Dragon Weather (6 page)

“If we let him,” the young man said. He sighed. “You won't get much work out of him at first, you know.”

“That's not
my
problem,” the fat man replied. “I'll be back when the Gaffer gets here.”

Then Arlian heard footsteps retreating up the stone passage.

The young man glared down at him for a moment, then pulled a knife from his belt and reached down to cut the boy's bonds.

Freed at last, Arlian tried to sit up, but found himself too weak and stiff to manage it until the young man grabbed him roughly by one arm and pulled him upright.

“Welcome to your new home,” the young man said.

Arlian looked around.

He was at the bottom of a deep round pit, dimly lit by three of the little oil lamps. Two black passageways opened off it, roughly at right angles to one another. The passageway by which he had arrived, however, was not one of them;
that
tunnel was on a higher level. Arlian could see now that he had been casually flung some fifteen feet or more off a ledge; had the huge pile of rags not been here he might well have been killed.

Also at that upper level, in the mouth of the entry tunnel, he could see a complex of ropes, beams, and pulleys, and what appeared to be a large bin of some sort. All the ropes had been carefully tied up out of reach, he saw—there was no way to climb up out of the pit, no ladder, no steps, no dangling ropes.

A row of four ugly little wooden carts stood along one side of the pit, full of gray rock. Somewhere in the distance Arlian could hear a clinking, rattling sound.

“Where am I?” Arlian asked. “Who are you?”

“You're in a mine, half a mile from the town of Deep Delving,” the young man replied. “You're here to dig ore. If you dig enough, you get fed; if you don't, you starve. If you cause trouble…” He hefted a whip in one hand, the knife he had used to free Arlian in the other. “I can use whichever of these I think is appropriate to the occasion,” the man said. “Or my fists, or a club, or whatever other tool it takes to get the ore out.”

“What ore?”

“It's a stone called galena,” the man said, waving at the row of carts. “It's gray, darker than the limestone.” He then gestured at the walls; Arlian supposed that this meant the pale stone around them was limestone. “When it's smelted it yields lead—and sometimes silver, which is what makes it worth the trouble.”

Arlian stared at him for a moment, trying to think what else he should ask. This was all happening too fast, it was all too harsh, to take in properly.

The young man did not wait to hear what else Arlian might have to say, however; he sheathed his knife and grabbed the boy by one arm, then gestured.

“Get that lamp,” he said.

Arlian obeyed, and held the lamp high as he was dragged into one of the dark tunnels opening off the pit.

The clinking noise grew louder as the two made their way down the tunnel, through widened areas and past side-tunnels, until Arlian could see light ahead.

Then the man released him and snatched the lamp away.

“Go on and join them,” the man said. “They'll tell you what to do.”

Arlian hesitated, and the man shoved him forward with the hand that still held the whip. “Go on!”

Arlian stumbled forward into the darkness, and tried to focus on the light ahead. He headed toward it, and finally staggered into a relatively open area lit by several oil lamps, an area where half a dozen ragged, pale-skinned, long-bearded men were working—four of them were hacking at a wall of gray stone with picks, while the other two collected the broken pieces with wooden shovels and dumped them into a wooden cart that stood nearby. A second cart was pushed up against a wall, just below one of the lamps. The clinking Arlian had heard had been the sound of iron on stone.

One of the loaders spotted him as he approached, and stopped his work; the other loader noticed, and stopped as well. In a moment, all six men had turned to stare at Arlian.

“Fresh blood,” someone muttered.

“They didn't give him a pick,” another remarked.

“Then he's a loader,” a third said. “He can do the handwork and push the cart.”

“He doesn't look strong enough to push it!” a fourth protested.

“Where am I?” Arlian asked.

One man snorted derisively; another laughed.

“You're in the Old Man's silver mine,” a third said—an older man who spoke his words oddly, with a singsong rhythm.

“The Old Man? Who's that?”

“He's who owns this mine,” the man with the peculiar accent said. “Now you know as much about him as we do.”

