Fallowblade (42 page)

Reaching the foot of a stair embossed with precious minerals, they walked through an arched portal carved with leering faces.

‘The skin of both kobold races seems dyed with woad,’ Asr
ă
thiel commented, fleetingly admiring the exquisite precision of the carvings even as she paid close attention to the lecture.

‘It is neither dyed nor painted,’ said her informant. ‘Cobalt is used to make blue tinting for porcelain and tile glazes and stained glass. To make blue glass, one must mix cobalt oxide with silicon. Cobalt is therefore an ingredient of smalt, an artists’ pigment made of ground-up blue glass. Pigments made from pure cobalt tend towards violet in colour. Thus mispickels are blue-skinned.’

‘Your lore is vast, Lieutenant Zwist! I cannot help but be intrigued by the secrets of the underground. The jewels, the ores and their strange properties—it is like opening a treasure chest of knowledge! In my pursuit of weathermastery I have studied fire, air and water, but never have I learned much about what lies beneath the ground.’

‘That is quite natural, since weathermasters can interweave their senses with only three of the four elements,’ replied the goblin lieutenant. ‘You might find, Lady Sioctíne, that scientific inquiry into the structure of this ball of rock and iron we call the world is a topic of endless fascination.’ He ushered her across a crystal-studded bridge that spanned an abyss so deep that its floor could barely be seen. The movement of dots of light indicated that wights were working at the bottom. Towers of steam rose from below, along with the far-off clamour of drills, picks, shovels and splitters biting at the rock face. As they watched, a huge kibble, or bucket, came rushing at them from somewhere above and slid rapidly into the deeps. Asr
ă
thiel ducked. It was only then that she noticed the thick steel cable strung above their heads. A moment later another bucket came banging up out of the depths, swinging from the constantly moving cable, travelling apparently of its own volition. With a metallic squeal it disappeared into the gloomy vaults above.

They crossed another flying bridge and went down a winding ramp, entering a torch-lit underground forest of wrought silver trees with argent leaves. Draughts, entering from cleverly placed vents, played pure, ringing music on pendant crystals. Asr
ă
thiel marvelled at this splendour of light and sound. Her companion barely seemed to notice the triumphs of silver-smithery beneath whose glimmering boughs they were passing. ‘Did kobolds fashion these wondrous forests?’ Asr
ă
thiel wanted to know.

Laughing, Zwist answered, ‘Mispickels smelt and forge most useful ores, and they are clever engineers, who don protective armour and work with iron. But for the main part we, the Argenkindë, are the silversmiths. Artistic work is to our taste, and we are geniuses in the craft.’

‘This I know well, from my experience of the Sylvan Comb,’ said Asr
ă
thiel.

‘Ah yes,
that
object,’ said her companion. ‘We are pleased to have taken it back.’

‘But after you demanded the comb from us with such insistence you merely threw it away! Why did you want it if you care so little about it? Did you have some purpose in casting it aside? Is there some consequence you want to prevent, or did you simply want to stop it from falling into human hands again?’

‘The latter,’ said Zwist. ‘You see, Lady Sioctíne, we prefer to possess what is ours. Furthermore, we do not like our things to be sullied by humankind. Even if we have no use for one of our artefacts, we would rather keep it from mortal men. Besides, we own hundreds of similar items—hand-mirrors that appear to turn into lakes when flung to the ground, candlesticks that become towers, shoes that become ships, belts that become rivers . . . items that humankind would perhaps find useful to throw off pursuit, or to amaze their foes in battle, but which for us are merely toys.’

‘Toys to tantalise men, perhaps?’ Asr
ă
thiel suggested.

‘Perhaps!’ Zwist said lightly.

Asr
ă
thiel dropped the subject. ‘Where do the kobolds dwell when they are not toiling in the service of their masters?’

‘They frequent their own levels, which stink of garlic as they do: the Slyving, for example; and the Kingswood Toad; the Dundgy Drift and the Nine Rivets. They have their own breweries down there.’

‘Such curious names! What do you call this place where we walk?’

