by J. S. Morin
The lad with him looked to be around the age of Buckets—or Naul—but seemed far more mature even at first glance. Buckets was carefree and adventuresome; his eyes always bright and eager. Naul was a lecherous lay-about, whose eyes never wanted to lift or focus. This lad looked up from the table and sized her up in an instant. She saw his eyes flick over her, then lock onto her own. He gave a glance to each of her companions, then returned to her eyes once more. He was taller than Powlo and as thin as Rynn, with thin dark hair hanging loose to his shoulders. Despite clearly not being Kheshi by his hair and green eyes, he was dressed in Kheshi finery with a black silk coat and wide-legged pants.
The lad leaned his head toward his older companion and muttered something Madlin couldn’t make out. Nor could she make out the older man’s reply.
“Hello, my name is Madlin Errol.” She stuck out her hand.
The man threw up his hands.“Aww, gut me, they’re Kheshis.” By his pidgin accent, she knew the source of his frustration immediately.
The lad intervened. “Sorry, do any of you speak Acardian? His Kheshi can’t get him directions to a brothel. His name’s Tanner, by the way. I’m Dan,” Dan said in passable non-native Kheshi.
Tanner said something to Dan, but Madlin couldn’t make any sense of it. She’d heard every major language on Tellurak and knew most of them by ear. These two were either slurring something badly or using a language she hadn’t encountered—it certainly wasn’t Acardian. Tanner and Dan’s conversation turned heated, and at length Tanner put up a hand to end it. He reached to his belt and placed the gold circlet on his head. Tanner looked at them a moment, then turned to Dan and nodded, with a few more incomprehensible words.
“I can manage Acardian,” Madlin said once the two miners sorted themselves out. Her lips stumbled over the awkward words, and they must have thought as poorly of her accent as she thought of Tanner’s Kheshi.
“Good,” Tanner replied. “Dunno how you folks talk like that all day; makes my tongue sore. I mighta not caught everything you said quite right ... you say you name was Errol?”
“Madlin Errol. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Tanner.” Madlin held out her hand once more, but the offer was left untaken.
“What’s the Mad Tinker wanting with my mine?” Tanner asked, letting suspicion drip from his words. If that was the limit of his subtlety, Madlin thought she might do well to get him across a table for a few hands of Crackle. With the practice Rynn was getting keeping her thoughts out of her expression, she could win the mine from him.
“My father’s company uses vast amounts of ore. Nearly any metal finds some use in his factories. He’s looking to own his own resources so he can—”
“No.”
Madlin blinked. “What?”
Tanner repeated the word in several other languages, including at least three she didn’t know.
“But ... why?”
“Stop with the act,” Tanner said. “You didn’t come here with dozens of men to buy a mine that might have iron or copper in it. You’re planning to buy me off at eckles on the trade bar or blast me out with those shiny Errol long rifles you brought along.”
Powlo, who understood Acardian better than Madlin, drew his revolver. “Mr. Errol isn’t one to be trifled—”
Powlo slammed face-first into the hewn stone wall of the mine passage with a grunt. His gun clattered to the ground.
Madlin pulled her own revolver from beneath her furs—it was growing too warm in them anyway. She shrugged off the heavy garment and had the gun leveled at Tanner’s head, aimed right between his eyes. “I’ll get a shot off before you can move me! How ... how did you do that?”
Tanner whistled. “That is one fine piece of metal. Your pa didn’t let the best stallions out of the stable, did he?”
Madlin felt a current around her. At first it felt like a cool breeze at her back, then changed to a river’s flow, trying to shove her sideways. She stood her ground and fought back, keeping her aim generally at Tanner’s head.
“What are you doing? Stop it or I’ll shoot!”
The current abated. Dan said something to Tanner in that gibberish language and stepped in front, blocking Madlin’s aim. He was a half hand shorter than Tanner, but still spoiled Madlin’s shot.
“What kind of a coward are you? Taking your son as a shield?”
“Madlin, put the gun down!” Jamile cried out in Takalish. She moved to grab Madlin by the arm, but stopped herself short.
