‘Sorry,’ Bregor whispered, all breath and mouth. ‘So sorry.’
He meant it. Grandson to the infamous last Duke of Roudhos? His family tortured and slain before his eyes? Opuntia had revealed none of this during her visits with him and Merle. Perhaps she doesn’t know.
‘So am I, my friend.’ Noetos turned his head away, though not before Bregor caught the edge of shame on the fisherman’s face.
The Hegeoman continued to think things through that afternoon as they walked. The behaviour of the Recruiters suddenly seemed more sinister. How much did they know about Noetos and his family? The fisherman—the pretend fisherman, Bregor reminded himself—had obviously chosen Fossa as a hiding place. Now he was being drawn out by agents of Andratan. Could this really be coincidence? What plans had they all been caught up in? And what role did the Neherian fleet play in all this?
‘I give you a choice,’ Noetos said eventually. ‘You can leave, now, in any direction you like, though you’ll have to go and fetch the pack from Ossern Hill. Or we can rest here today and camp overnight.’ He sat down on the damp ground and indicated for Bregor to do likewise.
The Hegeoman shook his head sharply at both suggestions, but sat anyway. His useless sprint had taken a great deal out of him.
‘What, then? Are you well enough to resume our journey immediately? Is this what you choose?’
Bregor nodded solemnly. What he had heard—what he had coaxed from his oblivious companion—needed to be thought about. Investigated. A need for answers settled on him, along with a conviction that the quickest way back to Fossa was onwards.
‘I’ll make no secret of it,’ Noetos said. ‘I wish to get to the first northern village as soon as I can. Every day we lose is another village fallen to the Neherians, with who knows how many deaths. And my family grows further and further out of my reach. Are you able to come with me?’
Another nod, more emphatic than he felt.
Noetos hauled him to his feet, and they were on their way.
Noetos sensed he had broken something in the Hegeoman. Not just in his throat, but in his spirit. The man, who had been so obviously straining at the bit to return to Fossa, had instead given in to Noetos’s purpose, with no clue as to why. Shamed into it, perhaps, or uncertain of his ability to survive the walk home. Neither reason sufficed. He thought it unlikely Bregor had suffered an attack of virtue.
Whatever the reason, Noetos felt the lift in his own spirits. The man was useless, but any company on the road was surely better than none.
They found their way into a wide, shallow basin, drained by a stream running counter to the direction they needed to go. Two paces across, the stream looked diseased, with a verdigris stain at either edge. After carefully wading through the water, they climbed the far slope of the basin. Noetos expected to see evidence of the Eisarn diggings at any moment. It was hours since they had left the summit of Ossern Hill; they ought to have come across some sign of the mine or the Palestran Line by now…
Some subtle sign gave him a bare moment’s warning. A glimpse of a wider vista, perhaps, an instinctual feel of space, or a small change in the flow of air. He made a lunge at Bregor’s arm, catching his sleeve and jerking him back from the sudden emptiness at their feet. He fought to arrest his own momentum, and caught a whirling vision of the ground—huts, piles of stones, layers of orange rock, the tops of trees—far below. Bregor sprang back, sending them both tumbling to the ground at the edge of the chasm.
‘We have found Eisarn,’ Noetos said, unnecessarily, after a long silence, and crawled forward.
Stones dislodged by their scrambling were only now clattering to the pit floor, hundreds of feet below. The fisherman watched, hands on knees, as three tiny figures emerged from a nearby hut, cast their eyes over the area, then shouted something up to him. The fractured cliffs of the pit garbled the words. Something angry, no doubt. More men joined the group.
Noetos replied by gesticulating left and right. Work it out, he willed them. Which way down?
Eventually one of the men understood, and waved to the fisherman’s right. Noetos waved back in acknowledgment. ‘Come on, Bregor,’ he said wearily, and plucked at the man’s collar.
They found a path a few minutes’ walk along the edge of the pit, marked by a collection of rusting shovels and picks. No more than a pace wide, it plunged over the lip, then wound off to the right, notched into the side of the enormous quarry. Knowing the likelihood of the Hegeoman tripping over his own feet at any opportunity, Noetos kept a hand on his shoulder.
