Grave Mistake Read online

  "So, you owe me?" I asked, frowning. "Cole mentioned you guys hate that."

  Gwydion looked away, eyes scanning the tortured, barren landscape.

  "It is not quite that straightforward," he said at last, quiet as this silent planet. "There is a debt. But I do not resent it. There are some shackles even we wear willingly."

  Sensing there was something he wasn't telling me, I stayed quiet and waited for his love of hearing himself talk to get the better of him. But he said nothing more. I opened my mouth to prompt him, only to be interrupted by the scrape of stone as the door in the Dwarven city opened.

  Chapter 13

  The Dwarf did not look like what I expected.

  I had anticipated something like what people with dwarfism looked like on Earth. Short and stocky, probably with beards. What fantasy had told me Dwarves looked like all my life.

  The Dwarf in front of me, however, looked somewhere between a badger and a star-nosed mole.

  It was short, about four feet or so, and covered in dense, wiry gray fur. Its fur thinned to a sleeker undercoat near the delicate pink sensory organ in the center of its pointed, eyeless face, and over the backs of its fore-paws, which were equipped with long, wickedly curved claws. Its 'nose' wriggled independently in a way that was fascinating and also slightly nauseating to watch. It wore a leather apron and nothing else. It walked slightly sloped forward, like it preferred to go on all fours.

  "You're lucky I was still so close to the surface," the Dwarf said in a surprisingly genial voice as he led us down into the unlit, earthen tunnels. "First Watch fort is a full shift's walk away from this door normally. But I had to let some other sun-blasted fool in less than half a shift ago."

  Gwydion had pulled some little enchanted gadget from his coat, which looked like the kind of crystal contact juggling balls I'd imagined him with earlier. He whispered a word to it, and it glowed enough to dimly light our way. By its faint dusty moth-light, we exchanged a significant look.

  "Where did he go?" I asked. "The sun-blasted fool, I mean."

  "Didn't ask," the Dwarf said with a shrug. "He'll have reached First Watch by now, and they'll send him along to wherever he intends to go."

  "You weren't curious?" I asked. "I mean, do people from other worlds come here that often?"

  "I imagine he was just grateful to get out of the sun!" the Dwarf laughed. His long snout was full of thin sharp teeth, and he didn't turn back or look at us when he spoke. Probably due to the lack of eyes. "I can't for the life of me understand why you all run around in worlds that still have them. We mined out ours, and the light is still unbearable."

  I considered asking how he could tell, considering he had no eyes, but decided that might be rude.

  "I guess it's just what we're used to," I said diplomatically. "Being born up there and all."

  "Well, that's all right," the Dwarf said with a distinct tone of pity. "The doors of the Undercity are open to all the poor sunburned masses. We have space enough for everyone, and there's always work to be done. I imagine you'll all end up down here eventually, once word spreads that there's an alternative to living on the surface. What work are you hoping to be placed in?"

  "Uh, we're not—"

  "Smelting? Brace making? You'll never get a job in engineering, so don't bother. No Dwarf worth his whiskers would trust a tunnel built by a surfacer. You just don't have the sense for it, no offense. I hear some surfacers make decent enchanters, but there's no upward mobility in that. But I can put a good word in for you with the foreman of Fernfossil mine if you like, find you good solid work in soil transportation. Now that's a reliable career, and valued. Shovel soil for just a few decades and you can open your own firm."

  "We're not actually looking for work," I said quickly before the Dwarf could keep talking. "We're just trying to find the man who came in here earlier. Then we'll leave."

  That actually made the Dwarf pull up short.

  "Why in the hell would you want to do that?" he asked. "Now that you know how lovely and cool and dark it is down here?" I started to explain, but he dismissed me with a wave of his long claws. "You'll change your tune when you see the city. Finest construction in all the worlds."

  The Dwarf seemed slightly offended and didn't say much more as we continued on down the tunnel.

