by Jason Fry
“The light’s back at the gate,” Stax pointed out. “If you’re already at the front door, that’s a little late for the light to come on.”
“Huh. You’re right. I didn’t think of that.”
Osk looked so crestfallen that Stax felt sorry for her. “I’m sure that’s something you can fix pretty easily,” he pointed out.
“It’s a little work, yeah. But you’re right, easily fixed! In fact, I should make it so the light comes on automatically at dusk. That’s a great idea. Thanks, Stax!”
“You’re welcome,” said a bemused Stax, who hadn’t actually thought of anything.
“Anyway, I’m glad to see you. I suggested Mrs. Taney send you over, to look at my inventions, and here you are. So welcome! Come inside!”
“Wait. You asked her to send me?”
“Sure. That trick of yours, with the pickaxe handle? It’s a clever innovation. Mining needs a lot more innovation. And, well, innovation’s practically my middle name. Well, actually it’s Eunice, but never mind that. Come on in, I have a lot to show you!”
The inside of Osk’s house was a mess, with gear lying around as if dispersed by a particularly ferocious windstorm. Osk led Stax to a trapdoor in the corner of the house, pushing a button on the wall next to it. Nothing happened.
“That’s a nuisance,” Osk said after several tries, reaching down to open the trapdoor herself and scuttling down a ladder.
Stax followed her, emerging in a sprawling underground laboratory filled with a bewildering variety of objects: iron rails, squat squares that looked like they were made of cobblestones, and stone blocks with wooden stalks sticking out of them. Tables were covered with books, papers with diagrams scribbled on them, sticky-looking balls that were a sickly green, and mounds of brilliant redstone dust.
“Did you build all this with your wages from mining?” Stax asked, startled.
“What? Oh, no. I’ve only been working for Mrs. Taney because I thought it would give me ideas for new inventions. And because she gives me a special rate on redstone.”
“I see. So what do you do, Osk?”
“Why, whatever anybody will pay me to do!” Osk said with a grin. “Isn’t that the way these days? I’m an enchanter, for one—best in Tumbles Harbor, or at least the second best. Hmm, there’s Grimble, and he’s pretty good, so maybe I’m the third best. Anyway, I’m an enchanter, but it bores me, if we’re being honest. So I’m also an architect and an engineer. But what I’m going to be is an artificer.”
“An artificer?” asked Stax.
By way of an answer, Osk scooped up a handful of the crimson dust.
“You know what this is, right?”
“Of course,” Stax said. “Redstone. It’s used to make compasses and clocks.” And as he said that, Stax’s hand strayed to the compass in his pocket, while his mind was filled with fantasies of facing down Fouge Tempro with a diamond sword.
“Compasses and clocks?” Osk said, shaking her head. “Think big, Stax! Redstone is used for so much more than that! You can channel it to direct power and make machines. Why, I’ll show you something that will transform mining. Now, what did I do with that schematic?”
Osk sorted through her papers, picking up and then discarding diagrams for a variety of baffling devices before thrusting one under Stax’s nose: a massive assemblage of blocks and levers, and objects labeled as…
“Does this drop TNT?”
“Yes!” Osk said excitedly. “See, and then these mechanisms come along and take away the water. It’ll clear a massive quarry in the better part of a day. I thought we could use it to speed things up at Tumbles.”
“If we had enough TNT to destroy a city,” Stax said. “And a fortune in emeralds to buy all this. And if Mrs. Taney didn’t mind us leveling the mountain.”
“Well, it’s just one idea,” said Osk, a bit defensively.
“It’s clever,” said Stax, though actually he found Osk’s proposed machine frightening. “You know our mines, Osk. Do you have anything smaller? And more affordable?”
“Sure. Wait until you see this!”
Osk hurried over to a niche near a set of bookcases and ducked inside. There was a great deal of whirring and clicking, a flurry of motion, and a moment later Osk was decked out in leather armor, with an iron pickaxe in one hand and an iron bucket in the other.
