“Move the light this way, boy. Something’s funny here.” Ram dutifully swung the cradled dulsphere closer to the tunnel wall so his father could inspect it. “Yeah, I thought so. Didn’t nobody cut this rock. Too smooth. Looks like it’s the same over there, and back that way too. All regular and even, walls, ceiling, and floor, just so far apart. Hey! You! How’d they do this?”
Ram winced as the murrush (they’d been introduced, but Ram couldn’t recall its name) clacked its way over. It wasn’t the heat that bothered him—it was clay-shielded like the smiths at Dul Karagi, and besides, his haranu enjoyed warmth—so much as the smell. There wasn’t much ventilation down here, and breathing murrush fumes made him cough. “The support sleeves are not cut,” the murrush agreed. “Cutting would create fractures, compromise integrity. The handmaidens create them under our guidance.”
“Fire did this? Must have been some kind of hot.”
“Little hotter than needed to extract ore. The chief difficulty is in sustaining it over a uniform area, and ensuring an even rock mixture. Until it is cooled, the shape must be maintained by vapor pressure.”
“Damn clever trick, huh boy?”
“Yeah.” All this might have been fascinating last bloom. This was certainly a much larger and far more efficient operation than Ganteg’s old whip-driven quarry line. Handmaidens, bondservants, and ten or so murrush had kept Dul Misishi going as an iron mine for kindlings after the copper had run out, smelting usable ore out of increasingly common rocks. It was a monument to what humans could accomplish with thousands of lifetimes of experience gathered together in one place.
Ram’s stoneworking days were long behind him now; he’d forgotten much of what he’d once known already. He would never use it. But Dul Misishi had hundreds of miles of tunnels, all of them apparently fascinating to Father. All of them cold, close, and clammy, an endless reminder that all man-built things would come to an end. It was obviously a poor pyre already; nine men out of every ten were bonded mine workers, hence Tirnun’s yearning for imported skilled craftsmen. Sooner or later, the ore lodes would grow too scarce for even the most ingenious schemes to extract a living from, and then where would all these people go?
They’d been down here half the day already. Officially, Ram was an off-duty Natatian flamekeeper, with his sword at his thigh for a bona fide, escorting his disabled war-veteran uncle about on vacation. It wasn’t yet clear what would happen to them. Tirnun’s husband had come home late last night, listened to a cursory explanation, and gone off to bed with a distracted promise to consider their problem.
This morning he had agreed to Father’s request for a tour of the mines, but conspicuously avoided any discussion of the larger situation. For now, they were guests and family friends, resting and waiting out white day after a long trip, and nothing more. Ram found it hard to feel interest in the ore processing sequence with his family’s fate undecided.
So he hung his dulsphere around Father’s neck—he was caught up in running his hand over the wall, and barely seemed to notice—then went back to check on Bal. He, at least, had needed no cover story; blackbands were commonly hired as guides for the rare private citizen who felt like traveling away from his hearth or pyre on foot. He had a dulsphere of his own, and had drifted some ways down the tunnel.
It wasn’t quite the same as his sense for Karagene spirits, but if Ram focused he could tell where the other sphere was. Between that and the glimmers of yellow light, he could find his way easily enough. This section of the mines was poorly lit otherwise; it had been several hours since the last bondsman passed through to feed sugar to the wet-lamps in their wall sconces. The blue lights shining out of the glass bowls would have been invisible outside.
He found Bal hunched over in a disused tunnel end, picking through a pile of loose rocks. He felt like he should tell him not to wander off, but it would have felt silly; Bal might not have been entirely normal, but he obviously knew how to take care of himself. Instead he said, “You find anything good?”
Bal swiveled his head, contemplated Ram for a long moment, grunted, and went back to his sifting. To be fair, it had been an inane question.
He tried again. “You ever been in a mine before?” It really said something, if he preferred Bal’s company to Father’s. But Bal hadn’t been acting quite the same, in the past month. He wasn’t friendly as such, showed no sign of talking. But he seemed more aware than before, less lost in his own mad inner world.
