Chapter 32: Mine Runners

The smoking closet in the Upper Adit workshop was finally put to new use smoking the butchered pigs. They had feasted on organs that night, and they felt a warm sensation not unlike drunkenness as the rich food strengthened their blood. The next morning, Yorvig was standing at the base of the new stair, triple-checking the angle of the spiral to ensure that they would be facing the correct direction at the agreed-upon height, when Onyx approached and interrupted his thoughts:

“I wish to carve myself a chamber,” she said. “I will not continue to sleep in this open smithy where any dwarf could walk by and see me.”

Yorvig lost track of his sums.

“What? Ay, yes. Alright." Honestly, it was frustrating that she slept there in the workshop, because none of them would approach it while she slept. "I suppose I can lend you my tools. There won’t be room for all of us to swing on the stair.”

“I have my own,” Onyx said. That surprised Yorvig too. He hadn’t noticed.

“You do?” Wait. He had noticed they had brought four picks and chisel-satchels. He just thought it was an extra, or that maybe it was Savvyarm's.

“Would I come to a prospecting claim in the wilds without tools at least?”

“Right,” Yorvig said. He found himself staring to try to read her emotion and manner. It was difficult with most of her face hidden. She still wore her hair tightly wrapped as if she was traveling. In Deep Cut, maids often displayed their hair above the half-veil, wearing intricate braids, bangles, and delicate meshes and ornaments of precious metal and stone. For the more lowly, copper, bronze, and agate were not uncommon. But no dwarf-maid needed to be lowly for long, if she wished to marry. Why had this one not?

“How old are you?” Yorvig asked. He thought Sledgefist might have told him once, but he couldn't remember.

“What has that to do with mining a chamber?” she said in a flat tone.

“Nothing,” Yorvig said, deciding not to make excuse for the impertinent question. But it would make more sense to stay in Deep Cut if she wished to marry dwarf or trade. Maybe she had been deceived about the situation in the claim, but it still didn't make much sense to come here without a purpose in mind.

“So about my chamber?” she asked.

“You are free to dig.”

“Where?”

Yorvig raised his eyebrows.

“Where should I dig?” she asked. “I never apprenticed in the mines but my understanding is that the rinlen chooses where to dig."

Yorvig sighed. He did not need this. He turned to look down the adit, thinking. Living quarters had not been on his mind.

“At the end of this drift,” he said. “The drift passes out of the seam. There is a left corner there. Continue straight on ten feet, then you may have a hold of fifty on the right, with the regular passway.”

A hold of fifty square feet was a generous space in Deep Cut, larger than most families had. The regular passway was seven feet of stone between the hold and the drift passage. By Deep Cut law, the outer three-and-a-half feet belonged to the passage and the inner counted against the cubic fifty. By tradition, the hold possessed the stone twenty feet up from the horizontal plane. Yorvig did not expect to care much about the specifications here. It was simply a way to outline location. Dealing with such things as private chambers felt foolish to him, but at least it could be done sensibly.

“That will take me a time,” she said. “Even the drift. I do not require a fifty. I seek only a chamber. ”

“You can have it, though, minus any ore that could be taken. I will send Khlif to help you until the drift is cut. There are too many to work the spiral, anyway.” It was better to keep holds to regular cuts like fifties, thirties, and tens. Irregularity caused problems as a mine expanded.

“Thank you,” she said.

Yorvig shrugged, and thinking of nothing else, he walked away. It would keep her occupied and away from the work.

Over a week passed in relative camaraderie. The dwarves were slowly learning not to track Onyx’s every movement with their eyes. But the end of the meat and the need to hunt again approached. Every morning they had gone to the weir, and most mornings they found at least one fish, but beside the oil for burning it was no significant gain to their food stores. A single fish sufficed for one meal for one dwarf at labor.