“Was he the one who bought me and brought me down here?”

The men exchanged glances and grins. “Now, how would we know?” one of them asked. “We didn't see who brought you.”

“A big fat man, who smells of onions?” Arlian asked.

“Could be,” one miner admitted. “If he's been eating onions.”

The others laughed, but Arlian ignored that. “And the one with the whip…” he began.

Expressions turned grim, and one man spat to the side.

“Bloody Hand,” one miner said.

“Is that his name?” Arlian asked, and immediately regretted it—how could it be a name?

“It's all the name he needs,” the miner replied.

“Why is he called that?” Arlian asked, dreading the reply.

“Because of what he did to poor Dinian,” another miner said angrily. “Whipped him until the blood sprayed everywhere. Cut him open to the bone.”

Arlian swallowed. “Did he die?”

“Eventually,” the oldest miner said. “Not of the whipping itself, but his wounds festered, and he took fever and died. And Bloody Hand didn't do a thing for him.”

One of the miners turned away and hoisted his pick.

“You can tell him your stories later,” he said, as he swung the pick and bit the point deep into soft gray stone. “If we want to eat tonight, we need to fill that cart, and two more after it, before the Gaffer gets here. The boy'll have the rest of his life to listen to us talk.”

The others mumbled agreement and lifted their own tools; one of the shovel-wielders beckoned to Arlian.

“You get the pieces we miss,” he said. “Throw them in the cart. Keep the floor clear, so she'll roll. Understand?”

“I understand,” Arlian said.

It was simple enough, after all. He could do it; it was honest work, not harming anyone.

There would be plenty of time for escape and vengeance later. He was just a boy. He had his whole life ahead of him.

And he would
not
spend it all here in the mine!

5

In the Mines

Arlian hauled on the rope, and the mine cart tipped up, spilling its load of ore into the waiting hopper. Wark leaned over with the rake and scraped out the stones and dust that hadn't slid out on their own; powder swirled up in dark coils that cast shadows on the walls of the pit.

When Wark raised the rake to signal that he was done Arlian let the cart fall back on its wheels; then he unhooked the heavy rope.

“One more,” Bloody Hand said.

Arlian and Wark didn't bother replying; Wark was already pulling the empty cart away from the hopper while Arlian crossed to the remaining loaded cart and braced himself to push it into position.

They didn't need to be told what to do; they had been doing it for longer than Arlian cared to recall. He didn't know how long he had been in the mine—years, he was certain. There were no seasons down here, no heat in the summer nor cold in the winter; there were no days or nights. He had not kept count of the shifts worked—and he did not even know whether there were really two shifts a day, as most of the miners assumed, or whether that might vary. Time did not matter to the miners.

But he had grown to man-height here, and was now one of the taller miners, with a respectable beard that reached to his chest, so he knew years had passed. He was sure he must be at least sixteen by now, and feared he was over twenty. He wasn't the biggest man in the mine, by any means—Swamp, named for his foul odor, was a head taller and a handsbreadth wider across the shoulders—but Arlian was tall and strong, and in the prime of life.

Of course, part of that height came from standing straight; many of the men in the mine were bent and stooped from years of labor, or from imperfectly healed injuries. Arlian had been lucky in that regard; he had never yet been struck by a runaway cart, nor injured by flying chunks of ore from a badly aimed swing of the pick, nor suffered any other serious mishap. Oh, he had burned himself with spilled lamp oil or by carelessly picking up a hot lamp, and he'd had his share of cuts and bruises, but he had never broken a bone or lost a finger, and his injuries had always healed rapidly. When the fever had spread through his team he had only had a very mild case and had recovered quickly to help nurse the others.

Not everyone had been so fortunate; Arlian frowned at the memory. Old Hathet had died of that fever. Arlian had been there, wiping the old man's forehead with a wet rag to ease the pain, when it had happened. Hathet had been talking in a thin whisper about his distant and perhaps mythical homeland of Arithei, far to the south, when he had begun coughing, and his mouth had filled with bright red blood, and he had spasmed and choked and died.

