LIGHTNOVELONLINE Dwarves of the Deep: The Hunt Begins
I spend the next several days, or maybe up to a week since I can’t seem to catch Jaemes, in a thoroughly bad mood. My giddy sense of triumph has been crushed by Commander Hraroth’s words, and in its place has risen frustration.
My new sense of hearing works perfectly well when I’m wandering the less populated areas of the fortress: the peripheral corridors, the storage rooms, the beginning stretch of the road up. But whenever I hear the voice of a fellow dwarf, an unexpected crash, or anything that isn’t either relatively quiet or with a regular rhythm to it, everything collapses.
I just need to get used to it, I think. After all it’s not like seeing is any easier: there’s all sorts of colors and movement your brain has to take into account, but I’ve had twenty nine years to practice seeing. Well, nineteen I suppose, since the last ten were spent blundering around in the dark.
On one of my practice sessions I run into Nthazes. I’m strolling through the ale storage, trying to concentrate on determining the shape of each individual barrel, and then his voice shivers through the air and turns the cylinders into rapidly expanding and disintegrating spheres. I stumble away from them, trip over my own feet and fall to the floor.
His voice reverberates violently:
“YOU YOU YOU
ALL ALL ALL
RIGHT RIGHT
THERE?!”
I rip my helmet off and resist the urge to dash the damn thing against the ground in frustration.
“I’m fine,” I say. “But how bloody long does it take to get used to these things?”
“Maybe longer for you than most,” he says, helping me up. “We’re used to the darkness, and getting around by touch and sound.”
“It’s the interference that kills me,” I say. “I’m fine if it’s relatively quiet, or just listening to my own footsteps. But as soon as someone talks...”
“Yes. Sensory overload is a problem for everyone at first.”
“How the hell do you deal with it?”
He thinks for a while. “Stop, and try to focus on one sound at a time. And don’t panic.”
“Even so...”
“Don’t worry about the voices anyway. Too many will disrupt anyone’s sense of hearing, so talk is kept to minimum in the foraging parties. And once a hunt begins, the rule is absolute silence.”
“How do you communicate then?”
“Arm signals, and the leader will carry a bell for signaling as well.”
“Something else for me to learn, I suppose.”
“Oh, they’re nothing complicated. You can learn them easy enough, though remembering them in the heat of combat is another issue... But you’ll be kept toward the back anyway on your first hunt.”
“I see.”
“Keep practicing anyway, you’ll get the hang of it. By the way, I’m meant to be choosing the ale for tonight. Any here that are on the verge of going off? I know you supervised the last delivery.”
I point out to him a few barrels that were already nearing its expiry date when they came in, and help him roll them up to the kitchens. It would seem awfully strange to a dwarf from Thanerzak’s realm to see fourth and fifth degree runeknights doing something so menial, but there are no commoners down here. No shopkeepers, miners, cooks, cleaners or servants. Every runeknight from tenth degree to first chips in with the day to day tasks that keep the fort running—and though naturally a lot of the work falls on the lower degrees, it’s not so unevenly distributed as you might expect.
As we roll the barrels up, I ask him to speak a little so I can practice dealing with interference. He talks just loudly enough for me to be able to hear over the rumbling and sloshing of the barrels, and word by word I get used to the way the complex echoes interact with the shape of my surroundings.
That mealtime, after I’m finished eating, I put my helmet on and listen. The conversations are a cacophony that blasts my ‘image’ of the dining hall and its furniture into spiraling fragments and grossly disproportionate shapes again and again, but after an hour or so of listening I feel that my ears are somewhat acclimatized to the chaos. The shapes are breaking apart and resizing a little less.
After another two weeks or so I can finally stay on my feet while listening to the sounds of conversation, and if I concentrate very hard, I can even make out what the words are.
I request that I be assigned to the next foraging party, and Commander Cathez allows it.
We are walking along a thin tunnel in single file. The tread of our boots creates a multilayered echo that reveals the texture of the walls to me: they are very rough, with long veins chewed out of them by either natural weathering or some fungus long since turned to dust. We are heading toward Hshosh-Yerthe, the ‘mushroom basket’, a vertical network of caves a several miles distant where the Guards of the Deep Darkness hunt most of their food.
