Transcendent (Ascendant Book 2)

by Craig Alanson

  “He told me you are a, a sort of mercenary,” she supposed that was the polite term.

  “I am that, and more. People consider me to be a criminal. In my profession, that is a useful reputation to have. I do, things which need to be done; things which need to be done in an unofficial manner. Mostly, I work for my own people, but occasionally, I will take on tasks for others, if the action will not harm my people. Kallron is not a fool; he may suspect that I am something more than a common mercenary. The guise of my profession is useful to us both, which is why we maintain the ruse. Over the years, I have performed tasks for your former chancellor, and for your father. He was a good man, your father.”

  “Thank you,” Ariana replied simply. Her father had used a dwarf spy? For what hidden task? Inwardly, she chided herself for being surprised. Her father had been a king at war. He must have had great need for certain things to be done, and done unofficially.

  “You are welcome.” Grimla leaned forward. “Kallron tells me you have need of my services? Highness, I must warn you; I will not agree to help you, if such action would not be approved by my leadership.”

  “I understand,” Ariana said nervously. This had all seemed much easier when she had been rehearsing what to say in her private chambers of the royal palace. “I seek to prevent Tarador from falling to the enemy; I believe your people would not wish for the enemy’s banners to fly above Linden?”

  “No,” Grimla agreed. “How do you wish me to help you?”

  And Ariana told him. Grimla then spoke privately with Hedurmur for a short time, and Grimla agreed to help the crown princess. He agreed enthusiastically, to the point of refusing the diamond ring she offered as payment. In the end he took the ring, because the princess insisted that Grimla might have substantial expenses in the task set for him, and because Ariana wished to make a gesture of respect for the dwarf lords who Grimla worked for.

  By the time Duston and Hedurmur escorted Ariana back to the palace and she crawled wearily into bed, there was less than two hours remaining before dawn. When her maids awakened her at the usual time, she rose as normal although she desperately wanted to stay in bed until noon, at the earliest. Responsibility, she told herself, was easier to contemplate after a full night of sleep.

  Grimla Ironstone, under the name of Heldur Ironstone, arrived at the gold mine, bearing expertly forged letters of recommendation about his experience as a mining engineer. He smiled to himself as he patted the pouch of papers inside his pocket; the mere fact that he was a dwarf would make ignorant people at the mine assume that he knew how to work the stone deep underground. In truth, he knew little of the art and craft of deep mining, having only worked at it for a few months when he was much younger. Every mountain was different, his uncle the miner had told young Grimla. You need to learn the bones of each mountain, and let them tell you how to extract the secrets deep beneath the surface. But, he knew enough to fake it, and he also knew the mine needed an experienced mining engineer. One of the previous engineers had been forced to leave due to a seriously family emergency. Grimla knew the emergency had been that dwarf being offered a large sum of money to leave the mine and go elsewhere. Grimla knew this, because he had been the one making the offer, using gold he had gotten from selling the diamond ring given to him by the crown princess. Seeing the look of pure delight on the former engineer’s face, when he contemplated the stack of gold coins offered to him, would have been payment enough for Grimla.

  The interview for the job took less than two hours, during which Grimla descended into the depths with the mine supervisor. The basket was slowly lowered into the darkness, illuminated only by baskets of a special glowing fungus supplied by the dwarves, and by magical lights that had been purchased at great cost from wizards. For every three miners, there was also a lantern that burned oil; more lanterns would have fouled the air even worse than it already was. Grimla counted as they descended, to keep his bearings on where they were. When the basket reached the fourth level, the supervisor pulled a chain, and the basket stopped. They walked around the mine shafts, with the supervisor, a man with very short hair and a bushy red beard, sounding like he wanted to impress a dwarf with how much he knew about mining. Grimla mostly nodded and agreed with whatever the supervisor was saying, until they reached a point where the tunnel split into three directions. Grimla stopped and looked at the rock column that separated the tunnel straight ahead from the one on the left. He tapped the rock with a small hammer, frowned, touched the rock with a finger and tasted in, then got on hands and knees to inspect that base of the column. “You need to shore up this column,” Grimla concluded. “It’s weak. I suspect the rock is undercut by water.” In truth, he had tested salt, and the base of the column was slightly damp. That exhausted his knowledge of mine engineering.

