by David Weber
But that was the point-and, no doubt, the reason for much of their reputed avarice. They wanted to acquire wealth and the things that went with it, and they both believed they could and were completely willing to work like a lake full of beavers to attain that goal. When others talked of how dwarves were eternally on the lookout for opportunities to squeeze another kormak out of someone, they were absolutely accurate. There were exceptions, of course, as there were in all things, but the average dwarf was constantly working, thinking, and looking for opportunities. As a people, they didn't waste time sitting around envying others; they got on with improving their own lots, or those of their children, at least, and they had two- or three-hundred-year life spans in which to do it.
Small wonder there was a sense of bustling energy about Silver Cavern, even in the winter, Bahzell mused, and at least there was always room for upward mobility-in every sense of the word.
The underground city was liberally supplied with spiral ramps and staircases between levels, and some busier, heavily traveled sections also boasted moving cars which Kilthan called "elevators" to move people even more efficiently. Now the dwarf led Bahzell and Rianthus down one of the more secluded stairs, winding steadily deeper and deeper into the living rock of the mountains. The stairwell was on the cramped side for Bahzell, and the risers' height had been planned for people with legs much shorter than his. His calves began to complain in fairly short order, but he told them sternly to leave him alone and concentrated on following his guide. If a man two centuries older than he could make this hike, then no power in the universe could have made Bahzell Bahnakson beg for a rest break!
He kept a careful eye on his surroundings, as much to take his attention off those increasingly insistent calf muscles as anything else. Like Mountain Heart and, to a lesser extent, Tunnel's End, Silver Cavern's walls and doorways and windows were as much excuses for artwork as functional. The dwarves' passion for stone and rock crystal showed in the loving execution of leaf patterns, birds, stars and moons, tiny gargoyle faces, and clouds which adorned walls and ceilings. Door posts were carved in the shapes of tree trunks, executed with such fidelity Bahzell could identify them from their bark, and window frames were covered in traceries of climbing ivy, roses, and morning glories.
Bahzell hadn't seen it, of course, but Tharanal had pointed out the peak beyond which the city's main reservoir lay as they approached Silver Cavern yesterday, and pipes from it fed not only public buildings and private dwellings but also the fountains which danced and splashed at major intersections. The springs and freshets which had been loosed in the course of the city's excavation had also been trained, and streams ran cheerfully down rough, natural-looking beds carefully inset into the smooth floors of passages and halls. Here and there, those streams ran together into deep pools where huge, exotic goldfish and carp nudged up against stepping stones or swam their slow, endless dances under the arches of delicate bridges.
Almost certainly, though, the thing which made the uppermost levels the most desirable was their gardens. Like other dwarvish cities, Silver Cavern maintained vast, commercially run farming operations in the surface areas surrounding it. Those outside gardens produced most of the food stored away in the city's vast storerooms and icehouses, but the same natural gift for stone which had wrought the city as a whole had also produced the Upper Quarter's gardens by opening deep shafts wide enough to admit not simply air, but sunlight, as well. Those shafts drove all the way to the tallest peaks of the mountains above Silver Cavern in order to make their upper ends as inaccessible as possible from outside, and they were guarded by steel-barred grates and incorporated hatches of solid steel which could be closed at need, for they were potential chinks in the city's defenses. But they were chinks the Silver Cavern dwarves accepted cheerfully, for the mirrors which controlled and spread the light that streamed down those shafts let them bring the greenery and freshness of the outer world into their underground homeland.
Yet wonderful as Bahzell found Silver Cavern, he recognized the city's less lovely side, as well. As Tharanal had led them towards it yesterday, he'd seen thick plumes of smoke-and other, more noxious vapors-rising from outlying ventilation shafts like the fumaroles of volcanos. The acrid bite of coal smoke had caught at the back of his throat, and he'd seen the great, dark streaks of soot that discolored the snow on the downwind sides of many of those vents. He hadn't immediately recognized the purpose of the pairs of gleaming metal rails which ran down long ramps and intricately braced trestle bridges from several dark openings in the mountainside. But then he'd seen the cars, piled high with slag and ash and other refuse, that ran down those rails on flanged wheels. Gravity pulled them downward-sometimes singly, and sometimes in short trains that had been chained together-but they trailed stout cables or hawsers behind them, so that some unseen engine buried within the mountain could winch them back up and inside after they deposited their contents in one of the monstrous waste dumps at the foot of the ramps. The rails ran past what Bahzell had thought at first were steep, natural hills between the dumps and the mountain proper. But as they drew nearer and the regularity of those snow covered slopes registered, he'd realized that entire centuries of refuse had been deposited there as the rails extended further and further from the city. Apparently the dwarves had taken pains to shape and contour their garbage heaps, and the older dumps actually bore well-grown groves of trees, but those "foothills" were still an appalling comment on the sheer amount of rubbish Silver Cavern had spewed forth over the centuries.
