They lingered on the siding just before the tunnel for most of the following day, then when sunset arrived, they started slowly down the track to their final destination.

There were so many things that Jon didn’t know at this stage of the trip. He didn’t know if both armies would be there in the Owen Valley or how they would be dispersed, but he felt sure that at least one of them would be, and they would be hopelessly out of position because they expected the rebels to march in from the west, not commandeer a train and come down from the north. That should be enough to give Jon all the edge he needed, he decided as he slowly raised the throttle and brought them closer and closer to their final goal.

He honestly wasn’t sure they’d have enough coal to get too much past this, but he was too close to the front to risk stopping and raiding another ammunition depot now. He wasn’t the only one that knew how to use flares, and as slow as the dwarves might be, he was certain that the king’s cavalry would be very quick to counter any advantage his initial surprise appearance would buy them.

Of course, horses were far from ideal in the bay of mud. The dry parts were nothing but hills, and his brands would soon hold all the high ground there. The lowlands, by contrast, were mostly nothing but shallow marshes, even miles from the coast. No one at Pearl Islet had ever called the place anything but Mud Bay for as long as Jon had been there, though he’d been told that it had been beautiful once.

Miles before the final turn to the coast, Jon closed the aperture on the light and doused the signaling lanterns. If there were any dwarves waiting for them, they would still be able to hear a train coming, of course, but the last thing they would do was open fire on that sound without investigating.

He hoped that everyone was as ready as he’d told them to be, but as Jon saw the distant silhouette of something on the tracks ahead, he knew there was no time to check. He kept going at speed once he realized what it was: an artillery battery pointed out at the pass they had expected him to use in a desire to close the gap as quickly as possible.

Though Jon had not known that even such amazing weapons had the kind of range to make them useful for targets almost a mile away, he now desperately wanted to claim them for his side before they could be turned against him.

The first shot rang out just as he was applying the brakes, and though Jon didn’t know if it came from his men or the dwarves, it didn’t matter much because everything that would happen next was unavoidable. At first, there were just a few sporadic shots being fired in Jon’s direction, but after half a minute, there was a full fusillade, indicating that they faced perhaps twenty or thirty dwarves. This was more than he’d hoped, and he pulled the front shutters of the engine compartment closed as he hunkered as low as possible.

The fight after that was brief. Almost as soon as the train stopped, more than a hundred shots rang out in unison, briefly lighting up the night. The next dwarven volley was less than half of the first one, and then, just when it seemed they might be about to win, something large detonated in the rear of the cannons.

Jon would never know if one of the fire bloods in his army had gotten overzealous or if one of the dwarves realizing that they were about to lose their position, had decided to detonate their own ammunition stockpile, but either way, the fireball that suddenly exploded from a hundred yard away was so dramatic that he could feel the heat radiating from it even through the solid steel shutters protecting him.

On insisting, Jon reached out and pulled as much off the fire from that wave as he could and forced it into the cold steel body of the train cars as well as the rails they sat upon to try to shield his men from the blast, but not even he could absorb that much fire that quickly, and he was sure that they would have injured.

After the shooting stopped, he got out of the train and told everyone to stay away from the artillery while he had a small team check to make sure they were clear. It was only once this was happening that Jon finally turned from the combat to gaze down at the valley.

What he saw there beggared belief. There were hundreds of campfires laid out like a hundred little constellations in the darkness. Jon tried to imagine how many people that could be, but his mind boggled at the idea and grudgingly forced himself to turn away as the squad he’d dispatched to inspect the artillery came back to report.

“None of the shorties are still breathing,” Rand said simply, holding his weapon. "Their weapons seem fine, and a couple of them are even loaded, I think, but whatever it was that exploded buried the track, the cannons, and most of the bodies."

That was worse than Jon feared. He’d hoped to take the high ground by surprise and have everyone below wake up to the new reality, but that wasn’t an option now.

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“All right," he said absentmindedly. "Pass the word. We dig in up and down this whole slope quick and quiet. You just got a taste of dwarvish magic, and I assure you, it will not be the last, so we need to be ready for it. Parts of the train make for decent cover, but what we really need is a lot of holes to avoid the shots that will be coming as soon as they get their act together."

The next several hours were tense, as Jon expected a barrage of artillery fire that never came. He wondered if the dwarves were unwilling to fire on their own until they understood what had happened or if their other weapons couldn’t shoot quite this far without the high ground.

