Redoubt

by Mercedes Lackey

  At least half the workmen hadn’t been visible over the last three days, either.

  This thing they were talking about . . . what was it? A demon?

  You know what it is.

  The Pieters boys had their own store of tales that they told, pretending to tell them to each other but really doing it to scare the kiddies working the seams. Most of the stories were about awful things down here in the mines. There were the ghosts of anyone that had died down here, and Mags knew of some few. These ghosts went about looking for someone who was the exact age they had been when they died—and when they found him, they would tear him apart trying to figure out a way into his body. Like Jak. Jak, who had been lurking, trying to figure out if Mags was the right size, the right age, the right person to take over.

  You know it isn’t that.

  There were the Knockers, twisted up little dwarfs no taller than your knee, but monstrous strong. They would wait until everyone was preoccupied and then just snatch a kiddie, grabbing him in his seam before he could utter a sound, bashing his head in with his own hammer, then dragging off the body to eat.

  You know it isn’t that, either.

  There were the Whisps, ghostlights that would lead you into dangerous parts of the mine, then drop a rockfall on you. They’d do it by putting you to sleep, then getting you to walk in your sleep to where they were going to kill you.

  Wake up, Mags, you know what it is!

  There were the Horrors, which got into your head and made you crazy, like the night-shift cripples. When the Horrors got you, all you saw were black things coming at you, all claws and red eyes, and you’d drive your head against the wall of the shaft to try to get them out, or you’d make a cave-in yourself to try to stop them, or if they managed to bring you above the ground, you’d throw yourself down the well to be rid of them.

  But every one of those was a monster in the mine. What about out of it? What was roaming about out there that was so scary the Pieters boys wouldn’t name it, wouldn’t describe it, and didn’t have any bragging ideas on how to get rid of it?

  Suddenly, he didn’t want to leave at the end of the shift.

  But you didn’t have to be afraid. Remember!

  No, he was afraid that whatever it was, it would be up there. Waiting. Watching. The Pieters boys said it was looking for someone. Some sort of devil. Mags didn’t believe in gods, but he believed, most fervently, in devils.

  And if a devil had come here, there was likely only one person it had come for. Well, two, maybe, except the boys were saying that Cole Pieters was driving the thing off himself, so it hadn’t come for Master Cole.

  All right, then. It had to be coming for Mags. Because Mags was Bad Blood. It would grab him and drink his blood to make itself stronger. And then it would carry him away to torment him forever.

  It isn’t a devil. It isn’t a demon.

  It’s coming for you, but not to torment you.

  He shook his head violently. It was as if there were some other part of him, talking to him. Some part of him that remembered something important, but what was it?

  Drugged. You’re being drugged. Every time they give you something to drink or something to eat, you’re being drugged. That smoke—it was probably a drug too.

  Wait—what?

  The mineshaft had gone away for a moment. There had been—someone. And that voice saying things he couldn’t understand.

  He shook his head again. This was all wrong, his head was all messed up. Maybe he’d gotten some taint in his soup, a bit of bad mushroom. It had to have been some sort of fit, this other part of him talking to him, talking nonsense.

  At least his arms had stopped hurting.

  Then he thought about that devil out there, and he was terrified all over again. It was coming for him, it was coming for him, just as it had come for him on the roof.

  Like the thing on the roof! That’s what happened! Remember! Fight this and remember!

  His heart raced, and he was sweating. And it was so hot! The mine had never been so hot. He couldn’t figure it out. Why was the mine so hot? It was always the same temperature. It had never been hot before.

  He was held in a strange paralysis of fear; he couldn’t lift his chisel, and no one was coming to check to see why he wasn’t working.

  If anything, that was even stranger than the gabbling voice. The Pieters boys had ears like owls; they heard everything, and, most especially, they were listening for what wasn’t happening—the steady tap-tap-tapping coming from ten different shafts. So why weren’t they checking on him?

  He realized at that moment that there was no sound of the others chipping away at the rock either. In fact, there was no sound at all. Just the terrible heat and silence. And in that heat and silence, his lantern went out.

  Now it was heat, and silence, and darkness.

  And he was lying on his side.

  How could he be lying on his side?

  The surface underneath him was wood, and moving, vibrating, and swaying from side to side. There was cloth over him. He was sweating buckets now, his clothing was soaked through and—

  Clothing?

  He was wearing real clothes, just as the Pieters boys did, not rags. He could feel them on his skin, even if he couldn’t move his arms or legs or open his eyes.

  Where had he gotten clothing?

  He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t.

  His thoughts seemed to be struggling through thick mud. It was so hard to put them together.

  This couldn’t be the mine. And it felt too real to be some sort of fever dream. Or if it was a fever-dream, it was so impossible that he must be dying of it.

  But what if it wasn’t a fever dream? What if this was real, and it was the mine that was the dream?

  He was in clothing, soaked in sweat. He was terrified. His head hurt. He was lying on his side. He couldn’t open his eyes, or move anything.