“My son? Kid, Dan’s no son of mine. He’s not usually my bodyguard either; he’s the muscle around here. He’s why I’m not sweating the fellas you got camped at the bottom of my mountain, ready to storm up here and blast their way in to take it.”
“He did that?” Madlin asked, indicating first Dan, then Powlo. The latter was on his hands and knees by the wall, trying to shake the gears back into place in his head.
“Girl, answer me this: why the dumb act? Things aren’t looking too good for you right now, so you’d better start talking. Fast.” Tanner crossed his arms, still standing in the shadow of the scrawny boy who had used some sort of runes to throw Powlo across the tunnel. “What’s in this mountain, huh? I know, and I bet you do too.”
Madlin nodded. “Gold. Lots of it.”
Tanner nodded and jutted out his jaw. “Thought so. Now how’d you know? That father of yours makes some nice toys, doesn’t he? But I bet he’s not a geological prodigy. You’re Megrenn, aren’t you? None of you speaks a lick of Kadrin, and I bet your pa knows a goblin or two, huh?”
Madlin blinked. “Huh?”
“Madlin, what’s wrong? What’s he saying?” Jamile asked. Madlin realized that Jamile couldn’t follow the conversation in Acardian.
Madlin lowered her gun, slowly, as if in shock. “I think they’re Veydrans.” She spoke in Korrish, and saw no sign of comprehension from Tanner of Dan, except for that last word.
“What was that?” Tanner asked. “That wasn’t Megrenn, Kheshi, or Takalish.”
Dan rubbed at his face a moment. “Something sounded familiar there. You, Madlin, say that again, slower.”
Madlin repeated herself.
Dan held up a finger. He hurried over to the table, turned over one of the maps, and began scribbling something with a quill. When he finished he held up the paper. “Is this what you said?”
Madlin’s eyes widened. She heard Jamile gasp. The paper bore Korrish runes spelling: I THINK THEM ARE VEYDRUS.
“Well?” Dan prompted.
Madlin nodded. It wasn’t exact, but they were unmistakably her words.
“What’s it mean?” Dan asked.
“How could you have written that if you don’t know what she said?” Jamile asked.
Dan shrugged. “It was nonsense, but I recognized the syllables and wrote it out.”
“I still don’t know what it says,” Tanner said, peering around to see the paper from the front side.
Dan said something to Tanner in their own strange language. Madlin tried to pick up on any bits that might be familiar, but had no luck.
“You are from Veydrus, aren’t you?” Madlin asked.
“If you know enough to ask, you must be, too,” Tanner said. “Who else are you? Megrenn’d be my guess.”
“Mine too,” Dan agreed. “She looks half Kheshi, and a mix of Acardian and Hurlan. That’d make her a mix of Kadrin and Ghelkan. The dark-skinned girl’s either half Sasfchan or half Narracki—no way to tell—plus a bit of something else ... maybe Kadrin? The one on the ground is obviously from the Painu Islands.”
Madlin glanced briefly to Jamile, who shrugged. “I’ve never heard of those places. We’re not from Veydrus.”
“Sorry, kid,” Tanner said. “You know too much to be a one-worlder, and I’ve never seen a twinborn with a Source like yours who wasn’t a sorceress. Just don’t think you can magic your way out of this, either. Dan’s a warlock on the other side.”
“Sorceress? Warlock?” Madlin asked. She wondered if her Acardian was faili
ng her.
“Did you wake up yesterday or something?” Dan asked. “You’d be almost as bad as my uncle. I’ve been awakened for about three years now.”
“No,” Madlin whispered. “I woke up screaming in the night twelve years ago, with visions of one father being dragged away in chains, only to be comforted by that same father on Tinker’s Island.”
Tanner chuckled. “Mad Tinker’s a criminal?” He elbowed Dan. “Who’d have guessed.”
Madlin shook his head. “Not a criminal, a slave.”
“Who keeps human slaves anymore? That still go on in Azzat, maybe?” Tanner asked.
“Maybe the immortals got him,” Dan suggested. “Aunt Illiardra could drag anyone off if she wanted, I’m guessing.”
