Chapter 36: Ch. 036 – (Then) No Good Deed

Jonathan was stunned. Not from the blow or the rough treatment as they dragged his already aching body from the courtroom, but because this is how it was going to end. All his suffering and struggles were over because he broke another law that didn’t make any sense. Kaspov had mentioned the law against magic, which Jonathan had secretly broken almost every day when he practiced channeling fire, but since no harm had been done he hardly needed to share that with anyone. What he did yesterday was save people though - didn’t they have exceptions for things like that? Weren’t extenuating circumstances taken into account when they decided who lived or died, or were all the answers written down in their ancient tomes so they could ignore just how messy the real world was in favor of their nice clean lines on a page?

Jonathan ceased struggling once they left the courtroom and were in the hall. There was no point in it anymore, and the more he flailed the more painfully the guards tightened their grip on him. So he complied, going meekly back to what he thought was the waiting room they’d had him in earlier. He was wrong about that guess though. Instead they walked past that without stopping and took him to an iron bared cell that was just barely big enough for him. Once they’d crammed him inside the guards locked the door and left Jonathan to find some way to get comfortable, which turned out to be sitting with his legs crossed while he slouched against the wall. This was a dwarf sized cell and he could neither lay flat nor sit up straight. Not that he really cared by now. He didn’t even take the time to study his neighbors in the cells across from him. He just fixated on the verdict. They were going to kill him and call that justice. Probably with the same axe they’d used to kill his brother. 

He couldn’t make himself get angry about it though. Jonathan had run out of rage, and now he was coasting on the fumes of self pity while he tried to fall asleep. He could have known. He should have known that he couldn’t do anything to help anyone in this blasted city. He fell asleep just like that, and had dreams he couldn’t quite remember when he was woken up sometime later by a bowl of room temperature gruel being slid under his cell door. Nothing about it looked appetizing, and Jonathan thought about just leaving it there as a show of… of what really? They wouldn’t care about him refusing to eat in protest. He was the one that would go to his murder hungry. That’s what Jon had decided while he sat there - killing him like this was murder, just the same as what Boriv had done to all those poor people in his village. They’d murdered them all. Apparently that’s what dwarves did. They murdered anyone that didn’t fit into their bizare worldview and a legal system that was as cramped as their cities. 

Jonathan had plenty of time to think about this for the next couple watches. Every other watch came with a meal of gruel, stale bread, or cold stew. The time between those important events was filled with the guards taking a prisoner, or depositing a new one, as they came and went at all hours of the day. Jonathan couldn’t say if all of the people in this area were the condemned, but if they were the dwarves were going through them at a healthy pace. For a time one of the dwarves in the cell across from him tried to talk with Jon, but the dwarf knew no Wenlish, and the short list of words and phrases Jon knew would do him no good here as he neither wanted to insult a criminal nor hand him a tool. 

It had taken them a couple days to execute his brother once the verdict had been decided, so he doubted he had much time. Escape wasn’t really a possibility so there was little point in thinking about it. The walls on all sides were solid stone, and the door was made of thick iron bars. Even if no one was paying attention to him there was no way he could melt through them in a timely manner. It was pretty much over, and all he could do was wait for them to fetch him.  

A watch and a half later, that’s finally what happened. The guards showed up, unlocked his door, and looked at him expectantly. He could have played dumb, or tried to resist. They’d probably have a hell of a time actually getting him out of the cell they’d wedged him into. Eventually they would though, no matter how many bones they had to break to force the issue, and he’d already decided that he’d rather not spend his last minutes in this life in agony, so with as much deliberate slowness as he could justify he slowly but deliberately unfolded himself and crawled out of the cell. Then each dwarf took an arm and led him away to what Jonathan was sure was the executioner's dias. 

Jonathan hadn’t attended Marcus’ execution, but Boriv had told him about it, and the images filled his mind as he walked towards his doom. Crimes and verdicts were read to a group of onlookers who were there for the blood as to see justice done in any particular case, and then the guilty criminal was knelt at a large wooden block that had been stained with the blood of thousands of the guilty that had gone before, and quickly beheaded by a dwarf who used a battle axe as precisely as any butcher used a filet knife. It was supposed to be quick and painless, but even a painless death still left you dead though. Even with those horrible images in mind, Jonathan held his head high. He was determined to die as he had lived - in a way that would make his father proud, no matter what he thought of this farce. 

He was utterly shocked when the guards led him back to the court room rather than the execution plaza he’d thought they were matching him to. Jonathan was too stunned to take in all the details of his surroundings as they marched him back to the spot where the accused stood, but once he was there he began to notice strange details. Fedon was still there of course, but so was Kaspov, and the rest of the crew in the repair yard. He didn’t even try to ask though - nothing good came from his outburst last time, and nothing good would come from trying it again. Instead he stood there, listening as Kaspov spoke to the Magistrate in the rough tongue of his race, apparently answering questions that were asked.

