Under Fragile Stone (10 page)

‘Get in the doorways!' Paternasse roared over the chaotic noise.

They rushed for the reinforced frames of the doorways, Nayalla pulling Mirkrin's arms from the column and
dragging
him with her. More chunks of stone fell from the wall and dust burst from some of the fissures appearing across the ceiling. The air filled with the stone powder, choking them and getting in their eyes. The shaking died down and they moved cautiously out from the doorways, coughing and wiping the dust from their faces. Nayalla stayed close to Mirkrin. She could feel him trembling, holding tight to the doorpost. Her knees were shivering too, from the
adrenaline
, but she knew that the tremor had terrified her husband, even more than the rest of them. He was reliving the time he spent crushed beneath the rock of the mine tunnel. She coughed and put her arm around him.

‘It's over – come on, it's over.'

He prised his fingers from the stone and opened his eyes.

‘Never knew I had such affection for architecture,' he sniffed self-consciously.

He stood up straighter, ashamed of his fear, but the miners 
were busy studying the damage to the room.

‘Haven't seen anything like this in the other rooms,'
Paternasse
was saying. ‘Apart from things that have fallen apart from rot and rust, the place has had no structural damage at all. And now this. I think these quakes are a new thing, something the mountain hasn't seen before.'

‘We don't get earthquakes in this area,' Nayalla told him. ‘I don't know what these are, but they only started after the exorcism.'

Paternasse nodded gravely. He put his hand on the wall, his eyes raised to the ceiling above them. In his mind's eye, he pictured the damage being done in the rock above them. Stress fractures would be weakening the structure of the stone, causing it to settle under its own weight. This would cause pressure below, pressure that the rock would try to release in any way it could. The caves were an inherent weakness in the mountain and all this space offered a means of releasing the pressure through the walls and ceilings. If weakened enough, the rock could keep collapsing in on itself until it had settled as far down as it could go.

‘The place is weak, without its soul,' he muttered. ‘We need to get out from under it. This whole mountain could come down around our ears.'

With no idea which door to take, they replenished the powder on their torches and split up, each trying a different way. Three of the doorways soon turned out to be dead ends, leading into smaller rooms. One went through to another well, a waist-high rectangular wall containing a black pool of water. Two others led to corridors that ended in closed doors, their silvery white metal curiously free of corrosion. Noogan and Dalegin attacked one and then the 
other with their pickaxes, but the metal was barely scratched.

‘Try some wedges lads,' Paternasse said as they battled with the second door.

The gap between the jamb and the door was too thin, but a few blows of a pickaxe made enough of a hole to get a wedge in. Dalegin drove the wedge in harder with a
lump-hammer
, but the door did not budge. Nor could he get the wedge out. They tried hammering in two more, but with the same results.

Paternasse stepped forward and ran his finger down the door, sticking the tip of it in his mouth and swilling the taste around.

‘It's metal, but not a type I know.' The old miner hawked and spat. ‘Harder, denser too, strong like steel, but it's not steel. I can taste rutile or ilmenite. These doors are
barricades
, made to keep something in … or something out. They'll take some shiftin'.'

‘We have to break through,' Dalegin snarled. ‘We have to.'

‘It'll take days to get through this door.' Paternasse shook his head. ‘Even then, I'm not sure we could do it. Let's see what else is around.'

‘I'm starvin',' Noogan said abruptly and as soon as he said it, they all realised how hungry they were. And cold too. The search for a way out had distracted them from their bodies' demands, but the events of the day were catching up on them.

They sat down where they were, propping up their torches, and took out all the food they were carrying. The miners had their packed lunches, pasties and biscuit and some apples; the Myunans had bread, cheese and a spicy 
pork paste. They all looked glumly at the collection of food.

‘We could stretch this out for a day, maybe two,' Mirkrin said. ‘But that's it. And we need to check the water in that well – my canteen's almost empty.'

It was true for all of them. They had all been sipping at their water since the first cave-in, but their thirst was
growing
and their water supply dwindling. Thirst would kill them long before hunger broke them down, but the water in the well could deal out death even faster if it were contaminated.