  The supervisor seemed impressed. “That’s what our last engineer said. He was a dwarf also.” The man tapped the rock with his own hammer, and listened intently. “Maybe you’re right.”

  Grimla nodded wisely, although he had absolutely no idea if the rock column was sturdy enough to hold up the weight of the ceiling. What Grimla did know was what he had been told by the previous engineer, when Grimla had asked him if the mine had any weak areas. That column, where the tunnel on the fourth level split into three, was one place that Grimla had memorized. Grimla had learned many other important and useful things about the mine, and he had not had to pay for the information. Not pay directly, that is. He had paid for many the drinks consumed, and he had paid with his time while the real engineer vented his grievances about the mine managers. And Grimla had paid with an aching head the next morning, for he had to drink along with the engineer or it would have looked suspicious.

  His one little nugget of knowledge, learned from the real engineer, was enough to convince the mine supervisor to hire Grimla. “When can you start?” The man asked rather anxiously. He had recently lost one of his engineers, and Duke Bargann was demanding ever more gold to be extracted from the mine. The supervisor had crews working around the clock, and still the duke was not happy. Rumor had it that Duke Bargann was deeply in debt, due to his rivalry with Duke Falco and his vain attempts to keep up with his wealthier rival.

  “Tomorrow,” Grimla said with satisfaction. “I’ll need a few days to familiarize myself with the mine, of course.”

  “Of course,” the supervisor agreed.

  Those few days were all Grimla would need. He could go anywhere in the mine, without raising suspicion, and he could deflect any engineering questions that he could not answer. The mine could survive a short time without a real engineer.

  After two days, Grimla knew enough about the mine to perform his real job. Early on the morning of the third day, he descended to the fourth level and walked around pretending to be inspecting the posts that shored up the ceiling, waiting until there were no miners in sight. He worked quickly, and when he was done, he joined a group going down to work the newest seams of gold on the fifth level. Here, an engineer was truly needed, for they were cutting a new tunnel, and there was water seeping from the ceiling. Even Grimla’s untrained eye thought the mine was going too deep, to close to an underground river or some other source of water under high pressure. But Duke Bargann demanded that the miners follow the seams of gold, and the gold led every downward. In addition to the pumps that brought fresh air down from the surface to all levels, the fifth level had pumps that constantly pulled water up from the lowest depth of the mine. If the water pump failed, the fifth level would slowly fill up with water. Then it would take weeks to drain the water so mining could continue. Unless more pumps were brought in, and with the duke needing every ounce of gold the mine could produce, he would bring in more pumps. “Good morning,” Grimla said to a group of miners who were carefully shipping away at tough rock that covered a seam of gold. He could see a thin line of gold gleaming in the dim light of the magical lamps. Grimla brought his own lantern up close to the seam, and stared longingly at the gold. Pure, raw gold th
at had never been touched. It was so tempting. But no, he had work to do that morning.

  Walking further into the tunnel, Grimla found his boots squishing on mud. Water dripped continually from the ceiling, and ran down the walls in rivulets. Trenches had been dug into the floor to channel the water, and it was collected in a deep pit, from which it was pulled up to the surface by powerful pumps. Grimla had seen the pumps on his first day at the mine; a team of oxen walked in a circle to power the water pump, day and night, keeping the mine from slowly flooding.

  Slowly was not good enough.

