Dusk

Chapter 5

THE MINES WERErich on the day Trey Barossa left. The seam of fledge was wide, the mood among the miners high, the song at the end of the dig vibrant. On his food break Trey had sat back, chewed a fistful of fledge and drifted, penetrated the earth, moved through a mile of rock to flit against Sonda Susard’s mind, and there he had sensed an interest. He was a part of her thoughts, and he liked that. He hoped that given time she would cast her mind back and see what he thought of her.

Wending their way through the shafts toward home, songs echoing back in carefully judged harmonies, it could have always been like this. There had never been machines to help them mine. There had never been machines to take fledge up to the surface. Things, Trey could have believed, had been like this forever.

Trey followed along near the rear of the line. The song echoed back to him, each echo intricately timed with allowance for tunnel travel and multiple reverberation from the mine walls, so that every miner heard a slightly different song. In the pitch black he could feel the sound waves impacting his skin, stirring the fine hairs on his face and around his ears. He added his own few words where appropriate and heard them blending with the whole, being swallowed and modified and expanded by echoes already living along the tunnel tonight. The song left the group and found its own routes back to the fledge face they had recently left. Sometimes it would remain there and fade into the earth itself, enriching it. Other times it would escape into a crack or vent too fine for any of the miners to work their way through, and on occasion a song would be heard ages away in another part of the mine, hours or days after its original singing. It was not magic, this strange transference, though irresponsible parents often told children that lie. It was simply one of the strange ways of the mine. It was easy to get lost down here.

Trey held out his arms as he walked, trailing his fingers along the rock walls when he came close enough. There would be some subdued light back in their homes, but mostly they worked and lived in total darkness. They had been excavating the current fledge vein for a thousand shifts now, and any one of them could have found his or her way back to the home-cave with nothing to guide their way. Every day after their shift there were signs: the scents of cooking, strength and direction drawing them on; the gentle hum of occupation, a background noise made of the bleat of goats, the muttering of people, the pounding feet of larking children. And the home-cave itself exuded a gravity, something apart from the senses that also gave out its own strong signal. Down here in the mines, death was always close by. Safety, and family, were strong draws.

So he touched the walls of the old tunnel, marveling that everyone who had worked on this particular stretch was now long dead and gone. He felt individual pick marks in the rock, and made out signature impacts: here, a left-handed miner had made his mark; there, someone right-handed; here, someone who had used their pick sideways instead of straight up and down. There were more definite signatures too, and Trey recognized one or two carved names from the countless other times he had run his fingers along these walls. He wondered at the history behind them, who they had been, whether any of them had ever gone topside. These tunnels held history in their rocky embrace, more ancient the nearer they came to the home-cave.

As usual, when they came to the suddenly smoothed seam in the rock that marked the time when machines had been at work, Trey took his hands away.

The songs died down as the miners walked through these machine-excavated tunnels. The routes had been made more than three hundred years before, when many things had been different. The echoes of their footfalls told Trey that there were occasional hollow pockets in the tunnel walls; evidence that fledge had been taken out. He wondered what dreams that fledge had given, and to whom. One of the men up ahead stumbled to his knees. Others helped him up, and they completed the journey in silence.

As ever, they were glad to reach the home-cave. Lights guided their way for the last thousand steps, a weak glow to begin with, brightening as home came closer. It gave their eyes time to become accustomed to the illumination, although they would still squint for a while yet, so used were they to complete darkness. None of the miners or their families really needed the light, but it was tradition to light the home-cave. They were human, after all. Fire gave them safety.

Trey looked around for Sonda, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Machines and magic had carved out this huge cavern. Miners had remained living and working here since the Cataclysmic War, and so over time they had made the place totally their own. Walls were hidden or remodeled by hand, the cavern expanded or altered to suit new homes, fresh caves dug into the extremities, walkways and ladders added to connect one area with another. There were even those parents who told their children that their ancestors had made this place, giving no mention at all to machines. Trey felt uncomfortable with this; however terrible the past was, it was set in stone and should be remembered. Altering history for a child’s sake was establishing life on a lie. Where would it go from there? When he found a partner and had a child, he fully intended on taking it to view the Beast. This old, dead machine, monstrous and haunting in its continuing state of decay, sat at the base of a deep pit two days’ travel through the mines. It had been sinking a new shaft at the time of the Cataclysmic War-it was still rumored that it had found the richest vein of fledge ever-and when magic withdrew it had died and remained there ever since. Almost everyone knew where it was, but nowadays few had any desire to view it.

He remembered his father taking him to see the Beast, through old tunnels and workings where people had not labored for generations. The silence down there, the loneliness. The awe he had felt upon first seeing the dead machine, then fear, and then after a time, the pity.

Eyes stinging from firelight, Trey set off down the main street. He knew virtually everyone here by smell and sight, and he nodded to those who he sometimes conversed with, relishing the fact that they could see him. After a long shift, most miners were silent for a time after returning home. The power of sight gave them a rest from talking.

He was looking forward to a long dust bath. He had a fist of fresh fledge in his rucksack, and he would lie back and gnaw on that, letting the drug settle him and open his mind. As usual he would seek Sonda, try to make out what she was thinking and doing at that moment. And perhaps yet again he would try to communicate what he would like to be doing with her in his dust bath. He saw her sometimes, they talked, and if she had touched on his guilty thoughts she did not show it.

Trey made a quick visit to a water bar, where the first drink was always free for a returning miner. He gulped down the cup of fresh water, closing his eyes as its coolness washed dust from his throat and brought his insides alive. There were others there whom he had spent the long shift working alongside, but they had little to say to one another now, so he gave a nod and left. Some of them would remain there for a while yet, moving on from the water to some of the insipid rotwine that was brought down from the surface. His father had died from this stuff-it had eaten his insides, his mother told him, and twisted his mind-so Trey hated the very thought of it. And yet, talking to some of the older miners, he sensed something vastly alluring in its murky depths. They told him that it gave an escape that fledge never could. Fledge enhanced, it did not stultify. Maybe he was too young to realize just why this was an attractive proposition.

Back on the main street a puppet master was performing for a group of children. Trey knew Lufero, an old miner who had lost both legs in a cave-in decades ago, as did all of the children in the home-cave. His puppet shows were a constant on the main street when the fires were lit, and his clumsy magic tricks-wide sleeves and deep pockets shouting the truth-made him a popular entertainment. And later, when children grew up, they saw fresh truths in his shows, serious statements hidden away behind childish displays. His metal puppets, most of them made from parts of small machines he had cannibalized from the mines, always played themselves, great thundering things that ruled over his long bony finger puppets. Through the slapstick and humor and laughs for the children, every play ended on a melancholic note with the machines grinding to a halt. Lufero would sit still for a while, his finger puppets staring at the dead machines as if willing them to move again, and the children would leave, thinking that the play was over. But Lufero would remain there, his face sad, his eyes confused. And sometimes it took a long time for this part of his play to end.

