Redoubt: Book Four of the Collegium Chronicles (A Valdemar Novel)

by Mercedes Lackey

  Mags couldn’t help himself. He shuddered.

  It took him a long time to answer. These were not things he cared to think about.

  “I was pretty much a mine-slavey from about the time Cole Pieters reckoned I could pile rocks into a cart an’ pull the cart outa the mine,” he said. “Now, reckon the kind of mine that’d be, an’ the kind of man that’d put a bare toddler down there t’work.” He paused to let the Healer contemplate that. “Even if he weren’t a cruel man, only a greedy one, it weren’t like he paid any attention t’makin’ things safe. Pretty much all’a kiddies doin’ the daytime diggin’ were just that. Kiddies. Kiddies gen’rally aren’t thinkin’ about bein’ safe. They don’t shore up behind ’em, or if they do, they don’t make sure of it. They ain’t got the knowing an’ the learning that tells ’em when a seam’s full’a cracks. They get real hungry, and they’re thinkin’ of their bellies an’ how many sparklies it’ll take t’ get a extra slice of bread, an’ they ain’t careful when they’re chippin’ stuff out, specially if it’s big.” He paused and let the Healer take all that in. “Reckon ye can see where that’s goin’, sir. Lots of cave-ins. Lots of people die. Would have been a lot more, ’cept the rock was pretty sound an’ didn’t need a lot of shorin’ up. But this’s what generally happened. If the whole roof comes down, it generally kills you on the spot, an’ yer lucky.”

  “Lucky!” Charis exclaimed, shocked.

  “Aye. Supervisor hears it, or else he don’t, but when he comes down yer way, he don’t hear you tappin’ no more, an’ he checks. Now, if where you was workin’ was a good vein, he’ll send somebody in there t’clear out.”

  Mags took a long, deep breath. “Now, if the rockfall didn’ kill ye dead, you’ve been a-lyin’ there for however long it took him to check. An’ if the shaft you been workin is blocked up now, well. Maybe they’ll get to you, an’ maybe they won’t, cause if it’s blocked up too bad, it’ll have t’ be a right good seam or vein t’ spend the time t’clear out. So yer lyin’ there, an’ maybe you don’t live. An’ if ye don’t, you’re lucky.”

  This time the Healer didn’t utter an exclamation, but Mags could tell he was about to explode with indignation. Of course he was. The very idea that someone young and presumably healthy was lucky to die was anathema to a Healer.

  “So say it’s too blocked up t’ get to ye fast. Now, remember, they ain’t tryin’ t’clear it t’ get to you. They’re clearin’ it to get to the stones. And say ye weren’t dead in the rockfall, an’ ye don’t die soon. Ye’re lyin’ there, in the dark. It’s getting harder an’ harder t’breathe. Ye mebbe got a lotta rock layin’ on ye. Yer bones is prolly broke.” He felt the Healer shrinking at the picture he was painting, as well he should. It was horrific, and one that Mags had pictured as his own fate in countless nightmares. Still did, actually, now and again. But he went on, though he was drenched in a cold sweat of fear, because he realized that he wanted, desperately, to have someone understand, at long last, understand gut- and bone-deep, the horrible, terror-filled life he and the others had endured, day after day, in that place. He had never spoken much about it, not even to Nikolas and Amily. He wasn’t sure why. But here at last was someone who would not only understand it but would feel it. He was a Healer, he was an Empath. He knew what broken bones and suffocation felt like; he’d endured them with his patients. He knew the agony of lacerated flesh and nerve. And he knew fear, the fear you felt when you finally accepted that you were going to die, be snuffed out, and be gone. As hideous as life might be, it was something they all clung to. And not one of them had a hope for anything afterward. Why should they? Such things were promised by men in fine clothing who came, looked past their protruding bones and frightened eyes, and told Cole Pieters what a good thing he was doing, caring for so many orphans. If they could be so mistaken about what was in front of their own eyes, how could anyone believe what they said about gods and heavens and things after death that no one had ever seen?

  So Mags went on.

