by John Hook
Kyo looked at me with a “here he goes again” look I had seen before. “I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”
“I’ve never figured out what the best idea is in this place. I just keep trying to find out what’s going on until someone shows up to stop me and then I usually learn something.”
“You apparently don’t learn not to keep doing it. The mine is exposed and in the open and the Shirks are spread out.”
I shrugged. “In my experience, the Shirks are not highly motivated when the bosses aren’t around. I can handle the two closest ones. I think the others will back off.”
“Since I don’t think I can talk you out of this, take someone with you and then use the archers to convince them there are more hiding in the trees.”
“Okay, I’ll take Izzy. He might give me a line on whatever they are mining and what they might be doing with it.”
“We know how to find out what they are doing with it, as Blaise pointed out.” Izzy again pointed to the mountain by the sea. Then he added, “This is about something else, isn’t it?”
Blaise let out a small laugh. “He want to free the slaves.”
Kyo smirked. “As usual. Great motives. Lousy timing.”
Izzy handed his bow and arrows to Kyo, who had great archery skills. She offered him a sword but he shook it off and took a club instead.
I turned to Kyo, Blaise and Saripha.
“Stay back under cover of the forest line here. Use the archery bluff only if you deem it absolutely necessary. Don’t reveal you’re here if it won’t buy us anything.”
“What if you’re under attack?”
“Play it as you think best, but if you don’t think you can win, stay hidden and simply track what happens to me.”
I stepped out into the open. Izzy followed and we headed down where the Shirks were standing around. When they finally saw us, a look of shock and confusion came over them. They tried to assume a threatening stance but their own indecision broke the effect. I walked up to the closest one and stood inches from his face. His eyes showed pure hatred, but his face showed an edge of fear.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
I couldn’t help letting out a laugh.
“Really? That’s it? I’m not supposed to be here?”
He started to move, but I was quicker. A sharp jab broke his nose. Both of his hands went to his face and my short sword was at his throat. My eyes went quickly to the other Shirk long enough to establish that he was unsure what to do and then back to mine. I sensed Izzy just standing there, coiled, ready to act, but simply watching.
“Take some time off. We’re going to have a look around.”
I looked at the other Shirks positioned near other parts of the dig and gave them a thumbs up.
“Let your pals know to stay out of our way.”
I shoved the Shirk away from us and Izzy and I walked towards the mine as if none of the Shirks mattered. I wasn’t sure why Hell didn’t do better with low-level thugs. Maybe because until I came along they never got much resistance. Might just be the nature of the thug pool.
We went to the edge of the excavation, where the first terrace eased up to the surface. Most of the workers were down on the second terrace. I could now see they wielded what were essentially pickaxes. They were shafts of wood with a tapered stone fitting at on end which they used to knock dirt loose and pry out stones. The rock used for the head of the pick must have been very hard because it was backbreaking work and most materials would have broken off.
Seeing the workers close up was even more disturbing. None of them even looked up from their work at our presence above them. The pit was hot, the air dusty and oppressive. Their skin was taut, muscles knotted as they worked. They were gray, almost ashen color. They didn’t talk or interact in any way. Their faces seemed blank of any emotion. They were like the undead. However, most disturbing, there were no chains, no shackles and little supervision by the Shirks. There was nothing that kept them at this backbreaking toil.
I could feel the anger rising up. We made our way down to the second tier and moved carefully past the workers, who seemed mostly oblivious to our passing, including where and when they were swinging their pickaxes. At one end of the terrace was one of the wooden towers with platforms that would be filled with the rocks they were extracting. There were already some rocks piled up. Izzy picked one up and examined it.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Definitely ore. In fact, from the color I’d say these are natural ore, the type we’ve mostly depleted in in the U.S. Maybe seventy percent magnetite or hematite. Primo stuff. I’d of course need a lab to know for sure.”
“If they have this kind of stuff lying around, why isn’t there more metal in Hell?”
“Good question.”
I checked the wooden framework of the ore elevator in terms of being strong enough to support weight. I figured it would be strong to handle all the heavy rock and I was right. I climbed up and Izzy followed me. At the top, on the surface, was the feed to one of the large duct-like metal housings we had observed before. The opening was large and flat, like the opening of the trunk of a car without the hood. I carefully ducked my head into the opening. Inside, more evidence of technology we had never seen much here. There was a conveyor belt. There were alternating black boxes at intervals that seemed to operate rollers and gears. I stood back up.
“So the ore goes in here?” I asked Izzy. As if on cue, one of the workers came up. He hefted a load of ore on something formed like a coal shovel, except it was made of wood. That’s how they got the ore from the elevator into the maw of the conveyor. The blank-faced man acted as if we weren’t there. He simply went back and forth with the shovel until the elevator platform was empty and went back down below.
The conveyor hummed and rattled and the ore was carried away.
“So where’s all that going? And why?”
“Well, we know it’s going to the mountain. I’m guessing they have to have a smelter there and indeed they are trying to get metal out of this ore,” Izzy answered.
“What else would they be doing with it?”
“It could always be just an elaborate way to torture the inmates.”
