The Magic Mines of Asharim

by Pauline M. Ross

  “We cannot break through it, I suppose?” Xando said.

  “No. We have no idea how thick the rock is. If there were even a tiny chink showing clear sky, we could perhaps attempt it.”

  “So – back to the egg chamber?”

  “First, we need to see if there is any food here.”

  “Surely not. No one could bring food here, not in quantity.”

  “No, but remember the wine? That was left by the previous occupants, and remained sound for the One knows how many years. We will spend a day exploring. If we find nothing, we will leave.”

  “And what is a day, exactly?”

  His humour always cheered me. “Ha! Good question. We will explore until we feel the need to sleep again.”

  We split up, to cover more ground. Each of us took a street off the square near the mine, working systematically up one side and down the next, looking quickly through every building. None were locked, but then none contained anything worth locking away. A few heavy cooking pots, statues and large wall-hangings. Valueless items like laundry poles. Broken furniture and empty barrels. Nothing of any interest.

  When we met up in the square again to share some food, we decided to try a different approach. Or rather, I did; Xando seemed quite content to follow my lead. For a Tre’annatha, he was very docile.

  We went back to the outer wall, and started again from there. It seemed likely to me that the refuge was abandoned before it was buried in stone, so the inhabitants would have left by the wall. The last houses to be occupied might have been at that end of the town.

  We chose the largest square near the wall and again worked up and down streets. It was dispiriting, and I began to despair. We had enough food to return to the egg chamber and outwards to another refuge, but only just. And if that, too, was abandoned—

  My flickers chittered with excitement. It took me a few moments to work out the reason for it, but then Xando rounded a corner, his face aglow with excitement.

  “There is a sign,” he cried, arms waving, when he was still some distance away. “Come and see.”

  He led me to a spot almost directly below the wall, in a semi-circular open space. Five streets led away from it, and in any normal town such a place would face a gate or archway, some kind of entrance. Here, however, the wall was as featureless as everywhere else.

  Right in the centre, facing the wall, was the sign Xando had found. It was the world’s least impressive sign, no more than a few broken pieces of wood nailed together so that the rickety edifice stayed upright. Across the flat area at the top, a few words were painted in black, with long drips on almost every symbol. Then an arrow, in the ancient curved style.

  “It is pointing down that street, so there must be something there, do you agree? Whatever it means, it must be in that direction.”

  “It just says, ‘This way’.”

  “You can read it?”

  “Of course. It is in an archaic form of High Mesanthian, although in Huranic script.”

  “Oh. You are clever.”

  “Just expensively educated. Shall we have a look? But we had better be careful.”

  “In case there are people here, you mean?”

  “People – or anything else. Keep your mind alert.”

  The street was broad, and for the first time we saw shops, proper shops with wide windows, although no goods were on display. We didn’t stop to explore, for we could see another sign further on.

  When we drew nearer, the arrow pointed to the right, through an archway. Again, it said only, “This way”.

  It was a courtyard, elegantly decorated with statuary in niches and a graceful fountain in the centre. Always, a fountain. A private house, by the look of it, although a wealthy one. I could imagine the bustle in its prime, visitors arriving in twos and threes in their fashionable clothes, perhaps with a slave to hold a parasol above their heads. Smartly dressed house servants waiting to greet them. There might be a ritual, washing of hands or feet, or perhaps a drink would be offered. Then through to a stylish receiving room to meet the mistress of the house.

  “The door is open,” Xando said.

  He walked in without hesitation. I was the nervous one, yet I could detect no sign of other minds anywhere nearby. This place was as empty as the rest of the town.

  Inside the door was a square entrance hall, with marble dragons on plinths, and frescoes full of more dragons frolicking over azure seas. Marble steps led up to an imposing gallery lined with pillars – marble again, but each pair a different colour, carved with draped plants. Seaweed, it looked like.

  On each side of the gallery we found rooms were arranged in the Hesstian manner, with the formal receiving rooms nearest the door, and the more relaxed rooms for family living further back. One set of rooms for the ladies of the house, and another set across the gallery for the men. At the far end was a door which would lead to the inner courtyard, sleeping rooms and slave quarters.

  Only one room was interesting, one of the family rooms at the far end of the gallery. It was the only room not in darkness, lit by soft spherical lamps suspended on chains from the ceiling beams. Shelves lined the walls, laden with books and jewel-encrusted treasures in gold. The chairs were draped with silk throws. On low tables stood several porcelain cups, empty, with a glass jug half full of some reddish-brown liquid.

  Xando sniffed it, then pulled a face. “Nasty stuff. Was it to drink, or clean the window panes, do you think?”

  He moved off to look for cellars or storage rooms, but I was intrigued. Everywhere else in the town was abandoned, only the large or unwanted items left behind. This was the only house that was furnished, that looked as if it had been lived in. And the makeshift signs, left to direct someone here. Who were they hoping would come? And why did they leave all this behind when they finally departed?

  The silk throws were beautiful, the colours extraordinarily vivid, and gossamer light, with a texture I’d never seen before. I picked one up to examine, and found one end unexpectedly heavy. A brooch, the shape of a dragon outlined with tiny blue gemstones. Whoever these people were, they really liked their dragons.