  The engineer, who Grimla had replaced, expressed great concerns about the fifth level of the mine. Perhaps the engineer’s fears about the lowest level of the mine had been one reason why he had eagerly taken the gold coins to go away. There was one particular area of the fifth level where the former engineer had banned crews from digging, even though a moderately-sized seam of gold led in that direction. The engineer had not only banned further excavation in that direction, he also had crews cover the rock in a thick plaster to contain the water seepage. In that direction also lay water under high pressure, water that had seeped down from the top of the mountain that towered above their heads. There were natural fractures in the rock; fractures that would inexorably grow wider over time, with the weight of an entire mountain pressing down on them. The cracks had been there for millennia, and they grew very slowly. Grimla could speed the process along.

  First, he used a chisel to quietly make cracks in the tough plaster. Then, out of sight around a corner, he crouched down and filled a leather water sack from the flowing trench, then dumped it at the base of the plaster-covered rock at the end of the tunnel. After repeating the process four times, there was now a large puddle of water at the base of the plaster.

  Walking back to the group of miners he had spoken to earlier, he asked them to come with him. Pointing to the alarming amount of water and the cracks in the plaster, he asked “Is this amount of seepage normal here?”

  The miners, eyes wide, told him no, there wasn’t supposed to be any water there. And there had not been any cracks in the plaster the previous day! One of the miners put a finger into a crack in the plaster, when he pulled back, a section of the plaster came away, and a trickle of water became a steady stream. Then another piece of plaster popped loose.

  Grimla did not have to fake his reaction; he felt genuine fear. Perhaps he should it have been tampering with things he knew little about, so deep underground. “I think it would be best,” he said while backing away from the stream of water, “if we went back to the surface, so I can bring down equipment to deal with this development.”

  The miners needed no additional urging to run toward the basket; they shouted a warning to others, and soon the basket was full. It took three trips for the basket to remove all the miners from the fifth level, and Grimla was the last aboard the last basket, making sure none of the precious magical lanterns had been left behind. He had been busy while the miners anxiously waited for baskets to be lowered down to them, and miners gratefully slapped him on the back for remaining behind to monitor the widening cracks. That was not what Grimla had been doing, but he accepted their thanks, and he assured them that when he was able to bring down the proper equipment, the fifth level would be open for work again. Miners were paid only for the gold they extracted; a mine that was closed even temporarily lot money for the hard-working miners. And for the duke.

  As the basket climbed to the fourth level, Grimla jumped off, and found a shift supervisor directing a work crew. “We should evacuate this level,” Grimla advised, “until I can get the flooding below contained.”

  The shift supervisor looked scornfully at the new mining engineer. Pulling himself up to his full height so his head almost scraped the ceiling, he towered over the dwarf. “Unless can show me that there is a problem on this level also, we will continue working.”

  Grimla stood on his toes and glared at the man. “You are questioning the judgement of your engineer?”

  The workers stopped hammering and looked anxiously at the shift supervisor. The man was responsible only for extracting the maximum amount of gold from the mine during his assigned shift; he cared nothing about safety. The engineer was responsible for assuring the entire mine didn’t collapse down on their heads.

  “You have been here less than a week, and you’re already shutting down the mine?” The shift supervisor scoffed. “The duke had best find another-”

  The floor shook, and dust and pebbles rained down from the ceiling. “The mountain is shifting!” Grimla shouted, grateful for the metal helmet he wore. Pebbles and flakes of rock pinged off the metal. The shift supervisor, without further protest, was the first to spin on his heels and run for the basket. Grimla appealed for calm, for the men to take the magical lanterns with them. By himself, he hugged one side of the tunnel as men ran past, going further into the mine. He asked men running past whether everyone had gotten the word to evacuate, and told them that he personally would assure than no one was left behind.