  Think!

  It was hot, stifling hot.

  He wasn’t hungry . . .

  That realization lanced through him like being struck by lightning. I’m not hungry. At the mine, the only time you weren’t hungry was when you’d had some lucky accident. Maybe you somehow found a patch of cattails or cress or poke or goose grass no one else had gotten to, and you gobbled it all up there on the spot. Maybe the cooks had had an accident with the ovens and a lot of bread was burned and intended for the pigs, but you got to it first. And you remembered those times, because they shined out in your mind. But he didn’t remember a windfall like that recent enough to make him full now, and of all of the parts of him that hurt, his stomach wasn’t one of them. His stomach was entirely happy.

  That only made him more frightened. If he wasn’t at the mine, where was he? Why was he here—and where was here anyway? The surface he was on was moving, shaking a little—

  He strained his ears, and he could hear the sounds of wheels, and hooves. Was he in a wagon or a cart?

  But why?

  He tried to remember . . . but the only thing he could think of was . . . a roof. Or, rather, a rooftop.

  That only frightened him more. He shouldn’t be able to remember a rooftop. Why would he have been on a rooftop? Particularly a rooftop like the one in his mind, surrounded by more of the same, under a cloudy night sky.

  And his head felt so . . . wrong.

  Why? Why did it feel as if there was part of him, inside his head, that was either missing or, like his uncooperative limbs, not working?

  And why couldn’t he move?

  That rooftop—had he fallen from it? Was he now lying in a state of paralysis, being taken somewhere? Had he broken his neck? But if he had, why wasn’t he dead? If he had, why could he feel his arms and legs, but not move them?

&
nbsp; What had he been doing up there in the first place?

  The surface he was lying on gave a great jolt, confirming that it was a wagon. But he didn’t roll, or otherwise move. He was wedged in this position, on his side, curled like a child. He could feel it, even if he couldn’t move.

  And it was so hot . . .

  His stomach might be happy, but his throat was parched, dry, his tongue felt swollen. His mouth and throat felt on fire with the need for a drink. Without even thinking about it, he managed a moan.

  The wagon or cart he was in stopped moving. He heard someone dropping to the ground, then footsteps. The cart tilted a little.

  There was a sound of cloth being whipped away, and a brief breath of cooler air. He fought to open his eyes and succeeded, only to find himself in the dark.

  A hand groped over his face and buried itself in his hair.

  He was hauled up by the hair. There was someone there, who ruthlessly jammed a thumb and forefinger into the hinges of his jaw to force his mouth open. The wooden spout of a waterskin was shoved in between his teeth, and bittersweet water trickled over his tongue.

  He drank, because the burning of his mouth and throat would not allow anything else. He drank, because some instinct told him that if he didn’t, it would be forced down his throat in some very unpleasant manner.

  But he didn’t drink fast. He didn’t gulp at the water, the way he vaguely recalled doing earlier. He drank sparingly, only as much as would ease the burning thirst, and the person feeding him didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t sucking the water down as fast as he could.

  Maybe because it was dark. Or maybe the person was so impatient, in so much of a hurry to get this over with, that he wasn’t paying attention.

  There was a drug in the water, he was certain of it. Water shouldn’t taste like that.

  Was he sick? Was that why he was being drugged?

  But sick or injured, none of this made any sense. Cole Pieters would never have wasted real clothing on a mine-slavey, much less sent one away to be treated for injury or illness. What had happened to him? Who had him, and where were they taking him, and why?

  He wasn’t dropped down, he was lowered back, even if it was by the hair, and curled back up in that fetal coil. He felt boxes and bags all around him, arranged into that shape to hold him there.

  This time the person didn’t cover him up again. He felt the cart shift with the other person’s weight, then heard him drop down to the ground, go around to the front of the cart again, and heard him climb back up.

  “Gabble gabble?”

  “Gabble.” A snort. “Gabble gabble gabble.”

  “Gabble.”

  The cart began to move again.

  Mags felt his head reeling. Had he lost all ability to understand speech? There was not a single word there that he recognized!

  But then, it didn’t matter, as he found himself back in the mine, crouched in the mineshaft, hands wrapped numbly around his tools and waiting for the devil to come for him.

  8

  The devil had found him. The horrible thing was coming for him, the devil that Cole Pieters had sworn was his due. It had just popped up, in the middle of the yard, just as they were all heading out of the mine.

  Mags hid, hid in the place he knew the best.

  The mine.

  They were all terrified, even the Pieterses, so it looked as though claiming he was a saint for taking in all the mine kiddies wasn’t doing any good. The devil had already torn one boy apart, mistaking him for Mags, so maybe the thing wasn’t real good at figuring out who his victim actually was supposed to be. But then again, the other boy had been right next to Mags, so maybe the devil had just missed him and gotten Davven by accident.