The immensity of the pit began to affect his nerves, making his feet tingle and filling his head with mad ideas of falling. He could hear his tutor’s voice in his head: If one man can dig a rectangular hole five paces wide and two paces deep in a day, how many men would it take…He shook his head in annoyance. Far too many. The tiny-seeming trees at the far edge gave him some idea of scale, as did the collection of huts, the minuscule figures beside them still pointing in their direction. Beyond the huts he could see machinery of some sort, wheels and gears, from which came a nerve-abrading grinding. Further away still, horses and donkeys grazed on bales of hay. Sensing the beginnings of dizziness, he jerked his head away from the unsettling view, studying instead the near-vertical rock-face to his right. Layers of crumbling dirt alternated with rust-coloured rock, as though some giant—presumably the same giant who had later dug the hole—had spread lard and honey over bread again and again. The clearly defined boundaries of each layer sloped down towards him, making the path seem steeper than it was.
‘Dangerous,’ came the hoarse understatement from in front of him.
As they wound around the northern wall of the great pit, a clearer sense of the space began to emerge. A thousand paces wide, a thousand long, two hundred paces deep, Noetos estimated; then, acknowledging his tutor, he added: It would take a thousand men four thousand days, master. Over ten years! Unless the hole had already been here, and men had simply enlarged it. The side of the pit nearest to the Palestran Line sloped much more gently and, as they approached, he noted it was made of a different type of rock. Crushed rock, darker, mainly grey with some brown. A mixture of the lard and the honey?
Halfway to the bottom of the pit they came to the Palestran Line, which climbed the shallow gradient out of the quarry. A man drove a two-mule cart up the Line towards them; the small tray was laden with the brown rock, and neither the drover nor his mules looked in any hurry. Another cart, this one empty, drew towards them from a distant notch in the rim. Noetos waved it down.
The drover, clearly used to giving rides, indicated the tray without comment. Minutes later Noetos and Bregor found themselves walking towards a small group of ragged men.
‘Who’re you an’ whaddiya want?’ one asked, a tall fellow with heavy brows.
‘No threat to you,’ Noetos replied. ‘We are two fishermen from Fossa village, a week’s walk to the southeast.’
‘Heard of it,’ another man acknowledged. Thin and tousle-haired, with pale, dirty skin and black hair growing from his ears, he was not a prepossessing sight.
‘So that’s who you are. Who you say you are.’ This from a third man, stockier but just as dirty. ‘What’s it you’re wanting?’
‘Help,’ Noetos said bluntly. It wouldn’t do to try to win these fellows with clever words; it would be the facts or nothing. He knew the type, had sailed with them every day. Until recently. ‘Help, not for us, but for the fishing villages north and east of here. The Neherians are raiding. Their whole fleet is out there.’
‘They raiding mines in their ships, then?’ one wag asked, a youngster, clearly not old enough to remember the ever-present threat from the south. His comment did not bring the laughter he had been expecting.
‘No. But when they have burned all the towns and villages on the coast, where will they look next? Where does the real wealth of Palestra lie?’
‘Something in that,’ the first man said, rubbing the stubble on his jaw. ‘Need t
o go up to Altima fer that, fetch enough men to drive off the longboats. Presume they still usin’ longboats?’
The man’s words heartened Noetos: he sounded like one who had dealt with the Neherians before. ‘Or we could hurry north,’ he said, ‘and warn the villages in their path. They could choose to fight or flee. Someone could be sent to Altima and to Tochar to raise the army, but the villages come first.’
‘Risky, that. Like as the salties have men posted on the roads t’ warn ‘em.’
‘We’ll have to go around them, approach the villages from the north,’ Noetos conceded.
‘Why? Let the fishermen take care o’ their own,’ the youth said. ‘We should stay here, git ready to face ‘em. ‘Sides, we got the mine to run. We’re due a bonus, and I ain’t missin’ it. An’ Duke Eltos ain’t gonna be that happy if we bust off t’play heroes.’
A few men voiced assent to this argument.
‘H’aint you bin lisnin?’ said a smaller, older man who looked as though he’d just been taken from a pickle jar. ‘We let these buzzards get themsel’s the coast, we’ll be next, and you c’n bet they’ll come down on us like a tunna slag. You want that, you’re more a fool than Ma named you.’ He clipped the youth hard over the ear.
