Sector Four did not smell of coal.
That was the thing Jim could never make anyone above understand, back when there had still been an above and people in it who asked him questions. Coal smelled clean. Coal smelled of old forests and lamp oil and money. The lower barracks of Rosalie Colony smelled of wet straw going to rot, of rancid grease scraped out of the guards' pans and issued as supper, and over all of it, sweet and thick and inescapable, the smoke of burning nightshade which Overseer Taron called incense, and which the children called the sleeping smoke, because it made the dreams worse and the waking slower.
Ninety-one of them in a stone chamber the size of a barn, in the dark, in the cold.
Ninety-one. Jim had counted at the last bell and he would count again at this one, and he did it the way he did everything now: without moving his lips, without moving his head, with his eyes half-lidded and his back to the bedrock.
Three things kept a body alive down here. Don't be first. Don't be last. Don't be seen counting.
They all wore the same garment. That was the part that got into your sleep. One pattern, one cut, one size regardless of the body inside it: a stiff collarless tunic of coarse grey burlap that hung to the knee on the big ones and to the ankle on the small, sacking of the kind you'd put turnips in, seamed at the shoulders with twine. It went black at the hem with sludge and stayed black. It went stiff with old sweat and stayed stiff. It did nothing whatsoever against the cold of a shaft nine hundred feet down, and it scratched God, how it scratched until every child in that room wore a second garment underneath the first, a map of raw red rash and soot ground into the raw.
And stamped over the heart of each one, in a dye that had been mixed too thick and had run: a crude wine-red circle.
The mark of the mine's faith. A ring, a hoop, an open round mouth.
Jim had been an Iron-rank sellsword, once. Fourteen months ago. He had a card for it, somewhere in a property drawer in the upper offices, with his name spelled wrong and his rank stamped in the lowest ink they made:
Iron
. The bottom rung of the guild ladder, the rank they handed to anyone who could walk into a room and walk out of it. He used to be embarrassed by it.
Now he thought about it most nights, the way a man thinks about a country he can't go back to.
The bell went.
They formed up the way they always formed up, and Jim watched who moved where, because that was the only honest register of what people were.
Galya moved first. She always moved first. She came up the length of Row Two at a hard walk, hauling the smallest ones out of the aisle by the shoulder-seam of their sacks and dumping them behind her, and when she reached the head of the row she stopped and set her feet and stood there. Sixteen, maybe. Shoulders like a dock hand from eleven months on the coal sleds, hands so calloused the skin didn't crack anymore, jaw set at an angle that had got her whipped four times that Jim had counted and probably more that he hadn't.
She stood where the whip-line started. She did it every single bell, and she had never once said a word about it, and Jim had never once been able to decide whether that made her the bravest person in the mountain or just the most tired.
"You're short," she said to him without turning around.
"Row's short. Not me."
"Same thing to him."
Behind her, Amala came down out of the upper bunks with her hands full of somebody else's water bowl.
The Flora had a way of moving that the mine had not managed to take off something loose and stem-like in the spine and Amala still had it, even now, even with her smock hanging off her like a sheet on a nail. Her hair grew the way theirs did, in a crown of living saffron-flower, and once it had been the brightest thing in the sector. It was still bright. It was just shedding. Small orange petals came away from her as she walked and went down into the mud and the black, three or four with every step, and she had stopped trying to catch them around the ninth week.
Her eyes were amber and they had not dimmed at all, which frightened Jim more than the petals did. There was a sharpened iron rod pushed through the twine at her waist, filed on the bunk-frame over nine nights. He'd watched her file it. He'd said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wasn't
don't
, and he had no right.
"Pip's not up," she said.
"I know."
"Jim"
"I know."
Old Edward was already in place at the wall, doing what Edward did, which was lean. Thirty years a mine guide, twelve of them in Rosalie, and the coal had got so far into him that his skin had gone a permanent bruised slate, the dust sitting under the surface in a thousand small blue scars where cuts had closed over it. He'd been broken a long time before Jim arrived. Whatever had done it, he'd never said.