“However, they could use any old rock for that. You said this stuff was primo.”
“Yes, and being shipped in metal tubes. They’re obviously in production.” Izzy paused, thinking. “Which raises the question...”
“What’re they producing?” I nodded.
“And why haven’t we seen much evidence of it?”
“You don’t think they are keeping secrets from me, do you?”
“Hard to believe, I know.”
“I’m shocked.”
“By the way, do you remember when we first arrived at Haven?” Izzy remarked casually.
The remark was a little out of left field. “I think so.”
“I’ve gotten in the habit of occasionally looking up since then.”
I looked at Izzy, being a little slow on the uptake, and saw him glancing up. I spun around. Knightshade was hovering on his two platforms about a hundred feet above us. He had woven a curtain of webs around him, which I was pretty sure was an illusion.
“You are surely a hard man to get rid of, Mr. Case.”
“Come on down. I’ll show you how hard.”
“And I see you still haven’t learned to use your power. Astonishing, your lack of discipline. Too bad you don’t have one of these platforms—you could join me.”
Izzy leaned close and whispered. “You don’t need the platform to levitate.”
I gave him a startled look.
“Taka and I were all over that platform. There was nothing indicating it had any properties of flight or levitation. It was a container for the energy. That’s all.”
“How can you be sure? What about magic?”
“I can’t be sure, but even if magic is involved, I would like to believe there would be something in the mechanics of
the container to support flight.”
“You empiricists take the fun out of everything.”
Izzy shrugged. “If I’m wrong, nothing will happen. If I’m right, don’t stop believing while you are up in the air.”
“This is your last chance, Case. Surrender and abdicate your power to us.”
“Or what? What do you have left to threaten me with?”
I think my intention was something typically crude like, “I’d like to go up and punch Spider Face’s lights out,” but it translated into me arcing into the air. I wasn’t flying like Superman. It was more like Izzy had hinted at. I was levitating up as if I had the platform under my feet, except I didn’t need one. The power was in me, not the platform.
The backdrop of spider webs disappeared, which I took as an indication that Knightshade had been startled. As I rushed at him, for just a moment a human head appeared but then the spider head reappeared before I could make anything out of the human features. I did feel a ping of familiarity, but I couldn’t say why. By the time I reached him, however, he had easily glided away from me and my fist hit empty air.
“Very good. You’ve learned a circus trick.” Knightshade was mocking me. “You can levitate.”
“You seem to be worried enough to play keep-away.”
“Since you like circus tricks, how about this?” He formed a steel lance in his hand using the metallic generation power he had from Baron Steel. Unexpectedly, there were several of him arrayed before me, all threatening with the metal lance. Obviously, the illusion powers that Janovic had possessed.
The lance jogging my memory of Baron Steel made me think about how I unwittingly defeated him. At the time, I thought it was the alien inside me that had done it. Now that I knew something about my power—making local changes in molecular structure—I assumed I had crystallized particles and impurities out of the air, creating diamond-hard crystals to grind Baron Steel into nothing. I first needed motion in the air.
One of the Knightshades lunged at me and skewered my shoulder. He then jumped back and the Knightshades reshuffled. It was painful, but I knew, as always, they weren’t going to kill me so I pushed the pain under the anger. I knew only one way to do this. I hovered in the sky and closed my eyes.
I had the little sky-drawing trick I had learned and maybe I could have thrown up some clouds with speed lines for wind, but I wasn’t much of an artist, so I turned to words and began forming a story in my head of how the air took a sudden churn and imagined feeling the wind whip against my face. Then I actually felt the wind and opened my eyes. I couldn’t tell where the voice was being projected from, but from the array of spider-headed Shades I heard, “What kind of nonsense are you up to now, Case?”
I grinned widely. Now that the air was flowing, dirt in the air began to crystallize and stick together. Suddenly, a much stronger wind came up and a dust devil spun up from the mine. I realized I wasn’t that facile yet. Saripha was lending a hand from a distance. The wind with her power behind it was overwhelming and the dust devil was kicking up raw material for me to spin into larger and larger masses.
As I focused I found I could direct the wind. A tsunami of sand-sized crystallized dust swallowed the entire array of Shades. Instantly, the fake Shades were gone as the sand met no substance. It pelted the real Shade, but more, it revealed that the spider head was itself an illusion rather than a glamour. As the sand enveloped Knightshade, who had turned his body to metal, the true shape of his head and his face were revealed in gritty relief.
Knightshade was Gerod. Somehow, it wasn’t that surprising.
Even through the sand, Gerod’s face flared with anger. He zoomed forward at high speed, which startled me. As soon as he charged I lost my grip on the—I don’t know what to call it, spell, I suppose—I was weaving and the wind and the sand dispersed in what was now only Saripha’s wind. I didn’t have time to think. So I did something completely ridiculous. I quickly sketched a door in the air right in front of me and slammed it shut. It was just a blue outline with a doorknob. I don’t think I expected it to do anything. He hit the door hard and was stopped dead.