“We’re not from Veydrus, I keep telling you. We’re from Korr,” Madlin said. There was a slight echo from the mine tunnels in the silence that followed.
“So,” Tanner said, “you’re from another world.”
Madlin’s brow furrowed. “You say that like you’re not!”
“I dunno, Dan,” Tanner said. “I was pretty sure we were going to have to kill them when they were from Megrenn.”
Dan shrugged. “Still an option.” Tanner cuffed him on the side of the head, but the lad didn’t so much as budge from the blow.
“Our people warned us away from Veydrans,” Madlin said. “Are you all really as dangerous as they say?”
Tanner shrugged. “Dunno. Whadda they say?”
“They say that Veydrans are vicious, lying snakes with strong magic and they’re responsible for much of the strife in Tellurak.”
“I don’t know if I’d say ‘much’ of it,” Tanner hedged. “Strong magic though? Yeah. I’ve seen some head-twisting magic in my time. Kid can pull off some tricks, for sure.”
“Not like back home though,” Dan added.
“Where’s home?” Madlin asked.
“He means Veydrus,” Tanner explained. “This is stall-mucking for him, having to work for coin. His twin lives easy.”
“You two know each other in both worlds? This one and Veydrus?”
“A bit,” Tanner said. “I seen him once or twice, but I’m not bumping elbows at a bar with his sort.”
“What’s it like? Veydrus, I mean.”
“Better food, better clothes, more to do—” Dan began rattling off a litany.
“Kid’s got a view from a tower. Down street level it ain’t so pretty. Tellurak hasn’t had a major war since I was a kid. Just bandits and pirates—small time stuff, really. Veydrus just got done a war a few years back, wiped out a quarter of the Kadrin Empire. They’re still sifting dead folks out of the sewers and some of ‘em still move on their own. Two strongest sorcerers anyone ever saw battled in the capital city, killed most of the ruling nobles and nearly all the top sorcerers. Kid’s about the best they’ve got left, so he gets pissy when he has to work to get fed; he’s used to everyone licking his toes clean for him.”
Madlin cringed. “That’s disgusting.”
Tanner chuckled. “It’s a figure of speech. You don’t speak Acardian worth snot, do you?”
“I suppose not. What about my offer for the mine? I didn’t come here to get put off course by this Veydrus business.”
“First you tell me about this world of yours,” Tanner said. “Your pappy just stealing his ideas from there?” Tanner took his gun from its holster, cradling it in the palm of his hand rather than holding it ready to fire. “And to think, I thought these toys were impressive; figured he was some sort of genius. This is one of his, handmade by Cadmus Errol himself.”
Madlin looked carefully at the revolver, adjusting her spectacles for a better view. “Let me see that,” she said. Tanner walked over and handed the gun to her. She wondered if it was confidence, naivety, or simple bravado that led him to hand over his only firearm to a woman who had just pointed a gun at him.
The handle was worn from use. The points where a hand held it were polished smooth and were lighter, as the wood stain had been rubbed away. Even the marking plate with her father’s “CE” emblem was worn smooth, the letters barely legible.
“It’s not one of his,” Madlin pronounced, handing the gun back.
Tanner looked down at the weapon in disbelief. “Naw! Really?” Madlin nodded. “Gut me, that bastard that sold me the thing said it was authentic Errol make.”
“Oh, it is,” Madlin said. She smirked at Tanner’s puzzled look. “I was the one who made it.”
Tanner shook his head. “I got this years ago. You’d just have been a wee little thing in pigtails with no teats.”
“I was eleven or twelve, and my father had me make dozens of these things before he’d let me design my own. You want to know what Korr is like? Korr is a world where every city has a dozen places that can make a gun like yours, most of them dug deep underground. It’s a world where any human caught with one gets hanged. It’s a world where whether you’re a slave or free human, you’ve got the arse end of life, cleaning up what the kuduks leave for us. For all the science and inventions Korr’s got, the average Acardian dockworker has a better life than any of us have there.”
Madlin was breathing heavily after her rant. The bile was fresh in her throat when she talked about Korr. Rynn deserved as good a life as Madlin had, and thanks to the kuduks, she could never have it.