“Ow!” she said, putting the pickaxe down and shaking her hand with a grimace. “That’s my fault, I had my hand in the wrong place. I call it the Insta-Miner. You’re geared up and ready to go in thirty seconds, tops!”
“It would certainly prevent Tanner from forgetting his equipment,” Stax said. “But you know most of us don’t wear armor underground. It’s too much weight. And I can pick up my own pickaxe, thanks to an enchantment known as the opposable thumb.”
“Well, if you want to do things the old-fashioned way,” muttered Osk, stripping off her armor. But a moment later she had brightened again. “How about this? See? It can sense when night’s come, and switches on redstone lamps throughout the mine.”
“Osk. Mines are dark in the daytime too. So you need lights all the time.”
“Oh yeah, you’re right of course. I always forget that, somehow.” Osk looked down at the floor. “You’re going to tell Mrs. Taney I’m some kind of loon, aren’t you?” she asked sadly.
“I’m going to tell Mrs. Taney there are some great ideas here, and they just need a little more work,” Stax said. “My suggestion would be to think about the challenges we face every shift. How about a machine that could detect gems from several blocks away? Or sense water or lava from that distance? Or a machine that could neutralize lava?”
Osk furrowed her brow, her hands plucking at her leather apron and raising little plumes of redstone dust.
“That last one’s an interesting idea,” she said. “Hmm. You’d need water, of course. Maybe you could use a light sensor. And pistons to block off the area. That might work. Let me think about that some more.”
“That would get Mrs. Taney’s interest,” Stax said. “But remember it needs to be small. And not too expensive.”
“Well, that’s a nuisance,” Osk said. “But I can work with those limitations. Limitations can lead to genius too, though money works a little better. I know you don’t believe me, Stax, but redstone really is the future. You can do anything with it. It could change mining, farming, travel, everything.”
“I do believe you, Osk,” Stax said. “And I’ve got a proposition for you—one that might give you some new ideas.”
“I’m listening,” Osk said.
So Stax told her about his plan for the Brandywine Hill Mine, and Mrs. Taney’s conditions.
“I’ll join your crew if I can have any redstone we find,” Osk said with a grin.
“It’ll all be yours, Osk,” said Stax, who hoped that the Brandywine Hill Mine would indeed turn out to be filled with redstone—and many more ores besides.
Hodey joins the crew * Beneath Brandywine Hill * A treasure and its guardians
To Stax’s relief, Hodey said yes to his proposal immediately. Now he had his crew.
But the miners loved to gossip, and word soon reached Barnacle about the deal Stax had struck with Mrs. Taney. After the day’s shift, Barnacle swaggered into the dormitory where Stax, Osk, and Hodey were gathering their equipment.
“Uh-oh,” Hodey said.
Barnacle’s face was brilliant red, his beady black eyes intent and searching. He spotted Stax and came to a halt, the corners of his mouth twitching.
And then Barnacle began to laugh.
“So you really think you can make that cursed hole in the ground pay off?” he wheezed. “Think you’re that much smarter than everybody else? Well, you’re welcome to waste time trying—you and anyone dumb enough to believe in you. That hole’s all yours, Sir Stax, and I hope
I’ll see you buried in it.”
Barnacle departed, cackling.
“Well, wasn’t that nice?” Stax asked with a smile. “I can’t wait to see his face in a week, when we’re all rich.”
An hour later, they opened the gate securing the entrance to the Brandywine Hill Mine and explored the galleries of tunnels that had been bored through the rock.
Stax tsk-tsked repeatedly. The excavation had all the signs of Barnacle’s handiwork, with tunnels dug haphazardly in all directions. Stax could easily imagine the burly crew boss ordering new digs based on nothing but gut instinct, then standing over the miners impatiently as more and more rock was stripped away, and blaming them when their pickaxes failed to uncover the great wealth he’d imagined was below the hill.
But Barnacle’s haphazard work practices weren’t what interested Stax. Once he’d toured the entire mine—thankfully, no monsters seemed to have taken up residence in the darkness—Stax sat down with Osk and Hodey in the center of the lowest level.