Yorvig was sleeping the night before the hunting expedition when he woke to a nightmare. Striper must have been near, for when he sat up, she meowed and came to brush against his foot, purring. Yorvig’s clothes were wet with sweat though he’d been laying directly on the cool stone of the Low Adit drift. It was odd. He hadn’t had that dream for many years. He picked up Striper and set her in his lap, stroking her fur. It relaxed him. One of her kittens, now a grown cat, had taken a liking to Shineboot and could often be found hanging around his heels. Another curled up on Sledgefist’s legs once he fell asleep. If the cat approached Sledgefist while he was awake, he would shoe her away, so she waited until he was asleep. Two of the kittens had disappeared, or at least he hadn’t seen them in a long time. Three others lurked about, inside the claim or in the dell, though they were stand-offish.

It was lore among the dwarves that before they learned the keeping of cats from the humans, rats and mice sometimes infested colonies and mines. Rodents were evasive, difficult to exterminate, and small enough to squeeze through tight spaces. Sometimes, it seemed there was no explanation for how the creatures could get into sealed stone containers. Some said rats had powers beyond the natural. Nonsense, but it made for chilling stories for the gilke and gilna.

One story always gave Yorvig shivers as a gilke. The story said that before cats were brought into the mines, if an infestation became so terrible, the dwarves would dig a pit and throw a group of rats within, keeping it covered until only one rat remained, devouring the others rather than starve. Then they would throw in more rats, and more, and more, and more, always until just one rat remained. Soon, it would always be the same rat who survived. Then, they would release that rat.

And the rats in the mine would vanish.

The Last Rat, it was called, and it had given him the same nightmare as a gilke as had woken him that night.

Yorvig shivered just thinking about it. Striper turned her neck and bit at his hand; his grip had become too firm without him even being aware of it. Her teeth did not pierce his calluses.

“Tsk,” Yorvig said, tapping Striper on the nose. She snapped at him again, but he pulled his finger away, then stroked her fur. She purred like a rumbling waterwheel. It might be a foolish, childish thing, but he had started feeding his mother's Mine Runners when he was a gilke to get them to stay with him as he slept. No Last Rat would come near him, then.

Striper’s nose turned toward the Lower Adit door not ten yards away, and the scruff of her neck bristled. A low hiss replaced the purr.

“Easy,” Yorvig said, stroking her back and staring toward the stone door through the pitch dark. “Easy, gilna.”

Yorvig was still doing sums the next day when he went with Shineboot to inspect the garden beds. They had just returned from the weir, which they had found empty. The sight of rows of little green shoots rising from the moist soil at least gave Yorvig some encouragement.

“How long do you think it will take?” Shineboot asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Maybe we should ask Onyx?”

“Maybe.”

They were still standing there, arms folded, staring at the life barely shooting up from the ground, when Yorvig looked over to the far end of one of the beds.

He saw tracks.

At first, he was annoyed thinking that one of the dwarves had carelessly walked in the garden bed, but as he approached he realized what it was and stopped.

“Shineboot,” he said. The dwarf hurried over, and when he saw he drew in his breath.

“More than one,” he said.

Yorvig looked down the dell. The ürsi tracks were heading south, toward the tower. He couldn’t see any tracks on the harder ground. They had just shown up in the softer garden bed, and much of the dell around the garden beds had been scraped free of loam. Thankfully, it did not seem that the ürsi had taken much notice of the little plants.

They headed towards the tower, and once there, Yorvig looked searched the ground for any evidence of ürsi. But the ground there was trampled down or covered with heaping mullock piles of waste rock dumped from the edge of the bridge, the results of their mining.

“Do you think they tried to climb up?” Shineboot asked.

“They were headed this way.” Yorvig looked down toward the Lower Adit. The ground around the tailings pond was damp and may hold a track. So rather than climb up the tower he went back down the dell, checking around the pond. Sure enough, there were marks from claws, and plenty of them. He moved to check the stone door of the Lower Adit. Here, too, the ground was packed down and hard, but he could see prints near the pond only a couple yards away. They had been here, at the Lower Adit.

