Skyborn

by Cameron Bolling

  Jisi narrowed her eyes. “I cannot be bribed, Raseari.”

  “No? Look around. Everyone is on edge. Food has been in short supply lately… There’s talk of changing the mining grounds since the current ones are running dry. Setting up a new mine requires days of labor before any fruits are possible. You know all of this. A food surplus right now could keep up spirits long enough to make the shift. You need it—the people need it—and I can provide. But not if I’m dead.” It took several breaths to get it all out, but she managed, slowly, relishing in the way Jisi’s face changed as she spoke. For a long moment, Jisi only gazed silently out at the mob. Then she stood.

  “Show’s over… I’ll handle it from here,” called Jisi. A few groans of protest came forward in response, but everyone dispersed before Jisi had to issue another command. When only the two of them remained, Jisi lifted the slabs from Oleja’s chest one by one and cut the ropes binding her to the stakes. Oleja’s bag lay on the ground nearby, and she started towards it. Jisi clamped a hand down on her shoulder and held her in place.

  “You had best lug a truly impressive haul out of those mines by sundown, or I will personally see to your execution. Is that understood?” Oleja did not turn to face her. She nodded her response. Jisi released her shoulder.

  Oleja scooped up her bag in her arms, tucking the broken strap into her grip to keep it from hanging free, and hastened away towards the mines. She didn’t need to turn and look back to know that Jisi’s gaze stayed on her until she disappeared through the threshold that would take her deep underground.

  Chapter Two

  With a torch held aloft in her right hand, Oleja wandered through the otherwise dark passageways of the mines. The walls crumbled. The support beams buckled and splintered—if they weren’t gone altogether, taken away to be recycled in a newer, active section of the mines. The village abandoned this wing when Oleja still lay in a cradle, and in the dozen and a half years since, few had ventured through the halls. The entire sector had been bled dry of ores and minerals after years of mining, and now lay empty, a husk of its former opulence, useless to the people above. All except for Oleja.

  As she rounded a bend, the torchlight illuminated a pile of rubble ahead, giving the impression that the passage ended at a dead-end due to a cave-in. Oleja approached and clambered up the pile. At the top near the ceiling, a thin opening just large enough for a person to squeeze through led into a deeper hollow. Oleja stuck her torch between a few rocks inside. She pushed her bag through the opening first, and it dropped down through a hole just beyond, hitting the floor somewhere out of sight and sending back a muted cacophony as proof. Oleja followed, crawling over the rubble and swinging her legs down the concealed hole.

  She dropped and landed beside her bag. Reaching up, she pulled the torch free from where she wedged it, and after scooping up her bag, she started off down the hidden hallway.

  The walls seemed more eager to meet in this section of the passageway, creating a space just wide enough for Oleja to pass through without her shoulders brushing the sides. The ceiling dipped lower too, and in a few places she had to stoop to avoid hitting her head. While the passages above had been cut long ago and since abandoned, more freshly carved stone lined the walls of this one. As she neared the end, her torchlight mingled with a similar dim orange light flickering out from the larger chamber beyond.

  A wide, oval-shaped cavern with a high ceiling stretched before her. Stalagmites dotted the floor, some joining with stalactites on the ceiling to create columns of stone. Torches burned at intermittent spots around the cave. Light reflected off the various metal items that were scattered throughout but concentrated near a large rectangular block of clean-cut stone that sat near the left wall, leveled to serve as a worktable and decorated on all sides with carvings. A wooden figure made from a few beams assembled into the vague shape of a human stood guard by the workbench, showing off a suit of armor pieced together from various mismatched scraps of metal. At the far end of the cave, a thin sheet of wood leaned against the wall with a target drawn in charcoal on its face.

  From where Oleja stood at the entrance, a handful of stairs led down to the main floor. She wedged her torch into a makeshift sconce by the door and then descended the stairs two at a time.

  “You’re usually down here earlier,” came a gruff voice from the shadows.

