Licking Walls in the Dark

By S.J. Magill

There are two types of dwarves. The fortunate and the unfortunate. Those born to the right parents, and those born to the wrong. The winners and the losers. The rulers and the workers.

Pon was born into a world of darkness and servitude. He is a miner dwarf. He began mining the day he was old enough to hold a hammer, and will be a miner until the day he dies. He lives, works, eats and sleeps deep underground in the darkness of the mine.

Pon has never seen daylight, or breathed fresh air. Each day the tunnels seem a little bit narrower, and more difficult to live in. Pon finds himself at a point in his life where, unlike his fellow miners, who are able to accept their lives underground, he feels he must take the drastic step of trying to get out of the mine. A fortuitous turn of events means Pon finds himself on the very cusp of leaving his old life behind him. However, just as he thinks he is about to get everything he ever wanted, Pon begins to learn that his lot in life is even bleaker than he realised. Pon learns secrets about the true nature of his place in dwarf society, which he could be killed for knowing.

Pon’s quest to escape the mine is complicated when a dwarf, of a type he has never seen before, comes into his life. For the first time in his life, he finds himself caring about something more than his freedom, which he would go to any lengths to protect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.J. Magill
• Release date: Mar 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311568496

S.J. Magill

S.J. Magill is a writer of comedy/fantasy. His books have been read by literally DOZENS of people worldwide - some of whom he doesn't even know! S.J. lives in Scotland where he works as a lawyer. In the five minutes of free time he has most days, he tries to fit in some writing. The Werechicken is S.J's first novel-length work, and it is frankly excellent. It is set on the fictional world of Terra, where there are wizards, weres, teleporters, telepaths, and other races who want absolutely nothing to do with each other. Other works from Terra include The Head Vampire, Manic Snake Venom, The Battlemage, Love and Lycanthrope, The Alchemist and the Wizard and Licking Walls in the Dark.

Book preview

Licking Walls in the Dark

by S.J. Magill

Copyright 2014 S.J. Magill

Smashwords Edition

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Contents

Licking Walls in the Dark

About the Author

Is someone behind me? I thought sharply. No one else had any reason to be in my tunnel.

Do they know my secret? Are they going to try and take my tunnel from me?

It was rare, but not unheard of, for a dwarf to murder another over a valuable tunnel. My huge hands began to sweat. I stopped walking, and tried to hear any sign of movement in the tunnel. Other than the low breath of the air-circulation system, the tunnel was silent. There were no torch-larvae this deep, so my eyes were useless. I opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue, and slowly breathed in through both my mouth and nostrils. I tasted and smelled tens of different things. My brain rhymed them all off, like it was crossing them off a list. Dusts, from the different types of rock that made up the walls of tunnel. Coal, there wasn’t much of it in this part of the mine, but there were traces. Copper, from the ventilation system. Sweat, but only from myself. There was no sign of any intruder. Relieved, I turned to face the other direction. The direction of the dead-end of the tunnel, where I would be digging today. All the usual smells and tastes were there too, but there was the tiniest, faintest hint of another.

Gold. A big find would be my ticket out of this place, I mused as I carefully made my way down the tunnel I had been carving for the past year. My whiskers told me that the walls on either side of me were no further than a foot away, and that there was nothing in front of me. I whistled a tune to make the tunnel seem less lonely, and to give me an idea of where the end was. The high-pitched echo was becoming deeper, so I slowed my pace. My forward-pointing whiskers made contact with something. I put out my hand and felt the solid wood of the door. I had scratched my name into the door, ‘Pon’. I traced my fingers along the letters. The keyhole was directly below the end of the letter ‘n’.

I took the key from round my neck, entered it in the latch, and turned it. In the silence down here the snick of the lock was like a gunshot. I opened the door and closed it behind me.

It was common practice to install a door at some point in a tunnel being worked. It gave a bit of privacy and security.

