Under Fragile Stone Read online

  ‘You will hold your tongue or you will join them,’ Cotch-Baumen warned. ‘Forward-Batterer, you have been given an order!’

  There were angry shouts from the crowd of miners and some of them placed themselves in front of the soldiers.

  ‘We’re not ones to shirk work, sir,’ a stocky, middle-aged man with a black beard spoke up. ‘But you won’t get one more crumb from that mine until we know there’s help on the way for our boys.’

  There was a murmur of agreement from the others.

  ‘If these people can find these caves then we need them,’ he went on, turning to Emos. ‘We’ve just had another cave-in, nearly lost another team trying to get to the first one. There’s no way we’ll reach them in time, even if we could dig and that’s lookin’ just too damned dangerous now. We can’t even be sure that they made it either, but we’re not giving up until we’ve given it our all. If there is a cave back there, it’s their only way out. But they’re down there in the dark, running out of light and water. So, can you find a way in?’

  ‘There are no cave entrances on Absaleth,’ Emos told him. ‘But I can lead you to an entrance in Ainslidge Woods, on the far side of the hills that could take us underneath it. It’s about two days’ travel by engined wagon. I don’t know if it’s a way in, but it’s the only cave system in the area. My family is down there with your friends and I think it’s their best hope. They’ll know about the entrance, though they might not be able to find it. I can find my way round down there, but I need help. The entrance is blocked by a huge stone.’

  The man nodded.

  ‘That’s good enough for me. Every man here’ll come along if needs be.’

  ‘Splendid,’ Cotch-Baumen clapped his hands together. ‘However, I fear that might deplete our workforce somewhat. And might I remind you who is in authority here?’

  But the Provinchus was weighing up the situation; he could not afford a revolt now. Production was already well behind schedule and he had learned from experience the desperate lengths the lower classes would go to when their brethren were in danger. They all wanted to be sure that others would do the same for them if the situation were reversed. It would be better to let a few of their number make their rescue attempt and get the rest back to work as quickly as possible.

  ‘Three will go: a miner and two footsoldiers, for security.’

  ‘No soldiers,’ the lead miner said. ‘And we need more men.’

  ‘It’s enough,’ Emos said. ‘We’ll be travelling through Reisenick territory and they would not take kindly to a large party of strangers anyway. Three it is.’

  There was a clamour of volunteers, but the stocky man told them he was going himself and would brook no argument.

  ‘My name is Halerus Jube,’ the miner said to Emos, as the crowd began to disperse.

  ‘Emos Harprag, and these are Taya, Lorkrin and Draegar.’

  ‘Come with me. Let’s talk about what we’ll need.’

  Taya and Lorkrin watched their uncle walk away with the miner. They looked over to the mouth of the mine tunnel; broken rubble was just visible in its shadows.

  ‘They were in there looking for us,’ Taya said shakily.

  Lorkrin did not say anything. He had a knot in his chest that would not go away.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Draegar put a hand on each of their shoulders. ‘None of that matters. Do you understand? You’re not to blame. This is down to a mix of things that nobody could have foreseen. Blame serves no purpose.’

  ‘We’re going with you,’ Lorkrin told him.

  ‘It’s not a good idea, Lorkrin. It might be dangerous. The Reisenicks can be a hostile lot.’

  ‘How are you going to stop us?’ The boy looked up into his eyes and Draegar was struck by the intensity in the lad’s stare.

  ‘We’ll follow you.’ Taya’s voice was as serious as her brother’s gaze. ‘It doesn’t matter what you do. We’ll follow you. You know we will.’

  Draegar looked at them. He had seen how wilful they could be, even when they were merely up to mischief. But he also saw a new resolve in their eyes. Now their parents’ lives were hanging in the balance. He reminded himself that they had already been through far more than most children their age. He nodded to them.

  ‘It’s your uncle’s decision. Let’s see what he has to say.’

  * * * *

  Emos was helping to load supplies onto one of the trucks. They were to take two of the six-wheeled machines. They would need one just to carry the massive hoist that would be needed to clear the cave entrance. Jube came over with the whipholder; the officer was being trailed by two soldiers.