“Lufero,” Trey said. The old man looked up and nodded, smiled. Then he returned quickly to the show, not wishing to disappoint the group of children sitting on the dust floor of the street. No machine-puppets today. That was unusual for Lufero. Instead he held one hand of long finger puppets, and his other hand was hidden down below the cloth-covered table.

“They dug and they dug,” the puppet master said, each of his long fingers taking on a life of their own. His yellow eyes glanced up at the children, and his smile touched them. “They brought out the fledge in great bundles, rolling them up and setting them aside for the riser to take them topside for trade. And Petra, the young miner who thought he knew so much more than his more-experienced friends, kept digging and digging and digging, even after the others had stopped and sat down for their food break.” Lufero’s fingers laid down and relaxed, but his thumb kept on working at the rock he’d lifted onto the table. “He scraped and he picked and he prised, and soon he found a narrow crevasse, just wide enough to take his small body. He willowed in, as all miners do, using his long feet and big hands to steer the way, and all the while he was thinking, ‘I’ll get the best, I’ll get the biggest, I’ll find what the Beast was looking for the day it died.’”

“I’m frightened!” a little girl said.

Lufero glanced up. “Good,” he said. “You should be. Because Petra should have been frightened too, instead of stupid. He didn’t listen to what he was told, you see, by those who knew better. He didn’t realize that behind every comment given by his elders was a whole host of knowledge, a history of reasons and a wealth of caution. ‘Don’t dig past your time,’ he’d been told, and the miners who told him that knew only too well of the dangers.”

Trey knew what was coming because he’d seen this play several times before. First when he was a child, and it had given him nightmares. Again when he was a teenager, when it had made him ask questions. And a couple of years ago, as a young miner back from his first shift. After the stories he had heard during that long first day, nothing could have scared him more.

The puppet master started working his puppets again, keeping the other hand ready behind his back.

“But Petra didn’t listen. He thought he knew better. He wasn’t a bad boy, and there’s the tragedy. But he did think that he could change things, when we all know that change is something gradual that none of us can steer. We miners change-we grow taller, our limbs longer-but it’s something that the land controls and gives us, even after magic has been taken away. We’re all part of the language of the land. Petra did not believe this.” Lufero grew quiet for a few moments, his thumb still working at the rock, the other fingers on his hand stirring now as the puppet-miners rose from their food break.

“What happened?” said one of the children.

Lufero glanced up at his young audience, looking over their heads and along the main street to where it ended against a rock wall. “Petra woke the Nax,” he said.

Even though he knew what was about to happen, Trey still jumped when the old miner brought his hand out from behind his back. His pale fingers were painted bloodred. He clawed his hand at the pitiful finger puppets, clasping, letting go, clasping again like a spider hugging its prey. His long nails slashed, tracing red lines across the puppets’ intricately painted faces and chests. In the flurry of movement, blood splashed onto the cloth-covered table. Trey had never been able to tell whether it was real or not.

Some of the children screamed. Two of them stood and ran away, their parents casting scolding glares Lufero’s way when they emerged from shops or food caves. A few of the braver children watched wide-eyed as Lufero’s bloody play drew to a close. The finger puppets lay down one by one as the ravenous Nax continued to whirl and slash at them like a tornado of disc-swords. And finally, a few quiet moments after the Nax had slunk away behind Lufero’s back, Petra emerged once again from behind the rock to survey what he had done.

The children left, some of them clapping as they walked away. Trey stood back, watching Lufero. The old man seemed to be asleep, but then his thumb moved again slightly, Petra casting his gaze across the destruction he had unwittingly brought down upon his folk.

“I always thought Petra should have died,” Trey said.

Lufero looked up, startled. “He did,” the old man said. “Nothing escapes a fledge demon once it’s woken.”

“We’ve not heard of one for years. Maybe they’ve gone. Maybe they’re used to us now and they’ve gone deeper, down into veins we’ll never mine. Down past the Beast.”

“The Nax sleep,” Lufero said. “They don’t run. No, they’re still there. Hibernating in the fledge, dreaming whatever it is they dream for years and years on end. It’s just that mining’s such a slow process now. And if a band of miners working in the Pavisse range or the Widow’s Peaks ever did encounter one, you think we’d hear about it? Not anymore. People don’t talk anymore.”

Trey dug into his rucksack and brought out a lump of bright yellow fledge. “Here,” he said. “It’s fresh.”

Lufero smiled and accepted the drug. He closed his eyes and rolled it beneath his nose, and in his smile Trey saw a thousand precious memories.

He walked on, left the main street and climbed a series of rock terraces and steps to his cave. His mother had lit a small fire at the entrance, and she was cooking a stew of cave rat and blind spider. A pinch of Trey’s fresh fledge would make it exquisite.

AFTER DINNER HEwent to the back of the cave and slid into the dust bath. The dust was so fine and light that it slipped around his body like oil, its inherent warmth soothing Trey’s tired muscles. A little firelight found its way back here, and Trey enjoyed watching it flit across the walls like lost insects. He imagined that it was performing its own play for him, and as he drifted away he made up stories to follow the dim light’s movements.

His mouth was sweet and sensitive from the fist of fledge he had chewed as part of the meal. His mother had taken some too, and she had fallen asleep soon after. She was old now, and she rarely made any effort with the fledge. It must haunt her dreams, but there was nowhere specific she wanted it to take her. Trey pitied her sometimes, and other times he was jealous. His own life seemed so meaningful that he wondered what it would be like to not care anymore.

The fresh fledge was so much purer and more powerful than anything sold or used topside; it faded as it rose, and sunlight drove it stale. Some young fledgers did try to make it on the surface, offering to sell their talents to the highest bidder, but their sight would soon fade away. And as fledge lost its effect, so the fledgers’ talent to use it dwindled. It was as if the sun was so alien to them that it treated them the same as their drug, and they all became just another topsider waiting for death.