Finally the exchange ended, and Kaspov turned to Jonathan. “Alright lad. I want ye to answer what I ask ye, but just what I ask ye. Nothin else. Do ye understand?” As the dwarf spoke he looked at Jonathan meaningfully, like there was some kind of trick to what he was saying, but Jonathan wasn’t quite sure what he was getting after. 

“Yes,” he said simply,  playing along. If what might be his only friend in the whole of the deeps thought this is what he should do, then he would play along. 

“Alright then,” the dwarf cleared his throat. “Ye know that usin’ magic inside Khaghrumer is a crime punishable by death, right?” 

“I do,” Jonathan answered, confused. Was the old dwarf trying to make sure that all the blame fell on Jonathan rather than splashing his way? Kaspov didn’t seem like the type to throw a man under the wagon like that, but Jonathan couldn’t say for sure when it came to dwarves anymore. The joke was on him though - Jonathan was already going to die. It’s not like they could kill him twice. 

“So when ye used yer magic in the rail yard, to save our lives, where were ye standin, exactly?” Kaspov asked. He seemed so different from how he normally acted and talked that it was hard to say what exactly he was trying to do here, but Jonathan thought back to that day anyway. He remembered his boots catching on fire. Then he looked down at the rocks around his feet, his vision wavering with heat as all the fire was forced from the steam into the rocks. That meant he was a ways back from the repair siding, but where did that put him?

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“I was on a rail bed,” he answered finally, and almost as a question as he tried to decide if that was the right answer. 

“Which rail bed, specifically—” Kaspov continued before there was a brief outburst in dwarven from the gallery. Jonathan turned and was unsurprised to see it was Fedon. What did surprise him was that the Magistrate immediately pounded his stone gavel and shouted down the interruption. 

“Excuse the interruption,” Kaspov said, smiling ever so slightly, “Someone felt I was tryin to put words in yer mouth lad. Let’s try this again. Which set of tracks specifically were ye standing on when ye cast yer spell.” The mention of casting a spell almost made Jonathan laugh. People with elemental affinities didn’t cast anything. They just reached out and moved around the parts of the world they could touch. Spells were for elves and fairies.

“I was standing just to the left of the track on the line to the east of the third repair siding,” Jonathan said, thinking hard as he tried to put a mental map of the crowded yard together in his mind. “So that would be… Line six.”

“And where does line six go Jonathan?” Kaspov asked, a bit more eagerly. They were obviously getting close to whatever the point of this little exercise was.

“It’s a deep run train that goes south…” Jonathan answered, wracking his brain to try to remember. “To Bhadrumer and eventually the southern peaks I think.” 

“So then if ye knew that magic inside the city was illegal, but ye chose to do so anyway, why did ye choose to do it standing right there?” Kaspov put a subtle emphasis on the end of the sentence as he spoke. Right there? Jonathan wasn’t sure why it mattered where he was standing when he dissipated the steam. He didn’t choose where to do it - that was just where he was standing after he’d pushed Kaspov out of the way. 

That wasn’t what the wiley old dwarf was asking though. He’d made it clear to Jonathan in a number of conversations that it wasn’t lying exactly to tell a very selective version of the truth, so that must be what he was doing right now. So what was special about a rail line that made that the right place to stand? Was he trying to tell him that the train lines weren’t part of a city, so maybe they had a different set of laws that applied to them? Jonathan was doubtful that the authorities would be particularly welcoming of a human using magic on their prized trains either, but maybe he was overthinking it. Maybe the rails were just outside the city, because… He wasn’t sure. A rail could certainly be a part of a city, right? 

Boriv didn’t think so, he realized, suddenly thinking about a years old conversation with his former master when he’d referred to line 17 that grazed Dalmarin as the ‘Dalmarin Line.’ He couldn‘t for the life of him think of what Boriv had said about it though - just that he had cuffed him good for the remark. That line definitely didn’t belong to his town though. He remembered that much. Maybe that was what Kaspov was getting at, he thought as the answer suddenly came to him. 

“I channeled fire there because it was outside the city, thus not subject to its laws” Jonathan smiled, feeling like he’d solved the puzzle. 

“Is that so,” Kaspov followed up, sounding skeptical. “It’s in the rail yard. That belongs to Khaghrumer, doesn’t it? Why would the line be any different.” 

“All rails connect at least two cities, and it can’t belong to both, so it belongs to neither.” Jonathan answered quickly, already working out where this was going. He didn’t know if it would work, but it was certainly more promising than kneeling on a bloody block of wood. “I stood there so I could save the engine and the crew without breaking the law.”

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