Nayalla clutched her empty belly. She should have been making dinner for her family around now; she thought
anxiously
of her children, and one look at her husband told her he was sharing her concerns. With all that had happened, she had had little time to worry about them. She felt a rising dread at the thought that they might have fallen foul of the Noranians, or the skacks. Mirkrin squeezed her hand and shook his head. There was nothing they could do for them now but hope.

‘There are no cave openings on Absaleth,' Nayalla told them. ‘The nearest caves that I know of are up north. This place may connect up to them somewhere. We should try to head in that direction if we can.'

Mirkrin took his compass out, but the needle spun lazily, failing to point in any one direction.

‘Too much iron,' Paternasse told him. ‘That'll be no good down here. I think I can keep us pointed the right way, but that's assuming we can find a route that'll take us out.'

They pooled the food, and Paternasse rationed it out, keeping two thirds of it for later. The paltry pieces of
sandwich
were downed in seconds, and then they all felt even 
more miserable than before. Nothing was worse than
feeding
a hunger with too little food.

‘What was that?' Nayalla said suddenly.

They all froze, listening intently. There was a skittering sound and then a wet, gulping noise. All five of them jumped to their feet and rushed back up the corridor.
Casting
their lights around, they spread out. Paternasse and Dalegin crept into the room with the well. They could see nothing moving. They were about to leave and continue their search, when Dalegin tugged Paternasse's sleeve.

‘Jussek, look!'

There, within the well's stone walls, ripples disturbed the inky waters of the pool.

The mist had grown so thick over the road that Jube had slowed the lead wagon down to a crawl. Taya and Lorkrin were fast asleep on top of some sacks near the front of the flatbed and Draegar was dozing in his usual sleeping
position
, curled up into an armoured dome that offered both shelter and protection.

‘Can't see a thing out there,' Jube muttered. ‘It's like looking into the esh.'

Emos nodded. He was weary but couldn't sleep, his mind haunted by thoughts of Nayalla and Mirkrin. He put down the wood chisel that he was shaping into an amorphing tool for Lorkrin and shook his head in exhaustion.

‘We need to pull over for a while,' Jube called back to him. ‘Let the engines cool down and refuel. I probably need to top up the oil too.'

‘We could do with some hot food and drink, too,' Emos 
assented. ‘I'll take a turn driving when we get going again. I won't sleep tonight.'

Jube found a flat stretch of grass under the trees and pulled the truck off the road. Khassiel brought the second wagon to a halt behind them, cutting the engine and
jumping
from the cab to stretch her stiff limbs.

The sudden silence woke up the sleepers. Taya and Lorkrin blinked and looked groggily over the side of the
flatbed
. Draegar uncurled and sat up.

‘What's all the rubbish on the road?' Lorkrin asked.

There were pieces of clothing, tin cans and other bits and pieces strewn down the road.

‘Looks like your side of the room after your friends have been over,' Taya murmured.

‘At least my friends keep the mess on my side of the room.'

‘Let's get a fire going,' Jube said. ‘That's a damp mist. It'll put a chill on you if you let it. Fetch me a pot down, Taya, lass. I've a hankerin' for some tea.'

‘I'll get some wood,' Lorkrin piped up, jumping over the side of the wagon.

‘No, you won't!' Emos said sternly. ‘I'm not having you wandering off into these woods in a fog. I'll go. You and Taya stay here.'

Lorkrin folded his arms, looking out into the trees with a sour expression.

‘We're not babies, y'know,' he sniffed.

‘I'll do it,' Cullum grunted, grabbing a lantern. ‘I need to stretch my legs anyway.'

He had fallen asleep with one leg tucked under the other and was now pacing about woodenly, trying to rub the pins 
and needles from his unresponsive limb. He picked up his weapon, a battle-hammer with a flat head on one side and a sharp spike on the other, and made his way off into the woods.

‘You work on their tools,' Draegar told his friend. ‘We'll get the firewood.'

