by John Daulton
No sooner was he over the cliff than she began her dive. Ilbei had seen Meggins do it, and he was ready enough to let himself go sliding painfully down as well. He let himself down another span, then stopped, waiting for her. He knew he had to time it right. He gritted his teeth and prepared to drop. She was almost on him. A blinding flash crackled, and a line of lightning split the air. A hot blast of moist air hit him, and all his hair stood on end, his beard puffing like a blowfish. He had to blink to clear his vision, and when he did, he saw the harpy spinning toward the ground like a wounded dove, wings limp and partway folded, her cries silent.
He shook his head and blinked a few more times, squinting down to the cave floor. His ears rang something fierce. Jasper was waving a scroll at him. “Lightning,” he called up. “I told you I had one.”
With a grin that was half relief and half pleasant surprise, he let himself down the rest of the way, taking his time given that the jolt he’d gotten made it hard to close his hands properly.
When he was down, he looked off to the left. In the shadows near the cavern wall, he could see the dim gray shape of the harpy where she had crashed into the rocks. He wondered if she was dead. If it wouldn’t have required the work of scaling a steep jumble of broken stone to get to her, he might have gone and seen to it that she was, but she wasn’t moving, so he let it go.
“Meggins, how are yer hands?” he asked.
“They’re fine, Sarge. I’ll be okay till we buy some space and time for one of Jasper’s jiffy scrolls.”
Ilbei turned to face Jasper square. “Nice work, Jasper. Fer a feller what near washed out of caster boot camp, ya done good. That lightnin spell worked fine.”
“Well of course it did. Why wouldn’t it have?” Jasper said. “I already informed you that the only limitation of the lightning spell was one regarding visibility. There’s enough light coming from all that over there to meet the visual requirements of the spell, even to the ceiling. To be honest, my only concern was whether or not there would be an issue with grounding, because, as you know, lightning can—”
“Son,” Ilbei injected, “ya done good. But we don’t need ya to write the book about it as we stand here listenin. Let’s get on our way, and hope some of them folks up yonder will direct us to the door.”
“Well, I wasn’t writing anything,” Jasper said. “I was talking. And I really don’t think there is going to be anything as simple as a door.” But he fell silent after, looking completely put out. After depositing the blank parchment of the spent lightning spell in his satchel, he did, however, fall in line with the rest. None of them, not even Jasper, was willing to protest a command for them to get out of that cave and into the light of day.
Chapter 29
With the noise they’d made, and the fact that they were now on the ground level of the cavern, Ilbei didn’t want to linger longer than they had to. They retrieved Ilbei’s helmet and pickaxe, found Meggins’ bow and then set out immediately for the bend around which they’d seen the little crowd run out when the fiery light flared. Using the relative shadows along the base of the cavern wall, they crept along as silently as possible, Ilbei with his weapon out but the others with theirs put away. The sight of a man with a pickaxe ought not to seem out of keeping with the situation, but a war party would arouse suspicion for sure. Ilbei suspected he and his people would do that anyway, but it was at least worth a try to avoid trouble if possible.
The pounding of many picks, hammers and iron bars beating on stone grew louder and louder as they approached. Ilbei held up a hand, signaling a halt as they were nearly to the corner. He crept closer, intending to peek around, when came the abrupt cessation of the clatter. The pounding of picks and mashing of hammers stopped and was followed immediately by the thumping of feet. Right after, the wave of figures they’d seen from the far end of the cavern passed by, close now and perhaps a hundred of them, though Ilbei didn’t try to count. All of them were as naked as could be—naked but for the feathered portions of their legs and the dangling bits of feathers at their backs, which were stained and filthy, hanging from the sawed-off stumps of what had once been wings. The whole lot of the “people” they’d observed from afar were harpies, or what remained of harpies.
