by E. S. Maya
Then Wulf laughed, wondering what about the fifth-year had turned him craven in the first place. He had fought boys Noth’s size before, in the back streets of Emrys, where the starving dogs hid all evidence. And in Notre, where the high stone towers made a stranger of the sun. Even in Serren, where knives were as plentiful as bread.
Wulf flinched as his minecart began to screech—its wheels, misaligned with the exit rail. He hooked a forearm under its handle and pulled. The rear of the minecart flew up for a moment, then came snapping down into position. Returning through the adit, the last thing he expected to hear was someone calling his name.
“Wulf!” the voice hissed, sounding much like his father’s old teakettle. “Wuuuulf!”
He raised his helmet and scanned the vast chamber. Miners and their carts moved in and out passageways dotting the high stone walls. Then he saw him. An ill-heighted, well-rounded boy standing inside the mouth of a drift on the opposite side of the adit, palm raised in greeting.
Wulf had never seen anyone use that drift before. He yanked a lever to divert the track, leading his minecart down a rail beside the first-year tunnel entrance. A few steps towards the hissing boy, he doubled back to his minecart and leaned over the rim, reaching to fetch his pickaxe.
Wulf recognized the boy up close. Anyone would. “Spanky?” he said, surprised to see the fifth-year announcer. The boy wasn’t a miner. “What do you want with me?”
“It’s important,” Spanky whispered, inadvertently loud. The quietest Wulf had ever heard him. “Talk in here.” When Wulf hesitated, he continued, “It concerns your fight with the recruit foreman.”
Spanky bent down at the waist, picking up an expensive brass lantern off the tunnel floor. “Come, come!” He started down the tunnel, lanternlight swinging around at the darkness.
Wulf gripped the haft of his pickaxe and followed five paces behind him. They turned a corner, and the light of the lantern cut hard lines into the darkness. He had little reason to distrust the sword ring announcer, but the boy was a fifth-year, and as they treaded the empty darkness, so grew the temptation to dash his head against the drift wall.
They turned down two tunnels more before Wulf paused his step, refusing to go any further.
“Come, come!” Spanky said. Wulf kept his boots still. The stout fifth-year shone the lantern upon him. “What’s the matter?”
Wulf threw his forearm over his face. “Get that damn light off my eyes.” When Spanky lowered his arm, he continued, “Say what you’ve got to say and be done with it.”
“I bring good tidings,” Spanky muttered, nervously thumbing his forefinger. The ring announcer’s playful demeanor drooped from his face. “Turns out you won’t be fighting the recruit foreman after all.”
Wulf tightened his grip on his pickaxe, leather squeaking. His hands felt hot and sweaty in his mining gloves. “And why is that?”
A voice answered behind him. “’Cause the recruit foreman don’t play on chances.”
Wulf spun around, raising his pickaxe slightly. A pair of fifth-years were coming down the drift. He recognized them from Noth’s mining team. They were tall, and the lanternlight sent their shadows streaking down the tunnel floor behind them. They were carrying well-worn pickaxes.
“Nothing personal,” said the second boy. This one carried his pickaxe in one hand. “Sometimes you’ve got to make an example out of someone.”
Wulf’s heartbeat quickened as the light in the tunnel shivered. Behind him, he caught Spanky slinking away from them.
Wulf raised the brim of his helmet off his eyes, smirking. If it was a fight they were looking for, he’d give it to them gladly. He hoisted his pickaxe over his shoulder and began marching after Spanky, confident he could drop the boy with a single well-placed swing.
But a second pair of fifth-years emerged from around the bend. They took positions in front of Spanky, and the lanternlight at their backs obscured their features in shadows. The pair of silhouettes carried large black pickaxes. The other half of Noth’s mining team.
Wulf gave a grim laugh. All this time, he had avoided violence out of a need to protect others, and for his own survival. Though the Anderan longed for a good fight, his gut feeling told him to negotiate.
“Five on one!” he spat. “An unfair fight is the simplest form of cowardice. Noth begs to face me in the sword ring, and now this? Has he any honor?” He looked at the pair behind him, then Spanky and the two shadows. “Have any of you?”
