by Jason Fry
“That would be a really stupid way to wind up working in the mines,” Stax said out loud. That habit was proving hard to break.
“What was that, Stax?” asked Brubbs, poking his head out of the back room.
“He was talking to himself,” Xinzi grumbled.
“So? Let him talk to himself! There’s certainly no point talking to you. That’s the most you’ve said in six weeks.”
Xinzi mumbled something—or at least his lips moved—and he returned to his polishing.
“Now, Stax, here’s what we have in stock,” Brubbs said, returning weighed down with pickaxes of wood, stone, and iron.
Stax decided to get the iron pickaxe; it was a well-made tool, and if he did get home, he’d need to replace everything that Fouge and his raiders had stolen. So what if he had to work for a couple of weeks to afford a berth on a ship? Wouldn’t he have done anything for such a chance while stuck on the desert shore in his ruined tower?
But there was one more thing.
“Could you mount the pick head on a slightly longer stick?” Stax asked. “I want one that’s exactly a block long, and this looks a little short.”
Brubbs looked over at Xinzi, who shrugged.
“I don’t see why not,” Brubbs said. “But can I ask why?”
“It’s what my father always used, and so it’s what I’ve always used,” Stax said.
Stax bought the pickaxe, modified as he’d requested. With nearly all of his credit depleted, he said farewell to Brubbs and Xinzi. He slung his new pickaxe over one shoulder and strolled up the hill to The Tumbles Extraction Company, finding the mine office’s door open. The gray-bearded guard peered at him with no apparent sign of recognition, which Stax decided was a good thing. Stax nodded politely at him and entered the office, where a white-haired, hatchet-faced woman was sitting behind a table piled with ledgers and adorned with a sign that read:
MRS. GUINEVERE TANEY,
MANAGER
She looked a little like Stax’s grandmother, whom he remembered as thin, wiry, and tough, and Stax felt hope blossom somewhere inside him.
Mrs. Taney’s dark-eyed gaze flitted from his clothes to his pickaxe and then settled on his face.
“That pickaxe’s never been used,” she said, making it sound like an accusation. “There’s nary a scratch or scuff on it.”
Stax had been so worried that Mrs. Taney would think poorly of him if he showed up without a pickaxe that he’d never considered she might think poorly of him if he showed up with one. This suddenly struck him as unfair, and he didn’t know what to do, so he stood there with his mouth hanging open, which was basically the opposite of doing something.
“I lost my old one,” he said finally.
“Careless,” Mrs. Taney snapped, in a voice that wasn’t very grandmotherly at all. “We don’t like that here.”
Stax thought of explaining what had happened to him, but decided not to. Mrs. Taney might consider having his house destroyed and being marooned on a barren coast careless too.
I feel like it’s my job to remind you that Stax didn’t know very many people, having spent much of his youth alone with his cats and with trees and flowers—which, while lovely, don’t offer a lot of conversation. And he’d become quite the loner, living by himself on his estate. A little too much of a loner, Stax was beginning to suspect.
Now that he was out in the Overworld, he was discovering something about people that all of us discover eventually: namely, that they’re funny. Not “funny” as in “they make you laugh,” though that’s an excellent quality in a person, but “funny” in the other sense of the word, as in “peculiar.” All of us are peculiar in a lot of ways, most of which are harmless and worry us a lot even though no one else knows about them, or wouldn’t care if they did. But a few of us, unfortunately, are peculiar in ways that are difficult or unpleasant to deal with. Stax wasn’t sure which was the case with Mrs. Taney; all he knew was that his interview, if that’s what it was, didn’t seem to be going well.
“Did you ever use the pickaxe you lost?” Mrs. Taney asked after a moment.
“Yes,” Stax said, and decided to try being charming. “Why, I’ve been a miner all my life, in fact. I’m Stax—Stax Stonecutter. ‘Stonecutter by name and stonecutter by trade,’ that’s what my father used to say.”
Stax had hoped the Stonecutter name would cause Mrs. Taney to look up in surprised recognition, but she just made an odd noise, something between “huh” and “hmm” and a grunt.