  Oleja shrugged as she made her way to the stone table. “Got caught up. Some people even declared the whole ruckus your fault, so I guess you’ve only got yourself to blame for the wait.”

  “My fault? And what have I done this time?”

  “Talked to me, and apparently that’s enough.” Oleja lifted her bag and deposited it onto the surface of the workbench. “‘It’s the old man, he’s Tor’s blood,’” she said in a mocking tone.

  “Old man? That’s quite rude of them indeed. I haven’t even reached my seventieth birthday!”

  “You’re the second-oldest in the village,” said Oleja, raising an eyebrow to herself as she opened her bag and began pulling out tools.

  “Until I’m the first, I see no reason to point it out.”

  “Fair enough, old man.” Oleja selected the tools she needed and took a look at the broken strap of her bag. The voice from the shadows was quiet for a moment. Oleja turned to where it had come from.

  Ude stepped into the torchlight as he approached her, a gentle smile playing across his lips. The low light exaggerated the wrinkles and stubble on his face, highlighting his features with shadows. His silver hair hung in a short ponytail.

  “Anyhow—what an impolite greeting I offered. Where are my manners?”

  “Buried beneath the sarcasm, as usual.”

  “Right alongside yours then, hm?” The reflected light winked in Ude’s eyes. “Good morning, Oleja. I hope I didn’t cause too much trouble for you.”

  Oleja shrugged and turned back to her worktable. “Nearly got executed, no big deal.”

  Ude walked around to the opposite side of the table. Oleja did not meet his eyes.

  “That can’t be just because you’ve spoken to me…”

  Oleja put the tools down and leaned on her hands. “Jisi noticed that I haven’t been mining… again. A mob formed. They accused me of not pulling my weight; didn’t want me eating their food anymore if I wasn’t going to bring up a haul.” When she finished speaking, she grabbed a heavy canvas bag from a hook hammered into the cavern wall and made her way to the corner near the door. A mound of ores and crystals rose up from the floor, piled taller than Oleja. She opened the bag and shoveled ore inside by the fistful.

  When she discovered the untouched cavern, hidden below the old section of the mines, she found it rich with ores and minerals. She stockpiled them there and brought portions to the surface periodically. Nothing could come of bringing it all up at once except a food surplus so grand the people wouldn’t know what to do with it all. They’d get comfortable with their full bellies, and when the food supply wore thin again, no one would be used to living on half-full stomachs and mining desperately for what they had. It would ruin them. She did the village a favor by keeping the hoard a secret and surfacing with it in portions. That, and it bought her time to do more important work, work she wouldn’t have time for if she spent her days with a pick in hand.

  That work culminated in a plan—a plan she’d been working on for years. She was going to escape the canyon. And she was going to get everyone else out with her.

  “Well, are you pulling your weight?” asked Ude. Oleja closed the bag, now full to bursting, and dropped it by the entrance. She turned to face him.

  “Yes. I’m doing work that’s more important than anyone else’s in the entire village,” she said, annoyance creeping into her words.

  “But you aren’t mining, so everyone else has to mine a little more so that you can eat too.” Ude leaned against the worktable with his hands clasped in front of him, a thin smile on his face.

  “I’m working to get us out of here. Every
one. They do a little bit of work for me, and I do everything for them. In the end, I do more than my share. They will owe me more than a few strikes with their picks and a cut of the day’s food.”

  “But you have yet to actually make those contributions. So, in the meantime, you are in debt to them.”

  Oleja returned to her tinkering bag and withdrew a cloth-wrapped bundle—her lunch—and took a seat with her back to a stalagmite. “Can it,” she said with a glare. “Everyone else in the village would happily see you vanish, don’t add me to that list too.”

  Ude held up his hands in mock surrender. His smile had not faded; he didn’t pester Oleja to anger her, rather he did so only playfully—that she knew. But it didn’t make the jabs any less annoying.

