Burgess gave low-voiced orders and the performers dispersed, some to draw water from an old well, others to cook over the meager camp-fires, still others to hastily dig latrines. They diced up the vegetables Burgess had wheedled out of the officials at the agri-caves, and simmered them with dried meat and herbs, filling the camp with a savory wholesome aroma. The miners drew closer; some brought handfuls of dried peas and lentils to throw into the pots.
After a while, performers and miners sat silent and intermingled, focused on soup.
Isabella did not eat, but she sat beside the leader as he shoveled food. She stared off to where the half-moon dipped below the horizon like a ladle in liquid silver. There was a protective, yet patient, aspect to her posture.
After the simple meal, Burgess handed out pieces of fruit-sweetened hard candy. Rafe took three and went to sit with his dinner companions: a faded, bent woman in loose clothing and her son who, to Rafe’s inexpert eye, did not look old enough to pull an ore cart.
“My man died last year of the miner’s cough.” The woman spoke in the same rusty, clogged voice as the rest of the miners did, from years of breathing dust till it lay in the lungs and permanently coated tongue and throat. “We had to work his share or lose our living, Jerik and I.” She jerked her head towards her son, who nibbled at his candy, eyes closed, savoring every drop of flavor, stretching the pleasure out like wool being spun. “But the old open mines were completely stripped and we had to tunnel into the hill. Then we had the falls, and the sickness, and now nobody goes into the dark for fear of the loose rocks or the poison gas.”
“He said”—Rafe nodded towards the leader—“something about voices?”
The woman laughed, a harsh sound that was strangled in her throat. “Aye. It’s the fancies that come to you. Spend too much time below and everything whispers to you. The dark, the lantern, your own shoes. It’s a bad business this, and with the little ones dying of fevers and screaming in the sickness…” She stopped and reached out to her son who was now licking his berry-sweetened fingers. Her hand stopped before she touched his sleeve, then dropped to her lap. She straightened her shoulders. “Once the Protector sends us the machines, we will be all right. The Protector would not let the mine close, or his people die. We are all brothers and sisters, we Blackstonians, unlike those Oakhavenites who would cut a brother’s throat for a scrap of tin.” She drew herself up proudly. Rafe was struck both by her faith in the Protector and her conviction that all Oakhavenites were dastardly beings who fought and stole from each other. This from a woman in clothes so faded and worn that the poorest of Oakhavenites would’ve disdained to wear them.
With no answer for the woman, Rafe looked around and saw Isabella talking quietly with the camp leader. A slight frown brought her eyebrows together, now and again she nodded, while the leader spoke with some urgency and his large gesturing hands gouged holes in the air. Once the leader had finished his piece, he deflated as if he had let out something pent up inside him. Isabella turned and stared towards the mine entrance, a hollow eye-socket carved deep into the hill. Empty carts huddled together to one side of it, and broken rails petered into the darkness within.
Rafe realized for the first time how everyone had sat with their backs to the adit all evening. Even now miner and performer alike went about their tasks without ever lifting their eyes to it.
The wind chimes hanging from the mine entrance tinkled uneasily, as if some great beast had just exhaled. Rafe, thinking of ancient dragons bound deep below the earth, felt an uneasiness stir within him. He’d rejected the stories of Dragon as myths seeking to explain the likely degradation of Salerus’ orbit, causing the eternally burning luminary to come too close to the surface of the world and set it on fire. The kayan, so the current scientific theory went, had then removed Salerus entirely from the sky and spent its fire inside the earth, though it cost them their lives. Selene, as seen by modern telescopes, was a chunk of rock, metal, and ice. Most likely Salerus had been made of combustible materials, coal, perhaps, or contained within it vast pools of oil. Natural causes explained its fire, impersonal forces had caused the Scorching. Surely there was nothing malicious residing underground…
He moved next to Isabella. “Grim place.” She nodded, but didn’t take her eyes off the mine. Neither did he. Foolish, maybe, but he challenged himself to face his fancies.
It’s just a mine, a mouth into a cave, no different from the agri-caves or the dozens of coal, iron, and tin mines you’ve been in. No arm of fire is going to reach out and snatch you up.
