They fell into a heap among the churned-up soil in front of the mine shaft. Torre staggered onward a few more feet, to the shade of a small toolshed that leaned as drunkenly as he felt. He fell to his knees and peeled off the remaining glove. Sweat covered his aching arm all the way to the elbow.
“Zayas,” Iliana said. “Did he . . . ? I didn’t see. My light went out.”
“He’s gone,” Carbón said. He coughed and wheezed. “The witherers got him.”
Torre remembered the foreman’s openmouthed, silent scream as the witherer snaked down his throat. That horrible expression of terror as it entered, and how the man’s eyes shriveled as black as a pair of prunes left too long in the sun. The final shudder as Zayas died. Torre felt the image burning itself into his mind. He opened his eyes and forced himself to stare into the light as an antidote to the awful vision.
Grosst lay on the ground clutching her foot and moaning, but suddenly sat upright with a cry. “The artifact!”
“Forget the artifact,” Carbón said. “It’s death to touch it again.”
“No, not that artifact. My drill. I can’t lose it. I have to go back inside.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Carbón snapped. “You’ll be destroyed.”
“I’ll take the other glove. I’ll—” Her words died into a strangled groan, and she grabbed her foot with another wince.
Carbón got to his feet. “Someone help me with her boot. No, wait. Torre, come over here with that glove.”
“No, don’t touch me,” she said. “Ah! Oh, God, it hurts.”
Grosst was a strong woman, and it took all six of the other survivors to hold her down and get the boot off. Torre, using the glove out of precaution, stripped off her sock. The foot looked okay at first glance, pink and sweaty, but he turned it over and revealed several small black spots.
“Some of it must have seeped through the boot,” Carbón said.
“That’s why you need lead gloves, you idiot,” Grosst said through clenched teeth.
Iliana drew in her breath. “It’s spreading.”
It was true. What had been four spots was now only two, as the smaller ones merged. It would soon be one large black patch. The skin around it was a bright, inflamed red, the leading edge of an infection.
“I’m going to die,” Grosst said. She muttered something that sounded like a curse, though her Basdeenian accent was so thick when she said it that it was hard to say. “Damn you all, why did I come here?”
“Presumably for fifty silver escudos,” Torre said. “Now be quiet and let us think or you will die. What about the shed? It’s got to have an ax or something.”
“An ax!” Grosst cried.
“No good,” Iliana said. “It’s padlocked—the tools vanish into the dumbre if you don’t guard them.”
“Well, who has the blasted key?” Torre said. He kept his eye on Grosst’s foot. The two spots had almost become one already.
“Only the foreman. Zayas.” Iliana nodded in the direction of the open mine shaft where they’d left the man’s desiccated body.
“Oh. Blast it.”
“Does anyone have a knife?” Carbón asked.
“I do,” Lozada said. The engineer swept back his cloak and drew an eight-inch knife from its sheath. “I’ve been carrying it since the temple riots. It’s plenty sharp, too.”
Nevertheless, he had drawn it awkwardly, like a man unaccustomed to holding such a weapon, and Carbón looked dismayed. He glanced around the group, as if measuring them all against the task at hand, then reached for the knife, clearly planning to do it himself.
“No, wait,” Torre said. He held out his hand. “Give it to me.”
“You?” Carbón said. “Sorry, but your hands . . . they’re trembling already. My friend, no, let me do it.”
“Not me, my nephew.”
“The boy?” Carbón asked.
All eyes turned to Pedro. Grosst who had turned quite pale the moment Lozada had drawn the knife, shook her head in horror.
Iliana moved next to Pedro and reached for the small wooden bird on the end of its thong. “He carved this, didn’t he?”
Carbón’s eyes widened. “Oh, yes. Of course. Pedro, take it.”
Pedro accepted the knife from Carbón’s outstretched hand and turned it over doubtfully. “It’s a big blade. Too big. And flesh is not wood.”
Torre fixed his nephew with a stern look. “You can either cut out the dead flesh now, or saw off her entire foot in five minutes. And yes, you are the one to do it. No more arguing now. Prove your worth—show them why I brought you instead of your cousin. The rest of you, get a good grip.”
The others tightened their grasp before Grosst could fight her way free. Torre held the affected foot with his gloved hand. The rest took Grosst by the ankle and legs and pressed on her chest to pin her down. The engineer was still struggling, but it was half-hearted, and she was mostly just whimpering in fear, as would anyone when facing a knife without black apple or another soporific to dull the pain.
Pedro, gripping the knife tightly, made one last protest. “I shouldn’t cut flesh with a dirty blade.”
“There’s vinegar in the cellar beneath the breaker,” Iliana said. “We’ll douse the wound once it’s out. Hurry, it’s growing.”
“Cut,” Torre ordered. “Do it now.”
Pedro bent over the foot and pressed the edge of the blade into the flesh. Grosst screamed. The boy flinched, and Torre braced himself for the horror of a botched job or outright balking by his nephew, but Pedro grimly forged on. After the first cut, his movements became more sure. The woman was straining, her miserable cries carrying through the air until Carbón and Iliana were looking out toward the massive breaker building, as if afraid the screams would penetrate the clanking coming from that direction and draw attention.
Or maybe they just couldn’t stand to see the bits of flesh coming off. Torre didn’t want to look, either, but Pedro kept telling him where to shift his grip with the glove so that he didn’t need to touch the blackened flesh himself. He had no choice but to look. Torre almost held his breath, he was so worried about his nephew losing his nerve.
