“We’ll just follow our way back up the slope, won’t we? Wait for them in the warm sun. Don’t worry, I’m coming,” he added, in response to a fresh tug on his arm.
And then they found the chamber. It was only about eight feet across, and the ceiling was low enough that Carbón and his foreman, a man named Zayas, had to duck. The others—Torre’s nephew, Pedro, plus Grosst and Lozada, the engineers, and Torre’s servant, Aquino—stood looking around the small room with doubtful expressions. A few picks, shovels, and other tools lay among the rubble of broken rock coal.
“Doesn’t look like much,” Aquino said. “You sure this is it?”
Zayas stepped up to the walls without touching them and let his helmet lamp illuminate the shiny black surface. “I thought it was here. Yeah, this was the room. But I don’t see it no more.”
“Where was it?” Carbón asked. “This wall over here?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“I hope you’re not wasting our time,” Torre said. “It’s a long way down here for nothing.”
“Oh, it’s here all right,” Grosst said in her nasal Basdeen accent. She had been carrying a heavy satchel slung over one shoulder, and now let it slide to the ground. “I didn’t feel anything when I came in, but as soon as we stopped, it started vibrating in my bones.”
“You can feel artifacts?” Carbón asked.
A nod. “Deep in my bones. When I was a kid, I found one on the beach. No bigger than my thumbnail. Shiny little blinking thing. Picked it up, and ever since then I can sense ’em.”
Torre frowned, not sure he believed her. “The Luminoso would love to get their hands on you if that’s true. Sniffing out old magic is their favorite pastime.”
“That cult of yours isn’t gonna get their hands on me. I got rights as a Basdeenian.”
“Nobody is going to touch you,” Carbón said.
Torre eyed the thick-set woman, wondering about her. Grosst had a good reputation, and her father and grandfather had been the Basdeenian engineers who’d helped his own father build the waterworks that opened and closed the Great Span. The Basdeenian engineers formed a guild, and it was said that they’d rediscovered the mathematics of the ancient geometers, secrets they jealously guarded.
Still, masters of numbers and materials were as likely to be swept along in superstitious nonsense as anyone else, in his experience. Torre would have doubted her claim, except that it didn’t stand alone. It rested on Carbón’s assurances, too.
“If there was an artifact here, does that mean someone stole it?” he asked.
“No, this part of the mine has been closed,” Carbón said. “Nobody has been in or out.”
“The artifact probably crept back into the wall,” Grosst said. “They do that, yeah?”
Torre walked to the wall and tapped the glossy black surface with the brass end of his cane. Hitting the coal seam was like striking solid rock. Which, he supposed, was why this was called rock coal, denser and more valuable than that shipped up the coast from the south.
“Careful, Uncle,” Pedro said. His thumbs worried at the little bird hanging from its thong around his neck. “Don’t get too close.”
“The boy is right,” Carbón said. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with, but you don’t want it touching you, that’s for sure. It will shrivel you up—we already saw that.”
“Don’t worry about me. Hell, I’m halfway withered to the grave already.”
Head cocked, Grosst walked beside the wall. She stopped. “Whack your cane over here, Torre.”
He did. Two tentative taps, and then the brass knob made a hollow sound. He stepped back with a satisfied grunt. “There you have it. Now, Grosst, how do you get the blasted thing out?”
She handed her bag to Zayas and unstrapped it while he held it up for her, then took out a pair of thick, elbow-length gloves, which she gave to Lozada.
“They weigh a ton,” Lozada said. “What the devil is in these things?”
“Lead,” she said. “Like Carbón said, you don’t want this thing touching you. Not until we know what it is and how to control it.”
“Touch it and it might give you the ability to douse for artifacts,” Torre said. “I don’t think Grosst wants the competition.”
The older engineer paid him no attention. She removed a hand drill, a hammer, and a chisel, took back her bag, and handed Zayas the tools. The foreman looked skeptical as he took them.
“You’re going to need picks and shovels,” he said. “Not this flimsy stuff.”