He lit a candle and followed Cullum into the grey
darkness
. Emos shrugged and sat down to finish the finer work on the tools he had started. Jube picked up kindling from under the trees nearby and got a small blaze going. Cullum came back with an armful of wood and Jube soon had the food heating over the fire. The Noranian headed back into the trees to get more and that was when they felt the ground start to shake.

The carefully stacked wood of the fire collapsed; the pots clattered to the rhythm of the trembling ground and the wagons bounced on their suspension. Taya and Lorkrin deliberately stood up and tried keeping their balance, but tumbled to the ground, giggling. They stopped abruptly when they saw Emos's anxious face and they remembered where their parents were and what this tremor would mean for them. Even as this thought occurred to them, the
earthquake
quickly faded into stillness. Somewhere out of sight of them in the forest, there was a sharp crack and they heard Cullum bellow. Khassiel seized her crossbow and another lantern and charged into the woods. Emos leapt to his feet.

‘Stay here!' he barked at the two children. Then he bounded into the fog after the soldier.

Jube got up and followed their uncle. The two Myunans stood sullenly, looking into the trees.

‘Make a sound and we'll make mince of yuh,' a voice 
whispered abruptly behind them.

They turned to see two men holding broad-bladed knives at the ready. Out of the mist came more Reisenicks. Some dropped down from the trees, others materialised out of the fog. All of them wore the distinctive clothes of rawhide and fur, all with long knives or blowpipes held ready. There was the sound of clicking joints as they moved and the
exaggerated
features of their faces were stony and hostile.

‘Oh, right,' Lorkrin snorted. ‘This is what we get for doing what we're told!'

The leader held up his knife, then raised a finger to his lips. Lorkrin stood up, using his body to hide Taya as she quickly gathered the tools their uncle had been working on and stuffed them into her backpack. She stood up beside him, anxiously eyeing the clansmen's sharp blades.

‘Does this mean Mr Ludditch didn't like the pendant?' she asked.

Cullum had a thin wooden stake through his left leg, just above the ankle. He had triggered a trap intended for a much smaller animal, set by the trunk of a tree. He lay with both hands clutching his leg, roaring defiance at the
offending
spike for its assault.

Khassiel reached him first, with Emos close behind.

‘By the gods!' Khassiel scoffed. ‘I thought you were being disembowelled, or something, Cullum. Stop being such a baby.'

‘Lie still,' Emos ordered the Forward-Batterer. ‘It's gone clean through. I don't think it's hit anything important.'

‘It hit my bloody leg! Is that not important enough?' 

‘You walked right into a skunkrin spike. Weren't you trained to avoid booby traps?'

‘I was watching out for man-sized traps. Nobody said
anything
about any damned skunkrin spikes.'

Khassiel raised her crossbow. Someone else was coming. Draegar crashed through the brush. He stopped and sighed when he saw what had happened.

‘I thought somebody was in danger,' he chided the injured man. ‘Is that little thing what all the noise was about?'

‘That little thing is my
leg
…'

‘You're lucky,' Emos told him. ‘They don't poison these kinds of traps.'

‘Lucky, my arse! Lucky would be stepping on a bag of gold. There's a bloody
spike
through my leg.'

Jube trotted up.

‘What's all the fuss?' he asked.

‘Cullum's pricked 'imself,' Khassiel cocked her head in the direction of her comrade.

‘That's right!' the Forward-Batterer fumed. ‘Have a laugh at a man's misfortune! I won't be able to walk on this …'

‘It's not a trivial wound,' Emos agreed. ‘Let's get you back to the fire where we can have a proper look at it.'

He drew his knife and cut the spine free of the branch that held it, then he and Jube helped Cullum hop back towards the road. They found the pots of food boiling over, the camp deserted. Emos jumped onto the back of the lead truck to look around. There was no sign of the children.

‘Reisenicks,' Draegar growled, reading the tracks on the ground. ‘A hunting party.'

‘Get in the cabs!' Emos told them. ‘Now, everyone in the cabs!'