No doubt the waste dumps, and the smoke and soot, and all the other fumes, were inevitable by-products of the dwarves' industry, but even though they seemed to make tremendous efforts to minimize the impact, he'd found the sights and smells less than appealing. Not that he hadn't seen far worse in other places, and with far smaller justification. Navahk, for example, was a cesspit compared to the damage Silver Cavern had inflicted upon its surroundings, as were parts of Riverside and other human cities he'd seen, and that squalor had produced nothing but disease and misery.
He shook himself out of his thoughts as Kilthan stepped off the stairs at a landing and led him and Rianthus down a side passage. There were few decorations here. Instead, these walls-some slick with condensation from the steam drifting through ventilation ducts-bore painted notices in the blocky dwarvish alphabet. Bahzell's command of written dwarvish was limited, to say the least. He could make out bits and pieces here and there, but not enough to make much sense beyond the obvious fact that most of them were directions of one sort or another. The arrows painted under some of them would have suggested that even if he'd been unable to read a single word of them.
It was much warmer down here, and the air had taken on a sharp, metallic tang that seemed to coat his sinuses and throat. And he became aware of vibrations, as if the rock itself were purring roughly, like some monstrous cat. He glanced sharply at Rianthus, but the human only smiled and flapped a hand, urging him on after Kilthan. The dwarf had paused at a bend in the corridor, looking back and beckoning impatiently, and Bahzell shrugged and trotted forward to join him-then stopped in astonishment.
Kilthan had halted on a high catwalk that snaked along the wall of a passage as wide as the Dwarvenhame Tunnel. But where the tunnel had been quiet, almost hushed, with the semisomnolence of winter's declining traffic, this passage rumbled and thudded and thundered. More of those steel rails were spiked to its stone floor, and powerful draft horses hauled dozens of cars along them, heaped with an indescribable welter of freight. He saw pike shafts and battle axes piled in some of them like bundles of firewood. Others seemed to be filled with shimmering fish scales until he realized what he was actually seeing was the glitter of light off the steel rings of mail, and still others were filled with shovel blades, mattock heads, axe and hammer heads, and dozens of other metal tools. Flatcars carried more of the gleaming rails, followed by gangs with sledgehammers and drills who clearly intended to extend the rail network still further somewh
ere far down the tunnel. More cars rumbled the other way, loaded with what looked like coal but wasn't, and knots of workmen flowed up and down the tunnel in either direction, as if Bahzell and his friends had arrived just in time for shift change.
The hradani stood staring down at the scene, awed by it yet wondering why Kilthan had brought him to see it. But then the dwarf poked him sharply in the ribs and jerked his head for Bahzell to follow him down the catwalk. It was too noisy for casual conversation. Not even Bahzell's powerful bass could have made itself easily heard, and the hradani opted to follow without questions. Hopefully, there would be a time for those-and answers-when the background racket had fallen to more endurable levels.
They walked down the catwalk for another fifteen minutes and passed three major cross tunnels before Kilthan turned into a small alcove, pulled open a heavy door, and waved the others through it. Bahzell had to squash himself down in an awkward crouch to clear the top of the opening, but he sighed in relief as the closing door muted the noise behind them. The lighting was much dimmer than it had been outside, but only until Kilthan opened a second door and ushered him into the most amazing sight yet.
The long, gallerylike chamber beyond the double doors was built in tiers, so that the dozens of dwarves seated in it all had a clear view through the huge window which made up its outer wall. That gave Bahzell space to stand fully upright once more, which would have been relief enough by itself, but the doors also acted as a sound baffle. No doubt that was so the dwarves in the chamber could hear one another without shouting, but his ears appreciated it anyway as he looked about him.
He had no idea what most of the people around him were doing, but he saw one of them bend over one of a bank of several bronze tubes (at least they looked like bronze) before her. The young woman flipped up a cover on the tube and blew down it, then spoke in firm clear tones. It would have looked ridiculous… if not for the fact that another voice, this one male, came back up the tube to her, clearly audible despite the background noise that came with it.
But however bizarre that might have seemed, Bahzell had little attention to pay it, for his eyes were fixed in wonder on the view through the windows which separated the gallery from the enormous cavern beyond them. He had never seen so much glass-or such clear glass-in one place, and he reached out to touch it as if to reassure himself that it truly existed. It was actually a double window, he realized after a moment, his thought processes slowed by the scene before him, and somehow that extra window muted the noise from its other side. And a good thing, too, he thought numbly. Without that muting effect, the people in this… this control room would have been deafened, for the racket beyond the glass must be far worse than the noise which had assaulted him on the catwalk down which they had come.
A wide river, its current diverted into square-cut stone channels, poured through the chamber beyond the windows to drive dozens of the largest waterwheels Bahzell had ever seen with steady, merciless force. Complex gears and shafting reached out from the wheels, transferring their power to machinery whose function, for the most part, the hradani was unable even to guess. But impressive as the wheels were, it was the steady, shuddering roar of enormous furnaces which dominated his impression of the scene. Despite the double windows and the thick stone wall separating him from them, the harsh, basso rumble of the forced-draft furnaces reached out to him, and he felt their power grumbling in his bones. Streams of fiery, lava-like slag spilled from openings in the furnaces' sides. More of those rail carts rolled steadily up to their tops, dumping crushed ore and what looked like already-burned coal into the hoppers which fed them. Kilthan stepped up beside him.