  A shift, it turned out, was roughly four hours, and First Watch Fort was a shift's walk away from the door. As we walked, the tunnel slowly changed from bare earth to packed earth braced with stone, to carved stone, to fine brick. There was a definite emphasis on function over form, at least from what we could tell by Gwydion's dim light, but at the same time, the corridors were wide and comfortable and well maintained. We weren't tripping over loose bricks, and the air was cool and relatively fresh. The only problem was the lack of any light sources.

  Still, we'd been going for a while even before we'd got here. Ethan and Cole had snagged a few hours rest at Gwydion's (and I'd had some possibly enchanted food and some possibly magic sex), but that didn't really make up for the hours we'd been running around through magical realms without even a lunch break. We were all starting to look fairly ragged.

  The comfortable dwarven tunnels featured regular carved stone benches and fountains bringing cold spring water from further down, but our guide stopped to use them less than half as often as we would have liked him to, and in general didn't seem to get tired, period. He ambled on at a steady pace, speaking only occasionally to comment on the type or quality of stone we were passing.

  "There's a lot of diversity in these tunnels!" he claimed. "It's more efficient to use local stone whenever we can, rather than shipping in bricks from deeper down. So you see all kinds of clever techniques used to take advantage of less-than-optimal stone while keeping everything up to the high standards of the Engineer's code. Take this gypsum for example..."

  He went on like that for a while. I learned after one or two of such lectures that he only got offended if I tried to contribute to the conversation. So we all listened in silence, learning more about geology than any of us had ever been interested in knowing.

  Finally, First Watch Fort came into view. By which I mean, the tunnel ended in a pair of heavy doors, which the Dwarf introduced as the fort, with great pride. Past the doors, it was slightly more impressive. The doors opened onto a wide causeway, which wound down and away from us around the sides of a large cauldron. It was lit for once by a huge sphere bound in brass rings hanging from the ceiling, which glowed with what felt like sunlight.

  "Uhg," the Dwarf grimaced. "Sorry about that. Downside to living in any of the Forts. The Fort-ring Overseer insists on keeping bright-shifts where those damn lanterns are turned on. Lotta surfacers live in the forts. Apparently, it helps em adjust."

  The walls of the sunken crater were crammed with carved out buildings, their size and style all extremely regular and efficient, no inch of space wasted. Looking down into it, the Fort seemed like a small town, teeming with life, not all of it identical to the Dwarf beside us. As he led us down into the fort, a cart trundled past pulled by two roughly Dwarf-sized humanoid creatures that appeared to be made of rough stone. They were as eyeless as the Dwarves and ignored us entirely. Ethan, distracted squinting up at the lantern, bumped into one of them. He apologized profusely, but it didn't notice or acknowledge the bump or the apology, just straightened out and kept going.

  "Don't bother," the Dwarf said. "The Constructs aren't alive. They're just enchanted scrap material we put to use at menial tasks or jobs too dangerous to risk Dwarves on."

  "Oh," Ethan said, looking after the retreating cart a with a concerned frown. "They can't like... feel things, can they?"

  "Course not," the Dwarf scoffed. "They're made of rock. No nerve endings, no brains for complex thought. If they aren't told to leave during a cave in, they'll just stand there and let themselves be buried. Script-writers have to write all their behaviors down on paper and bake it into them when they're made, and they can't do a damn thing that is
n't on that paper unless you break them open and add new behaviors. They're just moving tools, friend. You're not going to ask a drill if it has feelings just because it turns, are you?"

  "No, but a drill isn't shaped like a person," Ethan said defensively. The Dwarf shrugged.

  "It's an efficient shape. Versatile. And it's what we built all the doorways to fit."

  A decent point.

  "What if someone wrote a behavior like 'be alive' or 'think about identity' or something on their paper?" I asked, curious.