He talked, though. To Jim, mostly, in the dark, in a flat mumble you had to lean in for.
"Feel that?" he said now.
"Feel what?"
"Exactly." Edward put two fingers flat against the bedrock. "Nothing. No pulse in it. Third bell running." He said it the way a physician says
no heartbeat
. "Gate's wide, boy. Wider than I've ever known it."
Further along the wall, in the deepest shadow the chamber had, Izêm sat with his back against the stone and his forearms across his knees, and the marks on him were moving.
Nobody knew what he was. He'd come in on a prison draft out of Zenith with an adventurer's calluses and an adventurer's silence and had offered no more than his name in eight months. His skin was dark and over it ran patterns not tattoos; Jim had been near enough to be certain lines that drifted and curled across his throat and arms like ink dropped in still water, rearranging themselves slowly when nothing was happening and faster when something was. Right now they were sliding up the sides of his neck and pulsing, faint and rhythmic, once every second or so, like something counting down.
They always did that just before the overseers came in.
"He's early," Izêm said, to nobody.
And Seriva, who was the only adult in the chamber anyone would have followed anywhere, went on doing her round.
She was Flora and she was old, properly old, the crown on her head gone white and woody, the leaves at her temples curled and how she had ended up on a labour draft was a story she declined to tell. She moved along the sick line at the back wall with a strip of damp cloth, touching foreheads, turning faces toward her, saying two words to each and moving on. Wherever she had been recently, the air smelled faintly of crushed lilies. It made no sense. There was not a flower within nine hundred feet of that room, nor light to grow one, and still, when Seriva bent over a shivering six-year-old, the rot went out of the air for a moment.
It was the only warmth anybody got in Sector Four, and it was free, and Taron had never worked out how to tax it.
Jim swept the room one more time.
Lira at the end of Row Three, planted, hand drifting near the shiv at her hip the way another person's hand drifts to a pocket. Soren two places on from her, thumb going back and forth, back and forth, over a folded scrap of pelt hidden under his burlap, a map, Jim knew, drainage vents and dead-ends and grades, four years of it, inked in coal and grease. Soren had been a ghost of bone and tendon for so long that Jim sometimes forgot to include him in the count.
Toby stood apart. Toby always stood apart, up near the mouth of the guard corridor where the torchlight reached, smoothing down the front of his tunic over and over as though he could flatten the itch out of it. He was watching the guard quarters. He was always watching the guard quarters. Jim had stopped hating him for it about a month ago, on the night he'd worked out that Toby had traded away three names for a strip of dried meat and had then split the meat four ways among the smallest kids and eaten none of it himself.
Some people were cowards. Some people were just the last honest arithmetic in a room, and Jim had decided he did not have the standing to judge which.
And Milo.
Milo stood at the front of Row One with his arms loose at his sides, facing the empty aisle where Taron would walk, and he was smiling.
He had been like that for six weeks. He did not answer his name. He did not flinch at the whip or reach for food, and the sector medics had stopped bandaging what he did to himself between bells because he took the bandages off. The doctrine had gone all the way into him and came out the other side, and whatever was standing there in Milo's tunic now was not a boy who had been converted. It was a boy who had been
emptied
, and something else had moved into the room and hung its coat up.
Jim looked at him for a second longer than was safe.
Ninety-one.
Then the nightshade smoke thickened, and the torches at the corridor mouth doubled, and the tithe began.
Overseer Taron came down the aisle in wine-coloured silk.
That was the obscenity of him, and it never got any less obscene: in a room of ninety-one children in identical grey sacking, the master of Rosalie's lower shafts wore flowing silk over polished leather, and his skin caught the torchlight because he oiled it, and the oil was scented, and when he passed you the smell of him was bergamot and warm cedar and it made your mouth water and then made you want to be sick.
He walked slowly, hands loose, looking into faces. He had a good face. That was the other obscenity. He was perhaps forty, clean-shaven, with the mild, attentive, slightly sorrowful expression of a man who has just been told bad news about someone he likes.