‘This particular gallery is called Chloride Street; it gives onto the open mountainside at both ends, one at Quartz Gate, the other at Upper Gate. We are now in the Main Silver.’ The knight gestured extravagantly. ‘In that direction lies the Great Course. Up there is the Middle Course, and the Little Course is far away to the west, beyond Fountain Hall and Firestone. The levels stretch for miles in every direction, joining with other diggings such as Castle Mine, Old Mine, and Fershull Pit.’

Puffs of white vapour were whistling and hissing through the levels, and the air thickened with humidity. They arrived at the base of a tapered, four-sided tower of crisscrossed struts and girders, a sight familiar to Asr
ă
thiel, for many such skeletal structures loomed over mineshafts near the villages around Silverton. It was a poppet head. A huge revolving gin wheel at the top, driven by chugging, panting machinery, wound steel cable to hoist lifts and buckets in and out of the shaft.

‘How are your engines powered?’ Asr
ă
thiel asked. The winding engines she had seen aboveground were driven by draughthorses, which had to plod in endless circles around a drum, a practice she deplored, and against which she often spoke out.

‘Steam gushes freely from the volcanic regions far below our feet. It drives the ore-crushing batteries, the traction engines, the cable-ways and all.’

‘I perceive how this can be, for I understand the forces of fire and water. In the four kingdoms, most people would wonder how steam could have such strength, it being so fragile and evanescent that the slightest whisper of wind blows it away. No human being has ever used this method to harness the power at the planet’s heart. You speak of wondrous things. I am glad my people know nothing of this, for they would leave no forest unrazed, no fuel source untapped, to generate steam power, and the skies would be blackened with their smoke. Where do your chimneys vent?’

‘On the upper peaks, amongst the clouds,’ said Zwist. ‘They are thousands of feet high, driven through the rock above our heads. Their crowns issue amongst the lofty peaks so that the lead-poisoned fume from our smelters may blow away on high-altitude gales without hurt to mortal creatures. Some of our chimneys are wight-fashioned, but others are simply natural fumaroles. Unlike humankind, the Glashtinsluight do not hew trees for fuel, destroying the world’s lungs and the dwelling places of wild creatures. Our steam engines and furnaces are all volcanically fired. We burn neither wood nor fossil.’

Together they entered a metal cage bestraddled by the tower. From overhead, high up in a small cabin, a kobold peered at them. It threw a lever and the cage dropped thousands of feet in the blink of an eye, or so it seemed. Asr
ă
thiel instinctively clutched at the mesh, feeling as if her stomach must fly out the top of her head. She was not afraid, but exhilarated and charmed by this new adventure. When the contraption came to rest Zwist courteously took her arm and they stepped out onto a dim platform, from which opened the masonry mouths of tunnels diverging towards various subterranean levels. The rumble of approaching wheels heralded the dark shapes of laden ore trucks rattling along their rails towards the platform. Shadowy, malformed shapes of kobolds moved in the gloom. Here and there a lantern shone like a yellow eye.

‘Now we have come to dangerous ground,’ said the goblin knight.

‘What travels in those carts?’ Asr
ă
thiel asked, her curiosity whetted.

Zwist grabbed handfuls of small rocks from a passing truck and showed them to the damsel by the light of his silver lantern. ‘These ores were not gouged from any underground vein,’ he said with interest, examining the misshapen lumps. ‘By the look of them, these have been lying about on the surface in some distant part of the mountains where mispickels are prospecting.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘They are sunburned. Ah, but it looks as if the mispickels have struck more rich silver country!’

‘I see no glint amongst those dull stones.’

‘Some of these are crystals of native silver,’ said the knight, ‘tarnished blackish grey by the sun’s light.’ When he scraped one crystal with the edge of another stone, it shone with a serene, chaste whiteness. ‘Now you will recognise it. That is almost pure silver,’ he said, patently fascinated by the metal. He placed one of the gleaming hexoctahedrons into Asr
ă
thiel’s palm; it weighed heavy. ‘Sweet native silver occurs naturally, but seldom by comparison to more common silver ores such as these.’ The damsel relinquished the fragment, whereupon Zwist proceeded to hand her a succession of mineral nuggets, pellets, scales and plates, identifying them with increasingly outlandish names: soapy nodules like greenish-grey wax, which he called horn silver; lustrous slugs of silver glance; richly hued ruby silvers; silver bromides, some vivid green anti-monial silvers, oxides and iodides, stephanites and embolites, acanthites and sulphur-yellow iodyrites.