“These people have turned their misfortunes into a specter,” Rafe continued. “After the machines come and they clear the rock away, they need to go back in and get to work. Right now they’re just stewing in their fears and all it’s doing is making them sick and afraid.” He didn’t know whether he was talking about the miners or to himself, for the old creeping dread of going into the dark secret places of the earth was walking its fingers over his back.
“You think that, do you?” Her face did not change, but there was an odd edge to her voice. Almost as if she were angry. “All anyone needs to do when afraid is to run into the arms of that which they fear, eh? So anyone who runs out of a burning building must turn right around and run back into the fire’s embrace?”
Rafe stepped away. Their temporary union, the feeling of shared intentness, was shattered. “I was talking of irrational fear.”
“Not everything you don’t understand is irrational.”
“So, enlighten me.” Rafe spoke more sharply then he intended. “What is there to fear in the mines besides rock falls, fire, and poison gas—all of which are known hazards that can be avoided with some care? Voices in the deeps?” His tone became mocking. “Mythical creatures? Dragons? Soul-eaters?”
Isabella turned and looked full at him for a moment. Then, “You’re right, of course. There’s nothing there that cannot be managed.” She gave him a nod and walked away.
Rafe found that he had adopted a fighting stance, legs apart, hands clenched, jaw tight, eyes narrowed. He let out his breath and forced his muscles to relax, feeling ridiculous and empty.
What exactly had been the point of that disagreement? Isabella’s capitulation left him bewildered. She hadn’t been mocking or lying, but there was something else there, something that nagged at him to uncover it.
They left the next morning after breakfast, but did not travel far that day. One of the handcarts broke yet again, spilling its contents onto the dusty ground. It took an inordinately long time to fix the wheel and put everything back in—Burgess was most exacting about examining and packing each item just so. Not long after that, one of the performers tripped on a rock and twisted his ankle. He limped to the nearest shelter, leaning against a companion for support, Burgess scowling all the way.
The fellow’s ankle was apparently swollen, and Burgess decided that they would stay at the shelter the rest of the day.
“Scorch it, Fulsom, how could you have been so clumsy?” he berated the hapless performer, who shrugged his shoulders and looked chastened. Then, relenting, “But I suppose this is far enough away from the mines should their relief force actually come today. Funny how quickly a rescue mission turns into a sing-along about the wonders of the Father!” There was an edge of uneasiness in Burgess’ voice, a shadow of trouble on his face. Gone was the casual tone, replaced by a grim determination to be gone from Blackstone territory as soon as possible.
“Blackstonians have been known to seize itinerants for their forced labor camps,” Isabella explained. That was the most Rafe got out of her the entire time they fretted in the shelter. She sat and watched the moon sail across the sky for several silent unmoving hours.
After half a day of enforced rest, Rafe found it hard to sleep. The shelter was too hot, too crowded, too smelly, and too noisy. Bathing was not a favored pastime of the performers and Rafe imagined he still smelled of compost, though he had washed himself in cold streams—without soap as none of the performers admitted to having any. Someone had thrown dried herbs into the fire. It gave off a pungent smell he could hardly stand. The well water gulped and chuckled in a sinister way, and Burgess’ snores were an affront to his ears.
Recent events came to him in a series of memories—fiery batons and mold and womb-like darkness, the sharp rat face of the overseer, the eerie shrill of a whistle, the feel of cosmetics coating his face. Morvis afraid and pale, Berlioz bleeding his life out, thrusting a pamphlet at him, the coolness of Isabella’s voice.
And before that, before his work at the ministry as low-level functionary, investigator, and sometime-spy, before his time soldiering and the war—
don’t go there!
—, before he’d been the runaway tar boy and surveyor’s apprentice, there had been his childhood in the stony Grenfeld mansion, in the cold bosom of his highborn family. His father, distant and proud, with his habitual look of displeasure. His older brother who’d been at school for most of Rafe’s childhood. His pale silent mother who always looked past him, and
her
mother, the shriveled old lady who only took note of Rafe to dose him with vile homemade remedies, who threw handfuls of herbs into the fire, claiming they would help him sleep…
Rafe’s eyes snapped open. That smell. It was the same smell as that of his grandmother’s fire, and of the concoctions she forced into him when he was ill. Already his mind was fuzzy and his limbs weak. His coverings held him down. It took all his scattered will to thrown them off and stagger to the shelter entrance. He stumbled over a few bodies along the way, but no one moved.