  ‘They’re insisting we take two of their lot rather than some of the lads,’ Jube told the Myunan.

  Emos nodded. It did not matter to him. He just needed enough strong hands to unblock the cave. Otherwise he would have flown there alone. He had to will himself to be patient, aggravated at how long all this preparation was taking. Nayalla and Mirkrin could be injured, or already lost in the caves. He was not ready to consider the possibility that they were dead. He lashed a barrel of water in place to the side of the flatbed and jumped down.

  ‘These are two of my best,’ the whipholder said, ‘Forward-Batterer Cullum and Crossbower Khassiel. They will ensure your safety on this mission.’

  Emos – in no mood for pleasantries – was about to walk past when he recognised one of them. Khassiel was the woman who had shot Ceeanna. Her stance and the grey-and-black ornacrid’s shell that formed her armour were unmistakable. The other one did not look any friendlier. Emos swallowed his hate; grudges would only get in the way of his task.

  ‘Get aboard,’ he told them, and then strode past the soldiers to help load part of the hoist.

  * * * *

  On the far side of the compound, Kalayal Harsq sat on the chassis of his generator truck, glaring at the mouth of the mine. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. The dark circles of skin around his eyes spoke of two nights without sleep, a warning to his disciples to stay out of his way. Harsq had a violent temper when he was on edge.

  He took the canister from inside his robe and pressed the mouthpiece against his face, inhaling the purified air. It had a metallic taste to it. He tossed it aside in disgust. The taste of metal had not left his mouth since the exorcism; even his stores of blessed air seemed tainted. And he had been having visions. Not like his normal ones, not revelations from his master, but disturbing ones. Visions of being swallowed up by the ground.

  Harsq had once been a traditional eshtran, serving his flock out on the esh-boats. The vast ocean of gas that lay off the coast of Braskhia had been his home. But he had almost died when the ship he was serving on was wrecked in a storm and most of the crew killed. He and some of the others had survived by hanging onto a flotation bag. They had hung there for three days, with nothing but the pale yellow gas beneath them. On the third day, they discovered that the bag was slowly deflating. They were already very low in the esh. Panic set in and a fight broke out. Two men fell to their deaths, disappearing into the bottomless fog. The remaining five were able to stay afloat for another day, when a Noranian frigatch pulled them out. Harsq had been unable to go out to esh again, terrified of being suspended above the misty depths. And an eshtran who could not go to esh was no eshtran at all.

  So he had taken to wandering instead, exorcising spirits from the land, eventually perfecting the electrical projection method that had made him famous. But his work had resulted in his being exiled from Braskhia. Now, frightened of the esh, driven from his homeland, and under sentence of death from the Myunans, he discovered the land itself was threatening him. Well, he knew enough about the spirit world to understand the nature of his enemy. He would rise to the challenge.

  ‘Get the trucks started,’ he rasped at the nearest disciple. ‘Inform the Provinchus we are ready to take our leave.’

  ‘Yes, Kalayal,’ the young woman answered. ‘Have we been called on to purge another evil spirit?’

&
nbsp; ‘No. We’re not done with this one yet.’

  * * * *

  ‘Uncle Emos?’ Taya’s voice made the Myunan turn around to see her standing with Lorkrin and Draegar.

  She was about to say something else, but hesitated when she saw the expression on his face. He noticed how the two children were standing with feet stubbornly planted and how Draegar waited supportively behind them.

  ‘You’ll need tools,’ he said to his niece and nephew. ‘Find yourself some steel. I’ll make them along the way. And get yourselves some backpacks too. We might be doing some walking.’

  He turned away without another word and went back to work. Taya and Lorkrin shared a triumphant look and ran off to find some scrap pieces of steel.