His pupil brushed away the veneer of dirt on each sample and studied them with interest.

‘None of these has the look of silver, save for that which you call “native”.’

‘Silver must be purified by smelting before its true beauty can be seen.’

‘Why silver? Why such a cherishing of silver?’

‘Silver has a special relationship with electricity,’ said Zwist, caressing the nuggets where they glimmered brightest, ‘of all the elements, it is the best conductor. It is also sensitive to light, as you have just seen; a useful virtue. Your own kind use its compounds to create mirrors, those playthings of light and almost-windows onto another world. Human beings dye their hair with silver. Your apothecaries and surgeons use silver nitrate as a cautery and a cleanser of infection, and your royal treasuries mint coins of it. The freshness of water, wine and vinegar is better preserved in silver containers. You make of it tableware, jewellery, vases, pins, brooches, buckles and all the rest, you embellish with it by way of chasing, repoussé, filigree and inlaying, for you love it almost as much as we do, though you love gold better. Silver is the colour of starshine and moonshine, of mirrors, and ice crystals, and reflections on shining water.’

‘Silver is fair, but my people do indeed esteem gold more highly,’ said Asr
ă
thiel. ‘Gold is the sun’s colour, and the sun gives life. Aristocrats drink wines spiced with flakes of gold leaf, and wear cloth-of-gold, and gild the edges of their most important documents. Gold is kind, for it does not rust or tarnish.’

‘Neither does silver, in the hands of the Glashtinsluight,’ said Zwist with a stiff bow.

‘I have heard tell,’ said Asr
ă
thiel, ‘that gold and silver sometimes combine naturally, beneath the ground.’

The knight might have shuddered. ‘Speak not to me of tellurides,’ he said. ‘Sylvanite is an obscenity amongst ores. Electrum is a disgrace amongst alloys.’ Holding a bizarrely lovely specimen up to the light, he murmured reflectively, ‘I do admire the elegance of crystallised dyscrasite in calcite,’ before gently replacing the ore in the next car that rolled by.

Leaving the railway they walked down a long drive shored up by stout columns of dressed basalt, the tight-fitting beams holding back huge forces of gravity. In places, water dripped through the ceiling. Asr
ă
thiel could not help but quail for an instant when she pictured the enormous weight of rock pressing down from above. ‘Miles of drives like this weave through every level,’ said her guide, ‘but fear not, for all are supported by baulks of petrified forests or other stone, set squarely and securely.’

The sound of tramping feet approached, and a band of grim-faced mining-wights carrying tools over their shoulders came around a corner, four abreast, looking to neither right nor left. They paused, did homage to the goblin knight, and then marched on their way.

An efficient system of water-curtains was in place to curb the spread of any fires that might ignite in the underground gases. Sometimes, as they walked down a damp and gloomy tunnel, the damsel and her escort would arrive at a screen formed from trickles of falling water, gleaming in the light. They would walk right through without getting wet, by some twist of goblin gramarye.

The basalt walls of the lower caverns were not dressed, but rough-hewn. Here, the floors were uneven and the design austere, displaying no ornamentation. Spitting oil lamps depending from hooks illuminated their way. Asr
ă
thiel became aware of a background noise, a clashing and booming from the deeps towards which they were headed.

She had heard stories of the knockers; stunted manlike wights who wore clothes resembling the traditional garb of their human counterparts. Constant was their labour, yet they were not doomed to it, nor did they work for payment. It was simply that they were compulsive excavators, and could as easily stop mining as the wind could cease to blow. The blue-caps who assisted them were in similar circumstance.

‘How did the knockers while away the centuries while the Argenkindë were imprisoned, Lieutenant Zwist?’