by Jean Rabe
It was darker than he expected, as the clouds had grown thick since dinner and stretched in all directions as if they were sealing Steel Town and the mine away from the stars. Lightning flickered through the thunderheads, and Grallik could see curtains fluttering in open windows. He heard the pine trees shaking-no doubt shedding their needles.
He was irritable for a reason he couldn’t define and blamed his foul mood on the starless sky. He lifted his head until he was staring straight up, feeling dizzy as he continued to watch the lightning fingers. Grallik breathed deep, hoping to find the scent of water in the clouds, something to cut the heat and override the odors of the knights and the stable and nearest livestock pen-and the worse stench that wafted from the slave pens.
Grallik faintly smelled the pine trees, and wood smoke coming from the chimney of the tavern, even the iron nuggets in his workshop. He could always detect the smell of iron. The air that stirred the scents around him seemed trapped under the clouds, however, and made the world feel suffocating and cloying.
The thunderheads continued to pulse with lightning, and faint booms chased each other. The ground shuddered slightly under Grallik’s feet, but not a single drop of rain fell. His scarred flesh tingled with anger and anticipation.
There must be a storm, Grallik prayed. Something to relieve the hell of Steel Town, to drown out the stench that swelled under the cloud dome, to turn the damnable dust into damnable mud, to clear the air, however briefly, so he could breathe easier and stop coughing.
If he had the right magic, he’d try something to coax the clouds into giving up the rain. But he didn’t, and his magic was all but spent that night anyway.
He heard the crack of thick lightning and the rumble that followed it. He heard the guttural conversation of goblin and hobgoblin slaves, the whinny of horses, the laughter of someone in the tavern, the clink of mugs, the growl of the massive hatori-the huge digging beast kept near the base of the southern mine. He wished to hear the drumming of rain.
Water might be at a premium, but the proprietor across the way had wine and ale and liquor aplenty. He dropped his gaze to the warm glow that spilled from the tavern window. He would buy something strong with the coins in his pocket, and he would sit in a corner by himself.
3
THE LISTENER
The rising sun colored the mountains the shade of ripening plums and the flat expanses between the peaks a deep rose. Clouds scudded across the sky, too high to cool the ground, however, and cruelly scenting the air with the possibility of rain. There’d been no rain for too long. The Dark Knights’ crops had withered, and the pines that grew in the fertile earth at the base of volcanoes had started to drop their needles.
The camp’s well had dried up four days earlier and crews were working to dig another one. The Skull Knights cast spells to create water, but there were not enough of them to supply what the population of Steel Town needed. The knights drank first, then the hired laborers and the horses. If there was any water left, the slaves and livestock shared it. Sometimes the slaves were allowed one sip, and so they sought places in the mine where the walls were wet from hidden streams.
Mudwort had not had a swallow of water in more than a day. She should have looked forward to her stint in the mine, where she could lick at the rivulets running from cracks in the ceiling. But that day, though she was terribly thirsty, she didn’t care to be anywhere in the deep tunnels and chambers.
More than five hundred goblins, toting thick canvas bags, picks, and shovels, wended their way up a narrow trail lined with jagged black rocks toward a gaping hole in the mountainside. Already three times that many were at work in other areas of the mines, and one thousand more were either just returning from shifts or sleeping in the pens, waiting to be woken up for their next turn in the mines. Always, there were goblins working, working.
Only Mudwort knew for certain that disaster would touch that day.
She angled her face to the sun then glanced down the mountain to take in a sweeping view of all Steel Town. That was not the camp’s true name, but it was what the Dark Knights and the laborers had come to call it. The camp sat in the shadow of three volcanoes, which were usually glowing, the smallest making a grander show than the others. The volcanoes were an impressive sight, especially at night, and sometimes ribbons of lava would twist down their sides. But the lava never reached the camp, and the steam that rose from the domes never did more than tinge the air with sulfur.