Trey had never been tempted to the surface by false dreams of power or status. His home was the underground. And he loved his fledge fresh. It passed from his stomach straight into his bloodstream, thinned the blood and drove it faster, speeding his heart, finding his organs and massaging them with its benevolent touch. Plunging into his heart and out again, the drug surrounded the goodness in his blood and made itself a part of it, riding directly into Trey’s brain, where, like something almost sentient, it settled itself onto and into everything that made Trey what he was. It played with his memories, aggravated his desires, stirred his emotions, and with a slight effort of control Trey reined in the power of his mind and rode it like a horse. Trey’s mind-young and energetic, yet old enough to know some of itself-was the perfect age to lord over the fledge’s influence. A fledge journey was more than memory and less than experience, a realm hanging somewhere between dream and recollection, knowledge and foresight. And because of that, it was precious.

His mind floated. It remained with his body for a while, reveling in the intimate touch of the dust bath, imagining Sonda there with him, having her wrap her naked legs around him and clasp him secretly beneath the dust. Soon tiring of the pretence, Trey went in search of the true Sonda. His mind was lighter than memory and richer than fantasy as it drifted from his home-cave. It took effort-concentration, will, his physical self tensing and straining in the stone enclosure of the dust bath-but it brought results that were more than worth the effort. Out of the cave, into the space of the home-cave, Trey could look down and see the place that had always been his home. The main street was cut into the floor of the cavern, caves leading off from either side, a wide public area built up with decorated stalagmites which could be made to glow if just the right heat was applied. They used this area for their celebrations and rituals, weddings and funerals, and it was known to everyone as the Church. Either side of the main street were the dwellings, built around and into the five giant pillars that had been left in place to support the cavern roof. Higher up these great pillars were platforms and small caves, homes to the five mayors who took joint control of the home-cave. Trey soared and circled one of the pillars, glancing through the entrance at one of these homes. He could not probe inside, which meant that this mayor was shielding his dwelling from prying minds. He turned away and drifted toward the opposite side of the cave, taking long moments to do so. The cavern was huge. It took three thousand steps to traverse it, and even a mind wandering on fledge took time.

He briefly touched on the mind of a blind spider that had its home in a crack in the cavern ceiling, a chilling, alien encounter that bore no words or explanation. For that instant his sense changed, his perception altered so radically that it denied translation, and back in his dust bath Trey cried out. He withdrew quickly, disturbed but equally thrilled by this surreal experience.

Past another pillar, past the expanse of cave moss and fungi that gave food, dipping down to where the river rushed by way below the home-cave and carried its detritus and waste away, Trey drifted aimlessly by the many homes carved into the rock extremes of the cavern. A few of these caves were natural, but most had been excavated over the several generations since the Cataclysmic War. Many were ongoing efforts, expanding all the time as families grew and caves were passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. He dove into the misted spray that rose from the river below, trying to clear his memory of the spider mind, and back in the dust bath his body prickled with cold.

Trey knew exactly where to find Sonda.

Her family cave was dark, but that did not mean that she was absent. Her father was a miner and her mother worked in one of the food caves along the main street. Sonda herself was training to become a topside runner, the small group of mining folk who spent their lives traveling back and forth from the home-cave to the surface to trade fledge for essential supplies. Runners were those most likely to try to make their way topside, and few grew old in the caves. Sometimes Trey mourned Sonda’s leaving already.

For a moment images blurred and fought in his mind. He drew back slightly, becoming more aware of his own body back in the dust bath, the sound of his mother’s snoring, and as he opened his eyes he saw the weak firelight still prancing across the rock ceiling. He could even taste fledge in his mouth, instead of the cavern’s fresh open air. Or perhaps it was guilt.

He closed his eyes again and concentrated, moving himself back to Sonda’s cave, hearing her soft song from within, smelling the rich tang of the river sweeping past way below his feet. He remained there for a while, a strong consciousness cast across the space of the cavern, the tinge of guilt he felt at spying more than counteracted by what he was beginning to feel for Sonda. This journey was innocent, the pure necessity of a burgeoning first love. He was not trying to see the future, he was not spying on the girl as she changed or bathed or slept. He hardly even probed inside the house.

And then her singing stopped, and Trey knew that she was dreaming a fledge dream. If only she would ride the dream and come to meet him out here.

He moved away and slipped down one of the many shafts that led to the river. Like the tunnel he traveled every day to the fledge face, this river held history and the future in its grasp. The miners buried their dead here, dropping them into the water and letting them ride the river forever. And they drew water from here as well, catching the future before it hurtled past and lost itself deep beneath the mountains. The future was upriver, the past downriver, and this one moment beneath Trey was the most important of all. The river was all noise, a mind-shattering roar which, broken down, could be saying anything. He cast his consciousness down, tempted to plunge in and see where the waters would take him. Many had done so, and some came back mad.

Trey returned up the black shaft and burst out into the light of the cavern again, veering away and entering one of the old fledge tunnels. This shaft was not worked anymore, not because the fledge had all been mined, but because it had become too dangerous. It was here that Lufero the puppet master had lost his legs many years before, and others had lost more than that here more recently. Cave-ins, a flash flood and a plague of stingers had caused them to abandon this tunnel, leaving it to the dark and whatever eventually crawled in there, out of sight and mind.

Trey liked to travel through here on occasion, his body safe at home while his imagination sought whatever had driven his elders away. He was not the only one; he occasionally brushed past other minds steering this way, but like them he kept to himself. It was not exactly forbidden, what they were doing. But it would be frowned upon by the mayors. This was not a safe place. It had been abandoned for a reason. Many reasons, in fact; most of them told, some of them still held on to by the old miners that had worked this seam. Secrets. Trey knew that the whole truth had never been revealed, and like most people his age, the mystery intrigued him.

Like Petra in Lufero’s puppet play, Trey pushed on.

The shaft was long, winding, and soon it dipped and ran deep. There were several vertical shafts in the floor where machines had once toiled, and newer steps and staircases carved into the tunnels by hand since the Cataclysmic War. Trey had once started down one of these pits, trying to push his consciousness deep, smelling and sensing his way down, way past the river level and into a darkness so thick that it seemed to have weight. He had gone too far, he’d known that even as he pushed, and his body had stiffened and cooled in his cave as his mind plummeted. That shaft had no bottom, and its depth had a gravity. The air held hints of strange things far below, and the turning point had been the touching of an alien mind on his. Only briefly, barely a kiss of consciousness, like something turning its head and its hair swinging out to touch his face.

That had been enough. Trey had somehow hauled himself back, and he’d been sick for the three shifts following.

So now he kept to the tunnels and the mine workings themselves, leaving the old shafts to whatever it was that haunted them. He had asked his mother whether the machines could have become ghosts, but she had scoffed and stormed away, cursing his foolishness.

