His vision swam, but Drasky kept his good eye on Oliver, now looking down at the Keeper, who bent over and clutched his knuckles as the ridgers looked on.
“You going to try that again?” Draysky asked as the ridgers looked on.
“You struck a Keeper! How dare you raise your hand?”
“You struck me,” Draysky spat blood from his mouth as the others started to whisper. The other Keeper stepped in front of Oliver as he swore, pulling off his glove and massaging his hand.
“The crystal ain’t going to mine itself!” shouted Draysky to the onlooking ridgers as Oliver packed snow around his fist. “Back down to the Grinder. Let’s finish this shift!”
Oliver never tried to push charges against Draysky. There had been too many witnesses. A ridger had withstood a blow from a Keeper, the whispers said around the outpost, and when Draysky passed, he drew stares. A man couldn’t be punished for accepting a blow, and Oliver would never admit that Draysky had somehow managed to hurt him more than he had Draysky. The idea of a Keeper losing to a ridger who had never raised his hand was so laughable that he’d lose all respect from the other Keepers, and fear from the ridgers. Fear that kept men marching up the mountain and marching down crystal.
Oliver wore a sling for two weeks, created by Aila herself, as he hadn’t wanted to show the Keepers his wound.
“Fractured in two places, like he’d punched a boulder,” she giggled, then frowned as she looked over Draysky’s own wounds. “You really shouldn’t head back up the mountain tomorrow. The last person hit by that didn’t, and you were hit twice.”
“I have to,” grunted Draysky. “I won’t have the others thinking he bested me.”
“Well, you’re lucky to have survived, let alone be walking now,” she answered, and held a compress up against the side of his face. “Not much I can do to speed up the healing here. It’s mainly just bruising and some light burns. You’re in better shape than the others. Maybe he didn’t hit as hard.”
“Maybe,” grunted Draysky, but he remembered how the glove had hit the other ridger in the past. That had been a slap, and Draysky had taken a punch with far more weight—and anger— behind it. Maybe it was because he was more defiant. He certainly felt like he could spend a day in bed, but his mind refused to allow him that luxury.
From the corner of their living room, his grandmother watched him as he ate dinner, her lips pursed. When he finished, she walked over to him, holding a small bag, and dumped it out on the table, spreading it with her hands. Rayflower, the scent and color too familiar to him after years of working with the lighters, and she drew a line down the center with her index finger.
“Aila, fetch me one of Draysky’s lighters. Go on, girl, he’ll live without that compress, he’s looking better already. Now draw the rune there, on the table. Use the rayflower, girl. Shape the rune into it. It does not have to be perfect. Go on.”
Aila squinted at the painted wood, then copied the rune onto the stone tabletop from mounds of the powder. There was enough powder there to make at least fifty lighters, and when she finished, a thin trail of smoke rose up from the center before spreading along the rune, following the powder, the red turning to grey as it was consumed. Not enough even for an ember to form, let alone a flame, but the powder was consumed in moments until all that was left was ash.
Aila blinked in surprise, then sat down heavily in her chair, her knees giving way before she reached halfway.
“What, girl, did you think you couldn’t draw?” asked his grandmother. “Any simpleton can complete a rune.”
“It’s... It’s just that it feels different when it actually works,” she said, slightly out of breath. “I didn’t think it would wear me out. Draysky doesn’t ever seem tired.”
“That’s because he makes lighters, girl. The fuel is there in the wood, all it takes is a tiny spark. This you burned with the rune alone. Now, Draysky, use the second half of the rayflower. And don’t you make the rune shoddy, either.”
Draysky used his index finger to group the powder into the lines, then shifted those into the shape of the rune, finishing the drawing with a swipe. As soon as the rune completed, he felt something within him; a surge, almost adrenaline-like. A pressure exuding from the vertebrae just two below the base of his neck, level with his arms. He tried to push it back down, but it slid past his control, flowing out of him through his finger still coated with the rayflower. A sensation similar to his resistance when Oliver had struck him.
