The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  The gang reached the dark end of the tunnel, and Armand began to strike at the rock face with his pick. His body had become hardened to the rigors of the labor; no longer did his back cramp and spasm. Instead it ached like a hot coal, and he entered a deathlike stupor where the long hours seemed as one. Carelessly, he breathed in the bloodstone particles drifting around in the air.

  A second deep and ominous rumbling broke Armand’s trance. Dust and debris fell from the roof, and the timberwork began to groan. Armand heard a crack, and, in an instant, the crew dropped their tools and squeezed themselves against the sides of the tunnel. One of the beams gave way, and several large rocks fell onto the tracks. Then all was silent. Only after the rumbling had passed did Armand’s heart begin to race. Like the others, his eyes roved over the walls and roof, expecting them to give way.

  Ohan pointed to Armand. “Lift those rocks into the cart.”

  Armand took two steps toward them, when, in the far distance, he heard a soft whisper that slowly turned into a hum. In an instant he recognized that the earth was moving, but this time it came from far away. It grew in strength with each second like a terrible tidal wave rushing toward them.

  Armand dropped his pick and raced through the dark with the rest of them, bouncing off one another in their panic, striking the stony tunnel walls, fleeing for the surface. Someone behind him held a lamp, and it scattered jittery light. One moment Armand could see the tracks and the tunnel, the next nothing but darkness, then once more the road was lit up.

  Armand lost his feet, smashed his hands against the rough ground, scrambled up again. The roar of the mountain filled his ears, magnifying in the tunnel. Still the sound rose, until it was a deafening roar. Everything shook, dust poured from the roof, and the quake struck. Beams exploded above him. The air was filled with particles and debris. Armand lurched to one side, his arms struck hard rock, something smashed down onto his foot, and sharp pain drove up his leg. Rocks peppered him from above. Everything was momentarily black. Then all was still.

  Armand pulled himself to his feet as the dust around him settled. The roof behind him had given way completely. A still-lit lamp was lodged in the rockfall beside a protruding hand. Two others had escaped with Armand, but the other five of their gang were smashed beneath the rockfall or trapped behind it.

  One of the prisoners pulled the lamp from where it was stuck. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Anyone there?” called Armand.

  “They’re dead. Or they soon will be.” One of the prisoners started to move away.

  Armand thought he could hear something from behind the rockfall, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Come back. I think I heard something,” said Armand.

  But he was left in the steadily enclosing darkness. The other two were already around a corner. Only one side of the wall was illuminated, and soon he would be immersed in complete darkness.

  Armand raced after them. By the time they reached the outside, other gangs had emerged, covered in dirt. Yet others remained beneath, dead or dying in the darkness of the mountain. Lost souls without hope.

  Tiedmann’s man—the collaborator 7624—lined the prisoners up and counted them. That was what they were: only numbers. But Armand began to put together a plan. He saw now how he might gain the trust of the barbarians, if Ohan were alive behind the fall.

  Armand approached Prisoner 7624. “There are survivors below. We have to get them out.”

  The collaborator sneered. “They’ll be dead soon enough. You should thank the gods you escaped.”

  Armand thought of those below in the darkness, black desolation filling them. It might have been him. His fists clenched, and he pictured himself striking 7624 down for his callousness. Armand took two steps toward 7624 and dropped to his knees. “Please, let me lead a team to save them. They’re our brothers.”

  Prisoner 7624 frowned. First he seemed confused, then he seemed to give up as if it was too much bother. He waved his bloodstone-infected arm. “Go on then, with anyone who wants to go with you. You have until the usual time.”

  Armand looked around desperately. He needed help, but no prisoner stepped forward. In desperation, Armand grasped the two men from his own crew by the arms. “Come with me.”

  To his surprise, they followed him passively. Perhaps they had grown accustomed to obeying orders. He didn’t know their names, and with their gaunt, skeletal faces, they had the look of the prison’s many gray men eking out their last days.

  Together they pushed a cart down into the deadly tunnel, down into the blackness. This is my chance, thought Armand as he strained and heaved. He didn’t want to become like the men who walked beside him. It all rested on the hope that Ohan was still alive, and that rescuing him would bring Armand the favor of his tribesmen.