He traveled until he found the old fledge seam. Even after so long he could sense the toil of the miners that had carved their way this far. It was a wide seam, rich, and Trey guessed that it continued on and on beneath the mountains. Its surface smelled rancid after such a long exposure, but he pushed inside just a little and it was fresh and fruitful, good fledge, free of impurities. A pity that this seam had been left alone. A pity that stingers had come and scared them away, and cave-ins, and…

What else? He pushed farther, because there was something in there. Something denser than fledge. Trey stilled, his body tense and tight in the dust bath, his consciousness holding a moment five thousand steps away. He waited because it seemed the right thing to do, to hold back and make himself quiet and unseen, because something was about to happen. He had stumbled across a held breath.

Trey felt his heartbeat rippling the surface of the dust bath. His mind was submerged in fledge, and borne of it. And he was suddenly very, very afraid.

A heartbeat amongst his, deeper, slower, harder, trying to hide between his own but failing because he had been listening for it.

A heartbeat… something alive in the fledge… alive but sleeping, hibernating, because his heart beat a hundred times before he heard another strange pulse.

Nax?

He tried to pull back. He wanted more than anything to wake in the bath, his mind his own, and to tell his mother about the fledge nightmare he’d had. But this was no nightmare, and Trey could not pull back. Because he had already brushed against this Nax’s mind, and his frantic thought of escape was merely a vain attempt to avoid what was coming.

It came in quickly:

Threat from above, safety being slaughtered, magic returned to shift the balance of things, death and war and change that would seep down even this far, through the cracks in riverbeds and past the roots of the oldest trees down through the earth the danger given an easy route via the holes gutted into the world by those who still plundered

…

And more, much more, none of it in words, all of it in hateful alien expressions of such contempt that Trey, physically ensconced in his dust bath as if that could possibly keep him safe, began to cry.

Eventually he pulled free, or was let go. Flailing, horrified, venting psychic screams that echoed before him and gave many home-cave sleepers instant nightmares, Trey fled back to his own body. As he did so he sensed other minds waking through the earth, some near, some farther away. Minds angry not at him, but at what the future promised.

He flipped from the dust bath and hit the stone floor hard, bruising his limbs and shoulders, running through his cave naked, tripping over his sleeping mother and gashing his elbows open on the ground, giving premature blood to the land. He rose again and tore aside the leather curtain at the cave’s entrance.

“They’re awake!” he screamed. “The Nax are awake!” He could see shadows of people moving to and fro on the main street, and he imagined the puppet master’s red-painted hand clenching and cutting, taking them all down.

There was an outburst of screaming from all across the cavern. Other fledge dreamers were traveling too far this night.

THE FIRST NAXcame from the same tunnel Trey had fled in his fugue.

The Nax were also known as fledge demons. No one had ever seen one and lived. Most had an idea of what they were-myths, stories, legends handed down from generation to generation, drawings in books, ancient cave paintings that smeared some of the rock walls of the home-cave Church-but as well as sometimes being exaggerated with time, the truth can also be diluted. Most people had no idea what they were about to face.

Heads turned as the shadow burst from darkness into weak firelight. It flew across the cavern and landed at the base of one of the five giant pillars. And then it started to kill.

Trey fell to his knees and screamed. His mother shouted in her sleep, sounding as if she was being choked. Other cries rose up across the cavern, high-pitched and androgynous with terror. Because as well as the sight it presented its victims-wings spread, various limbs tipped with spinning bone-clawed appendages, openings that may have been mouths steaming and spitting gobs of flaming gas-the Nax gave them so much more. Its mind reached out as well, probing with alien fingers, seeming to touch everyone in the cavern. And it was like eating shit.

Trey pressed his hands to his ears, screamed, shook his head, trying to drown out the feeling that he was being invaded, his senses turned in on themselves, twisted and forced and split apart. He saw the slaughter that had begun below, people spinning and coming apart as the Nax danced across the uneven ground, limbs slapping at the air just as Lufero had shown in his play. Coughs of fire leapt from its mouths and wrapped around heads, stomachs, bounced along the ground until they found something to burn. People ran but few escaped; the Nax was too fast. It could run, it could fly, it could whip out its long tail and haul the escapees back into range of its killing limbs. They saw all this, but there were also images that could only have been seen through the Nax’s eyes. And with those images came outlandish glee. There was the smell too, the burning of flesh and spilled blood as Trey’s friends died before him. He retched, and his stomach rumbled with hateful hunger. Screams of pain and terror drove him mad. He tried to cry out again but he seemed to roar instead, a fledge-filled scream of fury and pent-up hunger that was echoed around the cavern by a thousand other voices, each once unwilling and yet reveling in its new freedom. The Nax was sharing itself with its victims before it killed them. A creature of the drug, its casting of its own consciousness was part of its makeup, a facet of the hunt.

Trey fell back and crawled into the cave on his hands and knees. “We have to go!” he said to his mother.

“We can’t leave,” she said, shaking her head, trying to shed the alien images. “We’ll fight, there are plenty of us, we’ll have to-”

“Mother, I sensed it, I felt it waking. There were more than one. Something woke them. I think something’s happening topside, and it angered them and drew them out of hibernation. Mother, we have to leave! We’ll go topside, somehow. Whatever, we have to get out of the cavern.”

“The mayors will know what to do,” Trey’s mother said with blind, humbling faith. But then she glanced over his shoulder, and he knew what she was seeing without turning around, because the image was shared between them all. A second Nax burst from another tunnel and powered straight into one of the pillar dwellings. Trey felt the walls and balconies of that place splintering, and he knew the weak flesh of the mayor was parting beneath the onslaught of the spinning and ripping limbs.

“Come with me,” he said. “Ignore everything you sense, just keep one thing in your mind: escape.”

“I have to get some things,” she said, and she turned slowly, dazed, confused. Trey grabbed her arm and squeezed hard.

“Mother. Please. These are Nax! We can’t waste any time, if there’s a slightest chance of escape we have to take it now!”

His mother winced and glanced down at where he was squeezing her arm. He had never hurt her before, not physically, not emotionally. She was strong. When she looked up there was a tear in her eye. “Oh Trey, I’m so scared.”

Trey hugged his mother, but only briefly. He could not be close to her with these images, these smells riding the psychic waves from outside. He felt corrupted.

He dressed quickly, then nudged aside the curtain and looked out. Many of the smaller cave fires had already been extinguished-the miners’ natural state was darkness, and that was where they found most safety-but new conflagrations were being seeded across the home-cave by the Nax. The hateful images and sensations were confused now, and Trey could not tell if there were still only two Nax down there, or more. People were running, screaming, whispering and trying to steal away. Some passed his cave and headed down the steps. Trey called after them, but they did not hear. He ducked back inside, breathing hard, not knowing what to do.

