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  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 PUSHED them 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 THE nearby 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.

  Chapter 6

  KOSAR THE THIEF had not been to Pavisse for a long time.

  He had been in Trengborne for most of the three years since he had been caught and punished, and that slowing down of life had suited him. He had been a traveler for most of his fifty years. He had seen many things, and stolen more than a few of them. That little, unassuming farming village had quickly become a sort of home, and he had barely strayed beyond its borders in all that time. There had been those there that shunned him because of his scars, but a greater number accepted him, though grudgingly. And it was the first place where he had felt accepted since he was a child.

  His long career as a thief had come to an end far to the north in Long Marrakash, stealing furbats from a caravan of rovers. It had been a foolish, clumsy endeavor, and pointless. There were a glut of the unfortunate creatures for sale in stalls and shops all across Long Marrakash, and any of them would have been easier to rob than the rovers. But he had followed the caravan for two days, staying up in the hills as they traced the Long River along the valley bottom. There were maybe fifty rovers with two dozen wagons, horses, a herd of sheebok and a hundred furbats flapping in their cages. As each hour passed, Kosar became more and more certain that it was folly to steal from these people. Rovers were not renowned for their charity at the best of times—they had a law and a religion of their own, both actively excluding outsiders—and to steal from them was madness.

  Perhaps he had wanted to be caught. He had thought about this long and hard since it happened, trying to recapture his mind on that day, in that place, just to look inside and see exactly how it was working at the time. He’d had tellans in his pocket, having robbed a group of rich traders just a death moon before. He rarely used rhellim, because his drive in that matter had always been strong and balanced. And furbats themselves were not easy to transport in relation to what they would be worth. Perhaps he could have made away with a dozen at most, each of them worth six tellans, and he already had three hundred tellans in his backpack. There was no sane reason why he ever should have tried to rob those rovers. Trade with them, maybe. Sit around their campfire, talking of dark days and drinking bad wine, perhaps, if they had let him.

  To rob them was suicide.

  They had caught him as he slipped a furbat cage from the fifth wagon. The wagon was rocking as he stepped onto it, and he heard the guttural grunts of a couple fucking inside. They must have noticed the change in rhythm beneath them, however, because he was suddenly face-to-face with the two rovers: an ugly, tattooed man, and a young long-haired woman, both of them flushed and panting from rhellim.

  The next few minutes would have been comic, were they not so painful and destructive.

  The man had pushed him from the wagon and proceeded to beat and kick. Kosar had been in more than a few fights and he could look after himself, but this rover’s rage had been beyond anything he had ever encountered. Kosar fended off the first few blows, but then his rhellim-flooded attacker knocked him to the ground and, erection waving and glistening in the moonlight, started kicking his head. The naked woman jumped down to join in, and even through the pain Kosar noted her beauty. Others added to the beating, almost all of them naked and drugged. Kosar was beaten into unconsciousness by a group of naked men sporting erections and women glistening wet.

  After the beating they strapped him down in the open and left him there for three days, remaining encamped nearby to observe his slow death. They watched with mild interest as wild animals took bites from his arms and legs. One of the women stripped him and forced a dribble of rhellim down his throat, laughing as he grew hard in the blazing sun, not following through on her implied offer. And then, feigning benevolence, the rovers had freed him.

  They made him an offer: they would kill him quickly and painlessly, or he could brand himself a thief.

  Kosar had done the cutting himself, sprinkling dried powdered Wilmott’s root into the wounds to prevent them from ever healing properly.

  It had been harder for him to travel since then, more difficult to make friends. Even though he wore gloves, they grew bloody. Everyone knew what he was. Honest folk shunned him because he was a thief, and thieves shunned him because he had been caught. So he had traveled down the western side of Noreela, looking for a place to settle, realizing the farther he went that his life must now change.

  He had stayed in Pavisse for several moons. His wounds had betrayed him there as well, yet in Pavisse that had seemed not to matter so much. The mining town had more than its fair share of criminals, and they formed something of an underclass, a society within a society. It was the last town he visited before finding and settling in Trengborne.

  And now he was back, seeking to renew an old acquaintance.

  SINCE LEAVING THE boy Rafe with his uncle, Kosar had wandered the bustling streets of Pavisse. Trengborne had sometimes numbed his senses with its blandness—the smell of dirt, the taste of cooked sheebok, the sounds of farming and families going about their mundane lives—but here they were opened up once again. The odors, the sounds, the sights of the streets amazed him for a while, worn traveler though he was, and he realized that his history had been gradually smothered by the constant glare of the Trengborne sun, and the idea that he had found his niche. The realization did not please him. He had been enjoying the life he had made for himself. There had even been a sense of reparation there, the idea that in a way he was making up for the damaged life he had been living. Not redemption, never redemption. Simply repair. />
  Now he was back in the world. He mourned Trengborne and its people, he was terrified and shocked by what he had witnessed and he needed to talk to someone friendly. This very fact proved just how far he had drifted from the life of a wandering thief.

  He had spent only a few moons here but he had made friends, fellow rogues and vagrants who were happy spending their lives in taverns and food halls, exaggerating their exploits and commanding respect from like-minded exaggerators. Kosar had never embellished his past, nor glamorized it. Sometimes he had done his best to downplay what he had been, what he had done. Already, back then, he had been changing.

  One of the friends he had made had been very special. He sought her now. He thought that she might know something about what he had seen back in Trengborne, the Red Monk that had slaughtered the village, what it all meant. She was a true traveler, a descendant of the Shantasi race that had been brought to Noreela in slavery thousands of years before. Their original home was long forgotten; some said it was an island to the east of Noreela, thousands of miles away across an uncrossable ocean. Others believed that the Shantasi had actually been brought into being by errant shades in the mountains of Kang Kang, their pale skins camouflage against the snow, their purpose to provide those incorporeal souls with premature flesh and blood homes. The Shantasi themselves were perpetually silent about their origins, but they could not hide one of their greatest gifts: knowledge.

  A’Meer Pott had also been Kosar’s last lover.

  The Broken Arm looked exactly the same as when he had last been there. The sign above the door showed a massive machine, its use or purpose clouded by the passage of time, its metal-and-flesh arm ripped and bent at one of its elbows. Bloodred wine flowed from the arm, or wine-red blood, it was not quite clear which. It continued to amaze Kosar that such an establishment had paid an artist a good amount for this piece of work. Inside, the absence of wealth was almost a theme.