At his shoulder came Kaelen with the slate.
Kaelen was the size of a door and carried a mace with an iron-bound head, and in fourteen months Jim had never once heard him raise his voice. That was what you had to understand about Kaelen. He wasn't a monster. He was a clerk. He carried a slate in his left hand and a chalk on a string, and his job was to make the numbers on the slate agree with the coal in the yard, and the mace was simply the instrument by which the numbers were adjusted.
"Children," said Taron.
The word landed in that chamber like a stone in a well.
"You are cold."
Nobody answered. Nobody ever answered.
"You are hungry. Your hands are open and bleeding and you would give anything for one hour of fire and one bowl of something hot." He turned as he walked, taking them all in, and his voice was not loud; the vault did the work for him, rolling it off the ribbed stone. "And in the upper colony tonight there are men lying on feather beds who want
nothing at all
. Who is full? Who is warm?"
He stopped. He spread his hands.
"Which of you would trade?"
Not a sound. He nodded, slowly, as though they had all spoken at once and said something that moved him.
"Not one," he said. "Good. Because a man who wants nothing
is
nothing. He is a stopped clock. He is a dead thing that has not yet been told." Taron began to walk again. "The scholars of Zenith wrote down a list, long ago, of the things they were most afraid of, and they called it a list of sins, and at the head of it they put the Wanting.
Lust
, they wrote. The appetite. The reaching. They were frightened of it because they had seen what it does to a soul that is merely comfortable." He smiled. "They were cowards with good handwriting."
Edward's fingers were still flat on the stone. Jim heard him breathe out through his nose, very slowly.
He didn't invent any of it
, Edward had told him once, in the dark, in that flat mumble.
That's the sick part. Chrysoula's a real woman, a boy. Amazon out of the Red Light District, big as a barn door, worships the Goddess of Desire and means by it the wanting to live. I want to eat. Wanting to put your body in the way of someone smaller than you. That's the whole faith. That's it.
A wet cough.
Taron read the same words and took the sign off the door and put it on this.
"Your bleeding hands are not a punishment," Taron said. "They are the offering. Every ache in you is a prayer that your body is saying without your permission. To suffer for this mountain is to be
heard
." He drew the word out. "How many of them, up there in the light, are heard?"
Milo, at the head of Row One, made a small sound of pure happiness.
Taron rested his hand on Milo's head for a moment as he passed, the way you'd pet a dog, and moved on.
And stopped in front of Pip.
Pip was ten. He looked eight, because everything down here looked two years younger than it was until quite suddenly it looked forty. He was drowning inside a tunic cut for someone twice his size, the neck hole so wide it had slid off one shoulder, and his left wrist was swollen to the thickness of his forearm and set crooked at the joint, because it had been broken in the spring and nobody had done anything about it, and the bone had gone ahead and healed however it liked.
His knees were knocking. Jim could hear them.
Kaelen looked at the slate. He held it up toward the torch to get the light on it. He had to squint slightly; the chalk smudged in the damp.
"Sector Four," he read. "Row Two. Short by two baskets."
"Please." Pip's voice came out as nothing. He tried again. "Please, High Master. The seam went to slate. There's no coal in it, there's just slate, I hit it all shift, I"
"I believe you," Taron said gently.
Pip stopped. Something terrible happened in his face: hope.
"I believe you entirely, child." Taron crouched, silk pooling in the muck, so that they were eye to eye. "The seam is slate. Of course it is. And yet the baskets are short." He tipped his head. "Which of those two facts do you imagine I can take up the shaft to Lord Diamante's factors?"
Pip's mouth opened.
"Your flesh resists," Taron said, and stood, and turned away, and made a small motion with two fingers, the way a man signals for more wine.
Jim moved before he decided to.
That was the thing he came back to, afterwards, over and over, down in the dark. Fourteen months of don't-be-first, and his body simply overruled him. He was out of the line and across the aisle and down on his knees in the filth with his arms around Pip before Kaelen's arm had finished coming up and he got his broad back between the mace and the boy, and folded himself down over him, and put one hand flat over Pip's exposed ear.
