Chapter 33 - Scrip and Freight Rails

The dimensional jump back into the Ash Wastes took place at eight on Wednesday morning.

The subterranean redoubt sat precisely as they had left it hours earlier: the volcanic rock walls were chill, the three runic barriers hummed at a low frequency along the ceiling, and the scent of basalt dust filled Maria's nostrils the second her boots cleared the rift.

She wasted no time.

Marching straight to the back of the stone chamber, she hauled out the two canvas sacks bearing one hundred and thirty pounds of metal and set them atop a crude workbench of wooden crates for the final inventory.

Dante pulled out a steel-spring hanging scale, rated up to two hundred pounds, and began weighing each lot with his clean right hand.

"One hundred and forty pounds of high-purity conductive copper cores," Dante noted the tally onto a sheet of yellowed paper with his graphite pencil. "Twenty-six pounds of tempered industrial brass gears. Nine pounds of shielded power cables, and the solid tungsten torch nozzle from the Track Forger."

"What about the sniper's ammo?" Maria gestured with her chin toward the three olive-drab metal boxes they had salvaged from the crane gantry.

"One hundred and fifty fifty-caliber rounds loaded with armor-piercing steel penetrators," Dante tapped the heavy brass casing of a cartridge with his fingernail. "Heavy rifle munitions aren't something you liquidate at a general ore warehouse. Old Orom only buys scrap by the pound. We stop by the arms dealer's shop on alley four before heading to the depository."

Maria hoisted the two heaviest metal sacks with her customary ease, crossing the canvas slings over her brigandine cuirass without needing an ounce of assistance to muscle the load off the floor.

Dante packed the three boxes of heavy munitions and the tungsten nozzle into a smaller rucksack on his back, sliding his conductive chalk kit into the flank pocket of his heat-resistant leather vest.

They filed out of the cavern, descended the slag trail, and took to the broad road leading toward the iron gates of Low Ember.

Alley four was the dingiest strip in the entire market settlement.

No food stalls or lime depositories operated here. It was a narrow alley of dark brickwork where clandestine gunsmiths ran modification workshops behind double-bolted sheet-steel bulkheads. The stench of burnt powder and bore solvent hung thick enough to sting the eyes.

Dante stopped before a low iron hatch bearing a faded white-painted placard: Krell's Armory and Munitions.

He rapped three times with his knuckles against the iron door.

A rectangular viewing slit two inches wide slid open at eye level. Two yellow eyes, with horizontal pupils like those of a mountain goat, took in Maria's height, drifted down to the greatsword sheathed across her back, and settled on Dante's placid face.

"I don't front powder on credit," a reedy, raspy voice hissed through the slit.

"I didn't come to buy powder," Dante drew one of the heavy fifty-caliber rounds from his pocket, displaying the brass cartridge between his fingers before the peephole. "I came to sell three sealed boxes of Legion armor-piercing ordnance. High-pressure blasting propellant in virgin brass casings."

The iron slit snapped shut.

Two seconds later, the hollow clunk of two heavy deadbolts echoed from within, and the door swung halfway open.

The armorer was a squat demon barely five feet tall, sporting thick horns sweeping back tight against his bald crown, wearing a grease-darkened leather apron hung with manual reloading dies dangling from wire loops.

He snatched one of the green tins from Dante's hand, popped the pressure latch, and plucked three rounds to inspect their hardened steel tips beneath the glow of a kerosene lantern.

"Where'd you turn these up, kid?" the gunsmith asked, his split tongue darting over needle teeth. "These lots walked out of the Depot Eight magazine just last month."

"The previous owner has no further use for them," Dante replied, keeping his voice deadpan. "Six hundred scrip for all three sealed tins. No haggling."

The armorer measured the width of Maria's shoulders, blocking every ray of light through the open door as she crossed her arms over her iron plate, grunted low in his throat, and dipped his hand into a drawer beneath the counter.

He slapped six thick hundred-scrip notes from the Bank of the First Continent onto the table, the purple stamp vivid on the gray paper.

Dante collected the bills, verified the rough rag weave with his thumb, and pocketed the cash inside his vest.

"Pleasure doing business."

