was the middle of the previous winter, months before Yorvig set out to join his brother’s new claim in the Red Ridges. He wasn’t even due to formally finish his apprenticeship for two more months, as it was.

The old prospector, his beard white and curling down to his waist, puffed on a long-stemmed pipe of hill-smoke.

“‘Course, we didn’t go to the Red Ridges, not in my day,” he said. “That was before the humans pushed the ürsi southward, back when we could still mine in the Long Downs.”

It was the third time the prospector had told him that, but Yorvig ignored the repetition. He’d bought the prospector his stone mug of stew, and a bag of hill-smoke in exchange for the interrogation.

“You’ve gotta do things in lots,” the prospector went on. “Focus on food until you’ve a good store, warmth then, light then. Don’t leave off any task until you’ve enough to make it through the hard months at least, and do that before you dig anything more than shelter.”

“It wastes work to change work,” Yorvig said, repeating the old dwarvish adage.

“Ay, yes, that’s it.”

“And you think my list is good?” Yorvig asked.

“More fishing line and hooks, I reckon, if you’re going to the Ridges. I hear the streams are plentiful there. Hooks would be time consuming to fashion when you’re hungry, and hook and line are light to carry. Take more than you think you need.”

Yorvig nodded.

“Alright.”

“Oh, and take clean cloth for bandages and patches,” the prospector added, and then he stiffened, his shoulders squaring. He set his jaw, staring past Yorvig as if a sudden memory had come to him. When he spoke, his voice had a sterner tone. Fifty years seemed to melt away from him.

“Neglect your necessities at your peril. Even for a little while. Death watches for an opportunity. The wilds delight in cruelty. And don’t be impulsive.”

Yorvig looked into his empty beer mug, wishing there was any left to drink. He’d spoken to everyone with prospecting experience he could find in Deep Cut months ago. This old dwarf had come with a trade caravan from East Spire. They all said a variation of the same thing; food, drink, clothes, shelter. . . The staples of life. It took supreme effort and skill to both survive and have time left over for prospecting and mining. The wilds had claimed many lives. He hoped that Sledgefist and the others were alright, and that he did not find disaster awaiting him in the Red Ridges.