The mace came down across Jim's shoulder blade.
There is a sound bone makes when it does not break, a deep dull knock that goes up through the neck and into the roots of the teeth, and Jim's vision went white at the edges and stayed white for a count of three. He did not make a noise. That mattered. He had worked out a long time ago that the noise was what they were buying.
Kaelen shifted his grip and drove his boot in under Jim's ribs, twice, methodically, the way you'd kick a stuck cart wheel.
Jim held on.
"Pity," said Taron, from somewhere above and to the left. He sounded genuinely curious. "Softness. In
my
house."
The whip opened Jim's back through the burlap in a line from his right shoulder to his left hip. The sacking split. So did the skin under it. Jim locked every muscle he had and kept his body rigid and kept his hand over the boy's ear, because Taron had started laughing a warm, delighted, avuncular laugh, the laugh of a man watching a child take its first steps and Pip was ten years old and did not need that in his head for the rest of his life.
Three more. Jim counted them. Counting was what he had.
Then the silk moved away, and the torchlight went with it, and Kaelen's chalk squeaked once on the slate as he adjusted a number, and the tithe went on down Row Three.
Jim let go by degrees.
Pip was shaking so hard his teeth were chattering, both arms clamped around Jim's neck, the ruined wrist pressed between them. Jim got a thumb under the boy's chin and wiped the mud off his face with the ball of it, slowly, the way you'd clean a plate.
"Hey. Hey." His own voice came out wrecked; there was blood in the back of his throat and he swallowed it. "Quiet now, Pip. Look at me. That's it."
"He's g-going to"
"No, he isn't." Jim got him up onto the bunk. "I've got you. You hear me? I've got you."
Behind him, Galya arrived with a strip of wet cloth she'd got from somewhere and started on his back without asking, and hissed once through her teeth at what she found, and said, in a voice pitched for exactly one listener:
"That was stupid."
"Yes."
"Do it again next bell and I'll hold your coat."
Amala knelt by the bunk with her hands full of orange petals she'd caught out of her own hair, pressing them one by one into the swelling round Pip's wrist. They were cool. They actually helped; Flora petals did something, nobody knew what. Her jaw was tight enough to creak.
"Don't," Jim said, watching her free hand drift to the iron rod at her waist.
"I said nothing."
"You were about to."
"I was about to say
nothing
," Amala said, "which is what I say every bell, and one day I am going to run out of it."
Along the wall, Izêm's marks had stopped counting down. They had gone still dead still, all of them, frozen mid-curl across his collarbone and Izêm was looking straight up at the vaulted ceiling with his head cocked, the way a man looks at a roof he has just heard something walk across.
And Edward, two feet from Jim's ear, had gone the colour of ash under the coal.
"Boy," he whispered. "Boy, put your hand on the rock."
Jim did.
Nothing. No hum, no flutter, no faint arterial tick of the leyline that had been under this mountain since before anyone had put a name to it. The stone was as inert and quiet as a table.
"That's the Gate open," Edward said. "Wide. He's been feeding it for years to keep the coal condensing, that's the whole trick, that's the only reason Rosalie's worth a copper you hold a Gate open and the pressure on the other side packs the seams for you." He was talking fast now, the mumble gone. "But you can't hold a door open and stop things coming
through
it. There's a hive boss down there. Guild classification, proper one, six-leg subterranean. It's been down there the whole time and he
knows
, he's known it for years, he keeps it fed and quiet and he does not tell the Colony because the day the Colony finds out is the day they close the Gate and Rosalie's just a hole in a hill."
Jim looked at his hand on the dead stone.
"How long's it been quiet?"
"Three bells."
"And what does that mean?"
Edward laughed, once, without any humour in it at all.
"It means it's stopped digging," he said. "It means it's finished."
At midnight, the mountain came apart.
The first blast took the upper gates. Jim was asleep with Pip's head on his arm and the whole world simply
hit
him a flat concussive slam that came through the bedrock and lifted every body in that chamber an inch off the boards and dropped them again and then the sound arrived, rolling down nine hundred feet of shaft, doubling and redoubling off the stone.
