They led him inside the small building, and the first thing that Jonathan noticed was that it wasn’t small at all. It might have looked like nothing but a mountain home attached to a small warehouse, but he could immediately see that the details were all wrong. For starters, the door had been wood on the outside but steel on the inside, and the way it was laid out in an industrial way hinted that this place was much bigger than it seemed.
Then, of course, there was the fire. There was an immense amount of fire in this building. It wasn’t just the warm air or the double hearths on either side of the room that kept it toasty. He could feel it on the other side of the walls. Either this was a very unique coal depot, or the dwarves here were storing an awful lot of dwarvish powder. He shuddered at the thought as they led him to a spot in front of one of the fires. Something big was hiding in plain sight here, and he’d stumbled into it, which was the last thing he wanted. He’d just wanted a little warmth and maybe some food before he continued his trip, but he didn’t fancy getting out of here any time soon with the way this pair of dwarves looked at him.
“Easy now, lad - just take a seat over here. You're safe now,” the first dwarf said. “Why don’t ye tell me and Kell here exactly what happened and how you ended up in the mountains all alone in the middle of winter with little more than your boots?”
Jonathan shivered dramatically as he bought himself time to think. “Thank you both so much,” he said finally, struggling to remember what he’d already told them at the door. It wouldn’t do to be caught in his lie too soon, but his mind was racing so fast that it was difficult to remember anything beyond the danger signs and the way they stared at him too fixedly.
“Ye said that you were travelin’ with a dwarf,” Kell said, only barely holding back his long enough with his question to keep from interrupting Jonathan. “Who was he, and what happened to him?”
“Please - before we get to such a tragic story, might I have something to eat?” he asked, looking at first one dwarf and then the other with pleading eyes.
Dwarves weren’t known for their pity, but Jonathan didn’t care. Hungry as he was just playing for time, and when the first dwarf threw up his hands and went into the other room, he swallowed hard as he tried to decide what to tell them. Should he pretend to be ignorant or valuable? Who was this dwarf he said he’d been traveling with, and how did he know him? Were they coming from the deeps or some other nearby city?
In the end, Jonathan didn’t know where he was, so he decided to incorporate some actual details so that it would be harder to catch him in a lie. By the time the dwarf returned with a heel of bread, he had a plan firmly fixed in his mind.
“My name is Jon, and I’m an orphan. My whole family was killed years ago, and so I was given over as an apprentice to the railway station in—”
“Yeah, yeah,” the first dwarf interrupted. “Hard luck story and all that. Kindly get to the important bit. Who was your master, and why was he traveling through the White Spires this time of year? Was he crazy?”
The White Spire Mountain range was somewhere to the east of Dalmarin. He knew that much. It was somewhere past the Malora pass, but he didn’t know much more than that. That was good news, though. That meant if he went far enough south, he’d find the sea and a dozen cities full of people in which he could build a new life.
Jon tried not to smile as he opened his mouth to answer but was almost instantly interrupted by the other dwarf, who’d been in the process of unloading the brand they’d taken from him before. “Bah! Pine needles?! What did you do to this weapon, lad?”
“Ummmm…” he hemmed. “I don’t really know how dwarvish fire magic works, but after my master drowned, I found his weapon. The first shot fired, and I was able to kill the goblin, but after that, I had none of your magic powder, so I tried kindling and—”
“There was a goblin? Just one? Where?” the other dwarf asked, interrupting again. Jon should have been able to guess that the very mention of a goblin would have gotten that response, but even so, he was having a hard time trying to figure out whether all these interruptions were hurting him or helping him.
Ultimately, he wasn’t even sure it mattered, and he just started telling them what they wanted to hear. Initially, he’d been planning to tell them about the wolves he fought off, but at the last second, he changed it to goblins because he thought that would buy him more credibility with the dwarves. Even if he couldn’t tell them he was the Trollslayer, he could at least get a little bit of that reflected glory in this story, couldn’t he?
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He told them about how they’d been attacked underground by 4 goblins after a cave-in had crushed the train they were on and that Erkom had killed three of them before the fourth got him. When they asked him for details and specifics, he just told them about the poor guard in the salt mines that had gotten killed by the goblin from above. Even as well as he told the tale, though, he could see skepticism in their eyes.