Hothuk, a fourth degree, leads our party. Bringing up the rear is a fifth degree called Yathak. I’ve never met either of them. In fact I’ve only spoken to two dwarves here out of our party of ten. One of them is Mathek, the dwarf who first advised me to check the shape of my crafts using sound.
The other is Galar. He is positioned directly in front of me, and is muttering to himself. I can’t make out the words, but the tone of his voice is angry, and it disrupts my hearing plenty enough to be irritating.
“Would you keep it down?” someone ahead of him snaps. “It’s bad manners to talk, even before we get to the basket.”
“I’m not talking,” Galar replies snidely. “I’m thinking out loud.”
“Keep your thoughts to yourself, then.”
“I’ve got too many thoughts for that.”
“Stop thinking then.”
“Easy for you to do maybe, not so much for me.”
“Shut it, you two!” Hothuk shouts from the head of the line. The noise shatters my sense of position for a moment before I quickly recover.
They stop their argument, but Galar keeps on muttering, though very much under his breath this time. Cathez must have given him a real chewing out about his conduct in the forges—not that he didn't deserve it. I’m amazed that he’s never been punished further—even at meals he’s argumentative, insulting, and apparently once he stabbed his brother in the shoulder with a fork.
We come to a sudden halt. It seems that everyone else was expecting it, but I’m not, and I accidentally stumble into Galar. Our armor clangs.
“Watch it!” he snaps.
“My apologies.”
“What are you even doing here anyway? You only just forged your first pair of ears.”
“I’m here with Commander Cathez’s permission.”
“Bit green to be hunting, in my opinion.”
“I apologized, didn't I?” I snap. “There’s no need for rudeness.”
“I’m just pointing out—”
“I’ve killed worse beasts than you have. Don’t disrespect me.”
“Shut up, you two!” Hothuk shouts from the head of the line. “Spread out, everyone. You know your quotas, so fill them quickly.”
Every foraging expedition starts off not with hunting for meat, but with gathering mushrooms from the first layer of the cavern, known as the farm. It’s a wide open area of tallish fungal trees with a dense undergrowth of mushrooms, some toxic and some edible. We each have a large sack we’re to fill with our assigned type.
I’m to gather Cowmeat Heads, a large brown kind of thing with a meaty texture. I’ve read before that a cow is a kind of surface animal, so it’s strange to hear the word down here so deep. Mathek is also gathering them, so I stick with him.
“What’s got into Galar?” I say in a low voice. “He’s been in a bad mood recently.”
“Oh, him and Fjalar are just like that. They’ll be struck with inspiration for some grand project, get on well, then it’ll fall apart and they’ll be at each others’ throats.”
“I’m amazed you all put up with them.”
“We don’t have much of a choice. They’re good at their duties and we don’t have enough runeknights. Can’t afford to send them away.”
“Still, are there no punishments down here?”
“Only for serious things. Besides, they have been punished. They’re not allowed to work together anymore.”
“Good. It’s not right anyway.”
“I agree, but they don’t see it like that... Oh, there’s a Cowmeat.”
He pulls it up and shows me what it looks like—sounds like? He shows me its shape anyhow, and I wander off a little to search for some for my own sack.
It’s a weird, unnerving landscape. Contorted fungal trees stretch right to the roof, and the mushrooms of the undergrowth are as tall as I am in many parts, and too close packed for me to make out the individual stems. When I walk into these patches it feels like I’m encased in solid walls.
Eventually my sack grows full and heavy. I pick one last Cowmeat, smack it against a nearby tree to release the spores, ensuring that it’ll be replaced by a few more for the next foraging party to collect, and stuff it in. I drag the sack back to the tunnel entrance.
In the blackness I get a terrible sense that I’m being watched, but hopefully that’s all in my head. It was explained to me before I departed that the big herbivores can’t squeeze their way down through the tight holes from which moisture and spores drip from the upper layers, and thus predators don’t bother coming either.
When I get to the tunnel the other nine dwarves are all there waiting. No one seems to care that I was slow.
“Right,” says Hothuk. “Let’s get these stored then head up.”
We store them in a large room hollowed from the rock in the side of cavern, which is sealed from the smaller herbivores that skulk here by means of a thick steel door. Then, we journey across the farm to staircase cut into the wall which leads to the upper layers of the basket.
It’s time for the hunt.