‘I see no glint amongst those dull stones.’
‘Some of these are crystals of native silver,’ said the knight, ‘tarnished blackish grey by the sun’s light.’ When he scraped one crystal with the edge of another stone, it shone with a serene, chaste whiteness. ‘Now you will recognise it. That is almost pure silver,’ he said, patently fascinated by the metal. He placed one of the gleaming hexoctahedrons into Asrăthiel’s palm; it weighed heavy. ‘Sweet native silver occurs naturally, but seldom by comparison to more common silver ores such as these.’ The damsel relinquished the fragment, whereupon Zwist proceeded to hand her a succession of mineral nuggets, pellets, scales and plates, identifying them with increasingly outlandish names: soapy nodules like greenish-grey wax, which he called horn silver; lustrous slugs of silver glance; richly hued ruby silvers; silver bromides, some vivid green anti-monial silvers, oxides and iodides, stephanites and embolites, acanthites and sulphur-yellow iodyrites.
His pupil brushed away the veneer of dirt on each sample and studied them with interest.
‘None of these has the look of silver, save for that which you call “native”.’
‘Silver must be purified by smelting before its true beauty can be seen.’
‘Why silver? Why such a cherishing of silver?’
‘Silver has a special relationship with electricity,’ said Zwist, caressing the nuggets where they glimmered brightest, ‘of all the elements, it is the best conductor. It is also sensitive to light, as you have just seen; a useful virtue. Your own kind use its compounds to create mirrors, those playthings of light and almost-windows onto another world. Human beings dye their hair with silver. Your apothecaries and surgeons use silver nitrate as a cautery and a cleanser of infection, and your royal treasuries mint coins of it. The freshness of water, wine and vinegar is better preserved in silver containers. You make of it tableware, jewellery, vases, pins, brooches, buckles and all the rest, you embellish with it by way of chasing, repoussé, filigree and inlaying, for you love it almost as much as we do, though you love gold better. Silver is the colour of starshine and moonshine, of mirrors, and ice crystals, and reflections on shining water.’
‘Silver is fair, but my people do indeed esteem gold more highly,’ said Asrăthiel. ‘Gold is the sun’s colour, and the sun gives life. Aristocrats drink wines spiced with flakes of gold leaf, and wear cloth-of-gold, and gild the edges of their most important documents. Gold is kind, for it does not rust or tarnish.’
‘Neither does silver, in the hands of the Glashtinsluight,’ said Zwist with a stiff bow.
‘I have heard tell,’ said Asrăthiel, ‘that gold and silver sometimes combine naturally, beneath the ground.’
The knight might have shuddered. ‘Speak not to me of tellurides,’ he said. ‘Sylvanite is an obscenity amongst ores. Electrum is a disgrace amongst alloys.’ Holding a bizarrely lovely specimen up to the light, he murmured reflectively, ‘I do admire the elegance of crystallised dyscrasite in calcite,’ before gently replacing the ore in the next car that rolled by.
Leaving the railway they walked down a long drive shored up by stout columns of dressed basalt, the tight-fitting beams holding back huge forces of gravity. In places, water dripped through the ceiling. Asrăthiel could not help but quail for an instant when she pictured the enormous weight of rock pressing down from above. ‘Miles of drives like this weave through every level,’ said her guide, ‘but fear not, for all are supported by baulks of petrified forests or other stone, set squarely and securely.’
The sound of tramping feet approached, and a band of grim-faced mining-wights carrying tools over their shoulders came around a corner, four abreast, looking to neither right nor left. They paused, did homage to the goblin knight, and then marched on their way.
An efficient system of water-curtains was in place to curb the spread of any fires that might ignite in the underground gases. Sometimes, as they walked down a damp and gloomy tunnel, the damsel and her escort would arrive at a screen formed from trickles of falling water, gleaming in the light. They would walk right through without getting wet, by some twist of goblin gramarye.
The basalt walls of the lower caverns were not dressed, but rough-hewn. Here, the floors were uneven and the design austere, displaying no ornamentation. Spitting oil lamps depending from hooks illuminated their way. Asrăthiel became aware of a background noise, a clashing and booming from the deeps towards which they were headed.
