by Jean Rabe
The Rebellion
( Stonetellers - 1 )
Jean Rabe
Jean Rabe
The Rebellion
1
MOON-EYE’S HEART
The ground shuddered and a rumbling began-the sound had no direction, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere deep in the Neraka mine. It was a soft sound at first, almost comforting. But it quickly grew in intensity, becoming hurtful and blotting out the clang of pickaxes being dropped and miners calling to one another in panic. A great breath accompanied the quake, the earth exhaling in a thunderous whoosh that belched centuries-old dust the color of cinnamon from its depths.
Moon-eye’s throat grew painfully tight as he clung to a support timber. The lantern hanging from a spike directly overhead jiggled. Its light sent shadows careening frantically along the shaft walls. The young goblin peered through the dust, which was falling like a steady rain, and flinched when fist-sized chunks of the ceiling came loose and struck him. He fought the urge to run toward the surface, instead edging away from the timber and making his way deeper into the collapsing mine.
Fleeing goblins brushed by him as he went, some begging him to turn around and leave with them. A few carried guttering torches, which helped Moon-eye make out the jagged tunnel walls and avoid the largest pieces of stone littering the floor. Some struggled with bulging sacks-fearing their whip-wielding taskmasters more than the quake and therefore not willing to abandon the precious ore they’d mined. One dragged a diminutive goblin with a crushed skull.
“Feyrh!” Moon-eye heard a large goblin shout at him. Run. Escape. Flee. The single shouted word was almost lost amid the continuing tremor and the slapping of the swarm of goblin feet against the floor.
Twice he fell when the mine shook violently. Both times he got back up and pressed deeper, only to fall again when a burly hobgoblin running in the opposite direction pushed him out of the way. “Feyrh!” the hobgoblin spit at him. “Feyrh, dard!”
Flee, fool!
Moon-eye shook his head and got up slowly in relief as the ground grew still and the rumbling quieted.
“Feyrh!” the hobgoblin called a last time before lumbering out of view.
“Cannot leave,” Moon-eye said to himself. “Not without Graytoes.” Broken shards of rock cut into his bare feet as he continued on. Then another tremor struck, and more falling debris bombarded his back and shoulders and set his small body to bleeding and aching fiercely. At a side tunnel, he waited for another group of fleeing miners to pass; then he sniffed the dust-choked air.
Moon-eye’s sense of smell rivaled the finest hunting dog’s. He sorted through the tang of the goblins’ sweat and terror, the scent of the old bracing timbers, which were threatening to split at any moment, and the odor the very stone gave off. He sniffed the sweet traces of water. Rivulets always trickled down walls in parts of the mine from some hidden stream. He also picked up the disagreeable stench of waste. Permeating everything, blood was heavy in the air, and Moon-eye knew it was not just his, that many other miners had been injured.
How many injured?
How many dead?
“Graytoes!” He called twice more, then inhaled deeper and smelled the fetid odor of something rotting, a hint of sulfur, and the stink of a Dark Knight. One of the taskmasters was down that side passage, and he hoped the vile man didn’t make it out alive.
Moon-eye disregarded all those scents and continued probing. He drew as much of the fusty air into his lungs as he could, over and over, finally finding the familiar scent he’d been searching for.
“Graytoes.” His quest led him farther down the main tunnel. He started off at a careful lope just as the ground bucked even more strongly, once more sending him to his knees. The rumbling was like the sustained growl of some maddened beast, and it came from a specific direction.
Moon-eye looked over his shoulder and picked through the shadows to see a wall of earth and rocks rushing at him. Broken goblin limbs and a helmet that must have belonged to a Dark Knight roiled in the churning mix. The mass moved with a torrential speed, forcing the dank, dry air of the mine howling before it, bludgeoning the support timbers and shattering them and gathering the falling ceiling into itself before rushing on.