  Or maybe the devil was here for a lot of them and would get around to him, sooner or later. A devil probably wouldn’t care if he got a few extra on his way to the one he wanted. Maybe the devil was just here to kill everyone. Depending on why it was here—if one of the crazy cripples had gone to hell and sent it back, well everyone was going to be dead. Even if they liked the mine-kiddies, the crazies all figured they were better off dead than here, and they said so, often.

  Mags didn’t know and didn’t particularly care. He ran, and so did everyone else who saw the thing, which must have confused the devil even further about which of them to chase. After all, all the mine-kiddies pretty much looked alike, matted mops of dirty no-color hair on top of stick-thin, sexless bodies in rags. Once they began to run, it would be even harder to tell them apart.

  You couldn’t really make out what it was. It was sort of a smoke-shape, and sort of a shimmer in the air, and sort of a black thing like a kind of burned-up skeleton in the middle of all that. It kind of changed within the smoke, first one thing and then another, and only bits of it visible at any one time. But you could sure make out what it was doing. Mags had seen it shred that boy it had pounced on, just tear off arms and legs and—well at that point, he’d been too busy running to look back.

  Mags left it chasing after two of the Pieters boys, hoping it would catch them and be sated. Or at least catch them and give them what they had coming. But he was pretty sure it had marked him as a target; he could feel it, and he ran for the mine. His first thought was to hide in a place where the devil would be at a disadvantage and he would not. By the time he got past the mine head, he had a plan—not much of one, but at least it was some kind of a plan.

  His arms and legs were aching, his back was aching, and his side was aching when he finished working his way through the labyrinth of shafts to the latrine tunnel. He ducked inside and kept running, keeping to the edge of the shaft. Most people didn’t bother going all the way to the end to relieve themselves, so it stank hardly at all by the time he got to the back of it where the seam of sparklies had died out in tough granite. He had to crouch after a while, as the shaft narrowed and started to peter out. Then he went to his hands and knees.

  By that point the tunnel was only high enough to crawl along, which was what he was counting on. There was a lot of fallen rock here, and that made it painful to crawl, but it would be a lot more painful to get caught by the devil.

  If the devil hunted by smell, the latrine-stink might confuse it. If the devil hunted by sight, well, he had an answer for that too.

  He stopped where he had a timber shoring up the roof, but a good amount of rock that had either been shoveled in or fallen down all around him. Carefully, moving more quietly than a mouse, he built up a wall between him and the rest of the tunnel. He could hear lots of screaming off in the distance; as long as he heard that, he had time to build his wall. Maybe in the dark it would look to the devil like the back of the shaft. Placing the rocks stone by stone, he had wedged the final one in when he heard someone come screaming down into the mine. Then he blew out his head lantern and waited, trying not to breathe.

  Wait, where did the lantern come from?

  He brushed the irrelevant thought away. There were much more important things to think about now, like living. There were lots of screams in the mine now, echoing through the tunnels. He couldn’t tell if it was more than one person, but he thought it might be. And he thought he could hear the devil now, too, making a kind of growling deep in its throat and muttering to itself. “Gabble gabble,” it said, then answered itself in a second voice. “Gabble gabble.”

  He ached all over, ached not just with the aches of working all day and the aches of running for his life, but with cold. Where before he’d been hot, now he was cold, cold enough to shiver. He clenched his teeth to keep the devil from hearing them chattering with cold.

  Shivering, terrified, he huddled in on himself, arms wrapped around his legs, eyes clenched tightly closed, and listened to the devil mutter to itself. It sounded like it was having an entire conversatio
n right outside the latrine tunnel.

  And his head felt so wrong, as if someone had stuffed it with rags. Or cut pieces out of the inside of it. What was the matter with his head? Why did it feel so wrong, as if something was missing?

  He was shivering so hard now that he couldn’t sit, he had to lie down, which wasn’t going to help at all because the rock would be so cold. . . .

  But the rock wasn’t cold, or at least, it wasn’t any colder than the air was . . .

  . . . because it wasn’t rock.

  It was wood.

  And it was moving.

  It wasn’t a devil that was muttering somewhere beyond his head. It was two men, having a conversation, and he couldn’t understand a single word.

  He was lying on his side in a curl, shivering with cold. His head ached so badly, but now, for the first time, when he tried to move his arms and legs, he could, just a little. That was when his mind cleared a little, and he realized that his last clear memory was of being on that rooftop.

  A rooftop in a city.

  Haven. The city was called Haven.

  He remembered being up there, looking around himself. He was about to go . . . somewhere. Somewhere important. And then, once he got to the important place, he would go home, only “home” wasn’t the mine, and he didn’t belong to Cole Pieters anymore.

  Something up there was watching him in the memory, and he was studiously ignoring whatever it was, because it had been watching him for a long time now, and nothing had come of it. Everyone said that eventually it would go away, that it wasn’t dangerous, and nothing was going to happen. Except this time, something did.

  Whatever it was that was up there in the darkness, whatever it was that had only been watching him until that moment, had . . . done something. Something unexpected, catching him completely by surprise. And then there was blackness, and he found himself back in the mine.