“Any chance you knew my father?” Stax asked. “He traveled a lot, working for our family mining company. I’d hoped maybe he’d visited Tumbles Harbor.”
“Never heard of anyone named Stonecutter,” Mrs. Taney said, and Stax hung his head as she worked a ledger free of its pile and opened it. “Now, as to your qualifications. Are you afraid of heights?”
“No,” Stax said, remembering Fouge Tempro shrinking back from the edge of the stairs in the Stonecutter mine, the one he’d left flooded and ruined.
“Any history of claustrophobia? That’s a fear of tight spaces.”
“I know what it is.”
“Good. And do you have a history of it?”
“No history of claustrophobia.”
“Are you afraid of the dark?”
“No.”
“Are you afraid of falling into lava and burning to death?”
“What?”
“Are you afraid of falling—”
“Of course I’m afraid of that. Anyone with any sense at all would be afraid of that.”
“Hmm,” said Mrs. Taney, making a checkmark in a different row.
“The trick is not to fall into lava in the first place, isn’t it?” Stax asked. “My grandmother taught my father how to avoid that, and he taught me. He also showed me how to make sure you’re not digging beneath a pool of it. That’s the real danger, down in a mine.”
“I’m not hiring your father or grandmother,” said Mrs. Taney. “How about being hacked apart by zombies, shot full of arrows by skeletons, or blown to smithereens by creepers? Do any of those things concern you?”
“Very much so.”
“And yet you want to be a miner,” Mrs. Taney said, leaning back and folding her arms over her chest.
“Those things you mention are bad, but they only happen if you make mistakes down in the mine,” Stax said. “Properly placed light sources keep monsters out. If you break into a cavern or rift, you block it off and look for a way around it, or move slowly into it with enough personnel and clear it of hazards. These are all things I learned, working in my family’s mine.”
Mrs. Taney stared at Stax for what felt like quite a while. Then, to his surprise, she smiled.
“It’s good to have someone come in who has a little common sense,” she said. “Most of the applicants we get barely know which end of the pickaxe goes into the rock. When can you start?”
Stax hadn’t necessarily been looking for a job, but with no leads on Fouge or on how to get home, and with his rapidly dwindling resources…
“Now?” Stax asked.
“A young man in a hurry, that’s also good,” Mrs. Taney said. “Since you’re not obviously an idiot or otherwise unfit for duty, let me explain how we do business. We work in three-person crews: two miners digging, one supervising. Everyone switches roles. Ore and gems are collected and brought to the surface. You get paid for every day you work, plus a bonus for anything your crew finds. Low bonuses for diorite and granite, higher for coal, iron, and redstone, premium for gold, lapis lazuli, and diamonds.”
“How about emeralds?”
“If you find any below the Tumbles, you’ll be the first,” Mrs. Taney said. “You’ll start working in the upper levels, on an ore crew. This is Mr. Barnacle’s month running the ore crews and he has an opening, so I’ll place
you with him. You’ll find him an interesting character, I think.”
Stax wasn’t sure what that meant, and he really wasn’t sure he liked the way that sounded, but Mrs. Taney wasn’t finished.
“Mr. Barnacle can be a handful, but be patient and put up with him and in a couple of weeks you’ll move to a gem crew. Do poorly, on the other hand, and I’ll get rid of you—and there won’t be any warnings. Any questions?”
“Is there a place I can sleep?” Stax asked.
“Miners’ dormitory. If you sleep or eat there when you’re not on a shift, it comes out of your wages. If you’re below ground working, no charge. Anything else?”
Stax shook his head, feeling a little dazed at how quickly the situation had changed. “I don’t think so.”
“Then welcome aboard,” Mrs. Taney said. “Go see Ms. Lea at the headhouse. She’ll assign you a bed and a chest for your personal items and outfit you with torches and rations. If she gives you the okay, you’ll go down with Barnacle’s next crew. Good luck, Mr. Stonecutter.”
Stax shook hands with Mrs. Taney, took his pickaxe, and headed for the quarry entrance.
