The Dragon Society (Obsidian Chronicles Book 2) (42 page)

"Uh..." Lithuil glanced uneasily at Arlian.

"Speak up, man," Arlian said. "Surely you don't think you can keep secrets from me?" He met Lithuil's eyes with his own intense gaze.

"Well, Enir left a little hurriedly after seeing the body," Lithuil explained. "He didn't bring it up with him. He left it down there. And then—well, as I said, we decided not to feed the slaves."

Arlian missed a step, stumbling on the smooth stone of the floor. He remembered what it was like down there, how they had all been perpetually hungry, all slightly underfed. Missing a single meal could be agonizing.

He knew what had happened to Lampspiller's body.

"They ate him," Black said.

Lithuil nodded unhappily. One of die guards gagged.

"Very
unpleasant," Arlian said mildly, though in fact it seemed oddly fitting. He wondered whether he would have eaten any, had he still been in the mine, or whether he would have preferred to stay hungry.

"We hadn't thought them so depraved," Lithuil said defensively. "It didn't occur to us at all!"

Arlian had no reply to that, and conversation was becoming more difficult in any case, as the ore wagons were coming up the tunnel just ahead. The rattle of harness and the creak of heavily laden wheels echoed from the stone walls.

The six men stepped to one side of the tunnel to let the wagons pass. The drivers glanced at them in surprise, but said nothing.

A few minutes later they reached the hp of the pitshaft, where a heavy wood and metal framework supported ropes and pulleys that would haul ore up from below, tons at a time. A lone guard in leather had been leaning against one of the support beams; he stepped aside at the arrival of this unexpected party of visitors.

He recognized Lithuil, and did not question the presence of strangers; his job was to make sure the slaves stayed down where they belonged, not to interfere with any guests his employer might bring.

Arlian breathed in; the air down here was cool and still, and smelled of dust and stone. It might have been pleasant and restful, a welcome change from the heat outside, if not for what he knew lay at the foot of the pitshaft. This was die end of the world of free men, Arlian thought as he looked down past the beams and ropes at the flickering light of oil lamps at the bottom.

Down there, fifteen feet below, was the dark and tiny world of the mining slaves.

And if the ore had just been hauled away, then the slaves would be eating the food that they received in exchange. Most of diem, maybe all of them, would still be nearby.

Arlian stepped to the edge and bellowed, "You miners! Listen to me!"

"My lord!" a shocked Lithuil protested.

From somewhere below another voice called, "Who in hell is that?"

"I am Lord Obsidian," Arlian called, ignoring Lithuil.

"I am the majority owner of this mine, and I want all of you miners to listen closely to my proposal."

"My lord, this is..."

"Shut up," Arlian told Lithuil, without looking.

"Black, keep him quiet. Cut his throat if you must."

Arlian heard the hiss of steel sliding on leather, and Lithuil made no further protest. A glance showed that the caravan guards had cowed the mine guard, as well—one of the caravan guards, a man called Stabber, whom Arlian had fought beside two years before in the Desolation, held a blade at the mine guard's throat.

"You men," Arlian shouted, "you heard a month ago that you were to collect the purple stones called amethysts, and send them up with the ore. You didn't deliver any. I don't think I blame you—what were you offered in exchange?"

"Nothing!" a braver-than-usual miner called back.

"Exactly. But those stones are very precious to me, and I'm going to offer you something precious in exchange. I know what men everywhere are like, and I assume you've all been saving die amethysts, and just not delivering them. That's fine—but deliver them
now,
and if you
collectively
deliver one hundred suitable stones, each large enough for my purposes, then you'll
all
go free."

When the echoes of this speech faded away there was a moment of stunned silence; then Lithuil protested, "You can't
do
that!"

Arlian turned, his hand on the hilt of his own sword.

"Yes," he said, "I can."

"But they're not your slaves! They're mine!"

"I'll pay you for them," Arlian said, smiling an unpleasant, tight little smile. This was his revenge on the Old Man. Then he turned back to the pit and called,

"One more thing—if any one of you dies before the full hundred has been delivered, the total goes up to one hundred and ten! Each additional death will add ten. If you steal from one another, you had better make sure your victim survives—and it won't buy you anything more; nobody wants these but me, and I will not pay you with anything but your freedom. I don't care who found how many—it's all of you or none. The sooner you can find die hundred, the sooner you can go! Now, how many do you have?"

There was a murmur from below, but no clear answer.

"All right, you aren't ready to say," Arlian said. "I'll be back here at the end of the shift with a bucket, and you can put the amethysts in the bucket, and we'll see what we have."

The thought of a mere bucket brought a wry, uncomfortable smile; ordinarily the miners filled a gigantic ore hopper twice a day, but to him, the contents of that one ordinary bucket would be worth far more than a dozen of the hoppers.

Then he turned away, and found he was trembling.

Being back in this place did not frighten him in the usual sense of the word, but it made him feel as if his mind were stretched tight and plucked, as if his identity were oscillating between Arlian the mine slave and Lord Obsidian the mine owner.

"We'll go now," he said to the others, pointing up the tunnel.

Lithuil started to protest further, then thought better of it and closed his mouth before a word had emerged.

The mine guard hesitated.

"You stay here," Black told him.

He stayed, and the other six men trudged back up the passage to the surface.

Arlian and his crew ate a late supper at the inn in Deep Delving. Lithuil did not offer to feed them at his home, as might ordinarily have been expected, and Arlian did not ask; he knew that his treatment of the Old Man at the mine, satisfying as it was, had swept aside the customary etiquette. A lord who had held a subordinate at swordpoint and arbitrarily claimed the right to free the subordinate's slaves had clearly given up any claim on the usual hospitality.