  “Like I said, they ain’t after you, they just wanta clean the stone away so they can be diggin’ again. Chances are, ye’re gonna die, smothered or bleedin, or all crushed up inside, all alone in the dark. An’ that’s lucky, ’cause if they drag ye out, you ain’t gonna see a Healer. Someone’ll haul ye out in the mine cart t’get you outa the way, an’ then they’ll pitch you out. Ye might die there. An’ mebbe it’ll be winter an’ ye’ll fall asleep in the cold. Or mebbe ye won’t die at all, mebbe ye’ll drag yourself t’ under the barn floor, where all of ye sleep, an’ mebbe ye’ll lie there, and mebbe someone’ll bring ye a little food. An mebbe ye’ll actually live. Yer bones’ll be all twisted up, a’course. But as soon as ye show up fer a meal—” He paused for effect “—they’ll put a pick an’ hammer in yer hand an’ send ye back in. Even if they have to take ye in the mine cart an ye crawl into the shaft.”

  The Healer made a choking noise.

  “Now,” Mags went on, “figure all them people, them kiddies, that die in there. They’re dyin’ hard, mostly. Pain. Scared. Fightin’ for breath. For the worst, mebbe dying for days. All alone an’ no one cares. So you figure what kinda ghosts they’d make.” The sweat of fear had soaked through his shirt now, he’d have to leave it to be washed before he could wear it again. The trews too. “Angry, I’d say. Wouldn’t you be? Wouldn’t you be mad that there was people just like you that was alive, and you ain’t? So we heard about all sorts of ghosts in the mine. There was one that’d come along, an’ no matter how careful you shored up behind you, he’d knock the timbers loose. Or the one that’d work the ceiling behind you, so it all fell in and you was trapped in a pocket and suffocate. There was one that’d find places for water t’come in an’ flood the shaft. An’ there was plenty, th’ ones that’d been brought out t’die, that’d come in the night an’ sit on yer chest and suffocate you, or walk through yer dreams an’ make ye feel how they died. But those weren’t the worst.”

  “They—weren’t?” Charis managed, through his horror.

  “No. They weren’t. Cause all that woulda happened if Cole Pieters were just a greedy bastard that didn’t give two pins ’bout anythin’ but money. But Cole Pieters weren’t just that. Cole Pieters were the meanest, nastiest, cruelest man I ever seen.”

  He could practically feel Charis’ eyes going wide with shocked surprise.

  “I seen him beat kiddies t’death for just about nothin’. I seen him beat ’em senseless, then have ’em dragged down into mine an’ the shaft collapsed around ’em. I seen him watch a couple go after each other over half a piece of bread, an’ laugh as one of ’em beat in the other’s head against a rock. I seen him tie up a kiddie out at the sluices overnight in winter ’cause he wasn’t findin’ enough glitter, an’ the kiddie soaked through wet. He died, naturally. He catch ye doin’ anything he could call stealin’ an’ off’d come an ear, cause ye don’t need an ear to work a seam, and maybe it’d fester, and maybe it’d heal. He’d smash your teeth just cause he felt like it.” Mags finally ran out of words and stumped along, exhausted by what had come flooding out of him. But he still had one more thing to say. “Now. You figure what sorts of ghosts those kiddies make. Then ask me why I’m feared of ghosts.”

  He remembered, oh, how he remembered, silently talking to the spirits in the dark. Reminding them that he wasn’t the one responsible for their deaths. Pointing out he was no different from them—maybe worse off, because he was hungry and they weren’t, he was cold or hot, and they weren’t, he was exhausted, and they weren’t. Begging them to turn their anger on the ones responsible for all the pain—Cole Pieters and his sons. He’d go to sleep thinking at them, or whenever he was startled by an unexpected sound in the mine.

  He couldn’t remember who had told him and the others about the ghosts of the dead miners. He didn’t think it was the Pieters’ boys, but it might have been. It wouldn’t have been the elaborate story he had just told Nikolas and Charis, of course; the Pieters’ boys had about th
e same imagination as a turnip, and none of that business about dying slowly and painfully would even have occurred to them. But it didn’t take much imagination to put together a lot of dead and dying mine-slaveys, ghosts, and some fun scaring the living mine-slaveys together.

  Ghost stories were the sorts of things that were whispered in the dark when you were too cold or hungry to sleep, because misery prefers to have company. The ghost stories that the Pieters boys told would have been simple and impersonal. But the stories the kiddies told each other . . . those had names.

  “Remember Bat?” “Issie sat on me chest last night!” “I seen Lu at privy, I swear!” Every ghost had a name and a face, and even if the faces looked much alike—dirty, straggling, greasy hair, cheekbones sharp with hunger—it was still the face of someone you’d eaten with, worked with, huddled up with against the cold.

  “I’m sorry, Mags,” Nikolas whispered, finally. “I had no idea. . . .”

