Schaldhaim was a village that was little more than a name on a map, but it was their next stop on the trip. It was nothing more than a flattish spot on the otherwise steep flank of the mountain that was large enough for a few buildings abutting the loading platform. It merited neither a station nor a full time presence from the dwarves to run one, though. People lived here, but they didn’t see them as they slowly approached the stop. They lived further out, in clannish clusters along various ridgelines. Jon only knew that because his father had occasionally handled business with this far-flung outpost, even if it had been outside his technical domain.

The whole community was dominated by herding, and this late in the season almost everyone would be high on the mountain looking to fatten up their sheep before they brought them back down to ride out the winter. It wasn’t worth the stop, but Jon did so anyway, mostly to give everyone, including him a quick break to stretch their legs. Besides him no one had ever ridden in a train before, and though it could be a thoroughly unnerving experience under normal circumstances, so far practically the entire ride had been half an hour in a tunnel followed by a few hours scaling a mountain that was so steep that there was literally nothing below them on the right for hundreds of feet.

Even brave men could be shaken by such things, so he made a big show of walking around and congratulating his lieutenants while he passed around a flask like he didn’t have a care in the world before he gathered them together to look at the map while he had other people empty the local coal bunker to top up the train’s fuel. The amount of weight they were carrying made the engine burn a prodigious amount of fuel as they scaled the mountain with so much weight, but it would make pursuit harder.

They could reach the next village today, but Jonathan planned to pull up a few hours short of that and hit it first thing in the morning. That wasn’t to say that there would definitely be shooting, but according to the rail map he’d taken from Boriv’s office, there was full time dwarven presence in Khronim, so he wasn’t going to take any chances.

“It can’t be such a big place this high up, can it?” Christoph asked. “Is it even worth the stop?”

“We’ll definitely want to cause a little trouble there,” Jon answered with a smile. “I’ve never been that far, but Marcus did once, and he said the place was big enough to have a nicer tavern than Dalmarin.”

“What was your brother doing there?” Rian asked.

“Entertaining a marriage proposal if you can believe it.” Jon laughed. “It would have been a good match given the regional power structure, but Marcus refused to go through with it when he met the bride to be. He said he’d rather marry one of the goats than be chained to a woman like her his whole life.”

Everyone laughed at that before Christoph asked, “So it’s just another herding town? That makes sense I suppose. You think we’ll get any recruits up there?”

“It was once upon a time. It wasn’t much bigger than Schaldhaim when I was born but decades ago the dwarves set up smelting facilities to take advantage of the confluence of a rich copper strike, and the peat bogs nearby, and the town has been growing pretty much ever since.”

“So then there could be trouble?” Rian blurted out. Jon could see in his eyes that he was itching for a fight. “From the townspeople? I doubt it, but if there are many dwarves around, it’s possible. More than likely we’ll be greeted as liberators. They should be at least as grateful as the people of Dovin and Kudds Bay were, don’t you think?”

Several of the men that had been with him long enough to remember those awful little places remembered how hard the dwarves had worked the local people in their canneries and factories. Most of their volunteers had come from places where the stone men had taken their power too far and no longer relied on human intermediaries to flex it.

The conversion continued for a little while longer after that, but soon enough they rounded everyone up and started the train again. The only sign that they’d ever been there was the missing coal and the broadsheets and pamphlets they left pinned to the notice board written in both Wennlish and Franish. Someone here could certainly read at least one of the languages, and they’d be able to explain the message to anyone else that cared to listen. It was something they posted everywhere they went, and it was as much a calling card as it was a recruitment campaign. It explained the reasons for their struggle and the way that the dwarves were using them in a way that everyone could understand.

That night they stopped the train on a siding, not that Jon expected any traffic up here, and after a short and nearly sleepless night with Elise, they crept to the edge of town with the light off going just slow enough to be quiet.

Even in the light of false dawn it was clear that Khornim was a hellhole that was decaying in a pattern that wasn’t all that different from the Dalmarin. While it was certainly a larger town, the soot stained buildings were in even worse conditions than the ones he’d left behind. Though they couldn’t see if the outlying parts of it were in better shape, Jon could really only see a better past in the large house that almost certainly belonged to the warden.

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As the sun rose Jon left two dozen men with the train and split the remainder of his men into two, sending most of them with Rian to arrest the Warden, secure the town square, and block the road leading to the smelters, so there wouldn’t be any surprises. They were still glowing a dull orange on the shadowy slopes just north of town, but if there were many dwarves here, they’d be living somewhere near that inferno to stay comfortable, he was sure of that much. Jon could handle any dwarves that were at the station, he just wanted to make sure that they didn’t get surprised by reinforcements from behind.