Originally, the camp was called Iverton, after Rudger Leth-Iver, a little-known commander with scant military ability, but who had-three decades past-discovered rich deposits of magnetite and hematite southwest of Jelek in the foothills of the Khalkists. The ores, rich with iron, were superior grade, and Leth-Iver named the camp in his own honor.
In Iverton’s first years, only knights worked the mine. But as time passed, laborers were hired from various towns in Neraka; then goblin and hobgoblin slaves were brought in. Finally, slaves, aided by priestly magic and by great beasts such as the hatori, which were chained in places below the earth, dug the tunnels. Only a handful of knights had to venture into the mines with each shift under their charge.
In the beginning, the camp consisted of a sprawl of tents, but in time those gave way to crude barracks and finally to permanent buildings of stone and imported wood and pens and shanties for the goblin and hobgoblin slaves. Iverton even boasted a tavern and gaming hall, a stable and blacksmith’s shop, a trading post, and a dozen houses for the families who operated the businesses. There were large pens for goats, pigs, and sheep, a coop for chickens, and a long, tilled section for a garden when the weather cooperated.
Iverton’s population nowadays hovered between two hundred and three hundred fifteen knights-from five wings to a full compgroup. The number varied according to the rotation and the amount of ore mined at any given time from the shafts. In addition, there were forty hired laborers, a half dozen business owners, and three thousand slaves. Nearly all of the latter were goblins, who were small creatures that could be easily herded into pens.
From her mountainside perch, Mudwort snarled at the Dark Knights standing before Marshal Montrill. In perfect lines and in full armor, they were kneeling with bowed heads.
After a moment of silence, their voices rose as a sonorous hum. Mudwort picked her way through the drone and recognized some of the words. It was the knights’ Blood Oath, she knew, and they would repeat it five times. Interspersed among the words was something the knights called the Code-but neither ritual interested the goblin. In fact, Mudwort considered it all a blather, a useless waste of time and saliva.
The Dark Knights should listen, instead, to other words, words that truly mattered: Mudwort’s words.
Mudwort had tried to tell the Dark Knights about the coming earthquake, though she didn’t call it a quake. Mudwort had no word for what was imminent because she didn’t know precisely what it was. She only knew that something bad was going to happen, as the stones she recently had touched in the mine felt … nervous. Yes, they were nervous stones, almost as though they were living things.
Mudwort became frightened by the way the rocks seemed to tremble in her hands, and so the previous day she’d told a Dark Knight taskmaster that something bad was going to happen and that everyone should leave the mine and not come back until the bad thing had passed. But the stupid knight would not listen to her, nor would the other knights she risked speaking to when her shift ended. She should have known better; the knights only pretended to listen to the goblins’ snuffling pleas for mercy or their begging for extra rations and water; they thought goblin words were all twaddle and worthless.
The knights treated all the goblins as worthless.
And when she tried to tell the knights a second and a third time about the coming something-even using a smattering of words in their own ugly-sounding tongue, shouting them out from the slave pen-they still dismissed her and, later, beat her for the noise she had made. The lacerations from the w
hip still burned her back, and the wounds opened and bled freshly as she trundled with her fellows into the shaft and to a deep chamber and stretched with the pick to begin work on her section of the wall.
She had warned her clansmen too, whispering to them late the night before and encouraging them to pass the word to the other slaves working in the other shafts and chambers, including the smattering of hobgoblins among them. Only a few goblins believed her. Some said they did, but she knew they were just being respectful. Most called her mad behind her back and some even to her face, laughing when she claimed the rocks were nervous. In the dozen years Mudwort had been a slave in the Nerakan mine, she’d never been sociable and had talked more to herself and the walls of the mine than to her fellows.
She couldn’t fault them for thinking her crazy.
In the slave pens, she usually claimed a corner, where she sat, back against the post, meditating or at least making the pretense. The others gave her as much space as possible. Mudwort had something special about her, and they alternately feared and revered her-the latter particularly when it was cold and she did something to warm the ground beneath them.