  When he reached the rockfall, Armand listened, but there was no sound beyond the dripping of water from the roof.

  “We have no idea how much rock has fallen,” one of the gray men said. “By the end of the shift, we’ll never have moved enough.”

  “The others will be sent back to work mining bloodstone,” said Armand. “At least we have a higher purpose.”

  They began to shovel away the rock, pulling out boulders and piling them into the cart or tossing them against the side of the tunnel, finding more rocks and shattered fragments of timberwork behind them. Occasionally they listened but heard no signs of life. So the hours went, deep into the afternoon. The shift came to an end, the tunnel still blocked by a wall of rubble.

  Armand felt crushing disappointment, but there was little else he could do, so the three of them placed their hands against the cart’s cold side, ready to drive it up to the open air.

  “Ready?” said one of the men.

  Armand stood back, held his hands in the air. “Wait.”

  The three of them stood in the shadowy hellhole, listening. Yes, there it was, a soft tapping from behind the rock: tock, tock, tock.

  “Do you hear that?” Armand cocked his head to listen. There it was, a definite sound. Someone was alive behind the rockfall.

  Armand unhooked a pick from the cart, but one of the other prisoners grabbed his arm. “We have to go. The shift is over.”

  Armand grimaced, looked back at the rockfall. They might work all night and not break through. He sighed, felt defeat rush in on him. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  He hooked the pick back onto the cart, and the three of them strained and heaved and sweated and cursed until they finally burst out into the cold twilight of the surface, where streaks of amber smudged the chilly sky.

  In the icy twilight air, Prisoner 7624 directed the factory workers back to the camp. At the factory entrance, warm gusts of air coursed from the furnaces and kissed Armand’s frigid hands and face. He thought of the dark tunnel and the brutal task facing them tomorrow. He steeled his voice and approached 7624. “There are men alive below. Tomorrow I’ll need some men to dig them out.”

  Prisoner 7624 stared balefully at Armand, raised his gleaming red hand to the depression in his forehead. “That vein of bloodstone is lost. Tomorrow you’ll work with another gang at another seam.”

  “We can’t leave them down there.”

  “Just be happy it’s not you, prisoner. What, are you going to stay up all night, thinking about the poor critters shivering down there in the cold and the dark? No, you’re not. You’re going to forget about them and focus on yourself. That’s what everyone’s going to do. Now get out of here.” Prisoner 7624 bared his blackened teeth, like an attack dog ready to growl.

  As Armand shuffled back to the camp, he realized the terrible toll the day had taken on him. His arms and legs trembled from exhaustion; his emotional reserves were gone. He felt like crying but didn’t seem to have any tears.

  In the evening Armand sat beside Irik, the barbarians beside them grim-faced at losing Ohan. Armand only had a few more bursts of energy before he would be reduced to one of the gray-faced men, incapable of action
, who haunted the camp, who took even his orders … ghosts who were not yet dead.

  The Westerner chieftain, whose name was Ijahan, pulled at his white beard and leaned toward Armand. Worry had carved lines on his face, and Armand could only imagine the years he’d spent trying to save his tribe from Varenis before he ended up here. He was lean as a reed, and there was a ropy toughness to him. Without the feathers in his hair he might have been mistaken for a weathered ship’s captain who had seen too much sun and salty spray.

  “Ohan is perhaps alive?” Ijahan said. “You tried to rescue some of the men today, they say.”

  Armand nodded toward the Tiedmann’s table. “Our supervisor, 7624, won’t allow us to continue tomorrow.”

  Ijahan drew a deep breath and looked at Tiedmann and his collaborators, sitting at the front of the hall like lords. One of Ijahan’s men said something to him in their strange western dialect. He nodded. Together they stood and approached Tiedmann, pleaded with him, but the moonfaced man shook his head and waved them away.

  Seeing this, Armand racked his brain: How might he buy Tiedmann’s favor? He was still wondering this as he forced himself to his feet and approached the table, where he slipped onto the bench beside Tiedmann. He would improvise.