Pitch-oil charges. Somebody had put pitch-oil charges on iron doors a yard thick.
Then the smoke came.
It came down through the ventilation shafts in dense black ropes, and it was sulfur, deliberately sulfur, cut with something that grabbed the back of the throat and squeezed the kind of smoke you do not use to burn a building down. The kind you use to drive things out of holes.
Ninety-one children woke up in the dark, in the cold, unable to breathe.
"
DOWN!
" Jim was on his feet with no memory of standing. "Everyone get
down
, the air's better at the floor Galya!"
"Row Two!"
"Take them to the vent, the old drainage vent, Soren knows the way"
"
Soren!
" Galya's voice, cracking. "Soren, get up here!"
The corridor mouth lit orange and stayed lit.
Through it came the Knights of the Holy Land.
Jim had seen Holy Land colours twice in his life, both times from a long way off, and had thought them beautiful. Up close, in a smoke-filled chamber, coming through a doorway four abreast with their visors down, they were not beautiful. They were
efficient
. They came in without shouting. That was the worst of it: no war cry, no challenge, no demand for surrender. They came in at a walk with their broadswords low and they began to work through the room the way men work through a field of wheat, and Jim understood in one cold instant what Lord Diamante had actually ordered.
Not a raid. Not a liberation.
Cleanse the mine. Leave no witness.
Because Rosalie's coal had been condensing for eleven years off an open Gate and an illegal hive, and somebody very high up had signed for it, and the only tidy version of that story was a mine that had suffered a tragic collapse with no survivors to be interviewed.
And with them, moving apart from them, came the rifleman.
He was broad-shouldered, older than the knights, with a deep white scar cut through one eyebrow, and he carried a long-barrelled rifle banded in copper that did not look like any guild issue Jim had ever seen. He moved in short, unhurried diagonals, and he fired in bursts of three, and between bursts he said numbers under his breath.
A cultist came at him from a side aisle with a pick raised. Blue-white light broke across the rifleman's skin in a shimmer like sun on water Notion, actual Notion, the real article, the thing Jim had only ever read about on a guild card and the pick head struck it and
stopped
, six inches off his shoulder, hanging there in the air for a full second before the shimmer flexed and threw it wide.
The rifle cracked. The cultist went down.
"Alistair!" one of the knights called. "Left block!"
"Twelve," said the rifleman, to himself, and reloaded on the move.
Then there was no more time for watching anything.
The chamber became a stampede in the dark.
Ninety-one children in identical grey sacks, invisible to each other in black smoke, running in ninety-one directions at once. Jim got Pip under one arm and put his other hand flat on Amala's back and shoved, and shouted until his voice tore, and kept shouting because it was the only rope any of them had.
Toby ran the wrong way.
Jim saw him do it with a flash of grey angling up the aisle
toward
the knights, both arms over his head, waving a folded paper above the smoke line. Jim knew that paper. Everyone knew that paper. It was Toby's list: ninety-one names, and next to each one, in a careful clerk's hand he'd taught himself, which of them were slaves and which of them were converts.
"I'm not one of them!" Toby was screaming. "I'm not I've got names, I've got
all
their names, I'm a prisoner, I'm a
prisoner
"
The knight did not slow down and did not look at the list.
Toby went down with a broadsword through the chest and the list still in his fist, and the knight put a boot on his shoulder to draw the blade back out and kicked what was left into the drainage gutter without breaking stride, and Jim thought, with a clarity that never afterwards left him:
He was fourteen. He split the meat four ways.
At the far end of the chamber, up on the central altar under the burning braziers, Taron had begun to sing.
He stood over the stone with his arms wide and his wine-coloured silks catching the firelight, and he was not running, and he was not afraid, and his voice went out over the screaming with the same unhurried warmth he used at the tithe.
Milo climbed the altar steps to him. Willingly. Gladly. He went up with his arms slightly out from his sides like a boy walking a fence rail, and his face, as he turned to lie down on the stone, held an expression Jim had last seen on somebody receiving a name-day gift.