“Can we get out?” his mother asked. “Is there a way?”

Plenty of ways, Trey knew, but none of them sure. None of them safe. And what about Sonda? He’d looked across to her side of the cavern but there had been only darkness. That could be a good sign, because it may mean the Nax had not visited there yet. Or perhaps it meant that they had been, and finished.

“We’ll have to get through the tunnels to the rising,” Trey said. “There’s an old seam, one that was mined way before the Cataclysmic War, that gives a route between the face we’re working on now and a tunnel leading straight there. It’s never used, it’s too narrow, too awkward. Barely a crawl space at times. If we can get there, get through, maybe we can make it up. If the Nax haven’t been there as well.”

Trey’s mother looked sad. “I can’t do all that, Trey. Look at me.”

Trey looked. His mother was big around the waist, even though their mining caste erred toward tall and thin. Her hands, on the coldest parts of the year when fires merely drew in colder air from deeper caves, were crippled into twisted claws. And she was old. She had been down here forever, with only a few visits topside to break up her underground existence. These visits, legendary in her eyes and related whenever she had the opportunity, had all been made safely, and via the proper routes.

But he loved her. He took her for granted and sometimes she annoyed him, always here for him. “I will not leave you behind. I don’t know much about the Nax-I don’t think anyone does, only what’s told in legend-but I do know that this is the most dangerous place to be. We can’t stay. Maybe if we can just get into the tunnels and hide, it’ll all be over soon.”

He knew that was a lie. And he thought his mother did too as she nodded, stepped past him and peered out into the cave. There were more screams out there from farther away, closer to the dark holes that plummeted to the underground river. There was also the occasional twang of a crossbow being fired, and here and there Trey saw the glint of steel as disc-swords were unsheathed. He turned quickly and ran to the rear of the cave, grabbing his own disc-sword from beneath his bed. If he came close enough to a Nax to use it he would probably be dead already, but there were other things out there. If they made it into the tunnels there may be stingers in the old fledge seam, hiding away from the miners. Past them, if Chartise and his mules were still alive, perhaps there was topside, the world of sunlight and moonlight and starlight, the world of no darkness. And there probably dwelled countless dangers of which he had never dreamed.

Trey was a miner no longer.

If he lived past the next few hours, he would be a survivor.

THEY WORKED THEIRway down the series of steps and balconies carved into the walls of the cavern. They hid behind huge pots on the landings, breathing in the meaty fumes of moss and trying to figure, from the ghastly psychic twinges they felt in sight or sound or taste, just where the Nax were unleashing their slaughter. Trey touched the ball of moss before him and squeezed, reveling as ever in the feel of this cold growing thing, pleased that his own sensation was covering those exuded by the murderous Nax.

He sensed a held breath, a diversion of frenzied attention away from one place to another, and he remembered that he still had fresh fledge in his system. He cursed himself silently and removed his hand, thinking Fuck you as he grasped his mother’s hand and led her down another uneven flight of steps. He’d tried to sling the disc-sword across his shoulders, but he was unused to carrying the weapon and the knot kept slipping. Unsheathing it gave him an unreasonable sense of power as the metal sang against the old dried leather.

“What is it?” his mother whispered. Trey turned and placed his finger across his mouth. Shhh.

When they reached the cavern floor they met a group of people milling around the mayors’ militia cave. The militiamen were nowhere to be seen-Trey suspected that the crossbow shots he’d heard earlier marked their fate-but still these people seemed to think that safety existed here.

“We have to get out!” Trey said. He recognized a couple of fellow miners from his shift and smiled at them in the poor light. He touched them as he spoke, pleaded, cajoled, his touch a familiar form of communication that made up for facial expression whenever the miners talked in the pitch black. “This place is finished, we can never beat the Nax, we have to leave and go topside until it’s safe again.”

“Why topside?” one of the miners, Grant, asked. He did not use touch as he spoke, a sign that he was angry or terrified, or perhaps both. “Why can’t we go into the tunnels and hide this out?” A few of the others mumbled in confused agreement.

“The militiamen are dead by now,” Trey said. “The Nax may not have fed for centuries. And they know this underground even better than us.” He looked around nervously, expecting at any second to feel the surge of displaced air tickle the hairs on his neck as a Nax swept in through the cave air.

“I doubt that.” Grant turned his back on Trey and his mother and spoke to the others. “We can go into the current working and wait in there. I know it like the touch of my own hand; there are tunnels and crevasses where we can hide. These fledge demons will be sated soon enough. As Trey said, the militiamen will be dead by now. The Nax can feed on them.”

“They’ll continue their slaughter,” Trey said. “It’s not only food they woke for, it’s something else as well. Something that’s driven them to fury.”

“What makes you an expert on the fledge demons?” a woman asked.

Trey looked at the group for a few seconds, wondering whether they would apportion blame. He realized that he barely cared. Wanting to remain down here was foolish, and if they blamed him for what was happening that made them even more so.

“I sensed them waking,” Trey said. “I was on a fledge trip. I went farther than I should have, found a Nax and withdrew quickly, but I knew that it wasn’t the only one waking. They never hunt in groups. They exist alone. That’s why I know there’s something wrong. I think there’s something going on topside that has enraged them and-”

“And you want to go there?” Grant said, spinning around.

“Trey…” his mother whispered, afraid.

There was a series of screams from across the cavern, accompanied by several loud thuds. They did not last for long.

“I’m saving my mother,” Trey said. “Anyone who wants to come with us, you’re welcome.”

Trey and his mother left on their own.

“They’re just afraid, Trey,” she said as they hurried past deserted caves and skirted the Church. “This is all they’re used to. It isn’t Grant’s way to be like that, he didn’t mean it.”

“He’s going to get them all killed.”

They continued in silence, passing by one of the mayors’ pillars, glancing up but seeing no sign of life on the balconies overhead. Each time they met someone Trey said, To the caves. Sometimes the miners would follow for a while before doubt took them and they slowed, trailing off, perhaps waiting for someone in authority to tell them what to do and where to go, not this lad wielding a disc-sword like a boy playing at war.

Trey tried to close off his mind to those sensations thrown off the Nax like sweat flicking from a fighting man’s skin. But at the same time he listened for the sense of pursuit, a hint of the chase as a Nax zeroed on them. It never came. Whatever had noticed him as he squeezed the moss had obviously found something else to warrant its attentions.

As they reached the opposite side of the cavern-the place where the entrance to the current working sat like an open throat a few steps up the cavern wall-there was very little light by which to see. Trey moved from memory, holding his mother’s hand and guiding her along. His ears were perfectly attuned to echo, distance and proximity, so each footfall told him just where he was. He grumbled in his throat here and there to launch a low, deep sound to echo back, and when he found a space in that echo he knew that the cave entrance was before them.