The two harpies nearest Ilbei looked over as the bright light flared, which was accompanied at this proximity by a furnace-fire roar, loud and thunderous. The nearest of these maimed creatures, a male, saw Ilbei standing there. For a moment Ilbei feared the harpy would call out and bring the whole flock of them upon his little band, a swarm of bashing picks, shovels, rakes and bars. But the harpy did not call out. He simply stared at Ilbei with a hollow look in his black eyes, the skin beneath them sallow and lined. The whole of him was shrunken, with barely enough flesh to cover his bones, the lines and angles of which were visible beneath, though none so visible as those two protrusions where his wings had been cut off and the stumps cauterized.
The harpy saw Ilbei, seemed to be aware that someone was looking at him, and then turned back and waited for the bright flames to die down. When they did, he ran with the rest back beyond the bend.
Ilbei turned to his companions, bewilderment apparent. He shuffled forward a few moments after and tilted himself so he could look around the bend.
There came a loud hiss as he did, and he saw that men, human men up on railed platforms, had been lowered down through openings high above. They held long, flexible tubes that dropped down out of the holes from which the platforms had descended. The men directed spouts of clear liquid down onto a heaping pile of broken rock on the cavern floor. The stone, glowing red in places, hissed and spat when the liquid splashed upon it and cooled it rapidly, so rapidly that some of the larger pieces split open on contact. For a moment Ilbei assumed it was water they used to cool the pile, but only for a moment, for right after, the smell of vinegar assaulted him in a hot, humid wave.
He jerked back behind the cover of the wall, pulling in clean air, or at least better air, and then tipped back out to look again, holding his breath this time.
The stump-winged harpies fell upon the heap like a pack of wolves on a fresh kill, and once again the chamber was filled with the sound of iron on stone. Some of the harpies beat upon the jumble of rocks while others raked down the pile, dragging the crushed ore to a long sluice that had been made in the creek, which ran along the far wall. More harpies worked the sluices themselves, and Ilbei could see them pulling out gold, which glinted in the light of the lamps that hung everywhere up and down the walls. The harpies working the troughs were a line of constant motion, bending and raking with short rakes, plucking out chunks of gold, then turning to toss them into baskets before turning back and raking again. They never straightened. They just worked and worked, like machines made of skin and bone.
Ilbei looked up to where the men who’d sprayed the vinegar down were drawing the long tubes back onto the platforms, piling them in great coils. As he watched, movement at the end of the cavern caught his eye. Small tunnels cut into the rock face now yawned out lines of more wingless harpies, all of them running two at a time to the open mouth of a tunnel and dumping ore down onto the pile by the basketful. Thin gold veins like threads sparkled as the pieces fell, and much more of it flashed as chunks rolled down the pile after some harpy’s hammer smote apart the bigger rocks. Gold was everywhere.
Ilbei pulled back a few steps and turned to his companions. “It’s a gold mine all right, fertile as a womb. And them harpies is slaves to it, weren’t no doubt. They all been butchered like that one we seen back in the creek, and now put to the slaver’s whip.”
“But, we’re north of South Mark by a hundred measures still,” Meggins said. “There’s no way we turned down that far south. Not in the two days since we came into the mountain. It’s not possible.”
“You’re right about that,” Ilbei agreed.
“So, Her Majesty would never tolerate such a thing. Not even harpies. At least I don’t think she would.” His voice trailed o
ff a little at the end. He glanced at Kaige, then back to Ilbei, adding, “Would she?”
“She damned sure wouldn’t,” Ilbei said. “This here operation is somebody’s secret, sure as kissin a colonel’s wife.”
“Well, then we’re not likely to be given directions to the front door,” Mags said.
“No, I don’t reckon we will. All the same, that poor devil what seen me didn’t seem to give two coppers I was here, so I expect we can make fer an exit if’n we find one without them harpies standin in our way.” He crept forward again and once more surveyed the scene around the bend. There were no openings at ground level in the opposite wall, and none on the far end beyond where the fires were other than the low, narrow passage through which the water ran out. He noticed as he looked that a basketful of ore was thrown right down onto one of the harpies working the heap, knocking him flat, face forward into the pile. Steam began to rise around him. Ilbei shook his head.
He glanced up to see if any of the people, the humans, up on the railed platforms were watching, but none were turned his way, so he risked a look down the near wall, right around the bend, hoping for a way out. Again there was no sign of an exit or passageway. That left only the stream.