  "You think they didn't try that right off?" The Dwarf laughed. "Some of the particularly eccentric Script-writers are still trying. But you can't use a hammer for a bucket, and you can't make a rock think it's a person."

  Still, we'd at last landed on a conversation topic that I couldn't seem to offend the guy talking about, so we talked about the Script-Writer's failed attempts to make a sentient Construct (there appeared to be two major schools of thought on the matter, one writing very broad behaviors open to interpretation and the other writing increasingly specific and detailed lists of every minutiae of living— plus the radical script-masons who thought the answer was to sculpt the Constructs brains, who were generally considered to be loonies) all the way down to the bottom of the fort. The fort was actually pretty nice. I didn't know enough about architecture to appreciate the quality construction, and any artistic flourishes tended to be tactile or even auditory, so there wasn't much to look at. But the Dwarves clearly had a talent for city planning. Everything was efficient, clean, easy to navigate, presumably well labeled, though I couldn't read the dwarvish signage, and as in the tunnel from the front door, there were always plenty of places to sit and a fountain when you wanted one. There were even flower beds and green spaces, though they were fungus and moss based.

  "Now, your friend most likely made his way to the Refugee Office," the Dwarf said, pointing to a building with a complex sign in unreadable dwarvish. "He'd need a train pass to leave the Fort. They should be able to tell you where he went."

  We said our goodbyes to our guide who, all aside, had been rather nice, and headed into the Refugee Office.

  It was a small, efficient little building with comfortable seats and a friendly Dwarf at the front desk who was delighted to see us, since they rarely saw more than one or two refugees in a day. I made a futile attempt to assure them that we weren't refugees and weren't planning on staying. They just assured us that we would change our minds and gave us our orientation packets, which included the train pass our guide had mentioned— a thin piece of stiff tin or aluminum maybe with our names, species, and gate of entry. After some wheedling, the desk Dwarf also gave in and told us where Gil had gone.

  "He headed into the central Undercity, to the Old Palace," the Dwarf explained. "Claimed he had urgent business with the king. Wanted to know if there was an express line."

  "Is there?" I said, my heart beating faster at even this little bit of progress. The Dwarf made an ambivalent gesture.

  "If you take the train from here to Limespire mine in the second ring, then transfer to the R Line, it stops in the historic government district. But you'll need tourism clearance on your train cards. We like to keep an eye on the movement of new citizens, just in case. Once you've been settled for a decade or so, you'll be able to move freely between rings like any citizen."

  "Can you give us that?" I said impatiently. "Tourism clearance? We need to see the king too."

  "Well, I can," the Dwarf said hesitantly. "But are you sure that's what you want? I mean, it's just that I'm not sure your friend exactly knew what he was doing. He seemed to think the king could help him with something but, well, we're a parliamentary monarchy. The king is a nice old man and we all love him, but it's not like he really makes any decisions. If he had wanted to talk to the Engineer's Union maybe or the Parliament of Overseers, even our local foreman..."

  The Dwarf trailed off hopelessly.

  "Yeah, he's an idiot," I agreed at once. "We don't really know what he's planning either. That's why we need to catch up with him as fast as we can and stop him from doing anything stupid."

  The desk Dwarf sighed and took our train cards back, using a device that looked a bit like a heavy-duty hole punch to stamp a ridged square in the corner of each of our cards, which apparently gave us tourism clearance.

  Not wasting time, we hurried onwards in the direction the desk Dwarf had told us we could find the train station. Halfway there, the bright-shift ended, and the huge lantern's light faded as thick metal blinds were drawn around it. Gwydion pulled out his little light orb again, and we navigated the town in the semi dark. Occasionally, we saw other non-Dwarves, other refugees, going about their business by the light of magic devices like Gwydion's or lamps that seemed to be miniature versions of the overhead lantern. There weren't many, and almost none of them were remotely humanoid.

  The train was not very crowded, fortunately, but most of the other passengers were Dwarves, who gave us curious looks as we found seats facing each other.