They exited alley four and walked two blocks down to Orom's Ores and Salts Repository.

The aged penal soul with wire-rimmed spectacles sat behind his riveted steel counter, measuring sulfur crystals on a balance scale with the exact same sour scowl as the week before.

When Maria dumped the two canvas bags onto the metal counter, the impact rang out in a crash that set the scale springs shrieking.

CLANG.

Old Orom slipped his spectacles off his nose, looking from the bulging bags to the solid tungsten nozzle Dante withdrew from his small pack and set carefully onto the timber.

"Did you two hit a Legion freight car?" The old man ran calloused knuckles across the clean copper cores, noting the total absence of slag residue or oxidized dirt. "This is grade-A stock. Heavy machinery central rotor conductive copper."

"One hundred and sixty-five pounds of sorted copper and brass," Dante produced the slip of paper with his scale measurements. "Plus a solid tungsten cutting tip from a Level 23 industrial arc torch."

The merchant took a needle file, scraped the charcoal-gray tip, and tested the metal's shear resistance.

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"The tungsten is clean," Orom conceded, propping his spectacles back on with a reluctant grimace. "Seventy-two hundred scrip for the lot."

"Eighty-five hundred," Maria stepped in, resting her knuckles onto the counter with enough authority that the steel plate warped two millimeters under the leverage of her thirty-three Strength. "Eight hundred for the tungsten tip alone. I cleaved the engine block out of that monster by hand, and I know damn well what it took to pry it from its neck."

The old merchant looked down at the fresh dimple her fists had pressed into the counter plate, swallowed dry, and gave the raspy sigh of someone who knew when a negotiation had reached the boundary of physical safety.

"Eighty-four hundred," Orom muttered, pulling open the iron drawer beneath his station. "Not a copper more. Any higher and I'm working charity for the north district smelter."

"Eighty-four hundred works," Dante stepped in before Maria could deform another plate.

The old man counted out eighty-four hundred-scrip notes, bundled in tens with rubber bands cut from bicycle inner tubes.

Dante secured the entire sum into his waist pouch.

Adding the six hundred scrip from the munitions to the eighty-four hundred from the ore and the three thousand already banked from gorge skirmishes, they sat on exactly twelve thousand scrip in clean bills recognized by every rail depot across the plain.

Their financial problem was solved.

The ticket broker's office for the Heavy Freight Line was not housed in any municipal building with glass wickets.

It operated out of the back room of a low-ceilinged tavern at the far end of the machine district, where the clink of tin mugs against rough timber tables mingled with the stench of ash-potato moonshine and cheap rolling tobacco.

Dante and Maria navigated through tables crowded with shift laborers and pushed past a beaded curtain of leather strips into the cramped back office.

Behind a desk fashioned from an iron railway tie split down the middle, a demon in a gray Legion uniform sat with his mud-caked boots propped across a stack of shipping manifests.

Both his horns were sawed off flat against his brow ridges, a jagged scar ran across his right ear, and his sergeant's chevrons had been violently sliced from the collar of his uniform.

His name was Goran. A disgraced supply quartermaster cashiered from the Depot Twelve garrison for diesel smuggling, who now ran the black market for illicit berths aboard central line ore freights.

Goran didn't bother taking his boots off the desk as they stepped inside.

He measured Maria's towering frame, ducking her neck to clear the low overhead rafters, then looked into Dante's calm gaze.

"Looking for tags on Express 404?" Goran rasped, his drawl thick with the accent of the southern mountain natives.

"Two open-transit cargo manifests," Dante stopped before the iron tie, hands free of his pockets.

"Thirty-two hundred scrip a tag," Goran tapped the tip of a trench dagger onto the desk. "Riveted lead seal stamped by the transport directorate. Inspection crews board your car, you flash the lead and claim you're shovel hands on secondary boiler two. They don't press anyone holding the colonel's seal."

"Sixty-four hundred total," Dante produced sixty-four hundred-scrip notes from his belt pouch, tossing the stack onto the iron rail tie.

Goran raked the cash closer with the flat of his blade, thumbing through the notes with the practiced speed of a quartermaster who had spent two decades auditing garrison payrolls. Reaching into a tarnished brass tin beneath his seat, he produced two heavy oval lead medallions strung on rawhide lanyards.