  The shape on the other side of him, the Healer Charis, just nodded, dumbly.

  :That was well done, Chosen,: Dallen said gently. :I was hoping we’d be able to get that out of you.:

  He thought about that. :That why you teased me ’bout it?:

  :Yes. To get you started. You’ve had that bottled up inside you for far too long, and it needed to be told to someone who would feel it, not merely be horrified, then do his best to forget about it.: Dallen sounded very contrite. :And now I apologize, because unlike Nikolas, I did know, and I prodded at you anyway.:

  The sweat of fear was drying, making his shirt itch. Mags scratched at his shoulder absently. :Ye meant well.: He pondered it for a moment. :Reckon was like lettin’ pus out of a wound.:

  :Very like.:

  “Well,” he said aloud, after a long stretch of walking in silence. “Now ye know. So if ye want t’make it up t’me, well, ye can.” He scratched his other shoulder. “Figure out if it is a ghost. An’ get rid of it.” He sighed. “There probably ain’t nobody in Haven that’s died as hard as any of the mine-kiddies did, and probably no reason for a ghost t’be that angry, but it doesn’t matter to m’gut. Understand?”

  Nikolas sighed. “Yes, Mags, we do.”

  He nodded, as the corner where their inn was came into view. “Good,” was all he said.

  But it was enough.

  7

  There were glimpses of eyes in the rock, the cold touch of a clawlike hand. Mags tried not to look, tried not to think about them. But he thought he could see them anyway. He knew who they belonged to, too, but he tried not to think of the name.

  Jak. I was Jak.

  He could almost, but not quite, hear the name being whispered. He chipped away at the rock in a cold sweat. He knelt in the shaft just as he always did, rock just a few finger lengths from his nose, his knees fitted into smooth hollows that he himself had painstakingly cut out. After all, the Cole boys were only listening for the sounds of rock being cut, and a little work in making smooth places for your legs to fit now meant a lot less pain later. His lamp, strapped to his forehead, cast a dim light on the rock face in front of him. One little flame, in that lamp, fed by oil, with a metal reflector behind it. You didn’t want the flame to burn too high, it’d burn the skin of your forehead. You turned it as low as you dared.

  Except that meant shadows, and in the shadows, were the hints, the glints, of a pair of eyes.

  Hungry eyes, the eyes of someone who had scrabbled for life and had it taken away from him anyway.

  Jak. I was Jak.

  “Leave me be,” Mags whispered. “Leave me be, I nivver hurt ye, I nivver took from ye. I nivver shoved ye t’edge of huddle i’ th’ col’. Leave me be. Go fin’ Bon. ‘E’s th’ ’un thet stole yer bread. Go bother Calli. She nobbled yer blanket.”

  Around him, behind him in the darkness, came the sounds of tapping, and echoes of tapping. He had just begun his half-day down here, but of course, he was hungry already. They were all, always hungry. The porridge of barley and oats that they all got for their breakfast didn’t last for very long. Especially not when you were working as hard as you could, chipping away the rock. But he was used to that; in fact, the times when he wasn’t hungry were branded in his memory. There weren’t more than a handful of them, and most of them were connected with visits from priests, those cursed god-men who promised everything after you were dead.

  They must have been branded in Jak’s memory too, or at least, whatever memory a ghost had. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe now that Jak was dead he knew what the god-men told was all lies. It was all the same rubbish anyway. Suffer on earth and be rewarded in a heaven Mags didn’t believe in, by gods who didn’t see fit to do something about misery right now. Sometimes, when he had a moment to think, and something turned his mind toward these gods the priests were so big about, he wanted to hit the priests, hit the gods if they existed. But that took energy, and mostly he didn’t have the energy to waste. But Jak, now, Jak had listened to the god-men, and listened to the stupid Cole daughter who read out of holy books at them while they ate, and maybe Jak had believed. And now Jak knew better. Knew it was all lies, that no one had anything for anyone who wasn’t important and rich, least of all gods. And now he wanted to be alive again, and he’d do what it took to get alive again.

  It didn’t work that way, but since everything else Jak had been told was a lie, he had no reason to believe he couldn’t steal someone else’s body.

  “Bon stole yer bread,” Mags repeated, ruthlessly. “I nivver stole fr’m ye.” Mags carefully positioned his chisel and tapped at a likely spot in the seam with his hammer. It was a good broad seam, this one, as wide as the tunnel was tall, which meant there was no problem with spending most of his time hammering out waste rock and getting shouted at for not bringing up any sparklies today. This had been Jak’s seam. Was that why Jak was here?