Dan giggled. Madlin clenched her jaw and glared at him.
“What’s so funny?” Tanner asked, not bothered by his insensitivity.
“I think their world is ruled by goblins!”
“What are goblins?” Madlin demanded.
“Short, scrawny little greenish people with long ears,” Dan said. “They make all kinds of devices. They even make cannons. I can’t believe—”
“That’s not what kuduks are,” Madlin said, shaking her head emphatically. “Kuduk are nearly human height, on average, and heavier. They’re tough as a plow ox and nearly as strong. They’ve got thick limbs, think fingers, and skin rough as tree bark. They grow beards that they braid and trim and shape to tell what their status is, and they make all slaves and any freemen that work for them shave clean so they can’t pass.”
Tanner and Dan exchanged a look. Dan shrugged.
“Sounds like nothing I ever heard of,” Tanner said. He scratched at his stubble. “Hey, if you never knew about Raynesdark’s gold mines, how did you know to come here?”
“This is right about where Eversall is, next peak over. That’s where I’m from. All the gold’s been mined out of it forever ago, but there were records documenting where it was. My father knew about them.”
“So you and I both know: this mountain’s filled to busting with gold. You slit its belly, it’d bleed yellow. Convince me why I should sell it to you, instead of keeping it all for myself.”
Dan cleared his throat.
“Ourselves,” Tanner clarified.
“You have a sword and a pistol on your person. You must fancy yourself quite a warrior,” Madlin noted, buttering her words as she spoke them.
“Yeah, I’m still fast enough to draw a blade before most fellas can get a pistol out—even nice fancy ones like yours,” Tanner bragged. To demonstrate his point, he whipped his sword from its scabbard. Madlin barely registered the sword’s movement. There was a clatter and a scraping of leather, then a sword point was aimed at her. The three intervening paces seemed scant protection against Tanner’s advance if he lunged for her. She might have been able to draw her gun in time, but it was chancy. She did notice that the length of the blade was carved with runes.
“Very nice sword,” she commented. “What do those runes do?”
“You like ‘em?” Tanner asked. “This edge will bite into stone and go through steel like it was leather.”
“So what’s a warrior like you doing down in a tunnel, looking over sad little mining schematics?”
“How’s that now?” Tanner sounded defensive.
“You’re a warrior. Dan is a wizard or something.
Powlo here is a miner,” Madlin said. She jerked a thumb over to where Jamile was looking after Powlo’s injuries. She suspected that Powlo would be none the worse for wear. “This looks like an animal’s den. Tell me some giant mole dug it and I might believe you. These support beams are decorative, your grade is uneven and a few degrees too steep. No one here knows the first thing about a proper mine.”
“We hired a Kheshi miner,” Dan said. “Yandur knows what he’s doing. He’s an expert at this.”
“I bet you that’s like finding one of this world’s experts on runes,” Madlin said. “It’ll take you years to make a profit on this place. I can buy it from you, give you your cut up front, and we mine it like it ought to be mined.”
“How much would that cut be?”
“Twenty thousand trade bars,” Madlin replied. Tanner’s jaw hung open. He stared at her. Dan gave a low whistle.
“Did you just make your offer?” Jamile whispered in Madlin’s ear in Korrish.
Tanner blinked a few times. He snapped his fingers and pointed to Dan. “Do that math thing you do. How much we stand to make on the mine?”
Dan looked up, not at the ceiling but away from everyone else. His eyes flitted back and forth and his lips moved. “No good. There’s a hundred times that much gold in this mountain.”
“And it will take you a hundred years to mine it all,” Madlin argued.
Tanner turned to Dan. “I never seen that much coin in my life, and I’ve lived good.”
Dan’s eyes panned slowly over to Madlin. There was a calculating look in them that she didn’t like. “What’s to say we can’t have both?”
“You wouldn’t live to see it!” Madlin threatened. “Anything happens to me, Cadmus Errol finds out in Korr. You’ll see the first airships Tellurak has ever known, dropping kegs of explosives that make black powder seem like pipeweed.”