"
Offer it!
" Taron roared, and the dagger came up. "Let the Sin take this mountain! Let it eat what it is owed"
Jim turned Pip's head into his chest and kept moving.
He did not see the blade come down. He heard the crowd, and he heard Taron's laugh climb into a register that was no longer entirely a man's, and he heard underneath everything, underneath the rifle and the screaming and the roar of the fires a low grinding groan that seemed to come from the floor.
The bedrock beneath the altar split.
It went with a noise like a ship breaking its back, and the flagstones lifted and tilted and slid, and out of the black wound in the floor came the thing that had been finished digging for three bells.
It was the size of a cottage and it was the colour of anthracite, and Jim's mind, which was not working well, reached for
insects
and then recoiled, because nothing that size has any business being made of plates. Six legs came over the lip of the pit and took hold of the stone and the stone cracked under them. Its back was segmented, glossy, faintly wet. It had no eyes that Jim could find.
It was mostly mouth.
Taron stopped singing.
He stood on the altar with the dagger in his hand and looked at what had come up out of his own foundations, and for one half of one second Jim watched the sorrowful, attentive, avuncular face do something it had never done in fourteen months: it
wanted
something. It wanted to be somewhere else. It wanted, desperately, with its whole soul, and the wanting was written all over it, the purest act of devotion Overseer Taron had ever performed.
The mandibles came forward faster than anything that heavy should move and closed around his waist.
The sound was not dramatic. It was wet and brief and entirely ordinary, the sound of a foot going through ice.
Wine-coloured silk tore. Taron screamed high, thin, astonished, a child's scream in a grown man's throat and the hive boss lifted him off the altar and folded backwards into the pit and took him down, and the scream went with it, getting smaller and smaller until the mountain swallowed it whole.
He had stamped an open red mouth on the chest of every child in Sector Four.
The mountain had simply gone and grown one.
"
The vent! MOVE!
"
Jim went through the chaos with Pip clamped under his right arm and Amala's fist knotted in the back of his tunic and Galya driving four of the small ones ahead of her like a sheepdog. Behind them the pit was disgorging more of them; smaller, faster, the brood and the knights had stopped advancing and formed up in a line and began, at last, to do something Jim could respect.
Soren reached the rusted hatch first.
He had the pelt map out in the smoke and his thumb on the right junction and he was pointing and shouting the grade "
Left at the sump, it's left, it drops eight feet and then it's flat all the way to the cut
" and he got the hatch handle in both hands and hauled, and the seal broke with a shriek of rust, and cold clean air came out of it in a rush that Jim would remember for the rest of his life.
Then one of them came out of the dark on the left and took him.
It happened so fast that Soren was still pointing. The mandibles closed and he went sideways off his feet and away into the black, and the map came out of his hand and turned over twice in the air, four years of work, and landed in the mud.
Galya screamed his name. Jim grabbed her collar and dragged her backwards through the hatch.
"Kael" She was fighting him, clawing at his wrist. "Jim, I
had
him, I had his hand, Kael's still"
He had been six. He had been ripped out of her grip in the stampede thirty seconds earlier, somewhere under the boots of fifty running children, and there had never been a chance, and Jim knew that, and he shoved her through the hatch anyway because knowing it wasn't going to help either of them tonight.
"Go.
Go.
"
He turned to get Pip through.
Overhead, the fire found the pitch-oil store.
The roof of the gallery detonated. Jim's world became a single white noise; the shockwave took him off his feet and threw him back the way he'd come, and tons of rock and burning timber came down in a wall between him and the hatch, and a support beam the thickness of a man's waist hit the floor across his shins.
When the ringing thinned, there was a mountain where the doorway had been.
"
JIM!
"
Amala's voice. Through the stone. Muffled, and very close, and utterly unreachable.
"
JIM!
"
He got his knees under him. He got his hands on the rubble. He was still trying to move a rock the size of a cart when the second voice came, and it came from behind.