Jon wasn’t surprised. He knew he’d made a mistake after he’d started telling the story, not that it was too late to do anything about it now. Not only had a human lived while a dwarf had died, which was something they would have had trouble accepting, to begin with, but a dwarf had died with his weapon unfired, and Jon had been the one to use it. He didn’t draw attention to it, but the inconvenient fact lingered there just the same, lying on the floor between them like a rotting fish.
“It’s a good story, kid,” Kell said gruffly, “But how do we know that you didn’t kill the Erkom fellow and not the goblins. Maybe you ran away from your master and took his weapon to—”
“I would never do that to Erkom,” Jon spat as he reached down and rolled up his tattered pants. Even if the idea that, in the end, all of his friends had let him down over Anda, he still would never betray them like that. “If there were no goblins, why do I have this?”
In the firelight, it was impossible not to see the angry red semicircle of puncture wounds. It was partially healed and nowhere near as gross as it had been before he’d lanced the worst of the infected tissue with red-hot steel, but as a battle scar, it was plain where it was from. Nothing but a goblin would have had such a broad mouth or so many sharp teeth looking to rend flesh. As a badge of honor, it was enough to finally give the dwarves pause to consider his words.
“Well, I suppose that just might make ye a goblin slayer lad, not that it matters now,” Kell said, picking up his freshly cleaned and reloaded brand and pointing it at him. “Because this part of the world ain’t for the likes of you.”
Jon dropped his crust of bread and put his hands up, confused and afraid. “Wha--what’s going on?” he asked. “I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s true but irrelevant. These lands are off-limits to humans. If you’d saved your master, then maybe he would have been smart enough to steer you clear of them,” Kell answered, fingering the trigger.
“Are you really going to do that in here?” the first dwarf asked in stone tongue. “Think of the mess it will be to clean up. He’ll bleed everywhere.”
“I’d rather scrub the floors than chase him through the snow Beark,” Kell answered as he drew a bead on Jon.
“Please,” Jon said, scrambling away as he rose to his feet. He could only go so far, though; soon enough, there was only a wall behind him, and all he could do was look down the barrel of the brand pointed at his head. “Please - I didn’t do anything or see anything - just let me go, and I’ll…”
Intellectually Jon knew that he could burn these men and this whole place down right now, but even with a weapon pointed at him, he was having a hard time with that idea. This had to be some kind of crazy test, or maybe they’d see reason at the last second. Something would happen to save him.
It wasn’t until he felt the spark that would bring his weapon roaring to life that something in him snapped. In that instant, he took the fire that would have launched the bullet that would end his life and stole it from the gun, releasing it as a spray of harmless flames on an instinctual level. The fire did nothing to the dwarves, but they stepped back quickly enough, allowing him to make a break for it.
“What the hell was that?” Beark bellowed uncomprehendingly. “Do you even know how to load that thing?”
“Just a misfire,” Kell shot back. “Grab him before he gets away. No man is allowed to escape from the giant territory.”
Jon tuned out their words and ran for the door, noting that it still wasn’t barred. He stopped only long enough to grab his bag as he ran outside in nothing but his stinking wolf skins and rags, and he tossed away his bag on the porch of the building as he pulled out his dwarvish short sword. The Dwarves were right behind him, though, well, at least one of them. He could hear the tramp of boots, but he wasn’t about to turn around and see what was happening. The deep snow would slow them down far more than him, so he’d be safe if he could just get behind a tree or something.
Only he couldn’t even see the trees anymore. It had barely been snowing when he entered the building, but it was near blizzard conditions as he came out. That made Jon swallow hard and wonder if he’d made the right now. Dead was dead either way, wasn’t it? By brand or snow, he’d still be nothing to be an ice-cold corpse in a few hours.
It was this thought that made him hide there, just beside the door, with his sword held high, ready to drive it into the first dwarf to step foot outside. He hated himself for doing it, but for the first time in a long time, he was really ready to fight back.
When the red-bearded Beark pushed past him and into the snow, Jon stabbed him with only the slightest hesitation. He didn’t quite stab the dwarf in the back, but he might as well, and the thought sickened him as he cursed himself for being a coward as well as a murderer. The dwarf turned towards him and managed to cry out in pain, but his lung had been pierced, and he was too weak to form actual words.
Jon tried to pull the weapon out but found it was stuck on a bone or something, and the blood-slick handle offered him no traction. So, as he heard the other dwarf inside getting closer, he picked up the fallen dwarf’s brand and readied himself for his next opponent.