Beyond the door I had widened the walls to give myself a bit of room to stretch out. My whiskers could only just reach both sides at the same time. Straight ahead of me was a stretch of tunnel with many side-tunnels branching off. To my left was a large store-room I had carved out, filled with good quality chunks of rock. About the amount that I would be expected to produce in a week or so. I had been working long, long hours of late, and had a bit of a surplus. To my immediate right was another door I had installed. It was an enormous door, twice as thick as the main door to this area, and with two additional locks on it. I kept the keys to that one in my underwear. I pulled them out to check on the room. I turned each lock slowly and carefully, trying to keep the noise to a minimum. I grabbed the handle, and listened for just a moment, to ensure that I was alone. Silence. I pulled the handle, and was hit by the most beautiful smell. Gold.

The room was enormous, about the size of my house. It was filled floor to ceiling with chunks of unrefined gold ore.

Dwarves mainly mine for stone, coal, and common metals to be shipped to the surface, but occasionally one finds something more valuable. It might be by luck, or it might be that a dwarf has an extra-keen sense for these things. Either way, if a dwarf makes a big enough find, he is given his freedom, and allowed to leave for the surface. I dreamed of the surface every single night. I’d read about it in touch-books, and heard it described in audio-plays. The air was pure, with not a speck of dust in it. The sky was bluer than the most flawless sapphire. There were flowers (whatever they were) with gorgeous colours. And there were the suns. Two balls of infinite heat and light. There was barely any light down here. In the living areas a special type of light-emitting larva was cultivated to provide a bit of dull light to guide us around. Eventually though, the larvae would grow into horrible, biting flies. I had suggested several times to my direct overseer that the Magister could invest in glow stones. A single one would provide enough light to fill the whole damn great-hall, but my suggestion appears to have fallen on deaf-ears.

I had begun working the tunnel a year ago. Every project begins with about twenty dwarves hollowing out a quarry in the rock. Eventually, as the quarry becomes wider, each dwarf’s work area develops into a tunnel. A dwarf may work his tunnel for as long as he wishes, and in any way he wishes, providing he is producing a satisfactory quantity of stone/iron/coal. If not, he may be demoted to a wheelbarrow jockey.

I left the room, locked the door, and took my heavy pack off my back. I retrieved one of my water canteens from it and clipped it to my belt. My tools were where they had been left last night. I picked up a hammer and long-chisel. The hammer’s head was almost as big as my fist, and was made of hardened steel. The rock down here was incredibly tough, so it needed a fair whack to get through it.

I headed towards my work area, down one of the offshoot tunnels which I was fairly certain was devoid of gold. I would work this until the barrow-men came around in 5 or 6 hours to pick up my stone. I had to make sure that there was no drop off in the amount of stone I was producing. That might draw attention to myself. The last thing I wanted was a nosy overseer coming down here to talk about my work, and discovering my find before I was ready to announce it.

I whisker-felt my way to the end of one of the dead tunnels. I sniffed the wall at the end. Not a trace of gold. I crouched, and extended my tongue, like a giant, pink steak hanging from my mouth, and ran it from the bottom of the wall to the top, then from side to side. Nothing. There was definitely no gold beyond this wall. I rinsed my mouth with water from my canteen, and got to work.

I lifted my ear protectors from my neck up over my huge hears, and began to smash into the wall. This was my day, every day. I had been working the mines, like all dwarves, since I was sixteen. I was now forty-eight. Barely an adult in dwarf terms.

I had become quite skillful at producing large slabs of stone. Large slabs are needed to be carved into bricks. Small chunks of rock are useless. In my youth I could work a tunnel for hours to produce a single slab, and about twenty tonnes of dust. I was a slow starter in terms of my mining, however, I had managed to avoid being forced into becoming a barrowman by making a few good finds.

I seemed to be particularly adept at finding things in the rock. In my first year, after a week of producing precisely nothing that could be sent to the surface, I could practically hear the overseer’s footsteps behind me to tell me to report for barrow duty, when I caught a whiff of something. We had been trained to recognise these smells from when we were very young. I began to smash at the wall like a lunatic, licking as I went. I was like a hound fervently stalking my prey, and then i found it. A part of the wall which tasted so strongly I