"There you are."
Kaelen walked out of the smoke.
His face had lost the clerk. Whatever Kaelen had been holding down for however many years had got out during the blast, and what was left was a very large man with a soot-blacked face and an iron-bound mace, and no slate, and nothing to count.
Jim turned around, put his back against the rubble that separated him from everyone he loved, and raised his fists, because he was an Iron-rank sellsword and it was the only thing his body knew how to do.
Kaelen swung with both hands.
CRACK.
The mace took Jim full in the centre of the chest. The force lifted him off his feet and folded him and slammed him against the rock wall, and he heard his own ribs go in not felt;
heard
, a sound from inside his own body like green sticks snapping and he came off the wall and down onto the stone and could not get up, and could not draw breath, and the breath he did draw came out again dark and frothing over his chin.
Kaelen stood over him and took a moment to settle his grip.
There was a crevice at the base of the wall, eighteen inches high, a drainage gap where the rock had parted centuries ago.
Nothing in Jim decided to go into it. The animal decided. The animal that runs a body after the man in it has stopped issuing orders got hold of his arms and dragged him sideways, and he went into that black gap with his shattered chest scraping the stone, and Kaelen's mace came down where his head had been and struck sparks off the granite.
An arm came in after him to the shoulder. Fingers closed on his ankle.
Jim kicked, and the boot came off in Kaelen's hand, and the floor of the crevice sloped away, and Jim slid.
He went down for a long time.
The tunnel was old water-work, smooth as a throat, canted at maybe thirty degrees, and it carried him down through the dark on his own blood. When it levelled he crawled. When it narrowed he turned his head sideways and crawled anyway. Both legs had stopped reporting somewhere above; they came along behind him like things he was moving house with.
Above and behind, the world got quieter by stages, the way a fever breaks.
First the screaming thinned out. Then the deep grinding of the brood in the gallery faded to a suggestion. For a while the only thing that still reached him was the rifle Alistair's rifle, three cracks and a pause, three cracks and a pause, absurdly steady, somebody up there still doing arithmetic and then that went too.
Then the sulfur thinned, and the air came cold and mineral and clean, and Jim was alone at the bottom of the world.
He counted.
He didn't know why. He'd lost track of what he was counting some time ago; the number just kept going, one hand forward, one hand forward, and somewhere around four hundred he understood that he was dying and that it was going to be here, in the dark, in a hole, nine hundred feet under a colony that would be a rumour by spring.
Ninety-one
, he thought. That had been the count at the last bell. He wondered how many Galya had got through the hatch. Nine? Twelve? If it was twelve, that was
That was something. That was a number you could hold on to.
His breathing had gone wet and shallow and there were long pauses in it now that he was not choosing.
Four hundred and sixteen. The tunnel opened.
He came out onto a floor of virgin stone in a chamber that had never in its existence held a lamp.
And it was not dark.
In the centre of the vault, half-sunk into unbroken bedrock not placed there, not quarried around,
grown
there, with the granite closed over its lower third like a callus over a splinter rested a crystal the size of a millstone.
It was smooth. It had no facets and no flaws. And it was lit from somewhere far inside itself with a soft, deep, rose-coloured light that came out through the stone in slow pulses, the way light comes through a closed eyelid, washing the whole vault pink and then letting it go dark and then washing it pink again.
With each pulse, the rock under Jim's ruined chest hummed.
Not a mechanical hum. A long, low, patient rhythm, perhaps twelve beats to the minute, older than the mountain and entirely unhurried, and Jim who had put his hand on dead stone six hours earlier and been told what that meant understood that Edward had been wrong about the leyline being gone.
It hadn't gone anywhere.
It had just all been coming
here
. It had been coming here for eleven years, condensing, packing, thickening, exactly the way the coal had, and Taron had never known, because Taron had never once in his life gone down as far as the labour did.
Jim lay eight feet from it and could not make that into eighty-eight.