‘What about Eltos?’ the ear-hair man asked plaintively. ‘He’ll be sore if we run off ’n’ leave his mine to run down.’
‘Be sorer if we let the Neherians wreck it, or take it fer ’emselves,’ said the first man. ‘Time we had a vote.’
‘Besen’t we wait ‘til dayshift come out?’ asked the stocky man. ‘Maybe some o’ them’ll be wanting t’bash Neherians too.’
The first man, clearly some sort of overseer or foreman by his words, addressed Noetos. ‘Y’reckon we can wait ‘til rimdown?’
‘Rimdown?’ the fisherman echoed, puzzled.
‘Shift changes when the sun kisses the rim o’ the pit. We go down, they go up. Good for us in the summer, good for them in the winter. About an hour from now.’
Noetos sighed. ‘We would be better to wait for morning, I think. I certainly couldn’t imagine trying to find my way east in the dark, though I’m loath to give another village away.’
‘Ah, but we miners see well in the dark,’ the overseer said. ‘Though you might be right. It’ll give us time to find our weapons, sharpen ‘em up good.’ He leaned closer to the two villagers. ‘I lived in a fishin’ village on a time. Used t’ go fish-stickin’ with a fearsome gaff. You use gaffs? Ah well, no matter. Kymos, that’s the name of the place where I lived. Got chased out by a woman I angered. Had a gaff in her hand, as I remember.’ He rubbed his chin.
‘You tellin’ fishin’ stories?’ one of the men called.
‘Just tellin’ ’em about my gaff.’
‘Gaff? That what you call it? Where you been stickin’ it lately?’
‘Kymos?’ Noetos interrupted. ‘The Neherians have already visited Kymos. I’m sorry.’
‘Have they now.’ The overseer scratched his face. ‘Best I find me a good sharp gaff, then, and see if Neherians wriggle like fishes.’
Shouts of encouragement followed this avowal.
‘Don’t need a vote,’ the stocky man said. ‘Plenty a’ volunteers.’
‘Maybe we can conscript some farmers on our way,’ Noetos added.
‘Maybe. We’ll be better at warning than fighting, I’m thinking,’ the overseer said. ‘We’ll take the mules. They’ll get us there quicker.’
‘And maybe you might help me recover my wife and son,’ Noetos said carefully, wondering how far he could push these men. ‘They’re being held captive, as are many villagers.’ No need to mention by whom, not yet. ‘My daughter…My daughter Arathè was murdered.’ Half-truth, but it would serve. ‘This is all I have left of her,’ he said as he pulled the carving out from his pack and held it up for them to see.
Immediately he knew he had done something wrong. Silence worked its way back through the group of miners, the men holding themselves absolutely still, focused on the object in his hand. Somewhere behind him a mule walked endlessly around a grinding machine, the only sound in the otherwise sepulchral pit. Noetos looked more closely at the bust of his daughter, wondering if it had transformed into something strange, capable of bringing so complete a silence to the voluble miners. A religious silence.
‘Er,’ said a man near the back of the group. ‘Excuse me, fellow, oh my, yes. Could I…could I come and have a closer look?’
Increasingly nervous, Noetos took a step backwards. ‘Why? Have you seen her? Did she come this way? What did she do?’ He imagined her, pawn of the Recruiters, casting Voice-spells on the miners, killing some, sparing others. ‘What is wrong?’
‘The stone,’ said the man at the back, forcing his way forward. ‘Oh my, the stone. I promise I won’t touch it, but could you just hold it out so I can look?’
Bemused, Noetos did as he was requested. The man came close, then stepped back and with a cry of ‘Just a moment!’ went dashing off into one of the huts, only to emerge a minute or so later with a curved glass.
‘Hold it out, sir, if you would,’ the man said.
As he did so, the fisherman took note of the difference between this man and the others: he was clean, untouched by the dirt and dust that begrimed the rest of the miners.
‘I am an alchemist, and I should be able to tell…yes…oh my, oh my.’ He looked up from his glass, the full intensity of his gaze boring its way into Noetos’s eyes. ‘You don’t know what this is, do you?’ he whispered.
‘I would have said it was a carving of my daughter, but I am guessing that is not what you mean.’
‘Oh dear, dear me, no. This is huanu, that’s what it is,’ the alchemist said, and fifty people behind him exhaled as one.