Moon-eye sped deeper down the main shaft, forcing himself to ignore the rocks biting at his feet and trying unsuccessfully to shut out the roaring cacophony so close behind him. He concentrated on the familiar scent; it came from yards distant. He turned at a side passage, then another, the second one angling upward and well away from the racing wall of earth. He leaped into the passage just as the ceiling gave way in the tunnel behind him.
“Graytoes!” Moon-eye thought he heard a reply to his call, though a part of him feared it was his imagination.
The ground shook again, and the odors all around intensified, settling in his mouth and threatening to overwhelm him. The dust filtering down was as thick as a curtain, and all Moon-eye could see were bands of black and gray. This tunnel was a more recent excavation, he realized, and the timbers were strong and fresh and-so far-holding.
“Graytoes!” Moon-eye crawled ahead, focusing on the remembered scent, constantly wiping his left eye with one hand while the fingers of his other hand felt along the wall to guide him. His right eye was a solid milky orb, oddly large and protruding from his leathery orange face. It was wholly worthless. The feature inspired his name, his father telling him that the eye reminded him of a full moon. Moon-eye had been born on a night when Krynn had only one moon, before the War of Souls. On the very night that Solinari, Lunitari, and Nuitari mysteriously returned, his family was captured by ogres and sold to the Dark Knights. When he was old enough to work, he had been sent to the mines, where he’d been toiling for years. He had no idea what had happened to his parents and siblings, lost like the single, large moon.
He passed a fissure in the stone, and through it came muted screams and the sound of rocks falling. He pressed his face into the crack and inhaled, registering and discarding one horrid odor after the next, before continuing down the passage.
It felt like an eternity, though he guessed it was only seconds, before the quaking took another pause and he stopped to catch his breath and steady his nerves. Moments later he reached a chamber filled with mounds of ore, buckets, picks, and crumpled bodies under chunks of stone. The nearest form was the only one breathing, a young female goblin whose legs were pinned by a fallen beam. A lantern that hung precariously from a crooked spike cast a soft glow on the scene.
“Graytoes.” His voice caught as he moved toward his mate. Her skin was the color of sunflower leaves, but it looked dead and ashen from the stone dust. Her once-delicate features were marred by deep welts. “Moon-eye’s Heart,” he whispered as he knelt by her, smoothing at her cheeks with his calloused fingers, his gaze darting from her face to her trapped legs.
The blood he smelled in that place was not hers, so perhaps she was not too badly hurt. He gently touched her slightly rounded stomach, covered only by a canvas rag of a shift; she carried their first child.
“Moon.” She sighed. Her eyes fluttered open, filled with pain and fear, and her thin, shaking fingers grabbed at him.
“Moon-eye’s Heart,” he said. “Must escape this place.”
2
STEEL TOWN
One day earlier
Grallik rose just before dawn and stared across Steel Town. The buildings and the men blended in shades of gray and brown, as if someone painting the scene had used so much water that everything ran together to create a drab spectacle. The air was colored dully, too, from the dust swirling thickly. And it was heavy with sweat and waste and dirt. No amount of spitting could rid Grallik of the foul taste.
The Dark Knight mines were
an extensive labyrinth, and piles of debris from the excavated tunnels lay everywhere, including right outside Grallik’s door. The largest piles formed the northern and western boundaries of the camp, one the size of a hill, rising nearly a hundred feet and occasionally luring goats from the eastern mountains.
Grallik breathed shallowly and kept his eyes on the debris hills as he strolled to the center of the camp. He passed neatly maintained residences of wood and stone with colorful curtains at the windows, dingy shops that looked as if a strong wind would blow them over, and men and women scurrying from one place to the next, all of them haggard-looking because of the dust and grime and stink that blew everywhere and stuck to them.
Grallik coughed and held a hand to his mouth. The cough had developed a year earlier, but came more frequently in recent weeks; he sometimes worried that it signaled a serious malady.