  I lifted up the whole throw, and with a sick lurch of horror realised what I was seeing. It was not a throw at all. It was a gown, draped and pinned at one shoulder with the brooch. A quick look at the others scattered over the chairs told the same story. And the liquid in the jug – now that I knew what I was looking for, the smell was quite distinctive. Moonrose root. Highly poisonous.

  Five adults and three children had sat here once and taken poison together, calmly waiting to die. It was a gentle death, so it was said, bringing no pain or discomfort, only sleep with no awakening. What desperation led them to this point? Were they the last inhabitants, too set in their ways to leave their home? Or had they lost the chance to leave with everyone else, and were trapped here with dwindling food supplies? So they ended their lives with dignity, and their bodies crumbled away to dust and vanished. Only their clothes, their jewels, their books lingered on, unblemished by age, kept vivid and fresh by magic.

  I crept out of the room, closing the door softly behind me. Xando was crashing about somewhere – I could hear boxes or barrels being scraped about – but I had no heart for it. I found a carved wooden seat, the back engraved with shells and octopi, and waited for him to emerge.

  “Wine!” he called gleefully, appearing from the door at the far end of the gallery waving a jug aloft.

  He had two glasses as well, so we sat, the lamp on the floor at our feet, drinking and exchanging details of our discoveries. He was solemn when I explained what had happened and went to look for himself.

  “Lucky I was not tempted to try the contents of the jug,” he said when he came back.

  “We had better throw that away. It may still be potent.”

  His explorations had been more positive. There were supplies of dried goods like flour and rice, as well as nuts and dried fruit. There were small amounts of meat and cheese, and a few ro
ot vegetables. There were shelves of sealed jars, which he hadn’t examined. We would certainly have enough food to live on for a while, assuming it was still edible.

  “Nothing goes off here,” he said cheerfully. “It will be fine.”

  I remembered the wine at Twisted Rock, which had been very palatable, and had certainly been there for – well, who knows, but a long time, certainly. But this refuge must have been abandoned dragons’ years ago, before the mountain grew around it.

  Xando saw my dubious face and shrugged. “It is possible to do anything with magic.”

  With pre-Catastrophe magic, perhaps that was true. The mages then were immensely powerful. Their power had destroyed the world as it was, but they had done a great deal to mitigate the effects and preserve civilisation. These refuges were proof of that.

  “What I cannot understand,” he said, “is why they would build them here, way up in the mountains.”

  “Ah, now that I can answer. They were certainly not in the mountains originally. These ones were clearly near the sea, for the fishing, no doubt. Perhaps on an island. But the Catastrophe pulled all the islands together and where land masses bumped into each other, they created mountain ranges. The Sky Mountains were produced by the Catastrophe, and in fact they are still growing. That’s why there are so many earthquakes, although we don’t feel them in the refuges.”

  “The Catastrophe created mountains?” Disbelief was written all over his face. “How do you know that?”

  “The science of the Catastrophe is one of the subjects I have researched extensively. Although I did not know about these refuges, and really, our scholars should have been told about that. And your academics knew about the refuges, but not, it seems, about the effects of land movements. It is not good policy, to keep so much information from each other.”

  “So why is this particular refuge buried inside a mountain?”

  “I suppose the mountain has grown up around it. But these refuges are puzzling. Clearly the flickers and the blue pools and the egg chamber are all connected with them, but how or why is beyond my understanding.” I sighed and rubbed my eyes. Tiredness was creeping up on me. “It has been a long, exhausting day. Shall we see if we can find a bed, with linen and a soft mattress and blankets?”

  He grinned. “I already have. Come.”