Each token bore an engraved five-digit serial below the mechanical eagle of the Iron Legion.

"The train rolls out of Coal Depot Twelve the day after tomorrow, six sharp in the morning," Goran slid the tags across. "Fifty-car manifest. Stay clear of the primary engine if you don't want your lungs boiled out by sulfur coal exhaust."

Dante didn't reach for the lead tokens immediately.

He dipped his hand into his vest pocket and drew out three additional hundred-scrip bills, laying them neatly onto the iron tie three inches from the veteran's hand.

Goran eyed the extra bills through narrowed yellow slits.

"What's this for?"

"Operational intelligence," Dante set his palms on the edge of the desk, leaning in. "I paid for the freight tags. Now I want the layout of how that train actually runs. Who commands the escort, where the scheduled water stops sit, and what's waiting for us at the Capital's classification yard."

Goran gave a dry scoff through his snout, sweeping the three bills into his tunic pocket before settling his back against the wall.

"You've got an edge on you for a shrimp, kid," the demon plucked a shred of tobacco from his teeth with a claw. "Express 404 runs under Captain Varek. A Tier Three cybernetic demon boasting north of four hundred hit points and an auxiliary steam hammer grafted to his left arm. He doesn't bother inspecting the ore gondolas because he hates getting grease on his boots, but his squad corporals run sweeps with sulfur hounds every time the engines take on water."

"How many water stops between here and the Capital?" Maria asked from the doorway, her voice filling the room.

"Four service stops," Goran turned to look at her. "The Slag Wastes, Black Chasm Trestle, Furnace Gorge, and Junction Twenty. The whole run clocks eighteen days if the stoker treads don't seize on low-grade coal. That's over twenty-six hundred miles of continuous rail."

"And the drop point?" Dante pressed. "Does the train pull inside the Capital?"

"Not a prayer," Goran spat a dark glob of tobacco juice onto the dirt. "It's an unrefined ore freight. It has zero clearance to pass the primary curtain wall. It slows to a crawl in the North Classification Yard, four miles outside the First District iron gate. When the train banks into the viaduct curve over the slag river, speed drops below fifteen miles an hour. That's where you roll out."

He locked eyes with Dante, his expression hardening.

"There's one more detail you need to understand before you step onto that soil."

"What is it?"

"Ambient Mana density in the Capital runs three times thicker than these frontier outposts," Goran said quietly. "That's where the primary soul matrices of central administration are rooted. The atmospheric pressure is crushing, gravity feels like it's dragging your meat down, and every soul walking the streets is Level 25 or higher. If either of you is carrying an unregistered mutation or off-grid sorcery, keep it buried deep. The central district hounds will scent pure energy from three blocks away."

Dante touched the basilisk bone plate through his vest, feeling the [Ash Veil] holding steady across his spine.

"Our papers are clean," Dante answered with typical coldness, picking up the two lead medallions.

"Good," Goran pulled his boots off the desk and gestured toward the curtain exit with his dagger. "Now get out of my tavern. Depot Twelve is thirty-five miles along the old sleeper line road. Miss the six o'clock departure the day after tomorrow, and the next freight won't roll for two weeks."

Dante and Maria exited the back room, crossed through the crowded, raucous tavern, and emerged into the open air of Low Ember's main thoroughfare.

The violet sky was deepening with the onset of the night shift, and the foundry smokestacks rained incandescent embers against the dark cloud banks.

They had two lead tokens hanging from their necks, over five thousand scrip secured in their waist pouch, and the precise logistics of a twenty-six-hundred-mile journey committed to memory.

Maria settled the harness of her forty-pound greatsword across her back, gazing out along the black dirt road trailing from the settlement's northern gate toward the distant rails.

"Thirty-five miles to the depot," she remarked, popping her knuckles with a brief grin. "We can hit it before midnight if we pick up the pace."

"Then we pick up the pace," Dante agreed, adjusting the straps of his rucksack.

They passed through the iron gates of Low Ember for the final time, leaving behind the frontier salvage market where their lives as hunters had begun, stepping out on their definitive march toward the heart of the iron continent.