In the end, Lord Falcott lived, though Jon couldn’t say he was happy with the result. The people of the town argued both for and against him for over an hour before they voted to take him down from the noose and exile him. The man obviously deserved death, but there was no justice in deciding that himself. Instead, he watched the man leave with his family, carrying what little they could and vowing that the King would hear of this insurrection.

“I should certainly hope so,” Rian called out after him. “We do this as much for the publicity as for the gold.”

Jon didn’t care either way though. Though the station master they’d released might send a little fear underground, depending on where the next station was, Lord Falcott would never reach anywhere that mattered before the battle was joined. They were hardly a week away now, and he was surprised to find that there was still only excitement in his soul. Fear would probably still come, but perhaps it would wait until he could see the battlefield and the forces arrayed against him.

Once the whole dog and pony show was done, Jon met with the headman of the town and gave him the quick version on how exactly he should deal with the dwarves when they came calling. He didn’t have time to give him a primer on dwarven law or anything, but he made it very clear how easy it was to put themselves in the clear regarding any repercussions.

“Just blame me,” Jon said with a smile. “You didn’t ask for our help, you didn’t help us overthrow your lord. Your hands are entirely clean, and there will be no hacking away at the roots or the branches of this village.”

“You’re sure they won’t try to seek vengeance?” the headman asked. “Seems like the thing I would do if I wear in their shoes.”

“Do you know why dwarven numbers work differently than ours?” Jon asked, throwing the older man for a loop.

“I haven’t the foggiest notion why dwarves can’t count to ten,” he said, the confusion plain in his voice. “But what in the name of the gods does that have to do with—”

“It’s the easiest way to explain just how different their world view is from yours and mine,” Jon answered, cutting him off. “See, humans will count on just about anything. Fingers are preferred by most, but toes are fair game too if you aren’t wearing shoes. Dwarves though - they only have eight fingers, so they only count to eight, but we have ten fingers so we count to ten.”

“That can’t be true,” the headman scoffed. “I’ve seen more than enough dwarves, and their hands are just like ours, only smaller.”

“It may look that way to you, but you’re looking at the situation like a human. In the deeps there’s a world of difference between a finger and a thumb,” Jon smiled as the man looked at him like he was crazy. “We have ten fingers, two of them happen to be thumbs, and they have eight fingers and two thumbs. You see the difference?”

“But it’s the same thing,” the old man declared in frustration.

“To you,” Jon nodded, “but not to them. That’s just the way they see the world. There is no gray to them. It is either one thing or the other, not both. That’s why when they come down to talk to you, you have to make it clear that you didn’t help us in any way, and if they find out people participated in our little trial for the Warden you just tell them they only did that to save his life. After that they’ll leave you alone, you have my word.”

“Won’t they want to do something punitive anyway - to make sure that we learn our lesson?” The worry showed clearly on the headman’s face as he returned to this idea again and again, but Jon tried to calm him as best he could.

“Why would they?” Jon asked. “They see all of us as livestock, not people. You just keep tending your fields like good farm animals, and they’ll leave you be. Any punishment will come when they manage to replace the warden. It’s my job to make sure that never happens.”

The conversation continued for a while after that, but it was just more of the same, and once Jon had an excuse he quickly excused himself to go to the train and bring it into town. There wasn’t a lot at the station that they wanted to take with them, but there were two cars in the siding, and despite the extra weight, Jon definitely wanted to load them up. Once they got higher traveling on the roofs of the cars wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. After they locked those in and moved everything around they beat a quick retreat before the dwarves at the smelters could decide how best to try again.

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Their trip to Khornim had been fairly bloodless as far as one of their liberation. Normally half a dozen men would die defending their lord, but this time the only one willing to die for the cause had been his son. That said it all really, Jon thought resentfully as he wished they’d left his corpse hanging from the post in town. Even though the warden had gotten away, it had been a good haul. They’d left the town with five more volunteers than they’d had this morning, as well as two more rail cars, and larger stockpiles of both coal and dwarven powder than they’d had when they’d arrived.

That night they camped on a lonely siding in the middle of a forest that had no doubt served a now abandoned mine they could see from where they set up tents before it got dark. Jon was tempted to warn everyone about goblins, but he doubted that they dwarves would have abandoned such a deep tunnel without sealing it properly. They were very thorough about that sort of thing.

