Why would Godwod have had his daughter acting as a servant? Gastard was pretty cagey about the entire situation, but he confirmed that the young woman who had brought the papers was Johanna, the girl he had asked to marry him. He seemed to think that Godwod had sent her out deliberately as a taunt.

“Does he want you to come back to work for him?” I asked.

“No,” Gastard said, “it was intended as a slap. Everything Lord Godwod does is calculated. Your oath to him is only the beginning. Whatever he takes from you, he will do so a piece at a time, so gently that you will not realize what is being done until you have lost all that you hold dear.”

Gastard was biased when it came to the lord, but I couldn’t argue with his assessment. I’d been so relieved to discover Godwod wanted to work with me rather than see me jailed that I hadn’t stopped to consider the implications of what he was asking of me. Regardless, our first meeting had not been a place for me to make a stand. For better or for worse, I was his vassal now. Hopefully, it would be a mutually beneficial relationship. If not, he was still a far less threatening antagonist than the one waiting for me in Dargoth.

The mine was around five miles from Henterfell, tucked in a rocky ridge that rose fifty feet out of the ground along its spine. The mouth of the mine was propped up by old oak beams under an outcrop of basalt. I knew it was basalt because my materials log told me so after I took a sample. It was darker and a little softer than granite, requiring a bit less effort to harvest.

There were a few trashy-looking structures thrown up around the mine, and a man in a filthy tunic came out to see what I was doing.

“What’s this?” He demanded. “Who are you people?”

Gastard and Esmelda had dismounted and were tending to their animals while I busied myself checking out the local stone. I strode over to the man and showed him the scroll.

“Can you read this?” I asked.

His cheeks reddened. “Just tell me what you’re doing here. This land belongs to Baron Gent, you can’t just ride up and do what you want.”

“My name is Will Smith,” I said. That felt weird, but it wasn’t like anyone in this world had heard of the Men In Black franchise. “Lord Godwod has permitted me to dig here. You can take it up with him.”

“What about us?” The man quickly shifted from bluster to alarm. “We already work the mine for the Baron. No one said anything about another team coming here.” He looked around. “Is it just you? Who are you working with?”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” I said. “Lord Godwod wants all of you out while I’m here. You can go tell the Baron that.”

That part wasn’t in the scroll, which said that I had been given a limited grant permitting me to dig in the mine for the next few weeks. But the man obviously couldn’t read, and if there were more people around here, I wanted them gone for the time being.

“We don’t work for you,” the man said. “You can’t give me orders.”

We were both distracted by the ring of Gastard’s sword as he drew it out of its scabbard. “Begone,” he said. “You are no longer wanted here.”

“Gotte above.” The man took a step back. “You’re mad. The baron will hear of this.”

‘Great,” I told him. “That’s what I said.”

There were a half dozen men in the area, some of whom had to be called up out of the mine. The entire group looked grimy and tired, and they left the area carrying nothing but a few tools and packs and nasty looks. Gastard didn’t have to make any more threats, but he didn’t put up his sword until they were gone.

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“That was harsh,” Esmelda said.

“It would be worse for them if they stayed,” Gastard replied. “We can deal with the Baron when he comes.”

The empty shacks where they had been staying didn’t speak to fortunes made out of mineral wealth. They had left behind a few broken tools, rags, and bedframes, and I had no use for any of them. Godwod was granting me a remarkable amount of trust, maybe because he knew where to find me if I didn’t give him what he wanted, but whatever the reason, he hadn’t sent anyone with us to keep an eye on my progress or stop me from stealing.

The entrance led to a tunnel that sloped down slowly for a few hundred paces before cutting into a series of switchbacks. There was evidence of pick work all along the walls, small sections that had been hacked out, and crevices that had been expanded with hard labor. I crafted torches for all three of us, and we took a quick tour of the facilities to find a good spot to use as our base.

Using the iron pick, I cut out a living space at the juncture where the tunnel became a switchback, hollowing out a ten by ten cube of basalt and dolerite before dropping the worktable and making a door. To protect the entrance from being broken down by a troll, I placed blocks around the outside to make a passage too tight for one of them to squeeze through.

The real problem was ventilation. Starting a fire down here would have us inhaling dangerous levels of smoke in no time.

“You guys should set up a camp farther away,” I said.

“I can stay with you,” Esmelda said. “We survived well enough on the journey here.”

“We can all cram into a coffin,” I said, "but there’s no need for that. And we’d have to do something about the horses as well. This is far enough down that nothing should spawn topside. But I’m not one hundred percent sure about that range, so you should keep your distance anyway.”

“Shouldn’t you come above as well?” Gastard said. “If the koroshai appear in these tunnels, there will be no sunlight to banish them. You’ll have to deal with a horde in the morning.”

“Maybe,” I said. “While I was mining in the mountains, I experimented with the spawn mechanic a bit, and I’m starting to suspect that the monsters won’t show up in total darkness. They need shadows, or maybe moonlight. I’m still not sure, but being this far underground will allow me to test that. If I’m right, nothing will spawn down here at all.”

Esmelda gasped. “You mean you’ll be safe if you sleep far enough underground? If that’s true, you could come to live in Erihseht.”

“It would take one heck of a basement,” I said, “but yeah. We’ll see.”

My companions left to find a place to camp away from the mine, and I spent what time I had left before sunset exploring. The torches only lasted about an hour, so I could keep reasonably fair track of how long I was taking to check things out. The cave didn’t extend much farther than my shelter, a simple zigzag that petered out after another hundred paces, and the group that had been working here hadn’t done much to expand the natural passages. Not that I blamed them, mining in the Middle Ages was no joke. If not for my superpowers, I certainly wouldn’t have attempted it.

They’d cleaned the walls of any obvious deposits. I had vague ideas of what iron ore looked like, I was essentially looking for rust spots, red or brown discolorations, and anything that flashed in the light. There were some glittering bits in the walls, small quartz deposits, but nothing else jumped out at me during the initial survey. There were a few places that they had been cutting into the stone where ore was accessible, and their efforts had tapered off as the area became too tight to work in or the vein disappeared.

Then I saw the mark. Someone had painted a white X beside one of the thin channels they had dug out at the end of the zigzag. I had to squeeze to get through it, but instead of tapering into a dead end, the channel opened up into a wide chamber. Was I discovering a natural cavern? As I scraped through the opening, holding my torch ahead of me, I started to feel giddy. This was what Minecraft was about.

Sadly, the chamber was just a chamber, with no other branches or exits. It was an oddly uniform bubble, with a round vaulted ceiling and a floor that was as flat as if it had been sanded. It didn’t seem likely that the miners had done this, but it didn’t feel natural either. The stone, however, was the same as everywhere else, and there were no signs of mineral deposits, iron or otherwise. It was unusual enough that I would have to do some digging here on principle, but that could wait until tomorrow.

My torch was burning low.

"Captain’s Log: First official cavern. Monsters may or may not spawn in the cave. Think of a way to celebrate. Take Esmelda to the theater or something. Find out what kind of foods she likes."

I didn’t light a fire in the area I had designated as my base. Instead, I munched on a few nuts and crafted another coffin by the dwindling light of the torch before calling it a night.