The White Fox (26 page)

“Good. That’s raw alchemy. Now close your eyes and try to—”

There was a pop, and the desk exploded into flames.

“Sorry,” Jack said sheepishly.

Sardâr smiled and flicked his hand at the desk. Invisible wind blasted over it, the flames dissipating, leaving it unharmed.

Later that day, Jack managed it with a bowl of water, but this time, he waited to let it go. He allowed it to expand, filling up every particle of his body. Focussing on it, keeping the surge from breaking out, he shaped it into the form Sardâr had described to them. He held on to it, and as he felt his head was about to explode with the effort, he let it loose. An orb of water, completely defying gravity, floated upwards out of the bowl and blasted from between his fingers, shooting across the room like a miniature comet. It collided with the bookcase, knocked a whole shelf of books on the floor.

“Excellent,” cried Sardâr, waving his arm vaguely so that the books replaced themselves. “That was the first controlled piece of alchemy you’ve performed. Now let’s try something a little different.”

Lucy looked distinctly put out at this.

Every day, after a short lunch, Jack and Lucy went down to the training grounds at the back of the fortress. This was a large room, where a smooth wooden platform occupied the majority of the floor and benches and weapons racks lined the walls. When they arrived, a regiment of dwarf guards were in the midst of an exercise drill, some jogging around the room, others doing press-ups, and still more practicing combat with axes and swords.

For the first week of afternoon lessons, Adâ was their tutor. She took them through the basics of weaponless self-defense: punches, kicks, blocks, and counterstrikes. She used Jack as her dummy for every example, through which Lucy nodded interestedly, and he winced every time her fist or foot stopped within an inch of him.

On the sixth day of their training, on the day Jack had first successfully practiced alchemy, Adâ announced the two of them would have their first free-sparring match.

“I won’t go easy on you,” Jack warned Lucy as they clambered onto the platform. She shrugged.

Adâ clapped two pieces of wood together, the signal for them to begin.

They started circling each other, gazes flicking between the other’s face and hands. Several dwarves, having finished training, watched from the sidelines. Jack took a deep breath and moved in to punch.

Five seconds later, he was on his back, coughing heavily, with no idea how he’d got there.

Adâ was applauding, and the guards were roaring with laughter.

Lucy stood over him, grinning. “Did I never tell you I took karate lessons when I was younger?”

“You kept that quiet,” he spluttered as she hauled him to his feet.

“I thought I’d get some fun out of it one day. Never this much, though.” Lucy giggled. “You were too busy throwing water balls to notice.”

After several more days of weaponless combat, Hakim and a friendly dwarf called Captain Umrád equipped them with some protective padding and a wooden sword each.

Lucy’s initial reaction was one of disdainful disbelief. “Don’t we get guns? Alex had a gun on Earth …”

“On
Earth
,” Adâ explained, “a gun is completely normal. Too normal, in fact. Here it would have disastrous consequences for the dwarf-goblin weapon escalation.”

Jack expected something like fencing, but this was completely different. The movements were not at all showy, part of a “gentlemen’s agreement,” they were purely practical and often brutal. Lucy, to Jack’s great surprise, was a natural at this too. With agility and a quick eye born of her netball training, she darted around the platform, disarming him three times during their first session. He had to admit to her afterwards that, whilst she couldn’t climb a mountain as well as he could, he knew which skill would come in more useful in the future.

This culminated when, three weeks after they had begun, Jack was becoming an increasingly competent sorcerer. He could now levitate light objects, manipulate water and air into shields, freeze objects, and conjure fire as Sardâr had done on the first day. Meanwhile, Lucy was increasingly skillful as a fighter both with and without a weapon; she could now fend off many of the dwarf guards who trained with them as well as Adâ and Hakim. And whilst she could easily outmatch Jack in the training room, she was still fruitless in her attempts at manipulating alchemy.

At the exact three-week mark of their training, the two of them sagged into chairs in Lucy’s room, exhausted. Lucy’s face was flushed—Jack had never seen her so well exercised—and he was aching from their recent bout as well. Despite Lucy’s playful denunciations, alchemy took a surprising amount of mental and physical application, and his legs were sore from being crossed for so long. She looked as he had never seen her before; her face had a lot more color in it, and she had taken to tying her hair back in a ponytail rather than constantly messing with her fringe.

“You know,” Lucy breathed, unwrapping the bandages they had been using as gloves from her fists, “this place isn’t so bad after all. I wish we did this in
real
school.”

Jack smiled. He was glad Lucy was finally settling in. She had even stopped talking about her parents at every opportunity, and Jack could tell that whilst she was still concerned, she was allowing them to dominate her waking thoughts less. Though he was happy to accept this—her attitude had improved a lot recently, and they were getting on as they used to—something nagged at the back of his mind.
His
concern for Alex had not diminished at all, and whilst he convinced himself that by learning these skills they were preparing to help him, he was still raked at night by the recurring fear of what had befallen his friend.

Over those three weeks, very little changed in the fortress of Thorin Salr. The new security measures Sardâr and the king had drafted were put into place almost instantly, but this did nothing to stem the influx of refugees. Disused rooms and hallways had been opened up for their use, so that the strain on the main chambers was lessened. Shifts of guards were on full patrol constantly, and, true to his word, Sardâr did not allow either Jack or Lucy outside the fortress. Jack thought it was a good thing that the two of them were so busy, or the atmosphere would have been stifling. After what had befallen the last scout party, no others were dispatched, but even so nothing was heard of the growing goblin army—or the Cult—at all.

Then, just as Hakim and some of the dwarves they spoke to were beginning to hope that the problem had gone away, everything changed.