He leaned back and brushed his hand across his mother’s cheek, stroking his fingertips across her lips in a sightless smile. “We’re here,” he whispered.

They were alone. A dull red glow lit the center of the cavern, throwing two of the huge pillars into silhouette. Trey could hear another volley of crossbow bolts being fired, then another. It seemed that the militia were alive after all, and putting up a sustained fight. Again he wondered about Sonda and looked across toward her cave, but there lay only impenetrable blackness. He closed his eyes and went into a crouch, trying to cast himself across this disturbed space, but the mixed input from the Nax-which he had quickly been able to filter and block so that he received only a hint of the terrible sensations they were reveling in-prevented him from casting himself at all. Besides, the fresh fledge was wearing off. Perhaps when they were farther into the mines they would pause, Trey could take some fledge from his shoulder bag and try to discern Sonda’s whereabouts.

A brief flush of guilt burned his cheeks in the cool darkness. There were two thousand others down here.

“Come on,” he said to his mother, leaning close and pressing his cheek to hers. “I’ll look after you.” He hefted the disc-sword, turned and entered the mouth of the mine.

They soon left behind the noise, the slaughter, the fighting and screaming. And within five hundred paces, gone too were the dregs of the Naxes’ psychic emanations, swallowed into the rock and fledge seams that had been their home for so long, miners and Nax both. Whether they would ever coexist here again… that was a concern for the future.

Right now, Trey had to get them topside. He wondered what awaited them up there, and just why the Nax had risen in such a fury.

TWO THOUSAND STEPSinto the new working, Trey and his mother paused for a rest. Trey had listened to her labored breathing, her grunts and groans as the landscape of the tunnel floor surprised her, twisting ankles, jarring her old bones. She tried to keep the pain to herself. He had passed this way thousands of times now and he knew the tunnel, how to navigate in the dark, the heavy sense of the tunnel walls repelling him and showing him the way. It was best they traveled as fast as him, not as slow as his mother.

He had sheathed the disc-sword and succeeded in slinging it around his shoulders. In this enclosed space he would sense danger long before it reached them.

They sat and took a drink from the leather gourd in Trey’s shoulder bag. There was very little water, he had not refilled it since his shift.

“How far?” his mother asked at last. Trey had been dreading that. He had known that this question would come, and he had felt the silence between them thickening with its weight.

Trey reached out and touched his mother’s face, not conveying anything in particular, just touching.

“Maybe two days,” he said.

“Two days,” she echoed. “I’m exhausted already.”

Trey sighed and sat back against the tunnel wall. They would reach the old fledge seam soon, and then they would have to start working their way through that hollowness, that place once filled with fledge that had been mined by machines generations ago, taken topside by machines, transported across Noreela by machines. Try as he might, Trey could never imagine what these things had looked like working and moving. Although he’d seen images of them in books and on wall depictions back in the Church, they imparted nothing of what they had looked like alive.

“Did I ever tell you how they time the days topside?” his mother asked.

Trey smiled to himself in the dark.

“By the movement of the sun and moons. The sun rises and falls, that’s the day. The moons appear and disappear, that’s the night. The moons are sent away when the sun rises again. Two halves of each day are so different up there, one so bright and warm, the other so dark. And short? They’re so short!”

“Three days to one of ours,” Trey said. She had told him many times.

“Yes. Everything is over so quickly topside. You just get used to the heat of the sun on your face, and then it’s time to sleep, and then suddenly it’s time to rise again.”

Trey had never been up. He’d never felt the urge. He was terrified.

“We should go,” he said. “The old seam starts just along here. We can walk for some of it, Mother, but I think we’ll be doing some crawling too.” He did not repeat what he had suggested earlier-that they would simply hide in the caves-and neither did his mother. They had both known that there was no returning to the cavern, not for a long, long time. Trey felt tears threatening, at his mother’s bravery and his own fears, but he held them back. He did not want her to sense him crying. He needed to be brave.

They started into the old, mined fledge seam. At first it was little different from the tunnel they had just traveled, other than the floor being more uneven and the walls unsmoothed; the machines had never been afraid of sharp edges. Trey went first, uttering the little grumbles and clicks that echoed back and gave him an idea of the topography of the seam ahead. His mother followed on behind, one hand holding on to the loose belt on Trey’s jacket, the other held out to her side for balance. They made good progress. There was no hint of pursuit, and the sense of danger seemed to recede as they left the cavern farther behind.

If I knew to come this way, Trey thought, others will as well. So why no sound? Why no signs that no one has come this way already, or are behind us working their way through?

They moved on. The seam dipped and turned, and for the next thousand steps their route snaked through the rock of the world as if in an effort to throw off pursuers. Trey’s miner senses led the way unerringly, and his mother followed, sighing, grunting, breathing heavily but never once complaining or asking him to stop.

Once or twice Trey mused that they really could linger here. But then he remembered that brief touch with the mind of the hibernating Nax-the fury, the rage, the hunger-and he knew that they had to go on. They may be out of immediate danger, but the Nax were unlikely to be sated with only one cavern. There were mines throughout the Widow’s Peaks, and probably long, arduous routes between them, untraveled and impassable to humans but known to the creatures who truly owned this underworld.

And so they moved on, resting now and then, licking mineral-rich moisture from the walls. And every step they took frightened Trey more.

They were leaving behind danger, but they were also moving away from the only life he had ever known. The people in the home-cave were his people, the pale fires and the moss pots and the stingers and the blind spiders and the cave rats and the mayors, the Church and the constant, comforting distant roar of the underground river… all his, all part of the memories that made his life. He always worked hard at the fledge face, but once back in the cavern he was contented, happy in the knowledge that he did his bit for their underground community. Sometimes there were thoughts of going topside, but it was curiosity more than desire. He was interested in why people would choose to live up there when there was obviously so much more to living down here. Certainly there were dangers in the dark-stingers took one or two people each year, and cave-ins, though infrequent, were often deadly. But he had heard about the inimical inhabitants of topside as well: the tumblers that roamed the surface of the hills, sweeping up children and unwary travelers; the bandits on the plains; raids along the coastal towns by savages from the sea. And fighting in the towns, a malaise in the villages. People topside, it was said, had no care anymore.

Trey felt comfortable history staring at his back and mourning his leaving. Before him, with every step he took into the darkness, lay his future.

