Dorrik

People call the Diggers dwarves. But that is not the name of a race; it is an insult. The Diggers descend from the last and slowest bloodline to thaw from the Stillness. The Stillness was the frozen calm that fell when Dem stopped flowing. Diggers grow slowly, age slowly and forgive slowly. Askaran does not count them as citizens. It gives half a name only to those who serve the Powder Guild. Dorrik has spent sixty of his eighty-eight years in the guild. Still, he can only have his name stitched on the lowest hem of a banner. And that name is stitched in thread that can be pulled out.

Powder is his faith. Powder asks for no Dem, no mage, and puts no one in debt. Dem is time in solid form in Devran. For powder, a handful of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal is enough. The rest is patience and arithmetic. To Dorrik, every quarrel in Devran comes down to one question: who hands out the time? Powder does not ask that question. That is why the bankers of Tavellin fear him. The Council of Banners needs him too. Dorrik likes neither of them.

His cannon is called Nine. She is long-barreled, rust-coloured and gold-banded. Her muzzle opens like a flower. She kicks back like a cranky old woman. Dorrik carries her on his shoulder, because Gurhal's basalt slopes break wheeled carriages. Dorrik's father cast Nine. Inside the barrel, where no one would ever see, he carved his sons' names: Dorrik and Olvek.

Before he died, his father left him a single piece of advice. “Powder owes no one. But the hand that lights it always owes someone.” Back then, Dorrik took it for an old master's crankiness. Now he counts the shares of Dem that go to Tavellin every month. He understands better which hand his father meant.

In 1241 AS, the Council wanted ember-stone. AS means After Stillness; it is how Devran counts its years. The Council marked a spot on the slope of Mount Ughrak. There the lava vein came closest to the surface. Dorrik did the math and lit the fuse himself. After the blast, the slope bled. A heavy, orange, slow liquid poured out. On the third day, something rose from the mountain's wound. It shrugged its shoulders and walked away. Askaran called it the Walking Mountain. The Council records named only one culprit.

Three years later, the Ninth Banner waited for his guns at the Black Pass. Dorrik was a day late. A strange storm had turned the roads to mud. The carriages sank to their axles. When Dorrik reached the pass, no one was standing except the standard-bearer, Kaedra. Kaedra never blamed him. Dorrik does not see that as forgiveness. He carries it like a sentence.

His brother Olvek was sixty years younger and twice as ambitious. He wanted to make the guild's powder formula the property of the Diggers. For that, he borrowed Dem from Tavellin. But he could not sell the formula to the Council, and the interest grew. In 1239 AS, the collectors took him to the Rust Prisons. Time runs slowly there. While one year passes for Olvek, four years pass outside. The debt grows every day, but Olvek does not age. The world drifts away from him.

That is why Dorrik came to the Arena. In the Arena, every champion gives their oath, a pledge of loyalty, to someone. Dorrik did not give his oath to the guild; he swore it in his own name. He sends every share of Dem he wins to his brother's account in Tavellin. He knows this is a contradiction. He fires for Dem with powder that needs none. Every month the same short letter arrives from the prison warden. The handwriting is neat and patient: “Your brother is well. He asks after you.” Dorrik has never seen the person who writes those lines.

In the Arena, he sometimes stops among the Menhirs and listens. Menhirs are the stone towers that guard the lanes. The Walking Mountain is in the Arena too. Sometimes it is on the other side, sometimes beside him. It looks at him with its stone face and says nothing. Dorrik is not afraid of it. What he fears is something else. On the night he opened Ughrak's slope, a sound came from inside the mountain. It came just before the blast, and it was like a heartbeat. Dorrik did not write that sound in his calculations. Then came the night of the Skip. The Skip is the moment all of Devran stopped for a single heartbeat. That night Dorrik heard the same sound again. It came from every tunnel beneath Askaran at once.