"That's coke mixed with the ore," the dwarf said quietly. "We used to use charcoal, but then we learned how to run coal through coking ovens." He smiled wryly. "A good thing, too. You may have noticed we have a lot more coal than trees down here."
Bahzell nodded, but his attention was on a huge iron cauldron or ladle as it tracked along an overhead rail, driven by the thumping waterwheels. It was enormous-twice his own height-and he swallowed as he watched molten metal seethe within it. He stared into that liquid, incandescent heart, and then flinched, despite all he could do, as a huge, fan-shaped billow of flame and sparks erupted from another vast piece of machinery.
"We're making steel, not iron, Bahzell," Kilthan told him, still quietly. "That-" he pointed at the bright shower of fury "-is from where we're blowing a stream of air through molten iron. Without going into details, let's just say it lets us produce steel by the ton… and more cheaply than we could produce wrought iron, as well."
Bahzell looked down at him, and the dwarf shrugged, then waved an arm at the scene beyond the window.
"We don't show this to just anyone. Not because it's arcane and complex-in fact, most of what you see out there is actually quite simple, once you break it down by task and function-but because it's the true heart of the Empire's economic dominance. We've spent centuries working out the most efficient ways to do the jobs you see going on out there, and after so long an investment, we've no interest in sharing our techniques with people like the Purple Lords." He paused, then frowned and shook his head. "No, let's be honest. Until we joined the Empire, we had no interest in sharing them with anyone. They were our secrets-the dwarves' secrets-and the source of our wealth and power. That was the true reason we were so hesitant about using nondwarvish labor."
Bahzell blinked down at him, overwhelmed and still confused. It seemed to take an inordinately long time for him to get his voice to work, but at least he cleared his throat and asked, "Were you after bringing all this from Kontovar after the Fall?"
"No." Kilthan stood beside him and gazed out the window with him, eyes distant. "Before the Fall, most of what we do here would have been done with wizardry, or at least with devices created and powered by wizardry. We had to start over, working our way up from the most basic concepts, to what you see out there. It's harder than it was in Kontovar-or the records seem to indicate that, at any rate-and we need enormous amounts of water power. There aren't too many sites where we can have that and proximity to coal for the coking ovens and to iron ore and copper ore and tin. Transportation is the biggest single bottleneck of our entire operation, but when all the elements combine properly, we can actually produce more steel and bronze in less time than anyone ever managed before the Fall."
"But why be showing me this?" Bahzell asked.
"Because of your father," Kilthan said simply.
"Ah?" The hradani turned to look down at him, and the dwarf met his eyes levelly.
"I was honored when you told me about Sharnā's meddling in Navahk and asked my advice on dealing with it, Bahzell, but we already knew about it." He snorted at the Horse Stealer's expression. "Of course we did! Of all the Dark Gods, Torframos probably hates Sharnā worst. He's none too fond of Fiendark, either, mind you, but Demon Breath prefers to hide his corruption underground, and Stone Beard doesn't like that. Stone and earth are His domain, and even if they weren't, no sane person wants Sharnā anywhere near him, whatever god he serves. We don't have any more details about the late, unlamented Harnak's friends than you do, but we have enough to know we want that infection crushed, and the people who opened the door for it with it," he finished grimly.
"Well enough," Bahzell said, nodding slowly after another moment of silence. "I can be seeing that much, but you were after mentioning my father, as well."
"I was." Kilthan agreed, gazing out at the blast furnaces and water wheels. "Dwarves are patient, Bahzell," he said. "But we're good haters, too. I think both those qualities come from the stone dust in our blood. And we're also Torframos' servants, so patience or not, what we'd really prefer is to offer you a Dwarvenhame army to go in and burn Navahk to the ground. Unfortunately, we can't. We don't have proof Sharnā is even there, and the only way we could get it would be to go in and dig it up by force. But we need the proof before we act."
"Just slow down there a mite," Bahzell interrupted
. "Who exactly might this 'we' be that you're after mentioning?"
"I can't-" Kilthan began, then paused. "Let me just put it this way," he went on after a moment. "There are those both here in Dwarvenhame and back in Axe Hallow who recognize the threat Sharnā's worship poses and who, under other circumstances, would possess the power to do something about that threat. But there are problems.
"First, if we were to invade Navahk, no matter what the reason, it would be seen as a foreign incursion that might well rally all the Bloody Sword cities behind Churnazh.
"Second, and to be honest, the thought of fighting hradani doesn't really appeal to us-and especially not to those of us who know hradani best.
"Third, the confrontation between Churnazh and your father has reached a stage where any outside interference could have catastrophic, unpredictable consequences. We might crush Churnazh and then withdraw, leaving a vacuum for Prince Bahnak to expand into… but we might also 'taint' him in the eyes of his fellow hradani as a 'tool' for outside interests. In that case, we could eliminate Churnazh only to shatter your father's alliances and set all the clans at one another's throats. That would be bad enough for your people, but if your lands turn into an ongoing, endless civil war like the one in Ferenmoss, it could spill over onto any of your neighbors, as well.