She had heard stories of the knockers; stunted manlike wights who wore clothes resembling the traditional garb of their human counterparts. Constant was their labour, yet they were not doomed to it, nor did they work for payment. It was simply that they were compulsive excavators, and could as easily stop mining as the wind could cease to blow. The blue-caps who assisted them were in similar circumstance.
‘How did the knockers while away the centuries while the Argenkindë were imprisoned, Lieutenant Zwist?’
‘Lady Sioctíne, I have never been peppered with so many questions. Yet I am bound to answer. They dug, as they always dig. Now they dig at our direction.’
‘One matter has always puzzled me about those little diggers. None of the tales mention their having wives.’
‘They have no wives. No wives, no lovers, no children. No parents, either, of course. Being deathless they have no need for procreation.’
‘Trows, too, are immortal, yet they seem blessed with eternal domesticity.’
‘Each race is different.’
Asrăthiel was about to ask, ‘Where are the wives and lovers of the Silver Goblins?’ At that moment, however, they entered a colonnaded gallery overlooking a vast cavern and the question withered before it passed her lips.
They had stepped outdoors, or so it appeared at first, after the close confines of the drive. An instant later the weather-mage understood what she saw. The immense space that yawned before them, extending into the nebulous distance, seemed to have been ripped out of solid bedrock. Lamplight twinkled haphazardly in high places along the walls. Asrăthiel lifted her eyes to the remote ceiling. This enormous chamber was like a giant’s treasure-trove of silver. Walls and ceiling glittered all over with pinpricks; multitudinous swarms of glistening silver motes.
‘Stars have descended from the night skies to bedeck the underground darkness!’ Asrăthiel exclaimed, enraptured.
‘Nothing so romantic,’ said Zwist with a laugh. ‘Those are lead sulphides sparkling in the walls.’
Around every glowing lamp the silver flecks took on a misty appearance. Far up, close to the ceiling, upon long, narrow ledges hewn into the rock, dwarflike figures hugged the walls. In groups here and there they laboured, like insects out in the sombre remoteness. Motes of sapphire radiance indicated the presence of implike blue-caps. The great hollow was filled with lights and movement, yet as far as Asrăthiel was concerned, abruptly it all faded to a grey stasis. A rill of shock fired her nerves.
A masculine figure dressed in black was lounging at ease against a nearby wall of the gallery, his sunless hair sliding on his shoulders. She blinked, and he was beside her so swiftly she did not even realise he had moved.
His beauty was such that to gaze at him was like being wounded.
Lieutenant Zwist saluted his lord, who acknowledged him with a nod. Bowing to Asrăthiel with a flourish that hinted of satire, Zaravaz said, ‘I trust the Storm Lord’s daughter is content with the hospitality of Sølvetårn.’ As he bowed, his long locks swept through the air like black vanes, and she felt the caress of turbulence, as if a bird had flown by.
‘Most content.’ She uttered the words like an automaton, stealing an amazed glance at him during the instant his violaceous gaze was averted.
‘Now I will show you the excavations that exist beneath this fastness.’ Zaravaz offered her the crook of his elbow. ‘Come with me.’
His sleeve appeared to be sable velvet stitched with seed-gems of morion, soft fabric covering smooth sinews as tempered and tensile as a sword blad
e. Asrăthiel’s pulse hammered in her ears as she passed her own arm around his. Beset by a type of harrowing delirium she walked close beside him, linked in such a way that she must be in constant contact with his warm, living strength, unexpectedly blind, deaf and disoriented. Sternly she told herself, It is some eldritch spell. I will not let it master me. But it was too late; already she had surrendered.
Lieutenant Zwist strolled in their wake as Zaravaz drew the damsel down to the deep caverns. Through limestone caves they went, where ancient stalactites and stalagmites had joined to form floor-to-ceiling columns, curtained with draperies of frozen calcium carbonate, and ornamented with fantastic natural sculptures, palely glimmering. They crossed subterranean lakes straddled by paths supported on stone arches or spanned by suspension bridges on chains. Rickety catwalks swayed high above chasms. Causeways intersected shallow pools. The labyrinths teemed with eldritch wights: pint-sized knockers in their shirt sleeves, their quaint little faces black with dirt, busy at their digging, but not too busy to bow to the Mountain King as he went past; spinners, resembling elderly women working at their whirring wheels; the elusive fridean, mere shadows and gleaming optics in crevices; gorgeous drowners, their cascades of green hair dripping down upon their naked slenderness as they rose from underworld waters to regard the passers-by, entreating the two knights with outstretched arms white-sheened as lilies. Strains of weird bagpipe music drifted subtly from mysterious recesses.