He did not have to be up at that early hour. He could stay in what passed for his home and wait until perhaps the breeze stilled and at least some of the dust settled. But long months ago it became his habit to rise early and watch the men, a mix of Dark Knights and paid laborers. The latter worked in hot, dry, and desolate Steel Town because the coin was good; the knights were posted there. Long before sunrise, the knights and workers were swinging heavy mallets at mounds of ore, smashing the rocks in a perfect, ceaseless cadence. The smaller chunks were easier for Grallik to deal with.
Grallik was Steel Town’s resident wizard. A Thorn Knight, or a Gray Robe as some called him, he would have preferred a posting in Neraka or with an army in a more hospitable clime. But he’d taken the Blood Oath decades past and recited it every morning: “Submit or die,” obey the will of his superiors and put all personal goals behind the aims of the Order. He accepted his duty in Steel Town because he believed in the words, and in the Code, the strict set of rules by which all the Dark Knights lived. He just wasn’t as fervent about them as he had been in his younger days.
Grallik’s ash-gray robe was always spotless, save for its hem, which was permanently colored brown by the clay and dust that spread from one end of Steel Town to the other. He wore his blond hair cropped so short that the slight points of his half-elf ears showed conspicuously, and he allowed not the faintest hint of stubble on an angular face that would have been handsome were half of it not horribly scarred. Not only was the left side of Grallik’s face disfigured, so was the entire left side of his body, his left hand twisted and the skin on that hand oddly shiny and forever looking wet.
There were scars elsewhere, but none so bad or noticeable-especially with his robe covering most of his features. All of them were the result of a fire that took his home and his parents and twin sister when he was little more than a child. His magic couldn’t heal him. Not even prayer to Takhisis and Zeboim helped. And in all his years with the Dark Knights, serving alongside their priestly Skull Knights, and before that with the wizards, no one had been able to provide any relief.
Grallik no longer entertained any thoughts of improving his appearance. He was intent merely on bettering his arcane knowledge and on doing his job, which at Steel Town entailed heating the rocks the Dark Knights and laborers were breaking up and forcing the iron out of them. The same fire that had taken his family and forever marred his appearance was part of his job. Fire fascinated him and served him well.
The wizard, using spells and charcoal, melted off the impurities and turned the ore into carbon steel so blacksmiths-some of the best in that part of the country-could pound it out and fashion swords and armor for the Order.
There was never any halt in the work and never a change to the routine … not in the thirty-eight months he’d been there.
In the years before Grallik’s arrival at Steel Town, the Dark Knights had used wagons to haul the ore to the capital city, Jelek, and Neraka, where the ore was processed in forges with flues as tall as three men. Later the knights grew to rely on a smelter built at the camp to cull the iron ingots that were transported to weaponsmiths in the north and east. The smelter had fallen into disrepair, serving only to provide shade for one of the slave pens. It would likely never be used again, and that was because of Grallik and his skills.
One of the knights Grallik observed that morning acted sluggish, raising his mallet once for every two times his fellows did. The wizard noted the knight looked pale; perhaps he had acquired some ailment. Grallik took a few steps back to distance himself. He did not want to catch something in that desolate place where there were only four Skull Knights available for healing and none of them able to mend his scars or stop his cough.
Grallik dug his slippered foot into the earth as he continued to watch the Dark Knights and workers labor to turn large rocks into small ones. Sweat plastered their tunics and tabards against their bodies and slicked their hair against their faces. It was hot already, though the sun was not yet up. But it was not nearly so hot as Grallik would soon make the stone.
The rocks and stones had to be very hot indeed for him to leech the precious iron from them.
“Look,” a knight said between swings. He pointed to a small volcano to the north of the camp, its cap glowing bright orange. “One of these days it’s going to bury this place.”
“The gods won’t let that happen,” another knight said. “Steel Town’s too valuable to gods and men.”
“Hell Town,” Grallik muttered, thinking that was a better name for the camp. “Aye, Hell Town is far, far too valuable.”
