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  “Come on,” Hope said. “It’s not far.” And then she crawled into shadow.

  Rafe followed. It was that or remain where he was, lost, so far from his uncle Vance that he would surely never find his way back.

  They passed through the machine. It was dark and heavy. Rafe felt the thing pressing down at him, like a huge presence paused with its foot held ready to stomp.

  On the other side there was another, narrower street, the faces of buildings so close that Rafe could almost stretch out both arms and touch them. People shoved by to and fro, some of them eyeing him suspiciously, others ignoring him. He could see addiction in their eyes: alcohol; fledge; rhellim. And there were other forms of abuse going on here of which Rafe had no knowledge. One man held a fleshy bag in front of his mouth, breathing in and out quickly as his eyes rolled up in his skull and his face seemed to darken. A woman sat cross-legged in a window above the street, sighing as a swarm of insects drew blood from self-inflicted gashes across her shoulders and neck. He had never imagined any of this. He was a farm boy, just like Hope had said, and the more he saw the more nervous he became.

  “Hope,” he said, and the witch turned to look at him. She must have seen the panic in his eyes because she put a hand on his shoulder and smiled. Her tattoos smiled with her, and Rafe felt calmer.

  “We’re nearly there,” Hope said. “My place. We can sit and eat and talk. I want to know what happened to you, and I think . . . I think I may have some things to tell you.”

  “About what?”

  “About why you’re here.”

  “My parents were killed,” he said. He expected to see the flash of a red robe at any moment. But they were ignored, just another couple of unknowns in this refuge for the unknown. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “No,” Hope whispered, “I think you know they weren’t your real parents. And you being here is fate.” She smiled, held his hand and led the way.

  Chapter 5

  THE MINES WERE rich 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 HE went 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.