Cold bit through his clothes. Rafe leaned against the stone and gulped in air that slid, bright and sharp, into his lungs. His head cleared, leaving only a dimming pain in his temples. Stars stared down at him out of indifferent pinprick eyes, flung across a black sky. The nightly frost coated the wall of the shelter.
A light up ahead, small and bobbing, carried by a traveler down the road. Rafe poked his head back into the shelter to confirm his guess.
Isabella’s bedroll was empty.
Rafe grabbed his own coat and boots, and hurried out after the light.
Isabella went back towards the mining camp, but approached the hill from the other side. Rafe followed her light, hanging far back so she would not hear him, ducking low behind rocks. Was she meeting someone here? The Blackstone mine supervisor? An agent of the Protector? Another of Rocquespur’s people?
Isabella stopped at the base of the hill. Rafe crept closer. Isabella pulled away metal rods and lengths of rusty chain across yet another mine entrance, one that had been abandoned for richer ore on the other side.
Isabella slipped through the gap. Rafe counted to eighty, then went in after her. Rust scraped his hands and flecked his clothing as he pushed through. The floor sloped up into darkness and panic fluttered around his heart before he caught hold of it. He squashed both the panic and the memories his brain sought to throw up at him.
There are no raptors here.
No booby-trapped tunnels. No poison gas. No walls rigged to collapse and flood the mine. No malice here at work.
Only time and abandonment.
Rafe hurried up the adit, staying away from the old rails in the middle of the slope, his fingers brushing against the rough damp walls. The tang of metal and mold and stale water wrapped itself around his face. The tunnel floor leveled out and he was relieved to see Isabella’s lantern in the distance.
Until it winked out.
Rafe went tense and still, ears wide open and listening, specks of light dancing in the blackness in front of his eyes.
Then he caught it. A small sound that he didn’t know if he heard or felt, like the whine of the machines or the alarm cry of the Key in his pocket.
Scritch scritch scritch.
The back of his neck prickled. Rafe pressed himself against the wall.
A scream seared down his nerves. Metallic teeth clunked and chattered.
Raptors!
And underneath it all, that incessant
scritch scritch scritch
.
Like the scrabbling of paws.
She knew I was behind her. She’s led me into a trap!
Rafe reached down for the knife at his belt, knowing that it was a poor weapon. But if he was to be taken, he’d rather it was in pieces. Maybe he’d get a lucky strike at one of the raptors.
Up ahead, something flashed briefly.
Scritch scritch…. Whiiinnnne.
Wheels ground rubble, gas hissed, a hungry crackling sound came from the direction of the exit… fire?
Even as he thought it, heat blasted the side of his face.
But there are no flames!
Oily oranges and yellows erupted from the ground. His mind screamed
Run!
but terror locked his knees.
And a small disbelieving part of him insisted that he stop panicking and think. Raptors didn’t lurk in abandoned tunnels. Fire didn’t spring from nowhere. This was not real.
He blinked and the fire sweeping toward him vanished.
That noise again—
scritch scritch scritch
—coming closer and closer. A blot moved towards him, blackness within blackness. Rafe sprang away from its leading edge. Dark tendrils burst out of the mass and plucked at his legs and arms. Cold seeped through his clothes, burned through his skin.
Something
alive
wriggled through him.
Come to me… I am hungry!
The voice of a demon, empty and powerful and alien, crashing like waves against his fragile skull. Rafe fumbled in his pocket for something to see by—even though it was foolish and he had no time—because he didn’t want to die in the dark. His hand found the Key and he focused on it fiercely.
Light, scorchit, light!
It responded, sending warmth up his arm, but did not perform the light show it had at the agri-caves.
No quartz here.
The darkness checked as if in surprise, but then surged forward faster still.
Ah, the ka, the ka! After so long!