I was giggling, which made Gerod even crazier. He was no longer even trying to maintain the spider-head illusion. He grabbed the door and threw it open. He was so mad he didn’t even seem to realize how absurd that was. He could have gone around. I was letting myself get into the spirit of a cartoon battle I didn’t even understand. I drew a large mallet and as soon as he stepped through, I let him have it. He flattened into a metal coin.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I heard Izzy from somewhere down below.
I was probably at least as surprised as Knightshade. I also didn’t know what to do next. Unfortunately, he apparently did. He shot out of the coin, his body distended like a jack-in-the-box, and grabbed me, pinning both arms. He dragged me a few feet across the sky before I could react. With a simple motion, he locked both legs in metal cocoons. I could feel the extreme weight dragging at me. It was happening so fast I was having trouble thinking.
I looked down at the metal formed around my legs. They were no illusion. When I looked down, I realized he had positioned me over the mouth of the deepest central pit, the opening where no one worked that looked like it descended forever.
“This time, Case,” came the angry words, “have the decency to stay where I put you.”
Gerod let me drop and I plunged towards the darkness.
19.
As I plunged toward the yawning black pit at ever-increasing velocity, I felt frozen and unable to think. I detected something moving rapidly on the ground towards the edge of the pit. As my eyes shifted I realized with some horror that it was Izzy. As I fell faster and faster, my perception seemed to slow everything down. Sound seemed to die away. I was able to leisurely watch Izzy and wonder what the heck he was up to, but it looked like he was going to run over the edge and fall into the pit. Somehow, with everything slowed down, I could work out the timing. He wasn’t going to run into the pit. He was going to jump!
As it dawned on me what he was doing, my perception sped up the world to real time. Izzy leapt. I had no idea what he thought he was doing. He was obviously leaping for me. However the pit was far too large and my downward momentum was far too great for him to have any reasonable hope of carrying me to the other side.
Izzy shot towards me and had his arms around my legs. His weight felt like it added speed and we plunged below the surface into the dark shaft that had been hollowed out. The air was screaming around us. I looked down at Izzy. It was pitch black but I could somehow see his face. He smiled but I could see the wild fear in his eyes.
“Izzy, what were you thinking?” I shouted.
“I was hoping the shaft was long enough that I could remind you that you don’t have to be wearing that metal around your legs.”
“What?”
“Local molecular changes!” Izzy shouted back. He was clearly getting nervous.
“What? But I don’t know how!”
“Heavy oxidation?” Izzy pleaded.
“What?”
“A lot of rust!”
I just went with it. My mind went to some sort of video I had seen on a TV science show showing time-lapse photography of complete disintegration of a steel pipe from rust and made it a narrative instead about my leg wrappings. They began powdering and burst off me. That allowed me to recover and do something I probably should have done even with them on. I just had been so paralyzed by the plunge, I wasn’t thinking. I used my levitation ability to slow our velocity until, at long last, I stopped our fall altogether. We just hovered in midair. Izzy was clinging to me a little frantically. My heart rate was highly elevated. I was betting his was too. It was pitch black; the light from the opening was a tiny night light. I decided to try something. I tried to get myself to relax and focused on bringing forth the glowing tattoos. They created just enough blue glow to see what was immediately around us. The ground, more a pile of boulders, was about six inches
below where Izzy was dangling.
Izzy looked at the rocks right under his feet and dropped down.
“Nice save.”
“You were an idiot for trying to pull a stunt like that.” I floated down beside Izzy.
“You’re welcome.”
“Can I levitate us both out of here?”
“Maybe. But look at this.”
As our eyes adjusted to the dim, bluish glow I was giving off, we could see that we were at the circular base of the shaft. There might have been terraces along the sides at one time or another, but, at least down here, they had crumbled away. However, on one side, at ground level, there was a tunnel that had been cut in the side.
“Where do you think it goes?” I didn’t actually expect Izzy to know but he surprised me sometimes.
“I’m too disoriented to know which direction it is headed, but I suppose it could be another way to get to the mountain by the sea.”
“But why? This looks like an abandoned older mine shaft. Who would be using it?”
Suddenly we heard a crashing sound above us. We could see the small orb of light at the top had become occluded. We realized the noise was the sound of rocks and debris plunging down the shaft. Either the top of the shaft was being collapsed or somehow debris was being dropped in. It didn’t matter which. We ran into the tunnel just as rocks started crashing down in the shaft we were in. The whole tunnel rumbled but somehow didn’t end up caving in. When all was done, the entrance from the shaft to the tunnel was completely sealed with earth and rock.
“So, what, they bury you under a ton of rubble until they decide to dig you out?” Izzy stared at the sealed entrance, rock dust still settling.
“Good a plan as any for that lunatic. You did notice it was Gerod.”
“Yeah. So what’s his game?”
“Power. I think he is done being Gerod. He’s Knightshade now.”
“Guess we’ll have to find our way out of here and show up again.” Izzy chuckled.
“Maybe we should call ourselves the bad penny gang.”
“So, they need your power. They can’t steal it and they can’t get you to cooperate. So they’re trying to put you on ice until they can deal with you? First the tower and now at the bottom of a landslide?”