Through the wavering orange light, Spanky’s round face contorted into a grin. “Fuck honor.” He smacked one of the fifth-year shadows across the back. “Put him in the infirmary.”
Safi’s pickaxe turned stone into dust.
It fogged up the air and piled at her feet and thickened with sweat on her forearms. She mined on, fast and hard, pausing only to brush her fingertips over the dust-caked glass of her mining goggles.
What good was finding a Siegestone if she couldn’t see the damned thing?
And while her eyes searched, her mind looked elsewhere, far beyond the boundaries of Camp Cronus. She thought of Ashcroft, wondering if the village had been emptied itself of its last family, and what she’d do with herself if she did find a Siegestone under all this rock. She wondered if she’d ever see home again.
Home. The word no longer carried the same weight. By the time she earned her freedom, there might not be a home left to return to.
So she pictured herself on horseback, saddled with all of her favorite foods: Cured meats and ginger cakes and sweet sugar candy, bowls of porridge painted with honey and dotted with raisins, and twine-tied bundles of bright colorful vegetables. She’d have to pack well to cross all the hills and forests and mountains between here and the Southern Kingdoms, not to mention the great desert. Indeed, the south was a fine place to be. To the northerners, she was an Abed, a Southerling, yet Jabbar had called her sister. Perhaps in the south they would see her as family, too.
But the further Safi went on her imaginary journey, the more she thought of her mother. It had been months since she had last seen her, and she hoped she was getting along well all by herself. Perhaps her father had survived the Titan climb after all. Perhaps the two of them were living together in Guardia, the city that crowned the North. The thought pleased her very much.
Or perhaps Yusef Azadi was on a journey of his own, in search of his only missing daughter.
Safi frowned under her neckerchief and forced the thought away. She tried to think of happier things, but by no intention of her own found her way back to Camp Cronus, through all the twists of turns of the Foot, and into the first-year work tunnels.
She grunted as her pickaxe struck the drift wall. Pebbles showered her trousers and the toes of her work boots. She shut her eyes and stilled her mind until a single thought remained in her helmeted blonde head. Just where the heck is Wulf?
She pounded stone once more, then set her pickaxe against the wall. Massaging her right shoulder, she turned away from her work area and pulled her neckerchief down from her lips. “You boys catch any sign of Wulf yet?” she shouted across the tunnel.
It took Stiv a half-dozen swings of his pickaxe to answer, “What!”
Safi loosened her goggles, left them hanging around her neck, and put her eyes like daggers into Stiv’s back. “I said, have you boys seen Wulf!”
Stiv continued his assault on the drift wall. Beside him, Jabbar was none the wiser. Warmth tickled Safi’s cheeks. She balled her hands into fists and approached the boy of Berrider, to grab him by the head and make his deaf ears listen.
At that same moment, Stiv reared his pickaxe for a big swing.
Safi gasped as head of Stiv’s pickaxe clipped the front of her helmet. She felt her head snapping backwards, and a biting pain in her neck. She landed hard on the flat on her back, and groaned.
“Blondie!”
When she managed to open her eyes, Stiv was putting his filthy hands all over her helmet and face. The whole tunnel was
spinning.
“Titans, Blondie, are you all right?”
Safi blinked as the tunnel righted itself. She wasn’t on the floor at all, but backed against the drift wall. “I’m fine,” she said, shoving Stiv’s arms away. The back of her head throbbed with pain, and a spell of dizziness nearly swept her off her feet. But she noticed some of her fellow first-years were watching, so she raised her fist to her helmet and gave it a couple of knocks. “Just a tap.”
“You should be more careful,” Jabbar said, shuffling away from his work area. He wiped his wrist across his forehead before raising his goggles to see. “What’s the problem?”
“What are you, my mother?” Then she softened her face and sighed. “It’s Wulf. He’s taking for-ev-er. I’m up to my ankles in dust over here.”
Stiv folded his dusty forearms and nodded thoughtfully. “We ought to look for him. A trip to the Pit shouldn’t take so long.”
