The Black Robe (The Sword and the Spell)

The wooden beams at his side creaked ominously and a fine cloud of sand sifted through the poorly fitting planks above his head, falling in his hair and finding its way between his shirt and his skin. With a texture more like ground stone than desert sand, the rough grains abraded at his skin and made him itch. He would have liked to rub his back on the shoring posts or on the low ceiling above, the same way that his stallion rubbed his back on the ground when he rolled, but that would have brought disaster down on them all. So instead he ignored his irritated back and the sharp stones which scraped at his hands and knees and continued crawling forward.

Behind him he could hear Dravin breathing hard and muttering under his breath although he couldn’t make out the words. It could have been a curse on the brotherlord who had led them into this decaying hole but on the other hand it could have been a prayer to Talis to be gentle with his spirit if the roof caved in and killed them all. Dravin, his brother in arms and the closest thing that he had to a friend, was young enough to be a believer in the wrathful god. Fortunately Dravin’s faith wasn’t blind and his friend only shook his head and laughed when he suggested that there might be more worthy gods he should worship instead of the fearful Talis.

Beyond Dravin there were his other armsbrothers, crawling on their hands and knees, dragging shovels and picks and cursing or praying depending on who they feared most, their god or their brotherlord. Like him they had all volunteered for this rescue mission but unlike him they didn’t really have a choice. It had been his suggestion that they should attempt to rescue the fifty or so miners who were trapped underground when a section of the mine had collapsed and as he had volunteered to lead the rescue the others had little option but to volunteer too. Well, that wasn’t quite true; any one of them could have stayed behind but they were armsbrothers and where their brotherlord went they all went.

The wooden beams and the shoring creaked again and more sand and rough, powdered rock cascaded down making the air in the tunnel thick with its dust. Behind him he could hear someone whimper in fear and another curse, which he suspected was aimed at him as much as the black hole they had been crawling through for what must have been at least two candle lengths. Not all of his armsbrothers would remember what it was like to have solid walls around them and a stone ceiling above. Most would have been just babies when their people lived in proper dwellings and some, the very youngest, had spent all their lives under the sky and stars. He remembered though what it was like to live in a city and whilst this tunnel was more enclosed than the house he had played in as a boy, the confined space did not worry him as it did some of the others.

In the feeble light of the lantern he pushed in front of him he could see the nature of the darkness change. Before there had been just blackness and the light had been sucked into nothingness but now the light hung there, reflecting off the dust that filled the air. The noise had changed too. The creaking of strained beams had changed to a groan, as if they were in pain and there was a constant hiss as sand shifted into spaces which shouldn’t have been there. His father had told him that the Goddess made the ground move when she was angry, and that the rumble that was heard when a mine collapsed, was her laughter as men died. He no more believed in the Goddess than he did in Talis and he was absolutely certain that when this mine collapsed there would be no rumbling, just a sibilant hiss as the stone hills above poured in and buried them alive.

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