Noetos sat on a rough wooden bench in the alchemist’s untidy and crowded hut, his head whirling like the change of tide through The Rhoos, and listened as the nature of his carving was explained to him.
‘Oh my,’ the alchemist said, running his hand through his sandy hair. ‘What you have here is a piece of huanu stone. You haven’t heard of huanu, right?’
Noetos shook his head slightly, though the word did tickle a buried memory. Beside him the Hegeoman nodded, eyes alight.
‘Understandable; most people consider it a fairy tale, if they’ve heard of it at all. Looks like your mute friend knows something.’
‘Not mute,’ Noetos admitted. ‘Just injured. He said something I didn’t like,’ he added, with a meaningful look at the alchemist.
‘Oh. Oh my. Well, if you must employ violence, please leave my hands alone, if you would. I need them for my work. Most important work, yes; though now you are here, perhaps not as important as I thought. Hmm.’ Another glare from the fisherman cut him short.
‘Hm. My, well, we mine here for iron ore, so everyone thinks, and they are right, of course. Except in reality we seek the huanu on behalf of Duke Eltos. In every seam of ore one can find—if one is very patient, very skilled, very fortunate perhaps—a small amount of huanu stone. By small, this is what I mean.’
He pulled a set of keys from his pocket, took one and opened a heavy-looking safe set in the stone floor. After a moment of careful exploration, he pulled out a tiny glass vial filled with water, brought it over to Noetos and Bregor, and held it under their noses.
‘Huanu,’ he said, gently shaking the vial.
‘I can’t see it,’ Noetos said. ‘There are too many little gritty bits of sand…oh.’
‘My, yes, oh indeed. Let me explain. Eisarn Pit as you see it now is on the move. A thousand years ago it was just outside Altima, not as wide or deep as now, just an exploratory pit, testing the viability of the seam. We dig, following the ore, and fill the hole behind us with spoil, thus moving Eisarn gradually southeastwards. Even back then, at the northwestern edge of the deposit, it was clear that a minuscule amount of huanu was mixed with the ore. We test it, you see; perhaps we can show you.’ His face lit up, as though he were a parent on A
ll-Gift Night.
‘Later, later,’ Noetos said, intrigued and frustrated. ‘Tell me about the huanu.’
‘Very well, yes. Well. Somewhere in the seam the huanu stone is concentrated; it is this way with every seam ever mined, though the amounts involved are still very small. Very small,’ he repeated, casting a covert glance at Noetos’s carving sitting on a small table in front of him. ‘We mine the ore, yes, and Palestra becomes rich, but we look for the huanu.’
‘Yes, oh my, yes,’ Noetos said mockingly, his patience at an end. ‘But why, Alkuon be begged, why? What is so special about huanu?’ Beside him, Bregor sighed and shook his head.
‘Why? You ask why? Did I not say? Oh dear. Huanu is the most valuable substance known. I’m sure I said that. Your carving there is worth all of Palestra, with plenty left over.’
What? ‘But, but,’ Noetos spluttered, his hand reflexively grasping at the bust of Arathé, ‘but why? What makes it so valuable, and why haven’t I heard of it? What does it do?’
‘What does it do? Oh my. Actually, you should know, if my guess is right. May I?’ The alchemist held out a quivering hand.
Noetos fought his reluctance to surrender the carving. Is it more valuable now than when it was just a likeness of my daughter? ‘Of course.’ He placed his daughter into the alchemist’s hand.
‘Now, look closely. The stone is pale green, with swirls of white. But look here and here. Two tiny flecks of blue.’ The spots he indicated were so small as to be barely visible. ‘Well, this is the thing. The value of huanu comes from its ability to resist magic. Absorb it, defeat it. When magic is used near huanu, the stone draws the power in and neutralises it. Oh my, yes. Am I right in thinking you have been close to a wielder of magic in recent times?’
A shimmer of blue fire spreads over the door to his house, which collapses in a sheet of flame. The Recruiters loose their power upon him; it flares brightly against his closed eyelids. A momentary blue crackling around the carving in his hand, then nothing. Shouts of anger. A tentacle of dreadful power reaches across Nadoce Square, searching for him, striking him, crackling and vanishing, leaving him unharmed.
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