He did it anyway. One hand forward. One hand forward. There was no reason for it; he wasn't going to be saved by a rock. But a man died the way he lived, and Jim had spent fourteen months crawling toward things he couldn't reach, and he was not going to stop in the last two yards of it.
Six feet. Four.
His arms stopped working around three.
He lay on his side with his cheek in the cold grit and the pink light going over him on, off, on and he thought about Pip's fingers locked behind his neck, and Galya standing at the head of the whip-line every single bell, and Seriva bending over a shivering six-year-old with the smell of lilies coming off her in a place that had no flowers in it, and Amala's voice on the other side of a mountain of rock, still shouting his name.
He got one elbow under himself.
He reached out.
And his blood-smeared fingers brushed the cold, smooth, humming face of the crystal.
The light did not pulse.
It
opened
the whole vault gone from rose to a white-pink searing blaze in no time at all, the glare going through Jim's closed eyelids and through the bones of his hand and deep in the ancient core of the thing, something that had been asleep since before there were mountains here to put it under turned over, and found blood on the door, and woke.
Oh
, it said. Not in words. Not in the air.
Oh, hello.
Jim felt himself come loose.
That was the only way he could ever have described it. Not pain he was past pain. Just the sudden, absolute, effortless
detachment
of the thing that had been looking out through his eyes, the way a coat comes off a hook when the hook goes. He came away from his own hands. He came away from the wet rattle in his chest and the grit on his cheek and the shattered architecture of himself, and he was drawn out along his own arm, out through his fingertips, out of the blood and into the stone
into the cold.
Into an enormous, silent, faintly luminous cold, a room with no dimensions and no air and no up, and a long way off in it, something vast and vacated, still warm where it had been lying.
And behind him, receding, getting smaller: a boy's broken body on a stone floor, with something else pouring into it.
Leo came in the way water comes into a boot.
He filled the chest first, and the shattered ribs flexed and ground and rearticulated, one by one, each with a small wet click, drawing back out of the lungs and reassembling along their proper lines. The torn flesh of Jim's back drew shut in a long seam from shoulder to hip. The punctured lung was sealed and inflated. The blood on the floor did not go back in when Leo left it; he seemed to find it interesting but the body above it stopped needing it.
The eyes opened.
They had been brown. They came open burning: a cold, brilliant, unwavering light, the shade of the crystal but harder, and behind them there was an intelligence at work that had nothing to do with a seventeen-year-old sellsword from a labour draft.
Leo sat up.
He did it slowly, testing the way a musician picks up an unfamiliar instrument. He turned the left hand over and looked at the palm. Callused. Chipped nails. A rope-burn scar across the base of the thumb, old and white. He closed the fingers into a fist, opened them, closed them again, and something like delight moved across the face that had been Jim's.
"
Iron
," Leo said out loud, and his voice came out with an accent that had not existed for nine thousand years. He laughed a warm, easy, entirely human laugh, and it was the most obscene thing that vault had ever heard. "They ranked you
Iron
. With these hands."
He got to his feet.
He staggered once, put out a hand, caught the crystal and stopped. I stood there. Rested his palm flat against the smooth, dimming face of it for a moment, the way one might pat a door on the way out of a room.
"Thank you for the knock," he said. "Eleven years of that dreadful little man feeding the Gate, and it takes a dying child to put his hand on the glass."
Far down and very small, in the cold and the quiet, Jim heard it.
Leo tilted the head. Listened to something. From very far above came a faint, regular sound, muffled through nine hundred feet of rock: three cracks, and a pause. Three cracks, and a pause.
"Ah," Leo said. "Company."
He rolled his shoulders. He tested the shattered ribs that were no longer shattered, and the legs that had stopped reporting and now reported beautifully, and he rubbed the drying blood between finger and thumb and considered it with his head on one side, and then he wiped the hand clean on the split grey burlap of the tunic over the heart, over the crude wine-red circle, which was the only part of the garment that had not torn.
A smile spread across Jim's face.
"Well," said Leo, and turned toward the tunnel and the long climb up. "Let's go and see who's left."
Behind him the crystal went dark.
Inside it, Jim began, again, to count.