Redoubt (20 page)

So Mags went on.

“Like I said, they ain’t after
you,
they just wanta clean the stone away so they can be diggin’ again. Chances are, ye’re
gonna die, smothered or bleedin, or all crushed up inside, all alone in the dark.
An’ that’s lucky, ’cause if they drag ye out, you ain’t gonna see a Healer. Someone’ll
haul ye out in the mine cart t’get you outa the way, an’ then they’ll pitch you out.
Ye might die there. An’ mebbe it’ll be winter an’ ye’ll fall asleep in the cold. Or
mebbe ye won’t die at all, mebbe ye’ll drag yourself t’ under the barn floor, where
all of ye sleep, an’ mebbe ye’ll lie there, and mebbe someone’ll bring ye a little
food. An mebbe ye’ll actually live. Yer bones’ll be all twisted up, a’course. But
as soon as ye show up fer a meal—” He paused for effect
“—they’ll put a pick an’ hammer in yer hand an’ send ye back in.
Even if they have to take ye in the mine cart an ye crawl into the shaft.”

The Healer made a choking noise.

“Now,” Mags went on, “figure all them people, them kiddies, that die in there. They’re
dyin’ hard, mostly. Pain. Scared. Fightin’ for breath. For the worst, mebbe dying
for days. All alone an’ no one cares. So you figure what kinda ghosts they’d make.”
The sweat of fear had soaked through his shirt now, he’d have to leave it to be washed
before he could wear it again. The trews too. “Angry, I’d say. Wouldn’t you be? Wouldn’t
you be
mad
that there was people just like you that was alive, and you ain’t? So we heard about
all sorts of ghosts in the mine. There was one that’d come along, an’ no matter how
careful you shored up behind you, he’d knock the timbers loose. Or the one that’d
work the ceiling behind you, so it all fell in and you was trapped in a pocket and
suffocate. There was one that’d find places for water t’come in an’ flood the shaft.
An’ there was plenty, th’ ones that’d been brought out t’die, that’d come in the night
an’ sit on yer chest and suffocate you, or walk through yer dreams an’ make ye feel
how they died. But those weren’t the worst.”

“They—weren’t?” Charis managed, through his horror.

“No. They weren’t. Cause all that woulda happened if Cole Pieters were just a greedy
bastard that didn’t give two pins ’bout anythin’ but money. But Cole Pieters weren’t
just that. Cole Pieters were the meanest, nastiest, cruelest man I ever seen.”

He could practically feel Charis’ eyes going wide with shocked surprise.

“I seen him beat kiddies t’death for just about nothin’. I seen him beat ’em senseless,
then have ’em dragged down into mine an’ the shaft collapsed around ’em. I seen him
watch a couple go after each other over half a piece of bread, an’ laugh as one of
’em beat in the other’s head against a rock. I seen him tie up a kiddie out at the
sluices overnight in winter ’cause he wasn’t findin’ enough glitter, an’ the kiddie
soaked through wet. He died, naturally. He catch ye doin’ anything he could call stealin’
an’ off’d come an ear, cause ye don’t need an ear to work a seam, and maybe it’d fester,
and maybe it’d heal. He’d smash your teeth just cause he felt like it.” Mags finally
ran out of words and stumped along, exhausted by what had come flooding out of him.
But he still had one more thing to say. “Now. You figure what sorts of ghosts
those
kiddies make. Then ask me why I’m feared of ghosts.”

He remembered, oh, how he remembered, silently talking to the spirits in the dark.
Reminding them that
he
wasn’t the one responsible for their deaths. Pointing out he was no different from
them—maybe worse off, because he was hungry and they weren’t, he was cold or hot,
and they weren’t, he was exhausted, and they weren’t. Begging them to turn their anger
on the ones responsible for all the pain—Cole Pieters and his sons. He’d go to sleep
thinking at them, or whenever he was startled by an unexpected sound in the mine.

He couldn’t remember who had told him and the others about the ghosts of the dead
miners. He didn’t think it was the Pieters’ boys, but it might have been. It wouldn’t
have been the elaborate story he had just told Nikolas and Charis, of course; the
Pieters’ boys had about the same imagination as a turnip, and none of that business
about dying slowly and painfully would even have occurred to them. But it didn’t take
much imagination to put together a lot of dead and dying mine-slaveys, ghosts, and
some fun scaring the living mine-slaveys together.

Ghost stories were the sorts of things that were whispered in the dark when you were
too cold or hungry to sleep, because misery prefers to have company. The ghost stories
that the Pieters boys told would have been simple and impersonal. But the stories
the kiddies told each other . . . those had names.