  "Finally gave up on the sun, eh?" one asked, loud and friendly. I just smiled and nodded.

  "You won't regret it!" the Dwarf assured me.

  I wasn't sure what to make of the Dwarves. They certainly were friendly. And advanced, for a fantasy species living underground in another universe. They had public transportation (the train ride was the smoothest and nicest smelling I'd ever experienced) and according to the orientation packet, free healthcare. But there was something just slightly off about the whole thing. Maybe it was just unfamiliar, or because they kept insisting I wouldn't want to leave.

  Chapter 14

  The train had no windows, its passengers being mostly blind. But there was a route map on the wall next to our seats. It was textural, meant to be read by touch and not sight, but from what I could decipher, the Undercity was essentially a larger, inverted version of the crater shape of First Watch Fort. Rings of settlements spiraled out and down, growing continually larger. We were headed towards a point near the bottom, where the rings grew less distinct, frizzing out into thousands of little deviations and branches that weren't, presumably, on the train line. What they were, I couldn't tell you.

  We switched trains at what seemed to be the Dwarven equivalent of Grand Central, jumping onto the R Line. The R turned out to stand for 'rough,' the texture used to differentiate it on maps. There was a Smooth Line, and a Bumpy Line, and a Sharp Line...

  I wished I could appreciate the cities and structures we were passing. But it was too damn dark to see anything. Things only got more confusing when we reached the historical government district, which had broad, elegant avenues and tall, beautiful buildings, which just made us feel lost in the dark on an endless plane of cobblestone until we ran face-first into an elaborately curved cornice-piece. Curiously, we'd also seen fewer Dwarves the deeper we went into the city. A chatty local we asked for directions in Limespire had said most everyone this deep down was working on expansion projects at the fringe. Which meant, in addition to being lost in the dark, we were lost in an eerily empty, silent city in the dark.

  "I've had just about enough of this shit," Ethan said. He'd been looking a little uncomfortable since we'd entered the tunnel. I was starting to think he might be slightly claustrophobic.

  "Fuckin' same," Cole agreed. "Can't we get some more light at least?"

  "Not unless one of you thought to bring a flashlight," Gwydion said, a little bad tempered. I didn't think he was enjoying this either. Or maybe it was just being cut off from his magic that he didn't appreciate.

  "We've got to be close to the Old Palace, right?" I asked, squinting at the map a helpful Dwarf had given us, which was of course all in texture and thus next to useless. "I think that’s the fountain I almost fell in was the one outside the old parliamentary building. If we just keep going straight—"

  "You lost, friends?" someone shouted from unacceptably far away. But then again, Dwarves had much better hearing than humans. Maybe the acceptabl
e distance for shouted communication was different for them.

  We headed towards the voice until Gwydion's light illuminated a Dwarf in elaborate and, I hoped, ceremonial armor.

  "We're looking for the Old Palace," I said. "We're visitors from the surface, and we need to speak to your king."

  "What for?" the Dwarf asked, looking confused. "If it's important enough to bring you all the way down here, you'd be better off talking to the Parliament of Overseers."

  "No, we definitely need to talk to the king," I said, exhausted of having this conversation.

  "Well, this is the Old Palace," the Dwarf said. "I'll show you in, and you can talk to someone about an audience, if the old man isn't napping." The Dwarf, whom I guessed was some kind of palace guard, chuckled fondly. "You know he once napped an entire year? We had a fantastic party when he woke up."

  Inside was as vast and dark as outside, though we walked on soft satiny marble rather than cobblestone. We were shuffled between several Dwarves of indeterminate importance, most of whom we never even got a good look at, before we finally reached someone who, presumably, had the authority to decide if we could see the king.

  "I'm very sorry," they said, invisible out of the range of the light on the other side of their wide desk. "But you understand why we cannot allow just any random surfacer to meet face to face with the king. Perhaps if you make your petition in writing—"