  Draegar, who spent his life being ready to travel, saw that Emos and the miners had the loading well in hand, so he took a roll of vellum from a tube in one of his satchels and spread it out on the flatbed of the passenger truck. From the satchel on his right, he took out a bottle of ink and a quill. Then he dipped the nib in the ink and drew a little compass marking north, south, east and west on the top right-hand corner of the calfskin. It was how he always started a new map. He had never been to the Reisenick area that Emos would lead them through. His quill scratched over the sheet, drawing in the mining camp, the mountain and the road to Sestina. The rest of the map was yet to come.

  6 THE UNDERGROUND WINDOW

  The two Gabbits were having problems with their donkey. It kept pulling at its rope and twisting to the left and right, as if it were trying to escape from the cart. At first they thought it was just bothered by the ever-present insects in the air; the gnats swarmed around it constantly. The two women tried soothing it, then coaxing it, then cursed it when it kept up its pesky behaviour. The donkey brayed back at them, nipping at their hands and craning its neck forward. Curious, the two women fell back to the cart and examined their load, just in case they might have picked up a spidersnake or some firemites. But there was nothing alive among the rubbish.

  It was late afternoon and they were still a good walk from the thick and tangled woods where their tribe had taken up temporary residence. There were some farms and a storyhouse to visit along the way and the donkey was going to wear itself out if it didn’t settle down. Once it stopped walking, there would be nothing the women could do to get it to start again until it had rested, and they wanted to get as far along that forest road as they could before dark. The Reisenicks were tolerant of the Gabbits, but some of them were nasty for the sake of it and the two women did not want to take the chance of bumping into them after nightfall.

  They slapped the donkey’s flanks and urged it onwards, pulling at its halter impatiently. They would give the farms and the storyhouse a miss. The cart was fully laden anyway. They would come back in the morning. The other people’s garbage wasn’t going anywhere, after all.

  * * * *

  Paternasse had decided that help was not coming. Whatever hope there had been of rescue had disappeared with the last earth tremor. The crawlspace through to the end of the tunnel was still there, as was the smell of the cave air. While Paternasse was pondering on how to chip away at the crack in the tunnel wall in such a tightly confined space, Nayalla slipped in first and pulled herself up to the end of the narrow channel. Slunching her shoulders, she stuck her head through the crack, and then one arm. Bracing herself on the wall on the other side, she hauled herself through. Mirkrin followed her a moment later.

  ‘Stone me,’ Paternasse grunted, seeing the Myunan’s feet disappear through the crack – a gap too narrow for a grown man’s head.

  ‘Hand us through the pickaxes,’ Nayalla called. ‘There’s room to swing them on this side.’

  It took some time, but the two shape-changers managed to widen the crack enough for the other three men to squeeze through. They brought with them everything they could salvage from the cart, including a spare bottle of oil for the lamp, some of the men’s packed lunches, and their canteens of water. Each man still had his satchel and tools and Noogan and Dalegin had their headlamps lit again. Even so, the group was ill-equipped for exploring caves.

  They took in the scene around them. There had been room to swing the picks, but not much more. The walls on either side leaned in oppressively, rising to meet at a point out of sight above their heads. The air was damp and the grey and orange-streaked walls glistened with moisture; the sound of slow dripping water could be heard nearby.

  ‘We have water, then,’ Dalegin muttered. ‘That’s something at least.’

  ‘Can take a long time to collect a cupful of dripping water, and our canteens are almost full anyway,’ Paternasse told him. ‘We can’t hang about. This only goes one way. So let’s get crackin’.’

  The rugged corridor twisted away downhill. Paternasse led the way with the lantern, his feet finding their way carefully on the slippery stone. Their breathing was loud in the narrow space and any word spoken had an eerie resonance.

  Mirkrin and Nayalla were in the middle of the group, with the other two miners taking up the rear. She noticed that Mirkrin had a tight grip on her hand and was keeping his eyes on the floor, not looking up. His breathing, too, sounded controlled, as if he were willing himself to relax. She knew then that the cave-in had damaged more than her husband’s body.

  ‘What the blazes …?’ Paternasse exclaimed.

  They jumped down a high step and followed the old miner’s gaze.