This bothered Arlian not at all; he had seen quite enough of Lithuil, and preferred to eat with his own people.

The four Aritheian magicians, Thirif, Shibiel, Qulu, and Isein, sat together at one table, chattering in their own language. The guards were clustered around another three tables, while Black, Arlian, and Quickhand ate at a small one in the back corner.

As lord and master Arlian could have had his meal brought to a private room, but he preferred to eat in the main room, with the others. He did however indulge himself to the point of ordering pork chops, rather than the greasy sausage that was the inn's common fare.

As he speared a piece of pork and lifted it to his mouth he recalled the conversation in the mine, and what had become of Lampspiller; the pork suddenly seemed much less appealing.

He stuck it in his mouth anyway, chewing dutifully, and then to distract himself he glanced around the room, his gaze falling on the tables full of cheerful, talkative guards. He asked Quickhand, "How are the men we hired working out? Is it a good crew?"

Quickhand looked over his shoulder at the others, then shrugged. "They're good enough," he said. "They think you're mad, hiring so many guards for just eight wagons."

"I probably am," Arlian said reflexively.

"You've worked with these men before?" Black asked.

"Not all of them," Quickhand said. "Twenty is a big company. We have four or five I'd never met before."

"Think they'll fight, or run?" Black gulped ale after asking his question, but kept his eyes on Quickhand's face.

"Oh, fight, most of them," Quickhand said, lifting his own mug. "There's one I'm not sure about—he's the sort with a little too much imagination. He might get thinking about just how much a sword in the belly would hurt, and decide not to risk it." He sipped his own beer, and made a face. "I think this is watered."

"Probably," Arlian agreed. 'This guard you think might run—what makes you think he's over-imaginative?"

"Oh, because he's always asking questions, my lord.

That's a sure sign of someone who thinks more than most. And the questions he asks aren't the practical ones that Black or I would worry about."

"Really? What sort of questions did he ask?"

"Well, any number of questions about where we were going—were we really going all the way to Arithei? Would we stop anywhere along the way? Are there dragons in Arithei? Not bandits, mind you, or anything else—I'd already told the men when Black and I hired them that we might ran into southern magic, but he didn't ask about that, he specifically asked about dragons."

"It would seem you've become associated with dragons in the popular mind, somehow," Black remarked.

"Mmm." Arlian took another bite of pork.

"I don't know about anyone else, Lord Ari, but
this
fellow certainly associates you with dragons! Or maybe he's just obsessed with them. He even asked whether there were dragons sleeping in the mines here in Deep Delving."

Arlian blinked and put down his knife. There was something strange going on here—that question felt wrong, somehow. Why would anyone think there might be dragons in Deep Delving? Oh, Arlian had sometimes worried, down in the mine, that he and the other miners might break through into one of the caverns in which the dragons slept, but in truth there was no evidence at all that there were any such caverns in the area.

And why would a caravan guard ask that? Neither mines new dragons were his concern.

For that matter, why would
anyone
be displaying such an unhealthy interest in dragons? Usually people tried to
avoid
speaking of them, since too much mention of them was believed to attract, if not dragons themselves, then at least lesser forms of misfortune.

"Who is this man?" Arlian asked.

"He calls himself Post," Quickhand said, pointing at one of the guards two tables over.

Black snorted. "Post? I suppose that's meant to impress women, but the first thing it brings to
my
mind is whether he's commenting on his own wits."

"At least he doesn't call himself Dragon," Arlian said. "That seems to be what he prefers to worry about."

"That, and sorcery," Quickhand agreed. "I tried to explain that southern magic isn't sorcery, but he didn't seem to understand or care, and he didn't want to hear anything about the Borderlands or the Dreaming Mountains except whether there were dragons there. I wanted to hear everything the Aritheians could tell us about the route, but Post wasn't concerned with that He seems interested in the strangest things! He asked how old you really were, my lord, as if it mattered—

and as if he couldn't see for himself as much as I can."

Arlian stared at Quickhand for a moment, a suspicion forming. These odd questions were beginning to make a pattern. He turned to look at Post again.

"Which one is he?" he asked.

"There," Quickhand said. "In the blue."

Arlian studied Post as best he could from this angle, and decided that no, he didn't know the man.

"I want to talk to him," Arlian said. "Bring him to my wagon after supper."

"As you wish," Quickhand said.

Black did not speak, but cocked an eyebrow at Arlian. "I suspect," Arlian said quietly, "that this Post may have another employer, in addition to myself."

"An interesting possibility," Black said.

After they had eaten Arlian returned to his wagon—

but he paused in the door of the inn to see that Quickhand was indeed speaking to Post.

Then he turned and stepped out into the street.

The inside of the inn had been hot and damp and slightly smoky, and Arlian had expected to cool off in the night air, but he found that the weather outside was still hot and sticky, as well, despite the late hour. The sun was long since down, but no moon or stars could be seen—the sky was heavily overcast.

Nasty weather, Arlian thought as he trudged to the waiting caravan. Hot and dark...

Dragon weather.

He stopped and looked up at the sky.

Maybe he would have thought of it anyway, he told himself, or maybe Post's questions about dragons had reminded him, but yes, this
was
dragon weather.

He turned and looked back at the inn; men were emerging, but he could not tell who through the gloom.

He clambered up onto the driver's seat of the lead wagon and waited in the dark, not lighting the lantern that hung near his head.

He looked back at the wagon's interior, at the waiting spears and blades. In this weather they might be needed soon, he thought—and they were all
here,
but they might be needed in Manfort.