“This is quicker,” Grosst said.
Zayas looked incredulous. “You can’t knock through rock coal with these little things.”
“Wanna bet? That drill is an artifact—does your work for you. And if those cultists try to steal it from me, I’ll drill holes in their thick skulls to prove it.” She took back the gloves and put them on. “You need to take some care, of course, but the problem isn’t the drilling. Even the old man could do it. Sorry, I mean Lord Torre.”
“I’m the one who said ‘old man’ first,” Torre said with a shrug.
“One of you miner types tell me where to drill so the wall doesn’t collapse,” Grosst said. “I need to make enough holes to knock out this segment right here.” She indicated a stretch of the wall with her gloved hand.
Lozada and Zayas consulted. The room had enough supports in place, they decided, that there was no need to leave a column. Just make her holes and knock it down.
“Hold on,” Torre said. “Give me the gloves and the drill, then. Let’s see if ‘even the old man’ can do it.”
Grosst raised an eyebrow and glanced at Carbón, who shook his head. “Don’t look at me. I’m not telling Lord Torre what to do.”
Grosst stripped off the gloves and handed them over. Damn, but they were heavy. By the time Torre had them on he felt as though his arms had been turned to rock coal themselves. His muscles strained just to lift them, and the little hand drill was heavier than he’d expected, too.
He almost balked, deciding that a little laughter at his expense was worth it. But Pedro was watching, and Torre desperately needed the boy to mature as quickly as possible. Watching his uncle embarrassed wouldn’t help with that; Torre would struggle through.
Grosst understood how the drill worked, and Zayas and Lozada knew how to fracture the coal and bring it down, and together they told him where to drill the first of what would be many holes. He placed the strangely curved bit against the rock. The bit gleamed, either reflecting the glow of the oil lamps or burning with its own light.
He gave a tentative crank of the handle. The bit turned, but didn’t bite into the rock. It seemed to be vibrating in his hand, and he thought maybe it was warm, too, given the shimmering around the bit, but he didn’t feel that part through the lead-lined gloves. He pressed harder and turned the crank again. Still nothing.
“I’m not sure I can put enough weight into it,” he admitted. “Maybe one of you younger people should give it a try. You’re all stronger than me.”
“It’s not a question of strength,” Grosst said. “You need to turn it faster. Go ahead, don’t worry about putting pressure on it. Just turn it faster.”
He did, still doubtful. After the second crank, it grew easier, and then suddenly the thing seemed to be turning of its own accord, until his whole shoulder was moving as swiftly as the running gear of a train engine. The drill bit into hard coal like it was mud. It began to smoke.
“We can’t have smoke,” Zayas said. “There’s fire-damp down here. We’ll be blown to pieces if it sparks.”
“It won’t spark,” Grosst told the foreman. “And that’s not really smoke. Look.”
A black, tar-like liquid oozed from the hole Torre had drilled, as if the coal had been converted into some other substance by the drill. The smoke-like substance was apparently a by-product of that.
Torre was ready to hand over the drill and gloves to someone else, but Zayas was already marking the other dril
l spots with a piece of white chalk, and Grosst urged him to continue. He went to work, and shortly had another hole drilled.
It wasn’t difficult to drill the holes. The hard part was holding up the tool with the lead gloves. His arms were soon trembling with exhaustion. Zayas went to work with the chisel and hammer to knock down the rock between his drill holes. Torre eyed the other chalk marks. There were still a lot of them.
Carbón tapped Torre on the shoulder. “Here, let me take a turn.”
He nodded gratefully and handed over the drill, then made to take off the gloves. But before he could do that, Zayas shouted and jumped back.
The wall was crumbling, suddenly turning to rubble before their eyes. From the expressions on Lozada’s and Zayas’s faces, it was clear they hadn’t been expecting this. A chunk of coal struck Torre’s knee, and he staggered back with a gasp. The air filled with coal dust, and all of them were soon coughing and hacking.
Iliana gasped. “By the Elders! Look at that.”