“The biggest problem with this mine is that Mr. Barnacle didn’t dig deep enough,” Stax explained. “He was unlucky not to hit a fair amount of iron and coal and even some gold, but I’m not surprised he came up empty where gems were concerned.”
Osk grinned—she hated Barnacle, who never missed a chance to mock her belief in redstone—while Hodey looked rapt, hanging on Stax’s every word. Stax hoped the young miner’s faith in him would prove justified.
“Now, my father had a system for finding the most valuable deposits,” he explained. “He worked down from sea level to find the right depth for the most profitable mining. Unfortunately, I can’t determine sea level here, and I don’t know how my father made his calculations.”
“Are you saying you want me to build something that could do that, Stax?” Osk asked. “Because that’s quite the puzzle.”
“That would be amazing, Osk. Definitely think about it. But in the meantime, we have another way to find the right depth. Instead of working down from sea level, you work up from bedrock.”
“Bedrock?” Hodey asked. “Never seen that, Mr. Stonecutter. Isn’t that what the center of the Overworld’s made out of?”
“Maybe. To be honest, the science was always a little over my head,” Stax said. “But lucky for us, you don’t have to dig as far down as the center of the Overworld to hit bedrock. Still, we’ll be below the lava line. You know what that is, right?”
Osk shook her head, but Hodey was nodding.
“It’s the depth where you start finding a lot of lava lakes,” he said.
“Exactly,” Stax said. “And the ideal depth for gem-hunting is right above it. So the dangerous part is that we’ll have to dig all the way down to bedrock to get the right measurement, and then back up to where it’s safer. So before you put a pickaxe into rock down there, check to see if it’s hot. If you think you see steam, or little blobs of stone on the ceiling or walls, don’t keep it to yourself. Same if you think you hear sloshing or bubbling. And you always, always have a water bucket nearby. Don’t forget that part. If I’m right, we’re going to find wealth somewhere down under our feet—wealth enough, Hodey, to build your girl that undersea dream house of yours. But you can’t build anything if you’re dead. Remember that.”
Osk gave Stax a thumbs-up, while Hodey grinned and applauded.
They started digging a staircase down, narrow enough that you were constantly turning left to descend and wound up faintly dizzy if you hurried. To Stax’s relief, they didn’t encounter lava as they dug down and down and down; to his disappointment, they also didn’t discover any valuable ore or gems. There wasn’t even a small vein of coal. At the end of the first night’s work, Stax caught himself worrying that the rumors were true, and the Brandywine Hill Mine really was cursed somehow. But he simply smiled and told the others to get some sleep.
* * *
—
Stax was tired the next day, but vowed to push on. After dinner, he joined Osk and Hodey for another night’s work. They’d been digging down for the better part of two hours when Hodey’s pickaxe struck something with a sharp, high-pitched ping instead of a dull thunk.
“Easy now,” Stax said. “Let’s clear some of this away and see what we have. Obsidian makes that sound sometimes too.”
Hodey was excited by the prospect of seeing bedrock for the first time, so Stax and Osk hung back, a block above him, as the younger miner cleared away the loose rock. What was revealed was definitely bedrock—dull gray and seamed. And impenetrable: The three of them could hammer away at a single chunk of bedrock until they grew old and stooped, wearing hundreds of iron tools down to nubs in the process, and not so much as scratch it.
“So now we can work our way back up?” asked Hodey, sweating and breathing hard but also grinning broadly, pleased that he’d been the first one to reach their goal.
“Not quite yet,” Stax said. “Bedrock isn’t an evenly distributed layer; it’s more of a lumpy line. We need to be confident we’ve found the lowest point. That will give us a baseline for how far we need to go up.”
“I never knew how much science there was to be aware of down here,” Osk said. “I thought it was just about putting a pickaxe into rock.”
“Well, almost,” Stax said. “My grandmother used to say it was about putting a pickaxe into the right rock.”