  He held out his hand to me, and I allowed him to lead me through to the courtyard and into a room with no door, wide open to the air. And a bed. I was asleep almost before I’d fallen into it.

  ~~~~~

  I woke to the flickers screaming.

  Heart racing, I sat upright, struggling to breathe. My mind was filled with anger, hatred, the desire to kill. I almost fell out of bed in the urgent need to respond, to do something, to tear things apart, to maim and hurt. It took all my willpower to resist, pushing my hands under my arms to keep them still. My coat with its eight occupants was hung over the back of a chair nearby, and I crawled close, in the hope that my proximity would soothe them.

  It was not aimed at me. My flickers’ awareness was directed elsewhere, and as I reached out to them mentally, they calmed a little.

  Xando scrambled out of bed behind me, gasping, hands covering his head.

  “Whatever is happening?” I asked, but he was too overwhelmed to talk. He curled up on the floor in a ball, whimpering. I touched his shoulder, but the force of his flickers’ anger hit me like a wall and I jumped away again.

  It seemed an age before the flickers began to settle down again. Even when the worst of the aggression had dissipated, there was still something – a heightened level of awareness, perhaps – in their minds, as if they were focused elsewhere, not really paying any attention to us.

  At last Xando groaned and began to uncurl himself.

  “What was that?” I whispered.

  “No idea,” he croaked, propping himself against the wall. “Never known… anything like it… before.”

  A couple of his flickers had wriggled out of the pockets of his coat in their agitation. He picked them up, and murmured to them until they were content. It was nonsensical chatter, but maybe that was all he could manage. Then he flopped against the wall again, eyes closed.

  I ran across the courtyard to fetch the wine. Stones edging the path lit up as I passed by. I’d been too tired to notice that the previous night. When I got back, he was lying down again, his arms wrapped round his head as if he were in pain.

  “Here. Have some wine. You’ll feel better.”

  “Will I?” He smiled wanly, but he struggled upright and sipped obediently. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d been running, or in a fight. Then he began chanting in the Tre’annatha language, grasping the necklace he wore. Praying to his gods – that was a bad sign.

  “Xando – Hyi – is there anything else you need? Anything I can do to help?”

  “No.” He sipped the wine again, and his voice strengthened a little. “Thank you, but… I shall recover soon.”

  “I thought you could shut out external emotions.” Not like me, prey to every mind within range.

  “People. Not flickers. Not usually bad. I just… It was so…”

  “I know. You don’t need to talk. Take your time.”

  I sat next to him and took his free hand in mine. His flickers were still agitated, and, through his mind, I knew they were aware of other flickers, of something going on, but I couldn’t tell what. I wondered if it was in the flicker cave beside the town, but it felt much more distant than that.

  “The flickers…” I began. “They are all connected somehow, is that it? And something has happened at one of the other flicker caverns, something – violent.”

  “Their minds are connected, yes. Even at a distance. I think…” He stopped, his breathing still laboured. “It reminds me… of when flickers escape. Have you ever seen that?”

  “I’ve heard of it.” I shivered. Everyone had heard stories of flickers who broke away from the control of their throwers. One of my nurses had delighted in telling me such tales, and my husband’s brother had witnessed such an event once.

  “Saw one once… not attached yet. In the market. Some imbecile dropped the glass jar. Broke it. Flicker got free. Killed five people before someone flamed it.”

  “Flamed it?”

  “Best way for escapees. Not possible to squash them… or cut them. Have to burn them. Best not talk about it. They are getting upset again. Is there more wine?”

  I refilled his glass thoughtfully. “So what could have happened? It wasn’t here, but it could have been at Twisted Rock. Or one of the other three.”

  “Three? How do you work that out?”

  I clucked impatiently. He was terribly slow sometimes. “Five tunnels from the egg chamber, five refuges, see? So – let’s suppose it is as you say – the flickers went wild, somehow. But why would they do that? The escaped ones do it because they’ve been extracted and stuffed in a jar and carted about. Of course they’re mad about it when they get free. But the ones in the caverns seem reasonably content. And the extracted ones – that was not just one dropped jar.”

  “No. There were very many flickers involved. Hundreds perhaps.”

  “I wonder…” I sat up straighter, crossing my legs. “The bloom has not long finished, so it’s safe to go into the caves again. Suppose everything went to plan at Twisted Rock, Chendria let the soldiers in and told them where we had gone, and now they’ve tried to follow us. What would the flickers do? But no… they didn’t try to stop us, did they? They didn’t get upset at all.”

  “But we have flickers of our own. We are friends. Extractors are friends, in a way. Maybe they are less tolerant of armed men swarming through.”

  “I don’t think they would care much about their mail or spears, but if their minds were full of violence… would that upset them?”

  “I will ask,” he said. I raised my eyebrows, wondering how he could possibly convey such a complex question to his flickers. His eyes lost focus for a while as he communi
cated with them – somehow or other. Then he said, “Yes, that would bother them. They seem surprised that I would not understand that. As if it is fundamental.”

  “And perhaps it is. They connect with us at a very primitive level. If we are friendly to them, they are friendly to us. So if people are full of aggression, they will react aggressively themselves. Like escaped flickers.”

  “So you think the soldiers tried to follow us, and…? Oh.”

  We were both subdued after that.

  19: Soap

  The food supplies were better than I’d hoped. The cellar was huge, and although a few items were in short supply or missing, we could have lived there for years on what was left. If this had been the last occupied house, undoubtedly all the food had been combined into this one extensive source. Best of all, the labels on the sealed jars and barrels were in Huranic script, so we didn’t have to open things randomly.

  Xando turned out to be quite useful in the kitchen, which was just as well, for my culinary skills were limited. He had that ability of natural cooks to throw ingredients casually into a pot, leave it to its own devices and then serve up a delicious meal, seemingly without effort. He would have spent all his time making elaborate pies and roasts, but I convinced him to make travel food: fruit bread, cheese cakes, dried meat and the like. Once we had enough, we would try to find another way out of the tunnels, and if we succeeded, we could be travelling through the mountains for quarter moons until we reached inhabited parts again. At least we now had a good base here; if we couldn’t find our way out at the first attempt, we could return here and resupply ourselves.

  I couldn’t wait to leave. The town made me jumpy, with its emptiness and the constant darkness. I could detect no sign of life anywhere, yet I kept catching glimpses of something out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to look, there was nothing there. Sometimes I thought I heard noises, like whispering, but again it was nothing. Maybe a leaf blowing, although I’d seen no trees. I told myself it was the oppressive knowledge that a mountain rested on top of us, and that I would feel more like myself when I got into the air again.