A pair of glowing green eyes cut through the dust. They swept back and forth in twin beams and settled on Torre. His face was instantly warm under their glow, and he could see the green reflecting from him to the dumbfounded, terrified face of Anne Grosst. The others all stood frozen in some mixture of fear and awe as they stared either at Torre or into the cavern that had opened behind the wall.
Something scratched in his head, a painful, clawing sensation, like there was a worm buried deep in his skull that was coming awake under the strength of that warm, sickly-green light. It was the object itself, the artifact, awakening something in his mind.
And a voice. By the Elders, there was a voice in his head, deep and resonant, and it was talking to him. He didn’t understand at first—it was all slurred vowels and harsh consonants. No language he understood. The words shifted and jumbled, and then concentrated, like water flowing down a hillside that encounters a channel cut by a mountain stream.
Man, speak to me. If you are sent by the Elders, then count for me.
His words came out in a stammer. “Wh-what is . . . what do you m-mean?”
Count for me! Number for me the particles in a hot lead fire.
Another voice sounded in the background. “Torre!” It sounded like a man yelling at him from the entrance to the mine, but a hand was also tugging on his arm, so it must be closer.
He was still talking to the creature with the glowing green eyes. It was calling him, compelling him to answer. “I don’t know what a hot lead fire is.”
Not a hot lead fire, it said. Or seemed to say, but then it repeated: A hot lead fire. The quantity of particles.
“What? I don’t understand.”
No, you do not. You are a lesser being, and you must flee here at once, or you will die.
The light vanished, and he found himself in absolute darkness. No, not entirely—the thin, ghostly whisper of oil lamps still flickered around him in the clearing air, growing in strength even as his eyes readjusted. Ahead, nothing but blackness in the chamber beyond the wall, but he’d caught a glimpse of the object, not only of eyes, but of a hulking body, some beast of immense size they had awakened.
“What was that?” Grosst said. “I heard something. A voice.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” someone else said.
Sounded like Iliana, but Torre was still groggy and uncertain. But at last, his head began to clear.
“That’s because it was speaking to me,” he said.
Carbón shook his arm. “What? What did you hear?”
The other part, the nonsense about lead and fires and counting, didn’t matter. Only one thing did.
“It said to run or I would die.”
Pedro screamed. Something oily and liquid-like came oozing out of the hole. It pooled on the floor and began to take shape, shadowy arms and multiple twisted faces. A witherer.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Two more witherers flowed through the hole in the wall before the group broke from their stupor. Terrified, Torre turned to join the others, who were scrambling and fighting each other to get through the doorway and out of the room. And he knew he would be the first to die.
He was old, weak, and slow. The three witherers—already moving across the room toward the interlopers—would catch him and destroy him first. His companions would use his death to make their escape, if they were lucky and kept their wits.
But if he thought they’d abandon him, he was mistaken. Pedro grabbed one arm and Carbón the other, while Iliana came in behind and took him by the waist to steady him. They hustled him along, half carrying him, lead gloves and all, out of the room and up the shaft. He was already gasping for air from the exertion, but kept moving as fast as he could.
A low, gurgling sound followed them. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw the three witherers entwining and separating as they alternated between curling like smoke and undulating on the ground like a puddle of oil flowing uphill. Their pace was unrushed, languid, yet they were gaining.
“Leave me!” he gasped. “Save yourselves.”
“No, Uncle,” Pedro said.
“Keep going,” Iliana urged. “We’re almost out.”
No, they weren’t. They weren’t even back to the main shaft yet, and even though the witherers seemed to be flowing toward the surface rather than actively hunting them, the creatures would overtake them long before they arrived. One touch from the witherers, and they would be done for.
He struggled to break free. “Go. Leave me. You’ll all die.”
But the others wouldn’t abandon him and kept dragging him up, and since his struggles were only slowing them further, he kept going for a stretch, seeming to concede, but looking for his chance to break free to save them all.