Arlian had cried off and on for days after that, even while he tended others who had taken ill; right from that first day, when Arlian had been dumped into the pitshaft and left in Bloody Hand's care, Hathet had been his best friend among the miners, a font of wisdom, guidance, and companionship despite his peculiarities. Hathet had been the one who taught Arlian the systems under which the mine operated, so that he had been able to settle into work right from the start—many new arrivals took days before they learned enough to earn their meals, as only those who met their quotas of ore delivered to the pitshaft were fed. Most of the miners were too busy earning their own keep to help out a beginner, but Hathet had taken the time to show Arlian the ropes.

Hathet had also told any number of stories of his past that Arlian thought were lies, but his instructions about the mine had all been sound.

Arlian had done his best to pass that on to newcomers, as he had tried to use the rest of what Hathet told him. Some of the others—Rat, and Bitter, and Stain—had made fun of Hathet's manner of speech and called him a crazy old man, but Arlian, while accepting that some of what Hathet said was probably nonsense, had found a great deal of wisdom in the old man's chatter, and had taken comfort in his presence. His death had been hard.

Nor was Hathet the only one of Arlian's fellow miners who had died. The old man the others had called Wrinkles had simply not woken up when called for his shift one day. The big, stupid man called Fist had gotten careless in a fit of temper after an argument with Rat and Swamp, and a wild swing of his pick had brought a chunk of tunnel ceiling down on his head, dashing out his brains. Wark's brother Kort had sickened and died, taking a long time about it—Wark was still grateful to Arlian because Arlian had never lost his patience with Kort during that slow decline, had never tried to steal Kort's share of the food and water.

Disease, age, and accidents had killed dozens of slaves, while Arlian had grown from a lost, frightened boy into a man who knew everything there was to know about tunneling, digging and hauling ore, and working the various systems that bounded his life. He had absorbed what Hathet had taught him and learned more on his own.

And through it all he had never once accepted that this was where he would live out his life. Someday he would be free, someday he would hunt down Lord Dragon and his looters, someday he would find a way to punish the dragons for what they had done to his family and the rest of humanity. Someday he would have justice.

Justice—he had learned a great deal about justice in the mines, and about injustice. He had come to understand that the world was not the fair and balanced place he had believed it to be when he was a child; he had heard a hundred stories from the other miners about wrongs left unpunished, courage and goodness left unrewarded. His horror and outrage at the unfairness of it all had faded—but had never died completely.

He had seen events play out in the enclosed world of the mines that taught him by example what the stories of the outside world described. He had seen how a crime left unavenged would rankle, would fester in the victim's heart like a disease, would make the offender harder and harsher, would cut them both off from the tiny society in which they lived. He had seen how just retribution would bring together the miners—except perhaps the criminal against whom the retribution was taken—content that justice had been done. He had joined the others in restraining Rat's worst swindles by stealing back extorted belongings, in keeping Fist from beating miners whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he had seen that life was better because these wrongs were prevented or avenged. Even Rat, well after the fact, usually acknowledged as much.

There were rules, and when men understood and obeyed the rules, life was better. That was true in the mines, and true in the outside world.

The world might be an unfair place, but Arlian swore he would do everything he could to make it a little fairer, either here in the mines, or when he once again found his way out. Someday he would punish those who had destroyed and looted his home, and any other wrongdoers he found.

Someday.

He pushed the cart into place and snugged the hook securely into place under the handlebar.

“Ready?” he called.

“Pull,” Bloody Hand ordered, his hand on his whip.

His hand was
always
on that whip when he gave orders, but in fact he used it less than Lampspiller, the other overseer. The general opinion was that this was only because he wasn't often given an excuse to use it. Everyone in the mine knew the tale of how Bloody Hand had flogged poor Dinian to death, and nobody cared to risk a similar fate …