Pedro didn’t. Trimming first the surface skin, then excavating deeper and wider, he worked with a look of intense concentration without ever touching the foot with his fingers, instead flicking away the cut-off pieces as if they were whittled flakes from a troublesome knot he needed to extract from a block of wood without destroying the whole. At last, he straightened, glanced at the blade, and set it carefully to one side.
“You got it all?” Carbón asked.
“Who knows? There’s a lot of blood. But I think so.”
Grosst, hair matted with sweat, groaned and sank back as the others released her. Her foot was a bloody mess, but the blackness hadn’t progressed toward the toes or up the leg, so far as Torre could tell. She’d be in a lot of pain, and she’d eventually need to learn how to use a cane, he thought, but one could live with that, he knew from personal experience.
“Lozada, give Torre the sheath,” Carbón said. “We’ll take the blade in case we need to do more cutting. And we’ll need to carry her, I think.”
“To the breaker to get vinegar?” Iliana asked.
“Right,” Carbón said. “Biggest risk now is that she catches an infection and the foot has to come off anyway.”
The two servants—Lozada and Aquino—glanced at each other, and Lozada said, “There will be questions at the breaker. We’d better make up a story if we want it to be believed.”
“Why two lords of the Quinta are carrying in a woman with part of her foot cut off?” Torre asked, even as Grosst let out a fresh moan. “Yes, I’d say that’s going to be hard to explain.”
“Let’s get the carriages,” Iliana said. “We’ll take her back to Carbón’s manor and treat her there.”
“There are still the stable hands to worry about,” Torre pointed out. “And Carbón’s household staff. Not to mention that Zayas—or what’s left
of him—is still in the mine shaft. From his accent, he’s from the Thousand, am I right?”
Iliana nodded. “That’s right.”
“With a family or whatnot—he has rights. We’re starting to talk about a big cover-up here.”
“That’s why we brought you into this conspiracy in the first place, isn’t it?” she said. “So help us figure it out.”
There was an edge of steel in the young chancellor’s voice, very unlike her gentle tone earlier when she’d been helping him enter the mine. Torre remembered how she’d stayed behind to help him when facing attack from the witherer. Iliana Diamante was no coward, and neither was she as soft as she first appeared.
“That’s what I’m doing,” he said. “Working it out, figuring out how to make it happen. What if instead we hide Grosst here until darkness, while the rest of us—”
Carbón interrupted. “That won’t work. Hiding what happened here, making up a story . . . it’s too big for that now. Zayas, Grosst, the breaker, the stables, the mine workers. And even if we could concoct a convincing story or keep your engineer out of sight, there’s still the question of the artifact. It’s not what we thought it was. It’s not something we can dig out.”
“If we retrieve the other glove . . .” Iliana began.
“Then what, repeat our attempt with the same disastrous results?” Carbón asked. “Wake more witherers to unleash on the city? And that thing . . .” He pointed toward the mine shaft. “What is it? It’s not a drill or a device for spying on the heavens. It’s not an artifact the Luminoso can shove into a vault beneath their temple. It’s something big and dangerous.”
“And alive,” Torre said quietly. The others turned to look at him. “It spoke into my head. Told me to run.”
“That’s right,” Carbón said. “It threatened us. Whatever this device is, some punishment from the Elders or a war machine left behind from the last plenty, we can’t get it out. Not by ourselves.” He drew in a deep breath and let it out, and the worry creasing his brow eased, replaced by a look of resolve. “We have to tell the city—the Quinta, the Luminoso. We tell them everything, and pray that someone, somewhere, has a solution.”
This hung in the air for a long moment, and then the others began to nod. Carbón turned to look at Torre, as if waiting for his final pronouncement. Torre reluctantly joined the others in nodding. But the younger man continued to hold his gaze.
“Sometimes, honesty is the best solution,” Carbón said. His words were slow, deliberate, and, Torre was certain, meant only for him.
Torre thought of the Great Span. For centuries it had loomed above the city, unchanging, witnessing the rise and fall of generations. It had seen the collapse of the Third Plenty, and had survived the chaos, the starvation, the descent into darkness and superstition. And seen a partial, fumbling rebirth, with the rise of the Luminoso to collect what bits of lost knowledge and magic they could, along with the emergence of the Quinta to organize and bring stability to the city.
Only now there was rot beneath the bridge. Torre had seen it with his own eyes, had held it in his hand in the form of an eroded, damaged piece of the undercarriage that Aquino had retrieved in the night and placed on his desk. Torre’s first impulse, driven by fear and doubt, had been to hide the thing, hide everything about the situation. Whatever decay his bridge workers had discovered, surely it could wait a few years until Torre was gone, and his heir could find a solution.
You old fool, he told himself. You only have one responsibility that matters: to safeguard the Great Span and leave it as a legacy for the generations to come.
Yes, it would have been easier to handle this thing thirty years ago. Even ten years ago. But the moment had come now, and he refused to be the old coward who pulled the blankets up around his face while monsters passed by outside the windows.
He returned Carbón’s gaze and gave him a firm nod. The younger man returned the gesture, then turned to Iliana to give her instructions on bringing the carriages around to take them down the hillside. Torre was lost in his thoughts, and he didn’t follow a word of it. The decision, once it had come, was a relief.
No more hiding. No more leaning on his age and exhaustion like a well-trusted cane. His friend was right—there would be no more delays. It was time for Torre to confront his fears head-on.
#
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The trilogy continues with book #2, The Luminoso, and concludes with book #3, Chasm of Fire. To receive notice when my next book is released, visit my web page to sign up for my new releases list, and get a free copy of the first book of my fantasy series, The Dark Citadel, as a welcome. This mailing list is not used for any other purpose, and your email will never be sold or distributed.
Wandering Star (The Quintana Trilogy Book 1) Page 21