Flame shot up from the tabletop, three inches high and flaring out almost immediately as he stumbled backward, his eyebrows singed. A whoosh accompanied the flames, spreading the ash to the corners of the room, the smoke much thicker than when his sister had tried. But like her, his knees nearly collapsed, and he rushed back forward to grab the edge of the table, where the rune was now burned into the stone.
“Heavens and hells,” whispered his grandmother, then she shot him a suspicious look. “Whatever you do, Draysky, do not let that Keeper strike you again.”
“What was that?” Draysky asked as she moved away, her eyebrows knitted. Already, strength was starting to come back to him. “Why was mine different? Hey, don’t leave!”
His grandmother stopped in her doorway, turning to face him, and he saw concern now filled her face, the wrinkles deeper than normal.
“Practice, boy. That is why yours was different, because you’ve practiced. And that is why you’re still walking today, because there’s resistance within you. That Keeper is used to punching through paper, but today he punched shale.”
Then she retreated to her room, refusing to answer any more of Draysky and Aila’s questions, as they looked back to the rune covering the table.
The next day, while he still climbed the mountain, his work had not increased in speed. He still mined the crystal painfully slow, with just enough to get by. The dullness of the challenge actually made the days slide by slower, and he found himself preferring the heavily exerted days of scouring the mountainside, the challenge of finding the next piece of pure crystal a thrill. But he persisted, refusing to speed up. Instead, he focused on trying to guess where the most crystal would be- trying to recognize the signs of a hidden load right under a pile of rocks, the secrets of the Grinder like a game to him. He had realized that where the Grinder belched and shale struck the mountainside, crystal was far more prevalent. Remembering where the impact sites were lead to easy pickings. There was also a certain depth beyond which nearly no crystal would be found, only shale—the vast majority of crystal was in the first foot or so under the surface. Twice he had found crystals as big as his so-called miracle stone using these guidelines, both when the slope of the Grinder took him down closer to the center than the other ridgers. And both times, he ignored them, leaving them behind on the mountainside.
Then quota day approached, and Oliver shouted at them as they gathered at the edge of the outpost. "Four days until quota, and five days of crystal left. If you want to stay warm, pick! It’s your own fault if your stomachs are empty!”
He looked over the grumbling ridgers, then his eyes fell upon Draysky for the first time since the incident. He’d made it a point to avoid the ridger, even letting the lesser Keeper hand out chits in the morning to eliminate all contact. But now, his eyes burned, calculating, as Draysky set off up the mountain.
The changeover came without incident, and they were slightly ahead of schedule, Oliver pacing back and forth across the ridge and shouting at the ridgers below to move faster. Then the second changeover happened, fresh ridgers shimmying down and attacking the ridge, inspired by the progress.
“Shalestrike!” came the call from the mountaintop, and the ridgers began to empty their buckets and sling them over their bodies.
“No!” shouted Oliver, his voice drowned out by the calling warning. “The shale, keep the shale, you idiots!”
When the shalestrike passed, most of the crystal had been swept away by the rockslides, and the ridgers started anew
. And just as their shift ended, the Grinder gurgled, the explosion so loud this time that it caused rockslides across the entire perimeter. Despite Oliver’s screaming, buckets emptied again of crystal as the ridgers hid underneath then, when it passed, climbed back to the ridge. An hour and a half’s work, but only about thirty minute’s worth of shale.
“We were ahead!” Oliver shouted at the ridgers, whose expressions darkened in response. Many of the buckets bore fresh dents from the shale, and had they continued mining, those would have been holes through their bodies. “We could have been on track! Damn it, we’re farther behind now that we were when we started this morning.”
He fumed, kicking a handful of shale back into the Grinder and throwing a chisel in after it, the tool skipping along the surface all the way to the bottom where it was consumed. Then his eyes fell on Draysky, and he shook his head, his tongue curling around one of his canine teeth, his lip curling.