  “We’ve met before, you know,” Armand said.

  The man turned his baleful round eyes to Armand. From up close he appeared paler still, as if no blood moved beneath that skin. Tiedmann’s stare frightened Armand, who sensed the man couldn’t see anyone else as a person, wasn’t aware of their hopes or emotions. There was no empathy there.

  “Ha!” said Tiedmann.

  Armand sensed 7624 standing behind them, ready to pounce and drag him across the room. Armand pictured the man kicking him viciously into unconsciousness as everyone else watched.

  Armand refocused on Tiedmann. “Met is not exactly the right term. We’ve seen each other. When you were the Director in Varenis. This is a camp for political prisoners. Of course they sent you here. There’s quite a struggle going on since you were removed. Valentin, Rainer—they’re all fighting like dogs over a bone.”

  Tiedmann’s face tightened at the mention of his previous office. Armand tensed, expecting the chief collaborator to call for 7624.

  Some crisis point had been reached. Before the man acted, Armand rushed on: “You spoke occasionally to Director Autec of Technis. I was his assistant, you see.”

  It was then that Armand’s path seemed to open up before him. He hated the next words that fell from his mouth. “In any case, I have come to offer you a trade.”

  Filled with guilt, he reached beneath his uniform, hesitated for a second, then brought forth his grandfather’s ring, which he placed on the table before them. He then reached forward and slipped it over his finger. In an instant, the ideograms rose from its surface, hovered above it, a hologram of the engravings below. He slid it off onto the table again, and the symbols settled back into the metal. “Thaumaturgy.”

  Tiedmann reached for the ring with stubby sausagelike fingers, but Armand’s hand closed over it. “You must allow me a full team to rescue the men buried by the rockfall.”

  Tiedmann’s avaricious eyes settled on Armand. He grasped Armand’s hand with his own. “Give me the ring.”

  Armand felt the corners of the metal jutting into the skin of his palm. He held tight.

  “You can have your team,” said Tiedmann. “Three days. You can have three days.”

  Armand opened his hand. A moment later the ring was gone, hidden in one of the folds of Tiedmann’s uniform. The former Director smiled cynically.

  As he settled back into his seat, Armand’s gaze roved across the hall. As he stared out at the gray mass, Armand realized with a jolt that all the children were gone. He closed his eyes and tried not to think of their fates.

  * * *

  Two of the team reconstructed the scaffolding above. The rest of crew dug through the rocks and rubble. Periodically they listened for sounds from behind the rockfall. In the morning they heard a faint tapping, but by the afternoon it had fallen silent. Still, they made good progress, but there was no telling how much of the tunnel had collapsed. When the shift ended in the late afternoon, they still faced a wall of rock blocking the tunnel. Armand hoped the survivors would last another night. They would have water, at least, but would they survive the cold?

  The following day they returned, but there was no sound of tapping. Desperation gripped Armand. He felt hope slipping away, but they kept digging. Armand’s back entered a new stage of pain, which seemed to shoot down his right leg. He felt numbness and tingling in his toes. But he wouldn’t give up.

  Halfway through the afternoon, one of the prisoners cried out. “Look, look!”

  Excitement buzzed in the darkness. The man had pulled a rock away, but it only revealed a cold and dirty hand jutting out through the rocks. The body they uncovered was crushed and broken, a man-sized rag doll whose legs and arms flopped in unnatural ways.

  By the time the shift was over, they still hadn’t broken through.

  That night Armand lay awake on his hard bunk, staring into the night. White spots drifted across his eyes. There was no hope now, he realized. He had given away his ring for nothing. He would not rescue Ohan, or anyone else. He would not escape. Soon he would die.

  On the final morning before his gang would be sent back to the bloodstone veins, Armand approached the rockfall with the same ambivalence as the others. The morning was half gone when one of the prisoners said, “There’s that tapping again.”

  Armand’s heart leaped. This time he didn’t have to strain to hear it. It came loud and clear, like someone knocking on a door. He redoubled his efforts, but morning gave way to afternoon and there seemed no end to the slog.

  Eventually one of the crew said, “That’s it. Time to go.”