At dinner she was usually last in line. She was overly skinny for a goblin-food held little interest for her. A one-eared hobgoblin often forced her to eat to keep her strength up. He was called Direfang and was the closest thing Mudwort had to a friend. Direfang was probably the only one who honestly halfway believed her when she told him that something bad was going to happen to the mine.
But the broad-shouldered hobgoblin told her ruefully that there was nothing he could do about the coming something. There was nothing he could do about anything; hob and gob slaves had no power in that world. Though he had advanced to the position of foreman, he couldn’t order the goblins out of the mines, not even to keep them safe from whatever it was Mudwort was predicting. And he wouldn’t dare argue with the Dark Knights over the matter. Mudwort had gotten nowhere by calling to the knights, and Direfang had no desire to be whipped as she had or to make the knights so angry that they revoked his meager foreman privileges.
Mudwort became certain of the coming something just the previous morning. In one of the shafts in the very deepest part of the Nerakan mine, she was chipping with her pick at a wall of iron-heavy ore when a shiver passed through her. She picked up chunks to put in her sack, and felt the difference. It was like the stones were trying to tell her something, warn her about something bad that was coming. But she admitted she couldn’t thoroughly understand the warning.
“Mad, maybe,” Mudwort had said to herself at the time. “Mind-breaking, maybe. Mind-sour and sad.”
She was working at that same station, pausing because the whip marks still hurt and because she was doing her best to listen to the stones. She pressed her ear against the wall. Mudwort always had been interested in rocks, as a youngling playing with them, sucking on them, or arranging them into patterns that others thought nonsensical. Until she’d been enslaved, she hadn’t known that rocks had names.
But they did, according to the knights. At that moment she was mining for hematite. It was a metallic gray stone, occasionally earthy brown, with thin, bright red streaks in it. It was relatively brittle, as far as rocks went, and sometimes there were crystals in it that sparkled in the lantern light. She’d previously mined in a higher shaft for magnetite, a black stone with a shiny luster. It was heavier and broke at uneven, sharp angles under her pick. She preferred mining for hematite. Her sacks were not quite so heavy when filled with the metallic stone, and her arms did not ache so badly when carrying the sacks to the mine entrance.
The shaft wall felt cool to her ear, the sensation washing through her and easing the pain of her back. She stuck out her tongue and tasted the wall, finding the ore dusty and not unpleasant. Then she ran her fingers across the wall, ignoring the complaint of a stoop-shouldered goblin behind her.
“Trouble, Mudwort,” he lectured. “Whip, no work. Work, no whip.”
She dismissively waggled her fingers at him then ran her hands across the wall again. The stone felt different that day too, even more anxious, almost shivering. Worse than the previous morning, she decided after a moment.
“Trouble, yes,” Mudwort agreed. “Trouble here. But trouble what?”
The stoop-shouldered goblin shook his head in disgust, spitting in Mudwort’s direction. He turned back to his wall and found a spot where the hematite was particularly dark and started swinging his pick energetically at the spot.
The chamber they worked in had a low ceiling, like nearly every place in the mines. But goblins could easily stand upright there. The walls were dark and the lantern light meager, and that chamber-like most of the others-appeared to be closing in on the slaves. The closeness of the walls kept them in a constant state of skittishness. The air was perpetually stale, the stench of the miners’ sweat so strong it often caused them to gag and work even faster so they could fill up their sacks and carry them to the mine entrance, where they had a chance to suck down better air.
It was easy to get lost in the tunnels, there being so many of them and all of them having a similar appearance-dark, narrow, braced by timbers that never appeared thick enough to be safe support. There wasn’t a day when some goblin miners did not make it out at the end of their shift and were found by slaves in the next rotation. But Mudwort prided herself on the fact that she had never gotten lost.
“Saying what?” Again Mudwort put her ear to the wall. The ore sounded as if it were purring, and she imagined that it was trying to speak to her-her and her alone because only she would listen. “Stone is saying, saying what?” After several frustrating moments, she stepped away from the wall, head hung in defeat. “Saying nothing. Mind sour and broken.”