  When he was on his own, he checked the item that Lord Salva had given him in Linden; it was still exactly where he had hidden it. As he checked the condition of the item and put it back into hiding, he suddenly was unsure of himself, and a thought sent a chill up his spine. Perhaps the court wizard of Tarador had thought it would be a bonus to get rid of Grimla Ironstone, to remove any link between the incident at Duke Bargann’s gold mine and the crown princess. With his hands shaking, Grimla hurried toward the basket, and force himself to remain outwardly calm while waiting for an empty basket to be lowered. There were only a half dozen miners with him, and Grimla was wracked with guilt that he had put the lives of these people at risk. His plan had seemed much more secure when he was on the surface; now he felt the massive weight of the mountain looming over his head.

  The floor shook slightly; shocks as the cracks on the fifth level opened wider. Grimla feared it was something more than that happening, that he might have unintentionally caused faults deep within the mountain to slip against each other. This is where some actual knowledge of mining engineering would have been useful. Without any insight into what might be happening within the rock around him, Grimla could only stand uncomfortably, trying to keep the men calm, until the basket creaked to a stop. Then, as the basket ascended with an agonizing lack of urgency, Grimla attempted to mentally estimate how long it had been since he hid on the fourth level the device given to him by Lord Salva. The device he had used on the fifth level had done its work within a quarter hour after he twisted the top of the bottle as the wizard had instructed. Lord Salva had told him to expect the larger device on the fourth level to remain dormant for one full hour. Although, the wizard had cautioned, the larger the device, the less accurate its timing could be. And the device on the fourth level was indeed large; big enough that Grimla had trouble concealing it.

  No matter now. The basket reached the surface and Grimla stepped off with a sigh of relief, looking at the morning sun now peeking over the ridge of the mountain above him. To his surprise, waiting for him was the mine supervisor, who had a cart full of equipment with him. “How bad is it?” The supervisor asked, waving his people to begin loading the equipment into the basket.

  To his horror, Grimla realized the supervisor had the equipment that would be needed to pump out water, seal cracks and shore up ceilings on the fifth level! And he expected Grimla to go straight back down and get working on fixing the problem. Grimla stared at the equipment, having no idea what most of it was used for. “We should wait,” he heard himself saying in a shaky voice.

  “Wait? What for?” The supervisor demanded of his new engineer. “The longer we wait, the more water we’ll have to deal with.”

  Grimla tried to think of an excuse. He should have thought of this before, made it part of his plan. And he could not risk other people’s lives. “The mountain is shifting,” Grimla said as a way of stalling. “If we go now, we will only-”

 
; He was thrown off his feet as the mountain did shift beneath his feet. As he regained his footing, a dense could of smoke and dust came billowing out of the mine shaft, covering everyone and everything in choking soot. Grimla ran away with everyone else, stopping to help those who had been overcome by the thick dust in air. Whatever the nature of the magical devices he received from Lord Salva, they had tremendous explosive power for their size. Looking back, he could barely make out that not only had the explosion sent a fountain of dust and ash up the mine shaft, the lip of the shaft had sagged and partially collapsed in.

  It was not until the next morning that the mine supervisor was able to send a man down in a small basket; a man who had been offered a large sum of money to report on conditions within the mine. Despite the substantial amount offered, there were only three people willing to descend into the depths, and they drew straws to decide which of them would go first. The supervisor was fervently hoping that whatever accident had befallen the mine only affected the fifth level. That would be bad enough, as the gold seams on the levels above had been almost exhausted. But if the fourth level was intact, it could be used as a staging area for pumping out and restoring access to the fifth level. And the mine could produce at last some gold as repairs were made.

  The supervisor’s hopes were dashed when the man in the basket came back up after descending only slightly below the third level. The rope had been jerked twice to stop the basket, then only a few minutes later, three pulls on the rope indicated the man wished to come back up. His report was not good; the vertical shaft had partly collapsed in above the third level, requiring the man to wiggle the small basket around obstructions. The worst news was that, just below the third level, the mine shaft was flooded and the water was still rising.

  “This is a disaster,” the supervisor groaned. He turned to his expert, the dwarf mining engineer. “What should we do first?”