  “No!” commanded Armand. “We’re staying. It’s not long now.”

  The men leaned against the cart, ready to push, but Armand grabbed one of them, shoved him back to the rockfall.

  “Just a little while longer,” commanded Armand.

  They began again. Armand almost expected someone to strike him from behind. But on and on they worked, and the others did not abandon him. Until, finally, Armand pulled away a rock that opened up a black and empty space.

  A Westerner’s voice came through the breach. “What took you so long?”

  Armand felt like crying. “Are you hurt?”

  “We’re alive,” said a second voice. “There are two of us. The rest, dead somewhere. But we’re alive.”

  * * *

  They loaded Ohan and Prisoner 8891, whose arm had given in to the bloodstone disease, onto the cart. They were dehydrated, emaciated, injured. Ohan seemed to have cracked a leg, while 8891’s chest had been crushed by a rock. He coughed up blood as they laid him down. When they rolled them out into the cold air, the guards were waiting.

  Prisoner 7624 sneered. “Get these two to the infirmary.”

  About half of the infirmary’s cold beds were occupied. Some of the patients lay staring silently, like gaunt cadavers watching for death himself to enter through the door. Others moaned and called out, fevers gripping their bodies and minds.

  An exhausted doctor—himself a prisoner—gestured for them to lay the two men on cots at the end of the room. As the others rushed off to the mess hall, Armand fetched water for the survivors. When he returned, the Westerner chief Ijahan was squatting by Ohan, talking in the hushed guttural dialect.

  “He says you insisted we be rescued,” said Ohan.

  Armand shrugged. “What if it had been me locked in that deep darkness? We must help one another if we’re to survive and escape this hell.”

  Ohan looked on quietly. “Well, perhaps one day we can return the favor.”

  “Let’s hope neither of us is trapped beneath the mountain again,” said Armand.

  Ohan nodded seriously, but his voice was light and ironic. “What, you have somewhere else to be?”


  Armand remained silent, let the joke wash over him. There were so few pleasures in the camp, so little hope, it felt like a moment in a warm bath.

  “Perhaps we can help.” Ohan smiled slightly.

  When Armand reached the mess hall, the food was gone, but a barbarian was waiting for him with a plate of paste. He gestured to it and nodded. Armand fell on it ravenously. As he lay in his bed that night, Armand felt happy for the first time. He ran Ohan’s words through his mind again. What, you have somewhere else to be? the man said. Perhaps we can help.

  TWENTY-TWO

  After the collapse of the tunnel, Armand replaced Ohan as the leader of the mining crew. He kept the time, directed the prisoners, worked hard himself. He watched as those around him lost all initiative and drive and accepted his orders like cattle. His own strength eked away by the day; his muscles wasted into thin and wiry things; his mind lost its agility. His back seared with pain, needles stabbed down his leg and foot. He could only think of the most basic tasks: filling the cart with bloodstone, falling asleep as quickly as he could on his wooden cot each night, scraping every ounce of the morning porridge and nightly paste from his plate into his mouth. The breakdown of a man happened quickly.

  Ohan had been transferred into the carpentry shop, which the barbarians ran. He was the last of the Westerners to escape the mining gangs. Now all of them were constructing a new barrack in preparation for a coming influx of prisoners. Safe and warm, they seemed to have forgotten Armand, whose thoughts of escape were now nothing but a child’s faraway dream. He had given away his grandfather’s ring for nothing.

  The prison had been growing for some time, it seemed. The Empire’s conquered provinces were resisting, internal dissent had increased, and Varenis had responded with greater violence.

  Armand had once thought that for an authority to rule, it must stick to the principles of civilization, respect, honesty. But after Varenis, he saw that power was a vicious game in which such principles often played little part. He should have known that, considering the fate of his grandfather, but he had been brought up on principles and couldn’t let them go. He still believed in loyalty, but Valentin had shown him there was little place for it in the world. No, thought Armand. I will not allow them to turn me into them—people for whom there is no good or bad in the world, people for whom there is no meaning but survival, conquest, the lust for power and personal gain. That was everything he opposed.