THEY ENCOUNTERED Anest of stingers. There were only a few and they were small, no bigger than a man’s fist. And because they surprised the creatures, Trey was able to unsheathe his disc-sword and slice most of them down before they even had a chance to attack. The surviving stinger came clicking at them, aiming for Trey’s mother, but Trey kicked out at where he felt the thing passing through the air, knocked it into the stone wall and struck it down with the disc-sword. Sparks flashed, and in their brief light he saw the creature dying in a splash of its own blood.

They moved on. Trey was pleased that he had seen them through this danger, but it only went to remind him that there would be more challenges ahead. And not all of them would be stingers.

TIME TURNED THEIRescape into a long, painful haul instead of a panicked flight. They were both still conscious of the danger behind them, but the effort of navigating the seam occupied most of their thoughts. They had already made their way through one narrow passage-at least three hundred steps long-in which Trey’s mother had almost ground to a halt, too exhausted to pull herself through. He had tied his belt beneath her arms, hauling her after him like a mule pulling a fledge-laden cart.

Five hundred steps after this narrow stretch, Trey began to notice something in the air. A smell. The smell of people.

And beneath it, so distant as to be almost imaginary, the tang of blood.

“How long have we been moving?” his mother asked.

“A shift,” Trey said.

“A topside day,” she muttered. “I need to sleep, Trey. Very soon, I’ll need to sit and sleep. Are the Nax following? Do you think they have our trail?”

Trey sniffed and knew that there was a menstruating woman in the group that had come this way before. For a hopeful moment he thought that could be the blood he sensed, but there was something else. He kept up the pretense, though he knew it was false.

He had chewed a finger of fledge a few hours before. He had cast his mind back several times since then, searching, watching the way they had come, to see if anything was following. Clumsy though this casting was-he was doing it on the move, trying not to let his mother know what he was doing-he was certain that the psychic picture he drew of the empty seam behind them was true.

“Nothing’s following us,” he said, and his mother breathed a heavy, heartbreaking sigh of relief and exhaustion. “But, Mother, someone has come this way before us.”

She sniffed at the air for a few seconds, an old person’s heavy, unsubtle inhalation. “I smell nothing,” she said. “I used to have a nose like a cave rat, though I know I’m old now. Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Trey said. Because there is blood here. Human blood. He wished he had cast forward too, but now that he smelled the blood he was afraid. If there were still minds to meet, he would meet them soon enough.

“How far away could they be? Surely not that far. Nobody had a chance to get into these caves much before us.”

“We had to get across the cavern from our side,” Trey said. “Then we stood talking with Grant for a while. We’ve rested a good few times, and when the seam narrowed…”

“I slowed us down, I know. But still, they can’t be more than a couple of hours ahead.”

“Probably not.”

“We should try to reach them, Trey. I’ll do everything I can, I’ll breathe harder, I’ll push harder. Let’s go and meet up with them. The more of us there are, the better the chances of reaching the rising in one piece.”

“I guess so.” The pause stretched into an uncomfortable silence.

“Trey?”

“There’s blood, Mother!” he blurted. “I can smell blood. It’s one of the women’s time, but it’s not only that. I’m afraid of what we’ll find.” He started to cry silently, and his mother knew. Not because of the smell or the way it changed his voice, but simply because she was his mother.

“Oh Trey, we won’t know until we get closer. Maybe one of them was injured. Perhaps one of them fell and cut themselves, or ran into some stingers. With our own people ahead of us and the Nax behind, I know which I choose.”

Trey tried to stifle his sobs but failed. The shock of what had happened hit hard at last. Beneath it, always there but so easily shut away, was the idea that it was all his fault. He had touched on the mind of the Nax and sensed the strange happenings topside that had woken it, but still, if he had not disturbed the fledge demon, perhaps it would not have come at them. It was a crazy idea, but right now he felt crazy.

“I’m proud of you, son. Your father would be too.”

“I’m useless!”

“No, I don’t think so. Let’s go. Trey, I can’t lead the way. Next to you I’m blind in these caves.”

THEY MOVED ON. The smell grew in strength, and Trey could make out now that its source was stationary. They passed through another narrow seam, this one sloping steeply, and they had to slide down feet-first. His mother managed on her own, though Trey could sense the effort draining her final reserves of strength.

For an hour before they found the bodies the stench was strong and sickening. Blood, insides, shit, everything that went to make up people laid bare to the air. It went a little way to prepare Trey and his mother for what they found.

The bodies were scattered across the floor in a wide part of the seam, ground into the walls, their clothes ripped and soaked with blood. The smell was bad enough, but the feel of the human wreckage beneath their shoes was enough to make them retch.

“Anyone alive?” Trey asked, already certain of the answer. For some reason talking to the darkness made him shiver. He felt as if he were conversing with wraiths.

“Let’s move on, Trey,” his mother said.

“The Nax may be ahead.”

“Well, they’re behind us for sure. I think whatever did this came at them from up ahead. There must be ten dead folk here, and most of them are in one huddle. One or two back here, nearer to us, as if they were caught trying to run away.”

Trey turned his head left to right, sniffing. She was right.

“The Nax probably found another way through. Whatever Grant may have said, those things have been down here thousands of years longer than us. They know their way around. The one that did this is probably back in the cavern right now…”

Sonda was here. Trey stopped breathing, terrified of the scent he had just caught. It was the dusky, slightly spiced hint of Sonda’s skin, the warm herby smell of her breath… and drowning it all, her blood.

“Oh no!” he said, leaning forward until he slumped down onto the ground. He pleaded with the dark, asking its wraiths to prove him wrong, but there was no answer. Sweet Sonda, barely aware of his existence, yet at times throwing him a coy smile that set him alight and fueled many guilty fledge dreams, and many castings to seek her mind. He had always drawn back, guilty and respectful, but how he wished he had been more brash. He had thought he’d seen love in her eyes once, but he had so little confidence that he believed it must have been for someone else, left over from a previous thought as Sonda chatted to him in a food cave, smiled, ran a hand through her braided hair. Love in her eyes, warm and bright and so often hidden in the pitch darkness of the caves.

His mother held him and tried to give comfort, but for a while Trey was far away.

LATER, TREY PUSHEDthem on. They had to move quickly, although deep down where he barely even knew himself, he no longer believed they could escape. They had been given this subterranean world for a short-term loan, allowed to plunder its wealth, wound it, pull fledge from its ancient seams as if drawing blood from the veins of the world. Foolish, smug in their pride, thinking they now ruled this place. Even after the Cataclysmic War the fledge miners had considered themselves insulated from the rot setting in topside. They had heard of the strange things happening to the land, as if the ties that bound it together safely were slowly snapping and unraveling. And stories had filtered down with topside runners of the world slowing down, tales that the retraction of magic had murdered the peoples’ confidence. Three centuries after the withdrawing of magic, humankind topside was like an old person waiting to die. Still eating, still drinking, still dreaming, looking to the rich past more than the short, doomed future.