Now he made a little humming noise, plucked a stone out of the heap, and tossed it to Ram. It was lightweight, glossy, and black—obsidian. Volcanic glass. Far from priceless, the more so since regular glass was so cheap. But it was pretty to look at, and his hands still remembered how to knap a sharp edge on it. “Thanks.”
Bal nodded, and shuffled through the leavings one more time before standing up and stretching his back and legs. Then he frowned, and put a hand to the one knife he’d been allowed to carry out of the house. “What?”
Bal tapped at his ear, and pointed at the passage to their right, which sloped sharply down into the depths of the mines. He turned and listened. “I don’t hear—“ Bal chopped the air with his hand: quiet! Several more seconds passed before he caught the tramp of footsteps. Probably a bunch of miners headed home for a shift change. Nothing to worry about. The only workers left would be the crews who hadn’t met their quota for the tetrad; they’d be looking for rest, not trouble. The thick mountain rock only blocked the white sun’s direct effects.
Yet Bal’s hand stayed on his knife-hilt, and Beshi, not surprisingly, suggested Ram follow suit. If Bal was feeling threatened, Ram was inclined to trust his instincts. Beshi’s, not so much. He was careful to keep his hand away from the sword as the footsteps grew louder, mingling with the noise of low conversation.
At last a group of about a dozen men appeared at the bottom of the tunnel, accompanied by a handmaiden and her light. All of the men were between Ram’s age and forty, clad in the common Misishin miner’s uniform—a sleeveless tunic and a wrap around the waist—and loaded down with picks, shovels, and hammers.
The handmaiden, bringing up the rear, was skinny girl of fourteen or so, fresh out of the Temple by the looks of her. Barely old enough to wear a veil. The pyre needed everyone it could get to keep the mines running. Even the handmaiden’s hands were pale; every one of them lived and worked in a constant dusky gloom.
The whole crowd was headed their way, at no particularly great speed, and evidently giving them no notice. Why should they? Those men were likely all bonded, after all. From what he’d heard, they went days at a time without seeing the sun, and most of them would die at their work sooner or later. Strangers from an outside world they’d never visit meant nothing to them.
All the same, they were getting closer, and Bal looked no less alarmed. The two of them had nothing to gain by staying to talk with mine workers. So he started walking away, trying to make it look casual.
At once three heads in the gang snapped up. “Hey, you!” one of the oldest men asked. “Wait up, would you?”
There was no way they couldn’t see his sword, and know what it meant. Why would a flamekeeper waste his time on them? “You all smell like sweat,” he told them. “Sweat, and piss, and Light knows what else. Come on … whatever your name was.” He snapped his fingers at Bal, and continued on his way. He needn’t have bothered; these men had lived most of their lives in these tunnels, and he had only a vague sense of Father’s distant dulsphere to navigate by. He could hear them scrambling behind him. So he turned, and drew Beshi half out of his sheath.
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The men—five or six had run after him—nearly fell over each other at the sight of it, and the foremost held up his hands. “Hey, we just want to talk, man. Where you from?”
“Nowhere you’ve ever been,” Ram told him. His eyes had adjusted to the poor light down here, more or less, but he couldn’t make out much more than the man’s outline. Bal hadn’t followed him after all, and the handmaiden was still obscured behind a bend in the tunnel. “Leave me alone. I’ll pay your owner for the loss of your limbs, if I have to.”
“You don’t need to do that,” the man said in reasonable tones, hands still stretched out. “We’re trying to calm things down a little, you know? People hear things, they get scared. Worried. They want to know the truth.”
It looked like word traveled quickly around here; they hadn’t been in this pyre a whole day yet. But then, it wasn’t like these miners got much news at all. A fugitive with a warrant on his head would be a big deal. “The truth is that I don’t like being followed, and I won’t be staying here long so you don’t need to worry about me anyway. Now leave.” He tugged Beshi loose another inch.
“Some things don’t stop being scary just because they’re far away,” the man observed.
Ram thought this situation would have been much less scary if he were farther away, but that couldn’t be helped. A real flamekeeper would have no reason to be frightened here. “And what are we scared of now?” He tried to sound bored and scornful. “The dark?”
“No,” said another voice from behind him. “Not the dark. The dark ain’t scary. It’s what comes out of it.”