Once, a huge cavern suddenly opened out at their feet and above their heads. They came to a halt, standing on a platform that jutted out over rarefied space. Chain-and-pulley lifts rattled up and down the chamber’s sides, and buckets crossed it on cables, but Zaravaz ignored those contraptions. He seized Asrăthiel around the waist and pressed her close against him, while with his free hand he grasped a rope whose other end seemed anchored somewhere high in a distant ceiling.
‘Hold tight,’ he said, and she gasped. She clung to his shoulders as, gripping the rope, he swung in a sweeping arc out across the cavern. They landed on a matching platform that thrust from an aperture in the opposite wall, whereupon he let go of the rope and a lesser kobold materialised from a dusky corner to wind it around a wall hook. As they walked away she heard Zwist alight from a second swing, at their backs.
‘You see how it would be difficult for you to navigate these warrens without assistance,’ said Zaravaz.
‘Oh,’ his passenger said offhandedly, still catching her breath, ‘I daresay I could manage the ropes on my own.’
‘I was referring to finding your path,’ he replied. ‘I am sure you could manage the ropes on you own, but I enjoy it better this way.’
At last they arrived at an enormous void, the biggest cavern of all. ‘Here is The Scatter,’ said Zaravaz, ‘where most of our misbegotten mispickels toil.’
Asrăthiel beheld a grim vastness hazed in smoke and steam, lashed by raw breezes. Gloomy little rivulets ran across the uneven floor, and glistening soakage trickled down the walls. Metal rails were hoisted high over this boggy surface, on viaducts across which wheeled steam engines puffed and wheezed, hauling furlongs of linked rolling stock that lumbered and bumped. Heavy-duty cableways stretched from one side to the other, cars swinging as they traversed through the acrid air. Somewhere, steam-powered suction lift pumps could be heard rattling and thumping, draining water away from this foundered sink. The place was noisy, filthy and bleak.
‘Mining wights thrive here,’ Zwist commented, ‘not only knockers but coblynau, cutty soams and blue-caps, buccas, gathorns and bockles. The fridean also.’
And indeed, by the light of thousands of lamps it could be seen that the cavern was teeming with small figures who plied picks and axes, mallets and sledges, chains, ladders, winches, gears, scrapers and drills. They clung like bats up and down the walls, swarming to improbable heights.
‘Enlighten the lady further,’ suggested Zaravaz.
‘The knockers have formed themselves into guilds,’ Zwist expounded willingly, while Zaravaz leaned on a rough stone balustrade and observed the industry below, without relinquishing his grasp on Asrăthiel’s arm, so that she must lean also. ‘Over there the Stingelhammer Guild is working,’ said Zwist, pointing to the left. ‘On the other side are teams from the Three Brothers Guild.’
The untrammelled hair of Zaravaz, blacker than knavery and lifted on the updraughts, softly grazed the side of Asrăthiel’s face. She closed her eyes.
‘This is a natural cavern,’ said Zwist, ‘with ore veins running prolifically through it—chiefly galena, arsenopyrite, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, calcite and quartz. The thickness of the main ore veins varies from several inches up to one yard.’
He might as well be speaking another language, Asrăthiel thought vaguely, for all it means to me at this moment.
‘Those trolleys,’ Zwist pointed a finger, ‘are taking freshly dug ore to be sorted. Worthless rock goes to the waste dump, for possible use as backfill. Low-grade ore is taken to the stockpile, for blending with high grade, or for later treatment. The run of mine, which is the valuable ore, goes to the mill-stock pile, to be put through crushers and sag mills, then to be cleansed and concentrated before proceeding to the smelters and thence to the refineries.’
Zaravaz stood up straight, drawing Asrăthiel with him. She opened her eyes, having barely absorbed anything she had been told.
‘The smelters provide quite a spectacle,’ said affable Zwist, behind her shoulder. ‘No human being has ever seen them.’
