Chapter 68: Ch. 068 – (Now) The Hold Up

Jon thought about waiting until he was past the gate before he kicked his roan into a gallop, but he didn’t. There wasn’t time for vanity, or pretending that everything was well in hand. Missing the train would be bad enough. Jon doubted very much that there would be another after this one. Not one without a small army aboard at least, and Jon couldn’t afford to let that happen. 

Not only would it tip his hand to the kingdom below, but it would endanger the only home he’d ever really known. There was no way he could allow that. So, instead of trying to pretend everything was okay, he pushed his horse as hard as he could without running down any pedestrians on his way to the station. 

Even with those efforts he still only beat the train to the station by under a minute. That gave him just enough time to grab one of the drab grey smocks that the day laborers that the dwarves hired now and then wore, and put it on to cover the satchel that held his revolver. 

On a normal train, there were less dwarves than there were bullets in his weapon, but fighting them wouldn’t be the hard part. The hard part would be turning 30 tons of steel and steam into an ice cube before they got suspicious. 

As the train pulled up to the station Jon picked up a crate with both hands and, pretending like it was heavy, he walked towards where it slowly pulled to a stop. This train was nine cars plus the engine and the tender, which was about right for one of the long meandering week long routes. The way he’d read the routes in Boriv’s office, Dalmarin was about halfway through this loop. That meant that this train would still have plenty of coal to drop off and almost as much grain that it had already picked up. 

“Ye there,” the train conductor called to Jon. “Where’s Boriv?” 

“He’s in his office I think,” Jon shrugged, doing his best to play to the weak and lazy stereotype that defined the dwarvish view of men like him. 

“Blast it! Why is he in there? We got a schedule to keep don’t we?” The engineer demanded. 

Jon was less interested in his predictable anger and more interested in the other dwarf that left the engine, and the two that left the second car. Four was fine. He could handle four. Only the engineer was carrying an obvious weapon, and none of them looked like warriors to him. 

Jon almost gave the dwarf an elaborate excuse about a meeting until he realized it would be out of character. Instead, he shrugged and answered. “Dunno. I just know he told me to make sure that this gets aboard no matter what.” 

“Well put it down and get a shovel,” The engineer ordered him as he started to walk to the station door. “Aint no special cargo getting on my train until the coal is off and Boriv has signed the paperwork.” 

Jon knew that the engineer was only seconds away from finding out that the doors to the station were all locked. If he had a keen eye he might even notice the remaining signs of a struggle, or that it was emptier than usual because he’d let the townspeople loot it of anything of value before he locked it up for the last time. 

He didn’t care though. He’d put down his box and hopped down onto the rail bed. He wasn’t going for a shovel though. He was pulling a thread of fire from the thrumming heart of the engine. In the deeps having this much fire to play with had been almost common, and in the last couple years he’d been on the surface, Jon had grown to miss it. The ability to channel this much power was practically addictive, and he felt the mana course through his body as he started to draw the fire out of the engine. 

Where he sent the heat right now didn’t matter so long as no one noticed it. So he dumped it into the steel tracks and the rocks beneath his feet, but after a few seconds he could feel the heat mirage dancing around him as the air rippled and moved in anger at being displaced by so much fire. 

If the engineer or his second had still been in the cab they would have seen the pressure gauge start to drop, and the firebox begin to dim, but Jon was only getting started. He gritted his teeth and put his hands on the side of the boiler, feeling the element thrum beneath his finger tips as he reached farther afield and started to dump all of the fire he could in the water tower. Water could hold more heat than any other substance. The dwarves weren’t sure why that was, but that didn’t stop them from being skeptical in their assertions that it was because it was the opposite of fire and the two were constantly seeking to annihilate each other. 

Whatever the reason, it was the perfect place to get rid of the heat, but in the few seconds it took to make it start to steam and churn, the engineer had reached the door. When he got there, he shook the handle angrily and pounded on it several times, but Jon ignored him. He was too lost in the flows of fire that coiled around him like climbing ivy to care about such trivialities. He’d missed this more than he’d realized. 

“Boriv - ye ole’ dog, get out here before ye make me late!” the Engineer bellowed, while Jon worked to drain the boiler of every last erg of energy. 

At least that was his plan until his second suddenly muttered in stone tongue. “Boss - what’s that cold blood doing to our engine?” 

They couldn’t see anything he was doing, but just those few words in dwarvish were enough to perk him up. The dwarf was annoyed that Jon was even touching it without permission. He knew what would come next, even before the engineer turned and yelled. 