“Look at this,” Shineboot said, pointing down at one set of the tracks. Yorvig walked over and looked down.

“What?” he asked.

“There’s water in them, in the bottom,” he said.

It was true. But Yorvig wasn’t following the meaning.

“It hasn’t rained for two days,” Shineboot said. “And these ones, they’re empty. No water.”

“You think. . . you think they’ve come here more than once?” Yorvig asked.

“Well. . . I’m just saying. . . They must be coming here at night.”

The thought lit a fire of rage in Yorvig. He grasped his walking hammer hard. The foul kulkur were coming into their dell. And for all the dwarves knew, they might be there every night, looking for opportunity. The dwarves had kept to a routine of sleeping during the night time merely for convenience. They wanted to see further when they left the mine, to make sure no ürsi were near. It was safer with enemies about. They kept the bridge shut when they slept. The dwarves could see well in the dark, but not well and far both. Their eyes were best in close spaces.

The stories said the ürsi were creatures of the night. Another reason they had chosen to align their waking with the daylight at the claim. Such patterns of sun and moon had little bearing on the miners in Deep Cut, but here it mattered.

That night, they began a watch. One at a time they would stay awake, keeping half-night watches. They’d peer out from the narrow opening they built into the bottom of the bridge so that when it was closed, they could still see across the dell. They couldn’t see the Lower Adit without going out, but in the dark it would be difficult to see much more than movement at that distance unless the moon shone. Even so, if anything came near the tower or passed down the dell top-to-bottom, they’d know it. This was not so much a hardship as an annoyance. The dwarves rarely slept longer than six hours at a time, anyway. It was simply valuable working time lost. Yorvig had left Onyx out of the watch rotation but in annoyance she had cornered him in the drift and asked why. He had no answer, and so she joined the rotation.

Yorvig would have preferred to live as if she weren’t even at the claim. Hobblefoot and Sledgefist barely spoke to each other, except for what was necessary to complete a task, and it seemed they often disagreed in what was necessary.

Nothing was seen for two nights, but the next day they broke through to the open air on the level of the first terrace. Working hard, they had constructed the spiral stair, the landing chamber, a thick door of stone, and even excavated a bit of gold-bearing quartz. The sunlight burst through the rock as they broke through and stone clattered down the cliff and landed in the dell. The work would speed up, now with more space for multiple dwarves to swing picks as they cut the terraces into the cliff.

Yorvig decided that he would watch from the new terrace opening that night. He made sure the stone door was shut behind him and that Khlif knew where to find him for his watch. Yorvig didn’t think the ürsi would be ready to rappel down the cliff from above, at any rate. It was his night to begin the watch at sunset, so he climbed up and settled in on his belly at the ledge. From there he could watch south, toward the tailings pond. He wanted to be able to see the lower dell.

Two hours dripped by.

Meow.

The sound was faint, coming from the other side of the stone door twenty-five feet behind him.

Meow.

Striper. Why she had come up after him, he didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to get up and let her out here on the ledge. . .

Meow.

Meow.

Maybe he was. He pushed himself up with his hands to go get her when he glanced south again. He dropped back to his belly.

There. Figures moving around the far end of the pond. Three of them. Five. . . Seven, maybe. Some of them didn’t come closer, crouching next to the water and. . . drinking maybe? He wished the thin clouds would part and let the moon shine. But then, it was only a crescent. With a full moon he might have counted their fingers. Or ears. . .

A smaller cluster of three ürsi moved toward the Lower Adit door, hunched over. They appeared to sniff around the door, then crouch in a tight circle and gesticulate. One kept pointing up the dell. Whatever their meaning, they moved back around the far side of the pond and disappeared over the edge of the berm of broken rock. If they lay there peering up over the edge and waiting, there was no way to see.

The meowing had stopped, and though the sound of his own breathing seemed terribly loud, he could hear a faint feline hissing behind the door.