‘Is it your pleasure to view a silverworks, Lady Maelstronnar?’ the goblin king invited in his usual lightly mocking tone; part serious and gentle, part scoffing and ironic, part angry. So many elements of his manner seemed to be in conflict that Asrăthiel could not know what to make of him.
‘I should like that,’ she said.
A deep, inclined shaft blocked their path; they crossed it on a narrow plank. The ropes dangling down through the middle of the chasm were jiggling without apparent cause, and just as they stepped off the plank an empty bucket came tumbling down at their backs, banging and sliding. In exchange, a full container, briefly illumined by Zwist’s lantern, shot out of the gloom below, vanishing upwards with startling rapidity. Had they remained on the plank a moment longer, Asrăthiel thought, they must certainly have been knocked into the shaft. The notion unnerved her, though her companions appeared oblivious of such dangers.
In a side cavern further along a vigorous fire was blazing against a rock face, tended by knockers in their shirt sleeves. The miners jumped back, while others brought up hoses. Jets of cold water spurted from the nozzles, dousing the flames, to the accompaniment of loud reports as the heat-expanded rock contracted and split into fragments. As soon as this was over, the little diggers attacked the rock face with zeal, gouging out the broken ore with wedges and picks. They paused only to salute the goblin king.
Asrăthiel and her two guides arrived at the foot of a spiral staircase cut into the rock. As they ascended the damsel could hear, through thicknesses of rock, the rhythmic thunder of the crushing battery’s gigantic hammers. At the top of the stair they crossed the floor of a chamber occupied by enormous bins heaped with powdered ore that resembled mounds of ashes, sand or brick dust. Each bin was identified by a rune chalked on its side.
A cabbage-water stench wafted from a gaping tunnel. ‘Down there lie the roasting furnaces,’ Zwist informed Asrăthiel, ‘tepid fires where mispickels rid the ore of sulphur.’
The goblin king steered a course in the opposite direction, and after a while the damsel found herself walking along a precarious footpath shallowly chipped into the side of a cliff. A slow-moving cable-way ran through the cavern below, which was as big as a tourney field. Laden skips traversed the cavern; as they did so, kobolds seized them with grappling hooks and tipped them up so that their powdery contents fell out onto the floor in lines. Hundreds more bluish-skinned imps were spreading the dusts in layers. Zwist said something about silver ores being
mixed with fluxes of coke and limestone on bedding floors, but Asrăthiel hardly heard him.
The Silverstreet Smelter was situated in caverns abutting a volcanic vent. Washes of rich tangerine light flickering from pits of simmering lava illumined the whole place, and it was hotter than any ordinary mortal could endure—although the heat could not trouble Asrăthiel, who was by then suffering more severely from inner fires scalding her to the core.
‘Here,’ said Zwist, ‘is where the heat of the smelters drives off impurities such as sulphur dioxide and arsenic.’
Imps on high platforms threw the fluxed ore through the mouths of the blast furnaces. Molten metal, shimmering and smoking, streamed into wells on one side of the great ovens, and crews wielding long-handled pots ladled it into hundred-pound moulds. Cooled bars of this base bullion were being stacked onto railway trucks and hauled away to be refined. The fume and steam was tremendous.
‘Base bullion contains more lead than silver,’ said Zwist. ‘Mortal silverworkers, Lady Sioctíne, fall prey to the abundance of lead gases that blast furnaces pump out. Over the years they slowly choke to death on the poison.’
The weathermage felt obliged to be polite, in spite of her distractedness. ‘You are most informative, Lieutenant.’
She was whisked away to the underground refineries, where she observed bars of base bullion being melted in large crucibles, after which the kobolds lowered the temperature very slowly, skimming off the lead crystals as they formed on the surface. They repeated this process several times, using a succession of crucibles, until the metal’s lead content was drastically reduced. This silver-rich residue was poured into cupellation hearths, from which blasts of fiery air raged through the caverns, hot enough to blister walls of stone.
‘It is bruited that you are inviolable, Mistress Stormbringer,’ said Zaravaz. ‘How fortunate for you, here in this infernal pit.’
Had he placed some subtle, suggestive emphasis on the word ‘inviolable’?
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