Chapter 63: Ch. 063 – (Then) Powder Keg

After that fateful day, everything changed. Even if it wasn’t obvious to anyone but Jonathan. The time before that pivotal conversation was just a blur of exhaustion and anger, but the days that followed became much clearer with the weight of the forbidden knowledge he carried. He wouldn’t be surprised if he was the only non dwarf who ever lived that knew the secret, and if he succumbed to either the heat or his dark thoughts, then it would die with him. 

Jonathan would never be able to face his ancestors in the afterlife, knowing he had failed humanity so utterly. A true Shaw would never let that happen, he decided. 

His greatest fear was not that he would succumb to the terrible conditions he faced, but that one morning he would wake up and forget the secret. Terrified of forgetting it, he repeated in his head hour after hour and day after day. It became a mantra of a sort, if a clunky one. There was no art to saying 75% stonesalts, 15% charcoal, and 10% brimstone though, so over time it mutated into a secret code he was sure he’d never forget. Fifteen white, three black, and two yellow. Like beads on a necklace. He repeated it and visualized it in everything he did, until the pattern invaded his dreams in a thousand little ways.

Jonathan still suspected that there was some secret trick to mixing them together, because he didn’t see how 17 parts not white and three parts white made a substance that dark, but he didn’t dwell on that right now. Once he was free, he would experiment and see for himself. If he couldn’t figure it out, he was sure that a sage or an alchemist would be able to puzzle it out. 

That didn’t matter right now, though, and it wouldn’t for a long time. What mattered now was that he escape. So while Jonathan worked, he looked for ways out of this hellhole. It was something he’d been doing since he got here, on and off, but now he did it with purpose. Such diligent efforts really didn’t turn up any new leads, though. 

The powder mill was light on guards and relied on gates that would take an awful lot of fire to burn through, if it was even possible. Even a perfect escape plan would require him to burn through at least two gates, and he doubted he could do that without drawing the attention of the guards. If he caught one by surprise, and they weren’t wearing the full plate that about half of them favored, then Jonathan thought he might be able to take one of them. In a fair fight, though, Jonathan had zero confidence in his ability to take down more than one without getting his hand on one of their brands. There were chutes that brought the foul sludge into the sewer and barred sluices that let it flow out the other side, but other than the train line, that was it. 

As always, he decided his best opportunity for escape would be the rare days he was called upon to load the volatile cargo they made into one of the cars. Just trying to disappear wouldn’t work, though. Not only were the guards that were posted at the rail tunnels unlikely to let so much as a stealthy goblin, though, but his height made him stick out more than every other prisoner combined. He would definitely need a clever plan. Fortunately, he had all the time in the world to think one up. 

In the end, he decided that goblins were the answer. He’d given a lot of thought to how those ugly bastards would sneak out of this situation, but even after he decided that they wouldn’t be able to, he eventually decided that they held the key to all this. Well, not them specifically, but the dwarves' irrational hate and fear for him. 

Almost irrational, Jonathan corrected himself. Vile as they were, they still weren’t worth the efforts the dwarves put into purging them, save for the fact that they grew into the nightmares that were trolls. A shiver still passed through Jonathan when he thought about those beasts. They certainly justified a healthy dose of fear. 

So, doing his best to remember what their turds looked like, Jonathan molded a few from the sewage he was surrounded by and used a little fire to dry them. He wasn’t sure that they were quite right, but he had to make them for concealability as much as realism, so he tried not to worry about it too much, reminding himself that in the end, it wouldn’t come down to how good his decoys were, but how much the dwarves needed to purge the little creeps. 

Almost a week later, the chance to try his plan finally came, when his whole crew was pulled out of the sewers early to help unload a fresh shipment of supplies. It was just the same as all the other times. A train arrived with boxes of food and barrels of beer, and in a few hours in would leave filled to the brim with nothing but dwarvish powder. It was a strange sort of alchemy, but if Jonathan had anything to say about that, it was all coming to a sudden halt today. 

For the first few hours, Jonathan bided his time, carrying crates of cans and sacks of flour from the box car to the appropriate store room, the same as everyone else. This was always a fairly calm activity for the prisoners for a couple of reasons. Not only were the guards already on edge because there were so many out here working at once, but because in a place like this, the last thing you wanted to do was piss off the cooks, and getting into a scuffle that resulted in wasted food would certainly do just that. Giving the guards an excuse to give you a beat down was bad enough, but a man might starve before the kitchen decided that he’d been punished enough. 