“Come to think of it, Grandmother was a pretty tough old bird too,” he said to himself, and the memory made him smile.
The troublesome Mr. Barnacle * Extraction methods explained, and complained about * The tale of the Brandywine Hill Mine
And so Stax became a miner with The Tumbles Extraction Company.
The other miners on Mr. Barnacle’s crews were familiar to him from his long-ago memories of being an apprentice down in the Stonecutter mine; they weren’t the same people, of course, but they reminded Stax of the miners who’d been employed by his family back then.
Cresop liked to work in silence, disliking any sound other than his powerfully muscled arms reducing block after block of rock to loose debris. Hodey was little more than a kid, and loved to talk, telling everyone about the great things he was going to do after he struck it rich as a miner. Billups was what Stax’s father had called a mineshaft lawyer, full of complaints about how things were run and opinions about what should be different. Tanner had a keen eye for changes in the composition of rock, but was careless about safety measures and kept forgetting equipment. Jirwoh, on the other hand, would refuse to dig if he suspected anything wasn’t exactly as it should be. Then there were the miners who left no particular impression beyond wanting to do their jobs and go home—Pyx, Gibbons, Ulias, and others whose names he hadn’t got straight yet.
The only miner Stax couldn’t figure out was a young woman named Osk Fikar.
Osk had pale skin and wild squiggles of red hair. She wasn’t a particularly good miner. For one thing, she wasn’t very strong, often stopping to slump over her pickaxe while the hardier miners were still carving away at the rock. But she was also frequently distracted, telling anyone who’d listen about fantastic inventions she’d dreamed up and insisted would change the world. The key to these wonderful machines, Osk explained, was redstone.
Stax was familiar with redstone from the Stonecutter mine: It was a gleaming red mineral found deep underground, and an ingredient for making compasses and clocks. But demand for those things had never been enormous, so redstone tended to pile up. Pretty but purposeless, his grandmother had said, and Stax had never had any reason to think differently.
The other miners mostly tolerated Osk because she was amiable and cheerful. Except for Mr. Barnacle, who detested Osk and looked for any opportunity to berate her.
Remember our discussion about people being funny in the sense of peculiar, and the kind of peculiar that unfortunately creates a burden for others? Well, I’m afraid that describes Mr. Barnacle pretty well.
Stax knew within seconds that his relationship with Barnacle wasn’t going to be a good one. He was a glowering hulk of a man who shook Stax’s hand with a grip that was hard enough to hurt, then said, “So, you’re the rich kid from a family business.”
Stax opened his mouth to explain that his possessions consisted of his clothes, his pickaxe, a wooden sword, a bed, two arrows (but no bow), a length of spider silk, a compass, and a very small amount of credit at the Tumbles Harbor general store. He was pretty sure that didn’t add up to being rich. But he sensed Barnacle wouldn’t be interested—and, indeed, the crew boss was already warning him that he was A Man Who Didn’t Tolerate Layabouts, that mining was A Very Serious Business, and loudly saying other things that were meant to inform Stax and all the other miners within earshot that he, Mr. Barnacle, was a man who must be respected.
So Stax limited himself to saying “yes, sir” and “no, sir” and hoped that he and Barnacle would get along better once the crew boss saw that Stax really did know about mining.
(The funny thing was that Stax had to admit he had been something of a layabout until very recently, doing nothing more vigorous than chopping down the occasional young oak. He tried to remember the last time he’d been down in one of the Stonecutter mines to actually work.)
Stax had the good sense not to share any of that with Barnacle, resolving to work hard and give the crew boss nothing to complain about. To his relief, he found that the days spent hacking timber from the shipwreck and rowing had toughened up his hands and strengthened his arms; a full day of labor in the mines, while not exactly relaxing, was something he could handle.
Stax was more surprised to discover that he actually enjoyed being underground again, after so long. The routines of digging through stone in search of ore soon came back to him—placing torches, feeling the head of the pickaxe bite into the rock, breaking down a block of stone in front of you, clearing it away, and seeing what had been revealed.