  The flickering yellow light illuminated a bizarre sight. Off to their left was a large, stained-glass window. They crowded up to it, examining it in disbelief. Stained glass was a mark of luxury; few buildings outside Noran could boast such a thing, and here was one in the middle of a mountain. It was coloured mostly in reds, yellows and greens. The pattern was traced in lead, strange flowers over a background of leaves. The top was arched, the frame made of what looked like oak, stained with damp and dark with age. The bottom of the window was at waist height, the top out of reach above their heads.

  ‘Who would put a window in a cave?’ Noogan wondered out loud.

  ‘Somebody who wanted to believe they could see outside,’ Nayalla said, looking at a metal plate that sat in a shallow alcove in the wall facing the window. ‘Something burned on this plate to create light, it shone through that window to make it seem like sunlight shining in.’

  ‘So, what’s on the other side of the window?’ Dalegin asked quietly.

  ‘One way to find out,’ Paternasse raised his pick to the dirty glass.

  ‘Don’t!’ Mirkrin stopped him. ‘There’ll be a way in.’

  They walked to the end of the passage and came upon a door. It was wooden, the iron hasps rusted through, the wood soft with rot. Paternasse put his hand against it and shoved; the door pulled free of its hinges, but stayed stuck to the frame. Another push sent it crashing to the ground. They walked into the room beyond. And it was a room, not a cave. About fifteen paces square, but quite a bit taller, it could not have been a greater contrast to the tunnel they had just left. The lower walls were flat, carved with intricate images of flowers, trees and other illustrations of the world outside. The upper walls curved into arches that formed the ceiling. Lumps of crumbled wood could have been the remains of furniture, and the doorframe and other features of the room were inlaid with a greenish metal that must once have been brass. Cobwebs hung like thin, sticky curtains.

  Noogan jumped when he saw an animal in the far corner, but then he saw it was covered in dust. It was a lifelike sculpture of a dog, a wolfhound sitting on its haunches looking expectantly at its master.

  ‘This place is old,’ Paternasse breathed. ‘Must be hundreds of years old.’

  ‘There’s another door,’ Noogan said, staring at the other side of the room.

  ‘Let’s go through it, then.’ Mirkrin walked across the room, noting that the floor too was rotten oak. He grabbed the latch of the door. It was made to open in, but the handle came off in his hand. The miners’ picks made short work of t
he decayed wood and they broke through into a much bigger, more impressive version of the first room.

  It was octagonal, with steps down to a sunken section in the middle. There were windows in four of the walls; one of them was broken and behind it was an alcove holding a metal plate like the first one they had found. Here too, there were sculptures of animals, all in materials that mimicked their natural colours. Two cats, one in pitchstone, with its back arched, one in striped sandstone, curled up as if asleep. There was another dog too, a shepherd’s collie, made of marble and quartz, lying on its side, sleepy eyes regarding the room. Around the middle of the room, rusted wrought-iron columns extended into the roof. Paternasse went closer to study one.

  ‘Odd,’ he grunted. ‘Some of the carving at the top looks like stone, some like metal; can’t see where one starts and the other ends. Like they’re growing into one another.’

  ‘It’s just the rust,’ Dalegin shrugged. ‘Makes it look that way.’

  ‘Don’t know, looks odd to me,’ the older miner frowned.

  There were two more doors.

  ‘One of these has got to lead out,’ Paternasse lifted his chin towards them. ‘People lived here once upon a time. They had to have a way out somewhere.’

  ‘You would think,’ Noogan said, raising his pick. ‘Makes me wonder though; if there were people about hundreds of years ago who could make stuff like this, where are they now?’

  * * * *

  Taya and Lorkrin sat with their feet dangling off the tailgate of the wagon. It chugged along at a little faster than walking pace, belching oily smoke and making a sound not unlike an enormous cat coughing up a hairball. They were on the road, off to find a way into the caves that might lead them to their parents. And despite the fear for their mother and father that gnawed at their insides, they were flushed with excitement. Behind their truck, the second vehicle carrying all the equipment brought up the rear, driven by the soldier, Cullum.