He took a second look at where it exited. It ran out through a narrow opening that had clearly been cut into the wall for it, just as the shafts above it had been. It wasn’t very large, and it obviously would lead them farther down.
He turned back, shaking his head. “Well, folks, we got ourselves into a bit of a fuss. Only way out and up I see is them platforms what come through the roof. Otherwise, we’ll be goin down again, either followin the creek we don’t know or goin back to the one we do and takin our chances bein spitted by the Skewer.”
Meggins stepped past him and peered around to see. He spent several long moments looking up and down, then came back and nodded that he agreed with Ilbei’s assessment. “Any chance one of those caves up that far wall leads out?”
“No. Look at how they’re all straight angled. You can see by the slant of the roofs. They’re all cut in by hand.”
Meggins went back and looked. After a few moments, his head jerked, as if he’d gotten a jolt of some kind, and for a long time after, he watched, shaking his head. When he came back, his voice was filled with awe. “You should see how much gold they just threw into baskets out there. Some pieces big as my head.”
Ilbei was nearly trampled by Kaige as he went to look, Jasper and Mags right behind.
Sure enough, Meggins had been on the mark, and they watched as the last chunks and shovelfuls of gold gravel from the bottom of the flumes were piled in two very large and very sturdy-looking baskets. The baskets were dragged beneath another opening in the ceiling, where they were then attached to a pair of hooks at the end of a rope that had been lowered down. When the baskets were secure, they were raised up into the darkness by someone unseen above. No sooner had the baskets vanished, both the platforms were hauled up into their respective shafts as well.
“Well that’s the damnedest thing I ever seen…,” Ilbei began to say, but he let it die off as all the harpies turned and ran back toward them again.
Just as before, all in a wave, the harpy slaves rushed out of the area where the pile of broken rocks lay, all but one harpy anyway, the one upon whose head the stones had fallen. He remained motionless but for the wisps of steam rising from him. The rest ran past the corner, again unconcerned by the fact that anyone looked on—even the harpy that had seen Ilbei earlier did not bother to look back again. They stood together, staring expectantly, and their scrutiny prompted Ilbei and the rest to follow the line of their collective focus up to the ceiling. Ilbei realized there was a large hole up there that hadn’t had a platform lowered from it, not quite so large as the others, and closer to the back wall. In the time it took him to make the assessment, a gush of flame blew out of the opening, straight down in a rush, as if the bottom of a barrel full of dragon’s fire had broken loose.
The blazing column of fire, at least thirty paces thick, burned and burned, roaring almost deafeningly, the heat blasting them as they observed, just far enough away to be at the edge of bearing it. Even at that distance, beads of sweat broke out on all their faces, only to be instantly evaporated. Kaige and Jasper wiped at the salty dryness upon their brows as Mags dabbed unconsciously at her upper lip with the back of her hand.
They watched and waited until the fiery deluge stopped, three minutes or so, Ilbei gauged, and then as abruptly as it began, it was gone, the roar, like the flames, retracting up into the hole from whence it had come. The heap of ore glowed bright red, pulsing as if it were the molten heart of this strange place. A heart of gold, in the most literal sense, and Ilbei suspected an evil one. Ilbei shook his head.
The harpy wave, caught in the tidal beat of that heaping glow, rushed back as the platforms were lowered again. The men upon them once more pushed out the lengths of tubing until the nozzles were clear of the platforms, which hung like dangling balconies over the nightmarish scene. One by one, the tubes jerked, then spewed streams of pungent white vinegar. The men washed the pile down systematically, the hot rocks hissing steam, spitting and crackling, ejecting splinters of stone while many pieces cracked and fell apart. Clumps of gold fell away sometimes when the rocks broke open, as if separated by invisible hands, and rolled down the pile.