  “I thought only to invite you along to see their side of things,” he said as he took a seat on the ground near her. He pulled a similarly-wrapped package from a small satchel he wore over a set of dirtied clothes not unlike Oleja’s, though while he wore a loose shirt that might once have been white, she had one of tan canvas, torn and tattered, that stopped at her midriff and left her arms equally exposed. Their grey pants and leather boots were almost identical, however—made in the style common throughout the village.

  Together, they unwrapped their lunch and began to eat. Hard bread and tough meat made up the bulk of the rations, but they were accustomed to nothing better except on rare occasions. Though hard and tough, they found the bread and meat more edible and considerably less hard or tough than the rocks and metals—the only items they could produce on their own—so they ate without complaint. Some said the food had gotten worse overtime. Ude made such claims often. As one of the oldest in the village, he would certainly be the one to know, though Oleja sometimes suspected not that the eclipsers started sending down worse food, but that the others in the village gave Ude the worst food of the batch when they divided it up. He was not widely liked, that was easy to say. He earned the contempt by no fault of his own, rather from residual hatred for his father, Tor.

  Tor was once considered a hero among the people of the village. The plan that led to the greatest escape attempt in their people’s history came from his mind. He suggested they mine a tunnel east—far east, as far as they could go—and then head upwards for the surface. The people thought it foolproof—they would surface beyond the borders of the eclipser territory and be long gone before the eclipsers noticed anything was amiss. Tor rallied the village, gave them hope of escape and a better life.

  But the plan failed. They didn’t mine far enough. Tor led the group from the front when they surfaced, but when they broke ground and saw the blue sky peeking through the cracks in the stone, they found themselves not met with sights of expansive wilderness landscapes, but the heart of the eclipser camp. Many died that day—the eclipsers dragged out nearly everyone mining in the tunnel and killed them, then caved the passage in on the rest.

  But Tor managed to get out alive. He ran back through the tunnel and reached the village as the eclipsers collapsed the path at his heels.

  If leading so many people to their deaths wasn’t enough, Tor being one of only three survivors truly dragged his reputation through the mud. The village pinned the blame for all of the deaths on him. Many of those who lost a loved one believed it should have been Tor who died instead, taking out their anger and grief on him. They said he only escaped because he bailed, left them to suffer for his actions, and got out just to save his own skin. They executed him the same day. His name became something accompanied only with a sneer, something people spat out with disgust.

  Ude, as his son, bore Tor’s name. Ude Tor, the only surviving member of Tor’s family. Ude was only twelve when it all happened, and while the people of the village refrained from executing him alongside his father, they had been less than kind to him ever since. The fact that Ude still lived at sixty-eight when most didn’t even see their fiftieth birthday only added to the scorn that accompanied him wherever he went. The only one who spoke to him with more than a jeer was Oleja.

  Perhaps it was because she found herself among the outcasts as well, or perhaps because she seemed to be the only one beside Ude who still regarded Tor as anything but a villain, but the two had become friends of a sort. He was the closest thing to a friend she had, at least. And she loved to hear stories of his father. Though admitting it to anyone but Ude would surely get her punched in the face—and the punch being merely a warning—she could not help but see Tor as a hero. He did what he believed was right; how could he have known the future held only failure for him? He did his best but inevitably failed, and for that he suffered gravely.

  Oleja picked through an assortment of small uncooked vegetables, popping them into her mouth one by one. She gave the orange ones to Ude. In return, he gave her his red ones, whatever they were. He didn’t like them because they had too much of a kick. She liked them for the very same reason. When she finished eating, she wrapped up the remainder and placed the bundle in her bag.