Ram didn’t turn around; he’d have strange men at his back either way. Instead he slowly, casually leaned against the wall, so neither would be behind him. He could sense two strange haranu nearby, one moving, one not, but he’d lost track of which was Bal and which the handmaiden. “You don’t get swords like this in dark places, idiot.”
“That don’t mean you came from the same place,” the new man grumbled. He had two other men at his back, at least. They’d deliberately encircled him.
“Then where did I come from?” Ram was still nervous, but also curious. What kind of stories would the Karagenes spread, since telling the truth was out of the question?
“Kur. Or a rookery.”
What? “Then how in the hell am I holding this?” He pulled Beshi all the way out, and took a couple of steps towards the encirclers; they stumbled back quickly.
“They been breeding you!” their leader spat, reaching for whatever tool he had in his belt. “Out in the wild, outta hearthless! Making a whole pack of half-men to take over! Don’t you try and deny it.”
The man Ram was pretending to be would never have tolerated such an insult, so he didn’t. But he tried to hit with the flat of the blade, not the edge, and Beshi helped. The man collapsed against the side of the tunnel, clutching his face. “I’m done with you mouthy bastards,” Ram snarled. “Clear out or die.” He stomped forward, holding Beshi high.
The man’s friends hauled him back, but Ram could hear shuffling steps behind him. He swung blind, not daring to turn, and the footsteps stumbled to a halt—but that gave fresh courage to the miners in front. He couldn’t keep both at bay forever, and they were past persuasion. These men were strange to him, but he’d seen this kind of thinking at work in his old hearth, just after the resh attack. They were working themselves up to violence; before long, fear of letting him live would overwhelm their fear of his sword.
His only hope was to put more weight on the other end of the balance. “Do you idiots know what happens to your kind when you attack your betters? It’s not pretty.”
“You’re no flamekeeper,” one of them shot back. “Just a freak impostor with a warrant on his head for killing an ensi.”
“Are you willing to bet your life on that, little man? All your lives?”
He got no answer. But he could see three men standing in front of him, all holding tools ready to swing. They were in one of the broader tunnels, with space for two abreast, and there might be any number in the shadows behind them. One of the Misishin haranuu was still frozen in place, just where it had been before. The other wasn’t far behind him now—down the tunnel, where he could still hear the squeak of an indignant teenage girl’s voice. The handmaiden. Where had Bal gone?
They struck from behind first, a sudden mad rush of footsteps and a wild hammer-swing that landed on Ram’s sword-arm just below the shoulder. He could only hiss and stumble back, holding his arm, then duck to avoid a pickaxe from the other side. A shovel thwacked against his ribs, then a second hammer-blow cracked against his ear before he swung out with Beshi in his left hand. There was no need to aim; he barely felt the sword cut clean through flesh and bone.
No time to stop and look. He bulled forward at a half-crouch over the new corpse, taking a blow to the lower back as he did. The pickaxe scraped along his scalp; he stabbed out into the dark, catching a man in the guts then tearing loose sideways. At least one more in front, and he couldn’t stand up straight for the pain in his back. A hand grabbed his ankle, and he kicked back hard with the other to get free. Then he scrambled forward in a half-crouch, hearing and feeling the whiff of something heavy brushing right past his back.
The lone surviving miner in front of him had bolted; Ram tripped his way free of the carcasses, then turned to face his attackers from the rear. Beshi took another man through the ribs as he rushed forward with a mattock. Mine tools were no match for an indwelt sword—but they had numbers, and the ground. He was sure more of them were already working around to get behind him again.
Which meant staying still was death. He hobbled backwards, then to one side when the tunnel branched, turning to look behind him from time to time. For all the good that did. He could hear shouts, hissed warnings, the echoing scuffle of feet on rock—but from what direction? Too many feet, too many places. The sound echoed. He might well be surrounded again already—
He had a second’s warning, a brief flash of light in front of him, like the first flicker of fire catching in a heap of tinder. Just long enough for him to be standing stiffly in place, his every muscle clenched, when the tunnel erupted in yellow fire, and he was thrown backwards to crack his head against the stony floor. Then all the light fled from his eyes, and the darkness of the mines was complete.