The three of them spread out in all directions from the staircase, hollowing out a chamber tall enough to stand up in. Stax had to keep reminding Osk to check for hot spots and make sure the water bucket was close at hand instead of chattering about how to make a depth gauge using redstone. And he had to repeatedly assure Hodey that there was no point hammering away at the bedrock, despite his burning curiosity about what lay below it.
As Stax had predicted, the bedrock was mixed with other varieties of stone, and the boundary formed a wavy line that rose and fell. With their four hours nearly gone, Stax halted the work and the three of them surveyed the room they’d hacked out of the rock, identifying the lowest points.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything lower than that,” Stax said. “Excellent work, people. Tomorrow, we work our way up and start to really dig.”
* * *
—
With the unglamorous task of figuring out the proper depth finally behind them, Stax found himself impatient to get through his next day’s work in the mine—a wait that was made far worse because Barnacle insisted on tormenting him. The man alternated between scoffing at him for his after-hours project and demanding to know, with a hint of worry in his voice, if he’d found anything. Stax gave Barnacle little beyond polite nonanswers, and was careful not to give the crew boss any reason to criticize him. Barnacle found things to yell about anyway, and Stax was tired and cross by the time his regular shift finally came to an end.
His spirits rose when he saw that Osk and Hodey were clearly eager to continue the project. They made their way down the tight, winding stair they’d carved out of the rock, until they reached the bedrock chamber. Stax knelt down at one of the lowest points they’d found and set his pickaxe on its end, then used it to measure the distance to the ceiling.
“About three blocks,” Stax said. “That’s what I figured. So now we dig up nine blocks above the ceiling. And then we can start.”
At Stax’s insistence they worked slowly to build a new staircase up, always mining to one side instead of directly above their heads. After a few more minutes of work, Stax called a halt and asked Hodey to take a measurement. Twelve blocks above bedrock, the young miner reported, a figure Stax checked for himself and confirmed.
“Very good,” Stax said. “This should be the ideal height for gems, then. We’ve got another hour or so. Let’s start on the feeder tunnel. Two blocks wide, sixty-four blocks long. Maybe we’ll even find something tonight.”
And they quickly did—a vein of iron
that snaked its way across the ceiling of the feeder tunnel. They followed it until it petered out a couple of blocks above them, then filled in the rock they’d removed. Stax was pleased about this quick success, but the rest of the hour passed with nothing found. Still, Osk and Hodey seemed optimistic as they packed up their tools, convinced that tomorrow Stax would be proved right about the mine.
But he wasn’t. In carving out the length of the feeder tunnel, they found nothing but a few short runs of coal ore. And the day after that was a disappointment too. They excavated six branch tunnels, but found nothing but some scattered deposits of coal and iron—more than Barnacle had found, perhaps, but not enough to justify the time they’d spent, and certainly nothing that would convince Mrs. Taney to hire more miners.
As they trudged back to the surface, Hodey muttered darkly about the gremlins his grandpa had told him could infest mines, working ahead of the crews and cackling as they stole away gems and replaced them with ordinary rock. Osk just hung her head; she’d hoped they’d at least find redstone. Stax assured them the next day would be different, but his words sounded hollow and he was sure his smile looked forced and fake.
They had only two nights left to make Stax’s gamble pay off. Stax stumbled through the day, earning savage rebukes from Barnacle that he had to admit he deserved. He was exhausted by the extra work and the lack of sleep, and knew Osk and Hodey were also suffering.
Stax’s father had taught him that ideas such as hope and luck didn’t belong in mines. There was only trust that your calculations and procedures were correct—and because of that trust, patience and belief that the odds of finding wealth were in your favor.
Still, Stax couldn’t help hoping for a little luck; an early discovery that would lift them up and give them the faith to push through these last two nights. He didn’t dare hope for diamonds, the most valuable thing under the ground, but even a small seam of gold or lapis would be encouragement enough to keep going. Or a little run of redstone—that would at least cheer up Osk.
