‘Nah, most don’t live long enough to cause trouble. We make ’em work the deadlier veins. It’s the arsenic what kills ’em, mostly-we’re pullin’ gold out too, you know. Profit’s gone up three thousand per cent in the past year. E’en my share I’m looking at maybe buying a small estate.’
Gorlas glanced across at this odious creature. ‘You married?’
Cough, spit, ‘Not yet,’ and he grinned, ‘but you know what a rich man can buy, hey?’
‘As part of what I am sure will be an exceptional relationship,’ Gorlas said, where I profit from your work, ‘I am prepared to finance you on such an estate. A modest down payment on your part, at low interest…’
‘Really? Why, noble sir, that would be fine. Yessy, very fine. We can do that all right.’
And when you kick off with no heirs I acquire yet another property in the Estate District. ‘It is my pleasure,’ he said with a smile. ‘Those of us who have done well in our lives need to help each other whenever we can.’’My thoughts too, ‘bout all that. My thoughts exactly.’
Smoke and stenches, voices ringing through dust, oxen lowing as they strained, with overloaded wagons. Gorlas Vidikas and the dying workmaster looked down on the scene, feeling very pleased with themselves.
Harllo squirmed his way out from the fissure, the hand holding the candle stretched out in front of him, and felt a calloused grip wrap round his narrow wrist. The candle was taken and then Bainisk was pulling Harllo out, surprisingly tender but that was Bainisk, a wise veteran all of sixteen years old, half his face a streak of shiny scar tissue through which peered the glittering blue of his eyes-both of which had miraculously escaped damage. He was grinning now as he helped Harllo on to his feet.
‘Well, Mole?’
‘Iron, raw and cold and wide across as three of my hands laid flat.’
‘The air?’
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’
Laughing, Bainisk slapped him on the back. ‘You’ve earned the afternoon. Back to Chuffs you go.’
Harllo frowned. ‘Please, can’t I stay on here?’
‘Venaz giving you more trouble?’
‘Bullies don’t like me,’ Harllo said.
‘That’s ’cause you’re smart. Now listen, I warned him off once already and once is all the warning I give and he knows that so he won’t be bothering you. We need our moles happy and in one piece. It’s a camp law. I’m in charge of Chuffs, right?’
Harllo nodded. ‘Only you won’t be there, will you? Not this afternoon.’
‘Venaz is in the kitchen today. It’ll be all right.’
Nodding, Harllo collected his small sack of gear, which was a little heavier than usual, and set out for upside. He liked the tunnels, at least when the air wasn’t foul and burning his throat. Surrounded by so much solid stone made him feel safe, protected, and he loved most those narrowest of cracks that only he could get through-or the few others like him, still fit with no broken bones and still small enough. He’d only cracked one finger so far and that was on his right hand which he used to hold the candle and not much else. He could pull himself along with his left, his half-naked body slick with sweat despite the damp stone and the trickles of icy water.
Exploring places no one had ever seen before. Or dragging the thick snaking hoses down into the icy pools then calling out for the men on the pumps to get started, and in the candle’s fitful flickering light he’d watch the water level descend and see, sometimes, the strange growths on the stone, and in the crevices the tiny blind fish that-if he could reach-he slid into his mouth and chewed and swallowed, so taking something of this underworld into himself, and, just like those fish, at times he didn’t even need his eyes, only his probing fingers, thetaste and smell of the air and stone, the echoes of water droplets and the click-click of the white roaches skittering away.
Earlier this morning he’d been sent down a crevasse, ropes tied to his ankles as he was lowered like a dead weight, down, down, three then four knots of rope, before his outstretched hands found warm, dry rock, and here, so far below ground, the air was hot and sulphurous and the candle when he lit it flared in a crossflow of sweet rich air.
In the yellow light he looked round and saw, sitting up against a wall of the crevasse not three paces away, a corpse. Desiccated, the face collapsed and the eye sockets shrunken holes. Both legs were shattered, clearly from a fall, the shards sticking through the leathery skin.
Furs drawn up like a blanket, and close to within reach of one motionless, skeletal hand was a rotted bag now split open, revealing two antler picks, a bone punch and a groundstone mallet. A miner, Harllo realized, just like him. A miner of long, long ago.