Down here, smug and foolish, the fledgers had believed themselves safe. Now they were being shown just how unimportant they were.

Any petty plans Trey had once entertained for his future were slaughtered as surely as Sonda and those others, ground into the rocks and spilled across cold stone by the Nax, who truly knew and possessed this place. Fledge demons, the humans had called them, unconsciously classing them as monsters. People know so little.

So he pushed on, and his mother never once complained. They stopped now and then, licked moisture from the rocks, ate a handful of moss even though they knew it could make them sick. They needed the energy right now, the input of sustenance to carry them the distance to the rising. They hoped that Chartise was still there with the mules, ready to raise them up to the surface. All the while, unuttered, not even hinted at, the certainty in Trey’s mind that they were both destined to die down here. And he did not care. Grief and exhaustion had hobbled his mind and distanced him from the truth.

Eventually they halted to sleep. They were both cut and bruised from the last thousand steps, all of which had been uphill through a narrow, twisting seam. It had taken them four times as long as it should have, because Trey’s mother was exhausted beyond tears. Still she did not complain. Trey pulled her, she pushed, and they made it. But time was running out.

Once, halfway through this narrow and dangerous seam, they had heard a loud noise from far, far behind them. A scream or a cry. Pain, or anger. It had not been repeated.

Trey chewed on a fist of fledge as he drifted into a sleep bordering on unconsciousness. His mother sat beside him and whispered in his ear, motherly things that he would only remember much, much later. She stroked his cheek, ran her fingertips across his closed eyelids with the subtlety of a breath of air, and when she was sure he slept, she stood and walked away.

TREY WANDERED THEnearby caves in his sleep, his mind distanced from his body through the influence of fledge. He took some control-he knew what was happening-but he did not steer where he went. There was nobody to touch upon, nothing to find, so he drifted into one large cave, passed down into a deep, dark lake filled with unknown things, forced through a hundred steps of solid rock, found himself in a smaller cave… and suddenly there was someone there he knew.

His mother.

She had not taken fledge before sleep, he was sure, though he had hardly been in a state to know. This was really her, her bodily self, not just her wandering mind. She noticed him suddenly, spinning around and smiling as his presence made itself felt.

Son, she said, and invisibly he smiled back.

What are you doing here, Mother? How did you get here? It’s dangerous; you should be back with me.

I thought I should let you sleep. And I want to set you free.

What do you mean?

There’s a long way to go yet. Trey. Distances to travel, days to work through. And already I’m a hindrance.

Mother…

I’ve been topside, son. It’s a wonderful place. And hateful. Wide-open spaces, and terribly confined outlooks. The people up there are so different, remember that. Some will love you for who you are, and some will cut your throat for a fistful of fledge. There’s no finer sight than seeing the sun sink behind the hills, but as it leaves, danger arrives in its wake. It’s backward up there, Trey. They live in the light and find safety in it; it’s the darkness they fear.

Why?

Because they never know what’s in it. We thought we did once son. That’s what pride does. It blinds you better than the dark.

Come back now, Mother. I’ll wake. We should go.

I am going, Trey. I love you. I’m proud of you, so proud. But I’m old and weak, and… and I don’t want to be the cause of your death. She was crying now, really crying, and in his sleep Trey could almost hear her sobs echoing through the caves.

Mother, I don’t know what-

Don’t follow me, son. Follow yourself. Always.

Trey’s disembodied mind watched his mother tip sideways into a black maw, a hole with sharp edges that seemed to go down, down… She fell, and although he obeyed her last wish and did not send his mind to follow her, he sensed in her last moments an immense peace and conviction that she had done the right thing.

Seconds later, suddenly, she was gone.

Trey screamed himself awake. The sound terrified him-they had been almost silent for the entirety of their journey-and so he screamed some more. He thought he heard something answering from far away with a scream of its own making, but perhaps it was an echo already lost.

TREY WENT ON. He remembered only brief flashes of the remainder of his journey. He continued to lick moisture from walls or drink from underground streams. He ate moss and it started making him sick. He had to defecate every few hundred steps, feverish, dislocated, driven now by instinct alone. Images flashed in and out, places and smells and distant sounds, but he did not know whether they were true memories or imagined by his fledge-fueled mind. He saw an underground waterfall venting itself into a bottomless pothole, but its sound could have been the roar of a victorious Nax. He swiped with his disc-sword at something in the dark as it flapped in and bit him, slapped at his ears with leathery wings. He cried himself to sleep as the minds of the dead touched his own. He dreamed of Sonda.

Trey remembered reaching the rising. It was a great cavern carved out of the bowels of the world centuries ago by machines as large as the entombed Beast. Traces of them remained, littering the cavern’s perimeter, metallic ribs exposed and rotted with rust, old byways and hollows where something once existed now sad and vacant. In a pit in the center of the cave flickered the Eternal Flame of the underground, ever-lit to guide in miners with their cargos of fledge. It illuminated the whole cavern and blinded Trey, showing just how deserted that place was.

He had expected to find people here, but there was no one. Even Chartise, the Chief of the Rising, had vanished. But the rising still turned. A great construct of wood and steel, it was pushed by a team of fifty mules, each of them tethered in its own enclosure, each of them forever stepping forward to bite at the food that hung from a huge cogged wheel just above and ahead of them. And this wheel was slowly spun on its axis by the constant motion of the mules. If they stopped in unison they might never start again, but once the rising was begun they only halted when forced to do so. The construct kept turning, and the cogged wheels and giant oiled pulleys continued to lift the timber platforms up, up, topside. The rising was the closest thing there was in the mines to a living, working machine. The mules were its living part; the rising, adapted by Trey’s ancestors soon after the Cataclysmic War, the machine.

Trey should have been awed. This was beyond belief. But he was way past any outside influence, immersed as he was in a miasma of grief, sadness and terror. Every creak from the rising was the sound of the Nax bearing down on him, saving him as their final sacrificial victim because he had woken them, he had cast himself too far and disturbed them from their endless sleep…

Trey fell onto one of the moving platforms and was carried higher than he had ever been.

Time passed. He slept. He raved and raged. And even when he felt sunlight on his skin, helping hands shading his eyes and giving him water, hands that touched him and communicated along with the gentle voice as if their owner knew the language of the mines… even then, he did not believe that he had escaped.

The heat on his face married with the cool certainty that he never would.

Tim Lebbon

Dusk