She fixed her gaze on the spot still wet from her tongue. Wielding her pick, she struck at that place again and again until chunks started dropping to the floor. “Saying nothing. Saying nothing.” Mudwort forced away thoughts about the nervous rocks and focused on striking the stone, knocking loose only the darkest, smoothest pieces of hematite. She knew the heaviest deposits of ore were in the darkest rocks.
Sometimes slaves were rewarded with food or water when they brought out sacks with prime ore. Mudwort was very thirsty, so she kept hammering at the wall, striking harder and faster as if she were angry at it. Perhaps the knights would give her water if she found some very fine ore.
Perhaps they would give her more than a sip.
She should have taken a sip the day before or that morning. She should have stood in line for it.
She’d already made four trips to the mine entrance where other slaves waited to take the mined ore down to the camp. Each time she received another empty sack to fill. There’d been talk for months that the knights would start using carts to take the ore down to the camp to ease the slaves’ workload. But so far that rumor had not materialized. Mudwort had to drag her sack to the entrance each time because she’d filled it so full.
On the fourth trip to the entrance, she noticed the first significant vibration. Suddenly the stone rumbled softly against the bottoms of her feet. Mudwort shivered and tried taking her full ore sack down the mountainside herself so she could get away from the mine and the something she believed was coming soon. But that was not her assigned task that morning, carrying ore down the mountain, so the knight stationed at the entrance pointed her back inside.
She was making her seventh trip to the entrance, again with a full sack, when the vibrations grew stronger and the mountain gave a jump beneath her. She grabbed the support beams at the mouth of the mine before she could be sent careening down the side of the mountain. The notion of death didn’t scare her. That would be a welcome end to slavery. But she didn’t want to bounce on rocks all the way down. She detested pain.
She lurched outside the mine entrance, holding her breath, knees bent to help keep her balance, sack of ore at her feet. There were plenty of sacks nearby, some that she and other slaves had brought out that had n
ot yet been hauled down the trail. The Dark Knight taskmaster at the edge of the trail looked down at Steel Town with a worried expression.
Curious-Mudwort was always curious-she crept forward to see what he was watching, sucking in a deep breath and stopping when a crack appeared between her feet and splintered, looking like a stony spiderweb spreading forward to the trail and behind her to the beams at the mine entrance. It might not be terribly painful to be swallowed by the mountain, she thought, certainly not as painful as bouncing down the rocky slope. Being swallowed would be a fast death. The crack grew wider, and Mudwort scampered forward to stand directly next to the taskmaster, ready to grab his leg for support. He didn’t notice her. He was intent on keeping his own balance and watching the camp below.
Mudwort followed his gaze.
People were scurrying like insects roused from a nest. They rushed from building to building, some grabbing the young ones and holding them tight. She imagined the knights were shouting to each other, the laborers and their wives and children screaming in fear. But she couldn’t hear them over the rising rumbling sound of the mountain and, she realized, the worse rumbling of the ground far below the mountain. All the land within Mudwort’s line of sight shook. Perhaps the flat expanse between the volcanoes, where Steel Town rested, was faring even worse than the mine.
As she watched, a barracks collapsed in on itself, the roof caving in first then the walls buckling. Puffs of dirt rose up, obscuring the jumble of stones and wood. She hoped that Dark Knights were caught inside and killed, but she suspected they would survive because the roof had not been made of material heavy enough to break their skulls.
Across from the ruined barracks was the stone and wood tavern, which she’d many times dreamed of visiting. It had been years and years since Mudwort had a decent meal and something strong to drink. The tavern seemed to bounce up in the air, the stones spat out of its walls, and the wood planks splintered and broke. The thatch roof burst apart, some of it dropping inside, the rest blowing in clumps across the camp in a hot wind that had suddenly picked up. A man ran out a side door, dragging a goblin-sized boy behind him. The doorframe collapsed, and what was left of the walls heaved inward. The man and boy dropped a few feet from the ruins, hugging each other.