“That town was soft as cheese boss,” Christoph said, happily devouring sausages he’d stolen from the Warden’s larder. “When you said dwarves I was expecting a real fight, but that wasn’t nothing. Tell me you got a few more beauties just like that on your map that we’re going to set free.”

Jon smiled and nodded, wondering just how bad a man like Christoph would be if he was the warden of one of these backwater regions. Someone like him had all the same lusts for power and the trappings of wealth, but without the noble characteristics or upbringing to moderate those urges. It was the worst of all worlds, and one of the reasons he truly didn’t want to kill the nobles that he didn’t have to. They would be needed in a just world more than ever.

“We’ll just have to see,” Jon said, “but I’m not expecting a real fight for at least a couple more days.”

After that the conversation devolved into a detailed blow by blow discussion of Rian’s epic duel with the stone blood, but Jon didn’t pay much attention. He’d heard stories like this at least a hundred times by now. The only thing that his friend loved more than winning fight was a good dice game, and the dice wouldn’t come out until they were done eating, so he would have to settle for stories.

Instead, Jon focused on Christoph’s words. It was true that Khornim had been soft. Certainly it had been an easier fight than he’d expected too. They’d gone in with almost all of their warriors and barely a shot had been fired. Dwarves usually put up a bit more of a struggle. In this case he could only guess that the station master had decided it was more important he reported the weapons that the humans had gathered than that he die for his honor.

That was just the first town they would hit along this line though, and no one was going to see it coming. Up until now most of the damage that they’d done to the kingdom had been hit-and-run attacks along the coast. They’d cause just enough trouble for a local garrison to send a force, and then Jon’s men would ambush them somewhere they weren't expecting and wipe them out. It was a simple strategy, but it had proved to work over and over again, even in places where they should have known better.

Nothing that happened the rest of the week would change any of that though. The only difference between Khornim and the towns that followed as they made their way down the valley were that the rest of them weren’t nearly as bloodless. In Kohngarte only a few dwarves died refusing to give up despite being outnumbered. He didn’t have a choice though. Given that he had no idea what ways they had to sabotage the massive suspension bridge that spanned the chasm just past that town, Jon couldn’t allow them to live.

Men died too though, in the towns the followed. In the smallest of villages the guards were quick to surrender to such well armed bandits, but in large villages like Mederin and Tassentale both led to plenty of death. In each of those towns the Wardens died too by popular acclaim, but before that happened both of them wasted the lives of good men trying to keep breathing for one more day. That was usually the way of it. The more a noble was worth killing, the more men he would try to throw away to prevent that fate. A few guards with swords or crossbows were a nuisance at best to Jon’s burgeoning army though.

At this point the only thing that could stop them, would be a dragon or a giant, and as Jon well knew giants were a myth and dragons hadn’t been seen inside the kingdom in generations. A small army of dwarves would be able to stop them too he supposed, but they were moving faster than the speed of their passing, and the only warning that anyone ahead of them had that something might be amiss was that the train was several days late. That was much more likely to be an avalanche or a breakdown than a revolutionary army bent on overthrowing the status quo, though.

This high up in the mountains the villages were smaller and life was that much more precious. Jon hated to see so much unneeded death as they traveled down the line that linked valley after valley together. He’d always thought that Dalmarin was unique in its beautiful isolation, but there might well be a hundred Dalmarins hidden along this route from everything he’d seen. Save for the fact that these villages focused on sheep rather than wheat, they often looked so much like his home that it broke his heart.

They weren’t all there was to see up here though. Even now they were only touching the largest villages that were directly on the train route. There were others though, he could see them from the high points in the track. Whole generations were living and dying out here without any idea what their role was in the grand scheme of things.

“They think their goal is to live a good life and have a happy family,” Jon commented bitterly to Elise one night, “but really, they exist to keep sending food to the deeps, and their customers don’t care if they starve in the process.”

“That’s why we're doing this baby,” she stroked his hair as she tried to soothe him. “You said so yourself, you can’t fix this until we take the fight to them and break the whole damn system.”

“You’re right baby,” he agreed, holding her that much tighter for believing in him. “We’re almost there, we just have one more stop to make first.”