Jonathan wasn’t one to make trouble, though, even on a normal day. He just did what he was supposed to and the dwarves left him alone like the freak show he was. 

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Today would be different, though. Today when the third boxcar they were unloading was mostly empty he cut up a flour sack and tossed down his fake goblin crap in the corners nearby, so it looked for all the world that a stowaway might lead to an infestation. Once that was done, he ran for a guard.  

The sudden change in his behavior almost got him clubbed over the head with the butt of the guard’s brand, and Jonathan guessed that it was only his value to their gambling pool that saved him from a concussion. Neither guard could speak Wenlish, but they both recognized the word gobbler, and as soon as he made that clear they rushed past him to investigate, just as he’d hoped. 

For several long minutes, Jonathan worried that his ruse had been discovered, but as more and more guards came over to investigate, he decided that they were convinced. There were simply too many dwarves discussing the problem not to set it aside. The goblin threat was real because goblin threats were always real. Minutes later, the whole facility was on lockdown and the alarm was blaring as the search for the goblins started in earnest. After that it was just a matter of time until he had his opening, he was sure of it. 

The prisoners that were in the facility stayed there. They’d be stuck searching every crate they’d just finished bringing inside for hours until they found a goblin to justify it. Since none existed, they might be at it for days if Jonathan could manage to slip away quietly, he thought, smiling while he waited meekly for his own assignment.

One of the guards gave him a large light stone, and after some trial and error eventually managed to tell him what to do with it. Jonathan was supposed to search the undercarriage of every train car, back to front. It was a stupid job to give the tallest person there, but he didn’t care. If the dwarves wanted to watch him crawl, then so be it. 

He took his time, pretending to be thorough while he waited for the right moment. While he did so, though, he thought about how screwed up it was that the bastards had sent out to look for a goblin without a weapon of any kind. If there really had been one of the green skins hiding somewhere under this train, it could have easily ripped out his eyes before he noticed it. No light stone, no matter how bright, was going to help with that. 

This stone was the brightest he’d ever held, actually, and it wasn’t even the brightest one that he’d seen down here at the mill. In Khaghrumer they were dimmer, but still fairly functional, but in the little crossroads that he and Boriv had spent a night in on the way down they were so dim that he’d barely been able to see. It was a funny little detail that Jonathan thought about sometimes, but unfortunately there was no one to ask about it here, and he didn’t care enough to try to figure it out on his own. After all, it could be as simple as them being mined from different quarries, not that that explanation made complete sense either. After all - if it was just a matter of cost, then surely a grand city like Khaghrumer would be able to afford better lights than a hellhole like this. 

It didn’t matter, but right now nothing really did, and he let his mind wander as he moved slowly from car to car looking for nonexistent goblins. 

As he slowly made his way to the front of the train, Jonathan finally noticed a detail that made his heart sink. The guards at the tunnel that was the exit from this cavern were still posted there. Even in all the chaos, they hadn’t moved, so the odds of him sneaking quietly away in the dark were pretty much zero. 

“All this work for nothing,” Jonathan sighed to himself. He could try to force his way through, of course, but they would shoot him before he ever got close unless he detonated all their powder from a distance, and that would draw even more attention to him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead as he approached the still steaming engine. Even pulling heat away from him almost constantly, the boiler was still uncomfortably warm. It had been idling too long, and the engineer was obviously banking on a quick release to get back on schedule, and now it was Jonathan’s problem to figure out how to get close enough to the damn thing to give it a proper search. 

He watched a dwarf look out the window of the engine’s cab for a few seconds before going back to whatever he was doing. The only thing he had any interest it was seeing this inspection finished, then he could release the brakes, open the throttle, and get moving. It only occurred to Jonathan after he was starting to walk away from the cab that that was probably his answer. 

Everyone was distracted, so if he seized control of the train he certainly knew enough about how it worked to get it going again, at least for a while. Kaspov had never taught him what the gauges meant or how to keep the pressure levels optimal, but for an hour or two he could keep things moving and shovel as much coal as he needed to. It wasn’t a lot of time if you were walking, but for a train… In an hour or two, he might be halfway back to the surface. The risk was much higher than with his previous plan, but he was sure he could create a distraction or two to distract the guards long enough to overpower the conductor and get moving.

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