  But Jak hadn’t died here. Jak had died of eating something bad, up on the surface. Probably those berries. Mags knew they were poison, they all know those plump, dark berries were poison. Jak knew too. But when you were starving and a bully had stolen your bread, maybe those berries were a little too tempting.

  Maybe Jak was here because Mags hadn’t shared with him.

  This was a good seam. Why hadn’t Jak managed to bring out enough sparklies to get him extra bread? He should have been able to.

  Mags’ tapping released a chunk of rock. There was nothing in it that he could see, but it wasn’t waste—it would go up to the hammer-mill and the sluices. He set his chisel into a good spot and began tapping again. One more sparkly and he’d get a second slice of barley bread with his broth.

  Jak could have done that every day in this seam.

  “If ye were hungry, ’twas yer own fau’t,” he said, under his breath, as the sad eyes watched the back of his head. “Ye hear me? Lookit this seam! Yer own fau’t.”

  That was what Master Cole said all the time. It was easy enough to earn bread, all you had to do was work for it. It was another lie of course, because if you found yourself in a really good seam, Cole would switch one of his sons to it. But that was what he told the ghost, lying to it as he and the rest were lied to. Maybe Jak even believed that, seeing Mags pulling out the sparklies now.

  There were two sounds in the mine where he was, the tapping and the steady drip of water. They provided a counterpoint to his own tapping and his muttering to the ghost. The rock fractured suddenly and dropped off the face, and there, catching the light was another yellow sparkly; not very big, but Mags’ sharp eyes never missed a sparkly. He pulled the rag he kept wrapped around his throat off, folded it a few times and set it on the floor of the tunnel just under the stone. Setting his chisel as delicately as he could, he began flaking bits of rock from the face around the sparkly. A tap, a pause to check his progress, another tap, another pause. It was serious, intense work. One slip of the chisel, and there would be nothing but chips and a beating.

  The feeling of eyes on the back of his neck suddenly intensified, and he felt a
cold hand touch the middle of his back. He jumped, the chisel slipped, and the stone shattered.

  Hoping the Pieters boys hadn’t noticed the change in rhythm, he shoved the chips with the rest of the waste for the sluice and went back to cutting the rock face.

  But now besides the sweat of terror of the ghost, he was drenched in the cold sweat of fear of a beating. “What’d ye do thet fer?” he whispered harshly. “Ye want me t’die too?”

  Yes. . . .

  He almost froze. So Jak was after—what? Company? No, he and Jak had barely exchanged a few words, ever. No, it had to be something else. It had to be about what he was.

  Yer Bad Blood, boy. Yer Bad Blood, and it’s damn lucky for you that yer here, an’ we can put ye to work an’ keep those idle hands busy, or ye’d be dancin’ at rope’s end already.

  He could hear that in his mind, hear what Cole Pieters said of him. Was that why the ghost was haunting him? Because he was Bad Blood?

  Out of the kindness, the pure kindness of my heart, I took ye. No one else wanted ye, not even the godly priests. They all knew what ye were. They all figgered one day ye’d turn on ’em. I’m a bloody saint, I am, fer takin’ a chance with you.

  Did he deserve this miserable excuse for a life? Did he deserve to be dead?

  Or should he just have died with his parents, and all this time the gods had been trying to kill him, and he just wasn’t cooperating with them and dying proper-like?

  To hell wi’ ye, gods! Ye sendin’ ghosts t’do yer work now? Tap, pause. Tap, pause. He put his nose as close to the stone as he could and still see, examining the rock minutely.

  To hell with gods. To hell with what they wanted. To hell with Jak and his sad story. There were no good stories here. Every kiddy here was unwanted, burdens on their villages, bastards left on doorsteps, kiddies left orphaned—they arrived, more often than not, with tear-streaked faces, and most of the time, their faces remained tear-streaked, day in, day out. There was little enough to be happy about here. Good days meant someone found food in the pigs’ buckets before the pigs got their slop. Good days meant you hurt less. Good days meant one of the god-men was going to visit, and you got put into long shirts made of sacks that you pulled on over your rags so it looked like you had clean clothing. The shirts itched, but you weren’t allowed to scratch. And you got two slices of bread and better soup, made with peas, and just for that night you didn’t sleep hungry. Those were good days, and they didn’t happen often.