Safi peered down the drift, past the other first-year boys, and scrunched her nose. “Could be trouble.”
“Could be nothing,” Jabbar said. “Wulf can take care of himself.”
Safi looked to her right. “What do you think, Goggles?”
Goggles halted his pickaxe and squinted in her direction, breathing laboriously into his neckerchief. “It’s probably a long line.”
“He’ll return soon,” Stiv assured her. “You know Wulf.”
Safi reluctantly agreed, and the four of them resumed their work. As the minutes passed, she listened to the first-year minecarts squealing along the floor rail. Each time she turned to look, her heart raced with anticipation.
When the noise finally settled, Wulf was the only boy yet to return.
Safi turned around to scold her teammates further but was surprised to find Stiv and Jabbar, pickaxes at their sides, staring down the passageway.
“Oi, Clayworth,” Stiv called down the drift, “you apple-crotched Resmyran bastard.”
“The hell do you want, you Berridian sheep-humper?”
Stiv was building up to another insult when he caught his Abedi teammates glaring. “Uh, Clay, you see Wulf out there in the Pit?”
Clayworth shook his head. “Nay,” he called back. “Saw an empty tub by the drift entrance though. Think it’s yours?”
Safi strode back to her work area and threw her pickaxe over her shoulder. “We’re going,” she told them, starting towards the exit. “And this time we’re taking our pickaxes with us.”
Stiv and Jabbar shared a look. The Berrid shouldered his pickaxe while the Abed grabbed Goggles by the overalls, dragging him away from his work.
They walked until the first bend in the passageway.
Then they ran.
48
Tooth and Claw II
The lantern gleamed on the drift floor, but Wulf wasn’t so distracted to miss how the older boys carried their pickaxes—two-handed, and poised at their sides to strike.
He readied his own trusty pickaxe, taking comfort in the knowledge that flesh was softer than stone. He had long understood the message sent by his black hair and hazel eyes. They were the telltale signs of the Anderan lower class, of the men and women and children that thrived on the city streets.
The fifth-years considered him a threat.
Wulf tightened his grip, eager to live up to their expectations. Here was his chance to show them how dangerous a child of Andera could be. There were plenty of dead ends in Notre, and any street runt knew how to survive situations like these. If you couldn’t run, you made someone hurt. Make the rest of them think twice about fighting you. A little blood could strike fear into anyone. He knew that from experience.
He turned to the fifth-years towards the exit, the pair he could better see. The tunnel brightened to the sound of footsteps. It was the boys ahead, however, who edged closer under the shifting orange light.
Wulf yearned for a dagger or a sword, for any real sort of fighting weapon. A pickaxe was too heavy for defense, too slow for accuracy. Testing its weight in his hands, he considered hurling the digging tool towards his closest opponent, but thought better of it. Better to fight with a pickaxe than his fists and feet.
The fifth-years crept closer.
Thinking fast, Wulf’s hand flew from his pickaxe to his trouser pocket. He wrapped his neckerchief around his face and pinned it down with his goggles, tight over his eyes. The dust-stained glass blurred his vision, but he saw well enough.
The fifth-years crept closer, rearing their pickaxes to strike.
Wulf whirled into motion, throwing his weight into a powerful swing. The fifth-years backed out of range, but they weren’t his target. His pickaxe pounded the drift wall, flooding the narrow tunnel with a cloud of thick gray dust.
The fifth-years began to cough and shout.
Wulf listened carefully to the pebbles showering his helmet and the drift floor. Inside of that noise was a whistle—coming straight towards his head. He ducked, felt his helmet go flying. and shuddered as the cold touch of iron slipped through his hair.
Wulf gasped, chest pounding, head spinning, fighting to keep focus, to react. He struck out with his pickaxe, hammering blindly in the direction of his opponent. His weapon landed with a soft thud, and someone roared in pain.
Breathing heavily through his neckerchief, Wulf backed away from the sound.