“You, Crystal King. I’ve seen you shell out crystal.” He looked back to the pile, running calculations through his mind. “Get your ass into gear, Crystal King. You bring me double by the end of the day, and I’ll pay you double.”
“Double and a half,” Draysky said, leaning against his pickaxe.
“Fine! Double and half, but you’re bringing me double and a half buckets! Any less, and you’re paid normally.”
“You swear it?”
“By lock and key, by the heavens, I swear it!”
“Witness?” Draysky asked Burnsby next to him, and Burnsby nodded. Draysky gathered a second rope and tied it to the first, then threw them both off over the edge of the ridge where they tumbled toward the Grinder below.
“Witness. And I witness that you’re a fool, boy.”
No sooner had Burnsby uttered the word than Draysky was over the edge, skipping along the slope before any of the other ridgers had saddled up. In his mind, he’d marked the spots where the previous shalestrikes had occurred in his vicinity, skimming far to his left before the ridger in that area could drop down, then far to his right. Knowing the exact spot, with only two to three swipes of his pickaxe he dislodged the top layer of shale, striking with enough force to produce showers behind him. Just underneath were the collections of crystal, spread out like spiderwebs from the position of impact, and within a minute he collected the majority from each. Enough to fill his bucket halfway, then he was back in his territory, swinging and searching in the general area he’d seen strikes.
Confirming a theory that had been sitting in the back of his mind.
That when the Grinder belched, the shalestrikes it produced were from nearly all crystal. There was some shale mixed in, such that only every other deposit was weak, but enough to make it extremely worthwhile to check them. That was why the shalestrike that had hit him had been the largest piece most ridgers had ever seen- the bucket had absorbed the impact of the flying crystal, keeping it in one piece instead of smashing it on the rocks. If he was right, what the ridgers discovered would have been the results of shale strikes slowly trickling down the Grinder, becoming diffuse with the rest of the shifting rocks, until it was no longer obvious that they had once been collected in pockets.
By the time the first ridgers had reached the bottom, Draysky had already harvested a full bucket from five of these shalestrikes, and he yanked on the rope for Burnsby to reel it in. Faces gawked to his left and right as the bucket disappeared upward, yet Draysky continued working where most would rest, unbuttoning the front of his coat as he investigated two more shalestrikes that he remembered in his territory. One turned out to be a dud, the shale completely devoid of crystal, but the second held a chunk about the quarter the weight of his miracle load, so heavy he could barely lift it, and instead of joining the other pieces stuffed into his coat, he stood atop it and waited for his bucket. When it slid down, he emptied his coat into the receptacle, then heaved the crystal mound upward, nearly toppling the bucket. He heard shouts above as the others spotted the size of his crystal shard, and another shout of fear when it almost spilled. Then he searched in a close radius around the bucket, now too heavy for him to drag around with him, collecting enough to fill it to the surface after ten minutes before yanking on the rope.
He allowed himself a moment’s rest as he fished for the second rope he had combined with the first, then clipped that to his belt as he unclipped the original, bypassing the stop knot at the end that prevented him from falling into the Grinder. After a moment of steady breathing, he was rejuvenated once more. The bucket came tumbling back to him, and he clipped it onto his initial rope. He was actually less tired now than the other hardworking ridgers. The majority of his energy had been spent lifting crystal, not searching for it, moving only small layers of shale to the side as opposed to the mounds most ridgers sifted through. It was the difference between searching through a field for the root of an herb when he knew what the leaves looked like, and digging up the entire field and sifting it to find the roots. Knowing where to look stripped away the tedium and most difficult actions, and where other ridgers buried themselves in shale, he danced upon it.
Now, he tested the second portion to his theory.
If all of the crystal came from the Grinder, then the areas they picked would only be refilled by shalestrikes that occurred while they were gone. That meant offshift, or if they were mining another part of the Grinder and let this part lie fallow; however, always toward the end of the day, it was harder to pick crystal because the rocks were depleted. And if they depleted the rocks every day, that meant that there were areas that were untouched—areas that would hold far more crystal because they had laid fallow for years.