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“Hey - hands off my engine,” the dwarf yelled as he started to pull out his brand. He was almost as used to his ability to order everyone around as he was his ability to use violence to defend his machine. 

It was a common trait of engineers that Jon had grown used to during his time in Khaghrumer. The difference between then and now was that he didn’t have to tolerate it. Before the dwarf could draw a bead on Jon and fire a shot, he stole all of the fire from the powder that was loaded and dumped it into the powder flask he could sense in the dwarf’s back pocket. The resulting explosion was enough to distract all of them for a moment as Jon turned his attention back to the engine. 

“Brugah’s down! Get that human before he has a chance to play any more tricks with his magic,” the engineer's second yelled as he pulled out his own sword. 

It was always easier when Jon could tell himself that what he was doing was self-defense, and it definitely was when the dwarves pulled out their weapon’s and started to approach him from two side. It was a lie though. None of them had brands, and so he was in absolutely no danger. Their swords could do nothing to him while he held a beating heart of fire in his hand. 

Even though he could hear the boots of the other two dwarves running across the platform, it was the engineer’s second that reached him first. When he was only a dozen steps from where Jon stood, Jon lifted his left hand from the boiler and unleashed a torrent of liquid fire that instantly closed the gap between them. 

Dwarves were immune to magic. He couldn’t light one of them on fire directly, or force heat directly into their bodies like he could with a human opponent, but they still burned like everything else. In a single instant the dwarf was engulfed in flame, along with the wooden platform around him for half a dozen paces in any direction. Jon didn’t let up though. That would have been cruel. If he left the dwarf like this, he would only smolder on the ground in agony for hours before the sweet release of death was granted to him. 

But if he ratcheted up the heat even more, then it would be over for the poor dwarf in seconds instead. Jon grit his teeth and forced the temperatures higher as the gout of fire narrowed. At these temperatures, the stream of fire pouring from his hand turned from an angry red orange to a cold yellow white. He wasn’t sure why, but in the moment it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that the dwarf didn’t even have a chance to scream before he fell to the smoldering planks beneath his feet. 

The other two dwarves had stopped running almost as soon as Jon started to throw fire around, but when he stepped out from in front of the train to meet them, they seemed suddenly unsure. They still held their swords, but they couldn’t quite bring themselves to pull their gaze from the smoldering corpse of his first victim. 

“What in the name of the pit are ye?” One of them asked him. “I’ve seen human magic before, and this ain’t it.” 

“Vengeance,” Jon said simply, as he unleashed a second streamer of fire at the two. One of them took the opportunity to run, but he only got a few steps before the gout of fire enveloped him too. The runner had time to scream, while Jon focused on the closer target first, but the plaintive wail only lasted for a few seconds before he went silent and still. 

By the time all three of them were dead the engineer was only just rising to his feet. “Ye don’t have to kill me lad,” the dwarf said, trying to find a way out of this for him that left him breathing. “Ye just tell me what ye want, and then I can—”

“What I want?” Jon laughed. “Sorry friend. I’ve only got fire magic I’m afraid. Time travel is impossible. There’s no way you could ever hope to fix the wrongs I’ve suffered.” 

“But I’ve n-not wrong ye personally, have I?” the dwarf stammered, trying to hide the pain that was clear enough by the slowly spreading bloodstain around his left foot. “Everything has a price. Even mercy.”

“Mercy? For a dwarf?” Jon laughed, feeling his cold, calculated anger turn into something darker at the very idea of granting a dwarf the very thing that they never would have granted him. The hypocrisy of it all stank worse than the smoldering corpses behind him. “Your sacred laws have a term for this. You might have heard it before. Root. And. Branch.” 

The dwarf’s eyes widened in alarm, but that was the last thing he ever did before Jon lit him on fire too. This time the fire’s started out white, and slowly crept to blue as he poured out everything he had into this arrogant engineer. The walls of the train station caught fire in the same moment as the fire overflowed in all directions. The doors, the eaves, and even the roof followed within seconds. 

By the time the engineer fell to the ground, the glass in the window panes was starting to shatter from the sudden change in temperatures, but Jon didn’t care. There was nothing in this place he needed more than he needed to make it disappear. This was the place it had all gone wrong. It was this building and the people that ran it that had taken everything he’d ever loved from him, and he couldn’t think of a single reason for it to continue existing. 

At this point there was no reason to drain the boiler of its heat, but there was no reason not to either, so, with tears of anger in his eyes, Jon let all the emotions and the fire pour out of him until there was nothing left.

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