When the hissing steam stopped and the red-hot glow was gone, the harpies once again clambered up the jumble and set themselves to crushing the rest with their hammers and picks. Shortly after, the other harpies up in the caves along the back wall once more emerged and began throwing down ore. Somehow most of it managed not to hit anyone below, and Ilbei wondered if that was intentional or simply luck. He thought as he watched that, were he one of those maimed wretches out there beating on that pile of rocks, the kindest thing that could have been done to him would be for one of those harpies above to simply cave in his skull with a load of rocks. He thought the harpy that had been struck down before the last fire blast was likely the luckiest one of the lot. A glance proved that particular harpy was no longer in evidence, his corpse vaporized by the column of flame. Ilbei harrumphed, disgusted. He’d seen a lot of mining in his day, but never anything like that.
He pulled his people back and pressed himself into the shadows with them. “We’ve got to get news of this to Hast,” he said. “We need to get word of it to Her Majesty. This here is intolerable.”
All were nodding as Kaige asked, “So how do we get out of here, Sarge? We gonna climb up on one of those hanging things?”
“We do that, we’re like to end up with that fire comin right down on our heads while we try. Even if it don’t, I don’t expect them fellers is gonna sit idly by and let us up neither, so I figure our best bet is to keep on like we have been and follow the water. Seein as this here cavern ain’t filled up yet, that water is gettin out somewhere. Eventually.” He couldn’t keep the discontent from his voice. He didn’t fancy the idea of having to go down into the mountain, but there wasn’t much to be done about it now.
“There’s a lot of open ground between here and there,” Meggins pointed out. “They’ll see us if we run across.”
“They take a little time after the fire to come back down out of the hole,” Mags said. “But I’m not sure I can run fast enough to cover the distance between here and that opening.”
“Well, I certainly can’t,” Jasper said.
“Why doesn’t Jasper use one of those fog spells?” Meggins said. “I’ve seen that used before.”
Jasper scowled at the suggestion and rolled his eyes. “Jasper doesn’t have one,” Jasper said. “Jasper had to leave his trunk up on the cliff because Jasper can’t climb cliffs with a huge box of magic on his back, and none of Jasper’s cohorts could be bothered to assist after Jasper’s sergeant insisted Jasper ‘travel light and with only what he could carry on his back.’”
“Ya don’t need no fog,” Ilbei said. “Besides, how’d that look
down here? And we don’t need nobody to run fast neither.” He pointed with a motion of his chin, his beard directing their gaze. “Didn’t ya see how them harpies pay us no mind? We’ll just go easy as ya please out there amongst em when they come near again. Walk straight across. Kaige, you’ll need to bend down some so ya don’t look the lone redwood in the walnut grove. We’ll sidle on through to the far side, and when the fire dies and they all run in, we’ll just run right on down the stream and into that there tunnel.”
“You’re sure giving those harpies a lot of credit for playing along,” Meggins said. “It may be they haven’t done anything to us because they haven’t all noticed us yet. Maybe the one that looked at you hasn’t got the sharpest beak in the flock, so to speak.”
“Well, I won’t make none of ya do it until I try it first, because there is a risk, I’ll grant. But I don’t see how it’s much worse than goin back and tryin to jump through one of them lances that bastard Skewer is shootin.”
On that they were all in agreement, so the plan was confirmed. They waited for the cycle to repeat itself, and soon enough, the fire shaft blew down its hot column just after all the harpies ran away. All together, the five of them slipped in among the harpies, Kaige doing as instructed and trying to hunker down. The reality was, he couldn’t hunker down enough, for the harpies were to a man, or to a bird, all slight by comparison—by natural stature, certainly, but also by privation. They were to the last among them all shorter than everyone but Ilbei, and built hardly more powerfully than Jasper was. But there were so many of them. And oh, how they reeked.
Sweat ran in rivulets through the mire that caked their flesh, and it brought to life the stench of the older sweat that had been layering there for who knew how many months or years. Some smelled like death itself, and there were more than a few whose wing stumps seeped pus and gore. These looked the sorriest. Though they were all bent and nearly broken with the toil of what must have been endless-seeming days, the wretches with the oozing wing bones were feverish and teetered on the verge of collapse. They looked out through rheumy, pink-rimmed eyes, the tracks of their endlessly flowing tears black against their gray flesh, streaks that shimmered in the firelight.