Testing his knot by throwing his weight against it, Draysky slid down his extended rope and down closer to the center of the Grinder, leaving the remaining ridgers far above him. Now he was at twice the depth of the others, and the sound of the Grinder ratcheted up, so loud that the edges of his coat vibrated and his teeth buzzed against each other. He put his weight against the second stopper knot, then swung his pickaxe at the shale below, launching it out to the side. It moved easier than the shale above, already sliding in place and dislodged, so that even a tap sent it moving. His shoes started to sink into the shale as well, the stones piling up atop them, and he kept his feet marching in place to avoid being sucked under.
Two swings in, his pickaxe returned nothing but shale, and he jumped left, letting the rope carry him out and over ten feet. There he struck again, frowning as only shale scattered under his blade, and he leapt left again, his rope skipping on the shale far above him as it snagged on jagged points. For the third time he swung, but found no reward—even near the top of the Grinder, by now he should have at least seen some flecks of crystal. More likely than not, he would have found a few pebbles to begin filling his bucket, unlike the one resting empty at his side. Looking up at the other ridgers, he bit his lip. It would be a long climb back to them, made more difficult by the shifting shale, and already they were watching him. Oliver, in particular, held a hand up to his forehead to block the sun, laughing with the other Keeper as he pointed at Draysky. If he returned now, Draysky might just still make two and a half times crystal with a little luck, and if he hustled.
He took another swing at the shale, and his pickaxe skipped off the top layer, the momentum nearly carrying it out of his hands. Draysky swore, then swung again, putting more effort into the blow this time, driving the tip in so shale leapt up around him. This time, it bounced back after barely sinking in two inches, the back half of the blade grazing against his forehead.
“Hells,” he cursed, then fell to his knees, scooping away shale with his gloved hands. Two fistfuls came loose before he struck something hard, and his eyebrows shot up as he dusted off the dark shape underneath.
“Or heavens,” he whispered, as the crystal came into view. Hundreds of stones packed together just under his hands, a streak of them like a small river, as thick as his pickaxe was wide. More crystal clustered in one spot than he h
ad ever seen in the Grinder; almost as much as the pile next to the chiselers at the end of each shift. For a moment, he stared in wonder at the sight, and a word jumped to his head that he had never quite understood when ridging in the past. Vein. This must be what they meant, a collection of crystal so thick that he could fulfill Oliver’s demand without moving more than five feet. Perhaps this was what the mountain had once looked like before the upper regions had been picked clean. Maybe that was the origin of the word. With enough buckets, he could fill his request for the entire shift in ten minutes.
He shifted his feet from where stone had started to accumulate around him while he was gawking, then set to work, loading fistful after fistful into the bucket. Above, the others would be too far away to see exactly what he was doing besides bending over, so when his bucket was full, Draysky gave the rope a solid yank. The bucket started to slide away from him, painfully slow as he loosened more crystal with his pickaxe, spotting two stones near the center as large as his miracle find. Then he started piling them together in a mound that he could easily transfer into the bucket before using his pickaxe to sweep away more of the shale beneath the vein, checking to ensure it continued. For ten feet he inspected it, and he had found no sign of it stopping by the time the bucket rattled back down to him, waiting to be filled.
Again he started scooping fistful by fistful into the opening, then stopped, looking back up the mountain to where ridgers and Keepers alike had their eyes on him. He paused, making a show of swinging his pickaxe around as he thought.
After finding the vein, completing Oliver’s task had been simple. Easy, even. But Oliver had chosen the number of buckets because he thought Draysky would never be able to complete them. If he knew how simple it now was to collect, surely he would raise the number of buckets next time, and Draysky would have to work hard again. At this distance, they couldn’t see how hard he was working, all that they could tell was the rate that he sent buckets back up to them. Which meant if he wanted to keep bargaining power over Oliver, he would have to slow down.
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