He also remembered the precautions his father had taught him, like making sure no one was right behind you when you swung your pickaxe, keeping the mine well lit, inspecting the ceiling and walls and floors for dripping water or excess heat, and listening for the growl of zombies or the music of running water.
All of those things came back to Stax. So did the pleasures of being underground: the cool air, the clean lines of the revealed stone, and the oddly sharp, faintly burnt smell left behind when iron struck rock. It wasn’t so bad, working beneath the Tumbles; he didn’t want to do it for the rest of his life, or for any longer than he had to, but it wasn’t the ordeal Stax had feared it might be.
Or at least that was true when Barnacle left Stax and the other miners alone. Unfortunately, that was rarely the case. Barnacle always found some reason to criticize Stax’s crew, with Stax himself attracting his angriest and loudest complaints. Most of these complaints added up to Stax being slow, both as a digger and as a supervisor. In Barnacle’s eyes, Stax took extra time to do anything, not because he valued safety but because he was lazy.
Their first real confrontation happened about two weeks after Stax started. It was the last day of the month, meaning tomorrow Barnacle’s crews would start working in the deeper sections of the mines, where gems were more common, while the crews working for the other crew boss, the mild-mannered Mr. Koppe, would shift to ore mining. That meant the possibility of larger bonuses for Barnacle’s miners, and for Barnacle himself.
It was Stax’s turn to supervise, and so he’d ordered his diggers—today they were Hodey and Jirwoh—to mine the way his father had taught him. First they dug a main feeder tunnel that was two blocks wide, meaning the diggers could work side by side, and sixty-four blocks long. Torches were placed on the left-hand side of the tunnel—and only on the left—every eight blocks.
You’re probably thinking those measurements sound too exact to be real, but I can tell you that they’re correct. So now you’re probably wondering how Stax could measure distance so precisely, down there under the ground. The answer is in the modification he’d asked Brubbs to make to the handle of his pickaxe. By making the handle exactly one block long, Stax could use his pickaxe not just for chiseling out rock but
also as a precise measuring stick. His diggers had admired that little trick when Stax first showed it to them, and had become so precise in their digging that Stax rarely, if ever, had to correct them.
Not even Jirwoh found anything to complain about, except for being distracted by Hodey’s ornate descriptions of the undersea house of glass he was going to build for his sweetheart with the wealth they’d make after they found seams of diamonds for the company. Stax remembered the spiky, scaly guardians of the Sea of Sorrows—the nasty burn on his chest had left a puckered pink scar he suspected he’d have for life—and shivered a little, but decided not to tell Hodey of his brush with death. So long as Hodey did his work, there was no harm in letting him dream of castles beneath the waves.
Digging the main feeder tunnel took up much of the morning, and turned up nothing but a few short veins of diorite and one of granite. On Stax’s insistence, he and Hodey and Jirwoh took the loose stone they’d dug out and hauled it back to a junction of tunnels where there was a headhouse, depositing the stone in chests for disposal later. When they returned, Stax surveyed the clean, straight lines of the feeder tunnel with satisfaction.
“Okay, gentlemen, now it’s time to make some money,” he said, directing them to dig a branch tunnel on either side of the main feeder tunnel. These two branch tunnels, he explained, would be precisely sixteen blocks long, with one torch eight blocks in and another at the end of the tunnel.
Jirwoh was halfway down the right-hand tunnel when he intersected a seam of coal; a few minutes later, Hodey cried out that he’d uncovered iron in the ceiling of his tunnel. Stax calmed the excited Hodey and fetched Jirwoh. The vein of iron ore snaked across the ceiling for several blocks, while the coal vein was long enough to reach where the next branch tunnel would be.
Once the veins were exhausted and the coal and iron-rich ore set aside, Stax told the others to fill in the gaps with cobblestone, restoring the pristine lines of the branch tunnels instead of leaving them honeycombed with gaps. Then he ordered a halt and they sat in the feeder tunnel, eating bread sweetened and softened with some honey Stax had bought on a trip to the general store.