Either way, he expected a serious dwarven attack at first light, and as it turned out, he was wrong about that.

What he got instead was a charge of almost 300 light horseback by crossbowmen. It was obviously a probing attack with troops that the forces below considered expendable, but even so, it hurt Jon to order and then cut down with two blasts of his horn.

The battle that followed couldn’t even rightly be called a battle. The enemy came within range, and they were killed before they ever became a threat. It wasn’t bravery, it was butchery, and as much as it gave Jon’s men a huge advantage, he still found it hard to watch how easily dwarvish weapons could kill the other side.

Jon’s army slaughtered half the men in less than a minute, and once they began to retreat, he sent a few people down to look for survivors.

“Why should you care if they live or die?” Cristoph shouted from an embankment not far from him, but Jon ignored him. There was no point in explaining to the other man how a few hostages would make it much less likely that their enemy would simply kill the messenger he was about to send down into the valley.

In a normal conflict between lords that respected each other, a white flag would have been more than enough, but Jon didn’t want to have to go through with what was going to happen next without one last chance for peace. He needed to know that he’d done everything he could before they got that far.

After twenty minutes in the killing field, his soldiers brought back 6 men that weren’t so gravely wounded they were likely to die any time soon. Jon opened the scroll he’d prepared for this moment so long ago and quickly added that note to the bottom. It was the only Wenlish text on the otherwise Dwarvish missive, but he liked the effect that would have too. The only mention of mercy was written in a language that dwarves might not understand.

That was the way it had to be, though, because the human king down there somewhere amongst the thousands of milling troops was not the master of anything. He was just the appointed servant for the upper reaches of the dwarven empire.

When Jon beckoned, the messenger he had set aside for this purpose came running. Geoffrick was an eager young air blood that wasn’t much with a brand. He’d been so eager to join Jon’s cause that he hadn’t the heart to turn the boy away, even if he was a little young for this grisly work. Even now, the lad’s normally sunny disposition was dampened by this morning’s sudden violence. No one except for his most ardent veterans had experienced even a shade of this violence, and Jon was sure that half of his newer recruits would have run during the night if they’d had anywhere to run to.

“Alright, Geoff,” Jon said, handing the scroll to the boy, “Where are you going, and who are you taking this to.”

“I am a messenger from the people; I can only deliver my message to your leader,” Geoffrick said, repeating his well-rehearsed line. “My leader would like a parlay to avoid further bloodshed.”

“Good lad,” Jon said, “Now make sure to hold your white flag high and be brave. We’ve got a handful of hostages to make sure no harm comes to you.”

“Yes sir,” the boy said, with a gesture that was between a salute and a bow, leaving Jon to wonder where some of his men picked this stuff up. He didn’t care about these formalities in the least as he watched his messenger march down the hills toward the rear of the army that was already turning to face him.

Jon pretended like this was exactly what he expected to keep his men calm, but in truth, there were many more soldiers on the other side than he thought there would be. The dwarves themselves likely numbered over two thousand, and the human troops probably had at least that many men on horseback alone.

If one of his men did the counting and told him that his 300 faced 30,000, he wouldn’t have been entirely surprised. It likely wasn’t quite so many, of course, but it was enough that the situation was entirely hopeless. He might have had the high ground and the combined might of humans and dwarven magic at his back, but there wasn’t enough shot on the whole train to kill half of these men, so normally, after a few hours of intense fighting, they’d have to resort to swords, and then they’d be entirely overrun.

He didn’t let that bother him now, though. Until the dwarves repositioned their own cannons, they were in zero danger in their current position, and once it became clear that no further attacks were coming, he set two squads of men to start clearing the tracks just in case they had to beat a hasty retreat.

For the next few hours, Jon chatted with his lieutenants and made jokes with Elise. He did this where everyone could get a good look at just how not worried he was as the day got brighter. Every man could see just how badly they were outnumbered, but Jon’s attention never left that little white flag until it finally began the long walk back up the hill after lunch.

When Geoffrick reached the safety of his lines once more, a ragged cheer went up and down the line.

“Well,” Jon asked, “What did they say.”

“The dwarven general agrees to your terms and will meet with you at sunset,” the messenger said, smiling ear to ear. “He says that he will guarantee a truce until Sunrise tomorrow as a show of good faith.”