  Laid out on the workbench rested a hand-carved bow. Oleja ran her hand along its surface before picking it up. It fit snugly in her grip, formed in such a way after years of whittling the wood into perfection. With her right hand, she reached over the worktable and grabbed a cylindrical container propped up against the other side. Constructed from a thin sheet of metal, her quiver looked not unlike those she heard about in stories, though with one addition. A screen of burlap formed a loosely-domed lid, and when she unlatched the copper clasp, the cover fell away and hung to the side, leaving a dozen and a half arrows visible with their fletching poking out the top. Oleja had given the matter careful consideration and deemed the cover a necessary feature. The clasp was easy enough to hook and unhook with her free hand, so her modification to the classic design came with few drawbacks.

  Ude watched her as he chewed. “You never do get tired of that thing, do you?”

  Oleja grinned and held the bow a little higher. “Not in the slightest.”

  She made her way over to a line carved in the stone floor and faced the target. The weight of the day’s events fell away as she let herself relax. The bow bounced loosely in her hand. One breath in, one breath out, and then she flicked her eyes up to the target.

  In one quick motion she raised the bow with her left hand and swung an arrow from her quiver with her right, nocking and firing it with one movement of her arm. The arrow whizzed through the air and struck the target with a thud. It stuck in the soft wood, left of the bullseye by the width of no more than two fingers. Oleja studied it for a moment and then cocked her head, disregarding it as her hand leapt for another.

  “Easy…” came Ude’s voice from behind her. Faint tinges of strain leaked in his voice as he got to his feet. “Don’t just go for the next one. What did you do wrong with the first?”

  “I missed.”

  “Well, clearly, but that’s not the right answer,” he said as he came to stand beside her. “You’re going too fast.”

  “I’m going to have to be fast when I’m fighting eclipsers.”

  “If you slow down to aim and manage to fell them in one shot, you won’t need the speed for a second.”

  Oleja let the bow fall to her side and turned her head to meet the man’s eyes. “I’ve taught myself this far, I think I can manage.”

  Ude chuckled. “Do I get no credit for my snarky remarks over your shoulder? Some of them have been quite good.”

  Oleja ignored him as she drew another arrow. She fired it with the same speed as the last. This one found its mark at the center.

  “I’ll stand corrected, I suppose,” said Ude with a shrug. “You say you’re going to be fighting eclipsers—you’re going through with it, then?”

  “Yes,” replied Oleja as she loosed another arrow, her eyes never drifting from the target.

  “When?”

  “Soon. A few days at most. I didn’t plan for quite so soon, but…” Oleja paused, thinking back on the events of that morning. “They killed someone
today. A boy. He didn’t make any attempts at escape. Things are dangerous down here, and if I wait too long it’ll be too late.”

  Ude let out a slow breath. “I see. That is soon. Everything is ready?”

  Oleja sent another two arrows to find their marks at the center of the target before voicing her response. “I have inspected the gate by the south wall as extensively as has proven useful. I won’t know what sort of mechanism opens it until I am outside, but I’ll figure it out—it can’t be too complex. Once I’m out, I’ll go to the gate and open it, releasing everyone. Then, we fight for our freedom. And we win. And we walk away from here to begin our new lives.” Though she still did not turn her eyes away from the target, Oleja could hear Ude scratching his stubble. A period of silence settled between them. Oleja drew and nocked another arrow.

  “And your plan of escape?”

  Thud. “I just have to test one last thing.”

  “Have you enlisted anyone to aid you?”

  Thud. “I can manage it alone.”

  “Just because you can doesn’t mean that you have to.” Oleja lowered her bow and met his gaze now. He looked troubled, deep in contemplation.

  “Your father made his plans by himself. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “My father worked alone on the plans, yes, but others helped when it came time to act.” Torchlight flickered in his eyes. He watched Oleja carefully, unblinking.

  “Others will act once I open the gates and they join me to fight. The first part is merely an escape and a dash to the gate, I don’t need others getting in my way.” Ude raised an eyebrow at that. Even the small gesture made her grind her teeth. Did he not trust her? Did he think her too incompetent to pull it off? She had been working towards this, training for it for years. He watched her do so on many occasions. What squashed his faith now?