The commander currently in charge of Steel Town, a decorated veteran of the Chaos War, Marshal Denu Montrill of Solace, approached and stopped at Grallik’s side. Montrill also rose early to supervise the knights and laborers.
“Marshal Montrill,” Grallik said, greeting him. “The slaves have been collecting richer ore from the deep part of the mountain, and I pull more iron from those rocks. But I do not believe all of our efforts should be spent on that shaft. There is still iron in the older sections, and it would be a waste to leave it there. We should mine the older sections until they are dry. Leave nothing useful behind.”
Montrill nodded. “True enough. Still, I’ve had the youngest and strongest slaves assigned to the new shaft. And I’ve sent word to the Nightlord that we need more blacksmiths. They cannot keep up with you regardless, Guardian Grallik. They can’t forge the swords fast enough.”
Montrill’s eyes sparkled darkly as he added, “More blacksmiths and armorers for the fine, fine steel you provide.”
The knights and laborers backed away from the rubble they’d created, took several deep breaths, then started shoveling it into a cart, mindful not to splash any stone or dust on the commander and Grallik.
“Thank you. And now I think I must go about my business, Marshal Montrill, rather than waste too much time. If you will excuse me.” Grallik respectfully withdrew to his workshop, mentally preparing himself for the spells he was going to cast on the rocks. He hoped to finish at least one cart before the sun came up and the daily ritual began again.
Grallik participated in the ritual that morning. He recited the words perfectly, though merely by rote on this occasion. His mind was elsewhere-on the second mound of ore waiting for him in his workshop; on his talon, which had been grumbling about the lack of water and being assigned a shift of digging the new well; on the mine, which he feared would be rich with ore for an eternity; on being trapped by his usefulness, there in Steel Town.
He did not eat breakfast with the officers, instead heading straight to his workshop after the ritual and starting work on the ore. He had no appetite, and he ignored his thirst. He concentrated on the fire he summoned to swirl around the damnable rocks.
The furnace made the workshop impossibly hot and drenched the wizard in sweat. His eyes, pale blue under the sun, shone as he worked, and his scarred skin glistened as the iron began to drip from the rocks and pool beneath them. It was not terrible work, he had to admit. Playing with the fire pleased him.
Grallik did not leave his workshop until the horn was
blown for the evening meal, his empty stomach convincing him that it was finally time to eat. The light had gone out of his eyes, giving his angular face a forlorn cast, an expression that told the others in the crude hall to give him a wide berth. He was exhausted, but not physically in the way the knights who also sat at the tables were. His muscles didn’t ache from pounding rocks as theirs did, though his chest ached from his coughing bouts. Still, he was fatigued to the point of collapse. Fire magic drained him. Grallik demanded too much of himself and the magic. It was a point of pride with him that he nurtured the flames until he could scarcely stand or breathe.
He sat at the end of a long table, two lengths of his arm separating him from the nearest knight. He caught the glance of a young man, the tavern owner’s son, who desired to be a squire to the Dark Knights and who often worked the hall. The boy immediately filled a plate for him, bringing it while it still steamed. A half-filled mug of water, which was rationed even for officers, quickly followed. Dinner was some sort of meat pie, served in an appealing golden-brown crust. Grallik savored the smell of it before cutting it open. He suspected the recipe had been intended for venison or beef, but there were no deer in that part of the country, and the Dark Knights did not keep cattle at the camp. So mutton had been used instead, and not liberally.
The pie was mostly made of chopped prunes and dates, with raisins lining the bottom. The fruits were readily available at Steel Town, as knights coming in for rotations brought wagons of supplies with them. There was a small side of a spinach pudding, and though it was reasonably tasty, Grallik thought the cook had used too much fennel. Dessert consisted of pears poached in wine and covered with a sweet syrup. All of it was passable, he decided. For the knights, the food was not bad at Steel Town.
When he was sated, he returned to the ore and went back to work until he nearly passed out, emerging before midnight in search of a bit of welcome coolness. But there was none. Despite the lateness, it was still uncomfortably hot.