The dust began to settle, and the fifth-years shifted back into view. Wulf went wild, swinging forward with broad strokes, then spinning to sweep behind him. Anything to keep the fifth-years at bay. In a snap decision he tried to run, but one of the fifth-years blocked his path. He was squeezing his left hand in the crook of his elbow. His partner jumped in front of him, pickaxe held sideways. Which only meant—
Wulf felt his lungs empty at once. A sharp pain began at his lower back and darted up the length of his spine. It clawed at his ribs and sank like a blade into his chest. The tunnel went dark.
When he opened his eyes, he was curled sideways on the floor, heaving for breath.
“Got the kid good,” grunted one of the boys behind him.
Wulf lay motionless on the drift floor. He attempted to breathe, but no air would come. He attempted to move, but his limbs were four dead weights. Inside his stone-still body, his heart was pounding.
“My hand!” the injured fifth-year groaned. “Bastard broke my Goddamn fingers!” In an explosion of movement, he reached for his fallen pickaxe and sprang towards Wulf. With his remaining good hand, the fifth-year raised the digging tool over his head.
Wulf shut his eyes, lips quivering. On some nights, as he lay in his bunk, he had told himself that death had taken him months ago. That his life had paid off his father’s debts and filled his sisters’ stomachs. That, he thought, would make the real thing not so bad.
Only he had never expected death to be so scary.
A few tight breaths later, Wulf opened his eyes. Still alive.
“Fool!” said one of the fifth-years, restraining the injured boy by his bicep. “Murder the kid and you damn us all!”
Wulf found the strength to push his elbow against the ground, rolling on his back. There were bells strung across the drift rooftop. He turned his head, looking past the fifth-years’ work boots and towards the tunnel exit.
Help. For the first time since coming to Camp Cronus, Wulf cried out, help me.
His words came out in a wheeze.
“Hold him still!” called a shrill voice. The shadows of the fifth-years stretched and contracted as Spanky strutted over, lantern in hand. “We don’t want a death,” he said to the injured boy. “We want an accident.”
“Fine.” The injured fifth-year spat to the side and clutched his hand to his stomach. His fingers were bent sideways and crooked. “I’ll give him an accident.”
Spanky and the fifth-years surrounded Wulf, each of them taking hold of a limb. The injured fifth-year loomed over him. He raised his pickaxe high, held it up like it weighed nothing. “Where should I hit him?”
On the drift
wall, Wulf watched the shadow of Spanky’s hand curl into a pointing finger. “Right here.”
But where? Wulf jerked at his restraints, but pain thundered inside him. Breathing at last, he lay perfectly still, biting down on his lower lip until he tasted blood.
The fifth-year grunted as he swung his pickaxe.
Wulf held his breath and squeezed his eyes shut.
They found the adit empty, save for a single, unattended minecart.
Safi leaned over the rim and looked inside, frowning. “No sign of Wulf,” she declared. And no pickaxe either.
Stiv raised his work boot and kicked the side of the empty tub. It rocked squeakily in place. “Then where in the Nine Stones is he!”
Safi chewed her lips as she scanned the adit’s broad gray walls, counting its dozens of tunnels and passages. How had she never realized the sheer size of the place? “He could be anywhere.”
“Except where he needs to be,” Jabbar countered. Safi adjusted the pickaxe on her shoulder and sighed.
“We could check the Pit,” Goggles proposed.
Safi and the boys nodded in agreement. Then they were running, pickaxes swaying on tense shoulders. They arrived in the adjacent chamber and found the Pit and its platform just as empty. Safi craned her neck, tracing the spiraling path that ran up the chamber’s walls. The mouths of the unused tunnels seemed to be staring back at her.
“I’m sure there’s an explanation for all this,” she thought aloud. “Wulf’s not the sort of boy to do anything reckless.” She meant every word. In fact, Wulf was the most careful boy she’d met.
Stiv cupped his mouth with two open hands. “Wulf!” His voice ricocheted around the chamber. “Goggles, shout with me.”
Goggles took a deep breath joined him. “Wulf!”
“Be silent,” Safi hissed. “That’s not going to help.”
Stiv was preparing to shout once more when they heard the faint ringing of bells. Jabbar glanced towards the adit. His voice cracked when he said, “It sounds like shift got out.”