Jack awoke on the morning that would have been their twenty-second day of teaching to another burst of loud noise. Looking out his doorway, something was different. There were dwarves running at top speed up and down the corridor, carrying a plethora of different objects and looking distinctly flustered. He checked Adâ’s room, but it was empty.

He met Lucy in the corridor. “Where’s everyone going?”

“I’m not sure.” She looked worried.

One of the dwarves clipped them as she ran past, her towering stack of parchment flying everywhere. “Sorry,” she said, looking scared.

The three of them clambered around the corridor, picking up all her sheets. The dwarf was about to run off again when Jack asked, “What’s going on?”

She looked at him a little strangely. “They’re here!”

“Who?”

“The greenskins! They’re here! Inside the valley!”

“What?” There was a pause in which he and Lucy glanced at each other in awe.

“Did you see an elf go past?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t think so … but the king and a few elves are up on the south balcony.”

“Which way is it?”

She gave them directions.

“Okay, thanks.” Jack and Lucy sprinted off down the corridor, leaving their bedroom doors wide open.

A minute later they were there, pushing open the door, and were hit with blinding sunlight. Blinking, they saw Sardâr, Adâ, and Hakim standing to their right and to the left the king, Bál, and several other dwarves Jack recognized from the council.

“So what’s happening?” Jack asked.

“They’ve got through the Great South Gate.” Sardâr pointed out across the valley.

Jack and Lucy stepped closer to the edge to get a better look. Just visible (for the sunlight was blasting in their eyes) was the rocky ledge that led the tunnel out on to the ravine. The entire valley was deserted, the cranes unusually still, but on that ledge there were silhouetted figures amassing. More and more of them were swarming out of the tunnel; some looked human sized, but there were a few that towered over the rest. Of the ones he could make out, Jack could see the strange reptilian creatures that had so nearly caught them on their way in to the valley.

“How did they get through the tunnel?” Jack asked, confused.

“That’s what we’re just wondering.”

One of the dwarves—Jack recognized him as the only survivor of the scouting party—clapped his hands to his forehead and shouted, “The scouts. My regiment. They had axes on them.”

“Why is that a problem?” asked Sardâr.

“The Great South Gate can be opened either by the password or a dwarf axe placed in the right position on the wall,” explained an aged dwarf. “It dates back to the days of our ancestors. All axes are shaped so that the momentum of it falling activates a pulley system inside. But they couldn’t have got in by having only an axe. They must have known where the gate was.”

“But how?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sardâr said exasperatedly. “What really matters is how we’re going to deal with them now that they’re here.”

“Don’t worry about that.” Thorin waved a finger at him tauntingly. “I had a solution installed as soon as the giants were sighted. Einhendr, Nyr, if you please.”

Two dwarves walked out from behind the door, carrying bows. Notching arrows to them, they held them up to a flickering brand by the king so the rag-wrapped heads lit.

“No, wait!” cried Sardâr, but even as he said it they let loose the arrows. They soared over the edge of the balcony, not anywhere near where the enemies were congregating. For a moment, Jack thought they had fallen short, but they were both veering in the same direction. They flew into the center of the valley, where he saw a large cluster of strange-looking metal objects heaped in a mound in between the mining pits. Then there was a terrific booming, and dust and chunks of rock flew into the air from where the arrows had landed.

“What did you do?” Sardâr roared over the rumbling.

“We laid explosives down, so now there’s a gorge between us and them.” Thorin looked pleased with himself.

“What!” Sardâr erupted at the top of his voice.

The cloud of dust was beginning to clear, and Jack could see the mining pits had been extended to form a single, massive gorge, at least half the distance of the valley, creating an impassable barrier between the two halves. Bits of broken wood and rock were scattered around the edge, the remnants of the dwarves’ livelihoods.

“What’s the matter?” Thorin sounded confused.

“Explosives! They aren’t due to be developed for hundreds more years! Do you realize what you could have done?”

“Calm yourself,” said Thorin. “We developed them ourselves. Strictly within the boundaries of our time period.”

Most of the council were looking confusedly, even scared at their king, not least because he was speaking as if he could tell the future. Jack couldn’t help thinking that Sardâr, for all his talk about keeping their true origins a secret, had just broken his number one rule.

“Come on,” Adâ said quietly, for it looked as if Sardâr was about to overflow with rage. She pushed Jack and Lucy ahead of her down the stairs. Somewhere behind them, another kind of explosion was going on.

Jack and Lucy spent the rest of the day training for battle. Adâ watched over them from the sidelines, but there was an oddly subdued nature, even amongst the dwarves. It was as if the explosives had blown the buoyancy out of everyone. Even the weather was overcast, dark clouds hovering ominously overhead, waiting for the chance to break upon the valley. Sardâr had still not returned.

At around five o’clock, by which time Jack and Lucy were thoroughly worn out, a messenger arrived requesting that they come to Sardâr’s study at once.

When they entered, Sardâr was sitting in his armchair, looking uncharacteristically weary. For the second time, he showed Jack and Lucy to their seats.

“How did the argument go?” Jack asked before Sardâr could say anything.

Sardâr smiled wryly. “Thengel still fails to recognize that he has done anything wrong.”

“Has he?” Lucy asked.

“Yes, many things. He introduced anachronistic technology into this world. He has virtually destroyed the economy of his people, not to mention sealing us completely into this valley with no escape. He’s been driven to action by extreme stress and pressure from his military advisers to do something about the goblin army.”

“Why do we need to escape? And anyway, can’t we get out up the mountain?”

“That trail, like this valley, is enclosed on all sides. As to escaping, Thengel seems to think it’s safe, but the rest of us don’t. We know that the Cult of Dionysus control these goblins, and
they
certainly will not be deterred by a mere boundary of earth or lack of it.”