There were shouts of alarm as they entered the town, and the bell began to toll shortly after that, but Jon ignored both. They weren’t here to kill any of the common men who lived here, not if they could help it, and the few villagers that quickly roused themselves and came out on to the streets with pitchforks and clubs quickly went back inside and shut the door when they saw almost three dozen men with brands approaching them.

Jon’s team reached the Station and kicked in the door without firing a shot. This early there was only the station master in the building, and though he held a brand of his own in his hand, he was careful not to point it at the intruders.

“Ye are awfully well armed for bandits aren’t ye?” he spat dismissively in Wenlish.

“Bandits steal from the defenseless, we prefer to pick on those that can fight back,” Jon answered in dwarvish, making the station master do a double take.

“Ye speak the stone tongue awfully well for a cold blood. I’ll grant ye that’s a rare skill,” the dwarf answered, leveling his brand at Jon. “I am Gemnd, and this is my station, so I will have to ask ye to leave.”

In that moment the situation threatened to spin out of control, as several of his men began to point their weapons at the dwarf, but Jon just raised his weapon to remind them to hold their fire. One dwarf with one brand was no threat to him from this range. The only thing he would accomplish by shooting at Jon would be sealing his own death warrant. Jon couldn’t very well send a dwarf back to the deeps as a messenger if he had tipped his hand like that.

“Ask all you like, but there's no way you can hope to take us all on with one shot Gemnd,” Jon taunted. “I'd much rather use you to send a message with your voice than with your corpse, but that’s entirely up to you.”

“And how do I know ye’ll let me walk out that door?” Gemnd asked, suspiciously. “Bandits tend to shoot people in the back.”

Jon smirked as he enjoyed watching this dwarf squirm. Personally, he would love to kill him, but another messenger was almost certainly more useful than another taste of vengeance. “I swear on the law that you hold so dear that neither I nor my men will kill you, and that you may leave in peace if you deliver my message to the Mithril Throne.”

“And that’s yer message?” The dwarf asked, the barrel of his brand tipping towards the floor now that he was mollified by Jon’s oath.

“Tell your lords that we are coming for their puppet king, and will smash the armies of the human realms on the fields of Arling in a few weeks before we march on the capital.” Up until now Jon had been jovial enough, but as he made his ultimatum his voice turned cold as ice. That wasn’t just because he wanted his audience to believe him though. It was because just thinking about the vast kingdoms below filled his heart with hate. “If you do not come to their rescue then your whole enterprise will collapse in on itself, and the dwarven kingdom will fall to ruin.”

They both stood in silence for a long moment before the dwarf finally said, “I’ll go, but only for the good of the deeps. Were it not for that I’d take ye to hell with me.”

Jon holstered his weapon, and escorted the dwarf to his office, letting him collect his money and personal effects, but when he got too close to a large cache of powder that Jon could feel radiating essence of fire Jon stopped him. “You won’t be getting the chance to detonate that I’m afraid. You’re lucky I let you keep your personal weapon. If you’re not careful we’ll have to confiscate that for the war effort as well.”

The dwarf glared at him with hate in his eyes, but didn’t think that it was worth dying for, so he backed down. It was the smart decision, but then so was trying to destroy the stockpile before he left. He would need to be able to honestly tell his superiors that he tried to do everything to prevent what had happened, and Jon couldn’t fault him for that.

Once the unpleasantness was done, Jon’s group escorted the dwarf to the town square, where a good chunk of his forces had arrayed themselves behind crates to prepare for a counter-attack from the mines that never came.

“Where in the name in the ancestors did ye get so many brands,” the dwarf asked as he walked past the men.

“I’d tell you,” Jon answered with a laugh, “but you’d never believe me.”

The stationmaster gave him one more sour look and then started walking the long road out-of-town by himself.

“Tell your fellow dwarves to get while the getting is good Gemnd,” Jon called behind him. “If you come down here looking for a fight we’ll show you just how ugly it is to be on the wrong side of a hundred dwarvish wands for once.”

The dwarf said nothing at that, but the silence spoke volumes to Jon, and he turned on his heel and started back towards the local Warden’s home to see how Rian was faring.

“You’re just going to let him leave like that?” one of the men asked. “He’s a shorty. We should kill him.”

“We should,” Jon agreed, “but sometimes there are better ways to send a message. You’ll see. I expect that our station master will pay big dividends in the battle to come.”