“Lord Carbón!” It was Zayas, coming back for them. His eyes were wild with fear beneath the flicker of his light at his helmet, but he grabbed for his master. “Save yourselves. I’ve got him. Run, all of you!”
“Let go of me,” Carbón said. “I won’t leave him.”
Now there was a three-way struggle. The mine foreman trying to save Carbón. Carbón, joining Iliana and Pedro in trying to haul Torre out of the mine. And Torre, trying to free himself to save the lives of his companions.
They entered the main shaft. A string of rail cars stretched along a track in the center, and Torre spotted his opportunity. Still wearing Grosst’s lead-lined gloves, he grabbed the side of one of the cars and gripped it with all the strength left in his arms. The others, still continuing along, jerked free.
“Torre, you idiot, stop this,” Carbón said.
He pried at Torre’s hands, and Iliana and Pedro joined him. Torre kept his grip.
“No. Leave. Go.”
“Help us!” Carbón shouted to the others.
Aquino was the closest, glancing back, clearly torn between fleeing for his life and helping his master, and he returned. Grosst and Lozada hesitated a moment longer, but ultimately returned as well.
Carbón struggled with him. “Damn you, Torre, stop this.”
“By the Elders, save yourselves.”
The shadows came slinking up the shaft. Now in the ground, now wisps of smoke. Now taking forms. Long faces, snouts open and full of teeth. The smell of leaking coal gas was so thick it was suffocating.
Terror gripped Torre’s chest, and he released his grasp, repentant of his stubborn idiocy. He tried to get up and run, but stumbled, knocking over the others. They gasped and screamed in terror and tried to scramble back from the three figures bearing down on them. Iliana lost her helmet, which tumbled next to where Torre was lying on the ground. Its tiny flame flickered around the feet of a witherer, who came flowing out of the ground, growing like a black, twisted tree trunk. It reached for Torre, who could only lift his hands to his face.
The witherer’s fingers twisted like black vines and wrapped around Torre’s wrists. He was still wearing the lead-lined gloves, and as the witherer touched them, it stopped and uncoiled with a hiss
. The whole thing fell back, form wavering and solidifying again. Torre was unharmed.
The gloves. It touched the lead.
Even as this thought raced through his mind, someone screamed, a terrified sound so high and shrieking that Torre thought it must be Iliana. The witherer that had been attacking him bent toward the sound.
The screamer was Zayas. He lay on the ground, wrestling with oily shadows that wrapped snake-like around his body. The third witherer bled into them, until they became a single, black, shapeless mass. An oily appendage entered the foreman’s mouth and plunged down his throat. The scream choked and died.
Zayas’s face shrank. His eyeballs shriveled back into his head. Lips withered to leathery flaps, and his nose seemed to melt away. He convulsed twice and stopped moving. His trousers and shirt hung loose about what was no more than a husk, a pile of bones and leathery skin, drained of blood and other fluids.
The survivors regained their feet and began to run. Grosst was the nearest to the shriveled husk of the foreman, and the last to gain her feet, and the witherers came at her before she could break free. A shadowy appendage, long and flexible as an uncoiling rope, grabbed her foot, and she screamed.
Torre flung one of the gloves at the writhing mass of witherers. It blasted through them like they were made of nothing, and they dissolved into smoke and a shower of ashes before beginning to take shape again.
“Uncle!” Pedro yelled.
Torre’s nephew had grabbed him by the arm, and Iliana had him, too, and they hefted him back to his feet. No more nonsense about staying behind and sacrificing himself. He found the strength to stumble along toward the entrance. Grosst had somehow regained her feet and came hobbling after, and Carbón and Lozada helped her along. As they got near the entrance, Pedro broke into a sprint and threw open the doors to the mine.
Sunlight, brilliant and blinding, streamed into the shaft. From behind them came a sound like the hiss of escaping coal gas from a ruptured pipe. Torre whipped his head around to see the witherers falling back into the darkness. Moments later, the survivors stumbled into the daylight.
Wandering Star (The Quintana Trilogy Book 1) Page 20