“Remember Bat?” “Issie sat on me chest last night!” “I seen Lu at privy, I swear!”
Every ghost had a name and a face, and even if the faces looked much alike—dirty,
straggling, greasy hair, cheekbones sharp with hunger—it was still the face of someone
you’d eaten with, worked with, huddled up with against the cold.

“I’m sorry, Mags,” Nikolas whispered, finally. “I had no idea. . . .”

The shape on the other side of him, the Healer Charis, just nodded, dumbly.

:That was well done, Chosen,:
Dallen said gently.
:I was hoping we’d be able to get that out of you.:

He thought about that.
:That why you teased me ’bout it?:

:Yes. To get you started. You’ve had that bottled up inside you for far too long,
and it needed to be told to someone who would
feel
it, not merely be horrified, then do his best to forget about it.:
Dallen sounded very contrite.
:And now I apologize, because unlike Nikolas, I did know, and I prodded at you anyway.:

The sweat of fear was drying, making his shirt itch. Mags scratched at his shoulder
absently.
:Ye meant well.:
He pondered it for a moment.
:Reckon was like lettin’ pus out of a wound.:

:Very like.:

“Well,” he said aloud, after a long stretch of walking in silence. “Now ye know. So
if ye want t’make it up t’me, well, ye can.” He scratched his other shoulder. “Figure
out if it
is
a ghost. An’ get
rid
of it.” He sighed. “There probably ain’t nobody in Haven that’s died as hard as any
of the mine-kiddies did, and probably no reason for a ghost t’be that angry, but it
doesn’t matter to m’gut. Understand?”

Nikolas sighed. “Yes, Mags, we do.”

He nodded, as the corner where their inn was came into view. “Good,” was all he said.

But it was enough.

7

T
here were glimpses of eyes in the rock, the cold touch of a clawlike hand. Mags tried
not to look, tried not to think about them. But he thought he could see them anyway.
He knew who they belonged to, too, but he tried not to think of the name.

Jak. I was Jak.

He could almost, but not quite, hear the name being whispered. He chipped away at
the rock in a cold sweat. He knelt in the shaft just as he always did, rock just a
few finger lengths from his nose, his knees fitted into smooth hollows that he himself
had painstakingly cut out. After all, the Cole boys were only listening for the sounds
of rock being cut, and a little work in making smooth places for your legs to fit
now
meant a lot less pain later. His lamp, strapped to his forehead, cast a dim light
on the rock face in front of him. One little flame, in that lamp, fed by oil, with
a metal reflector behind it. You didn’t want the flame to burn too high, it’d burn
the skin of your forehead. You turned it as low as you dared.

Except that meant shadows, and in the shadows, were the hints, the glints, of a pair
of eyes.

Hungry eyes, the eyes of someone who had scrabbled for life and had it taken away
from him anyway.

Jak. I was Jak.

“Leave me be,” Mags whispered. “Leave me be, I nivver hurt ye, I nivver took from
ye. I nivver shoved ye t’edge of huddle i’ th’ col’. Leave me be. Go fin’ Bon. ‘E’s
th’ ’un thet stole yer bread. Go bother Calli. She nobbled yer blanket.”

Around him, behind him in the darkness, came the sounds of tapping, and echoes of
tapping. He had just begun his half-day down here, but of course, he was hungry already.
They were all, always hungry. The porridge of barley and oats that they all got for
their breakfast didn’t last for very long. Especially not when you were working as
hard as you could, chipping away the rock. But he was used to that; in fact, the times
when he wasn’t hungry were branded in his memory. There weren’t more than a handful
of them, and most of them were connected with visits from priests, those cursed god-men
who promised everything after you were dead.

They must have been branded in Jak’s memory too, or at least, whatever memory a ghost
had. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe now that Jak was dead he knew what the god-men
told was all lies. It was all the same rubbish anyway. Suffer on earth and be rewarded
in a heaven Mags didn’t believe in, by gods who didn’t see fit to do something about
misery right now. Sometimes, when he had a moment to think, and something turned his
mind toward these gods the priests were so big about, he wanted to hit the priests,
hit the gods if they existed. But that took energy, and mostly he didn’t have the
energy to waste. But Jak, now, Jak had listened to the god-men, and listened to the
stupid Cole daughter who read out of holy books at them while they ate, and maybe
Jak had believed. And now Jak knew better. Knew it was all lies, that no one had anything
for anyone who wasn’t important and rich, least of all gods. And now he wanted to
be alive again, and he’d do what it took to get alive again.

It didn’t work that way, but since everything else Jak had been told was a lie, he
had no reason to believe he
couldn’t
steal someone else’s body.

“Bon stole yer bread,” Mags repeated, ruthlessly. “I nivver stole fr’m ye.” Mags carefully
positioned his chisel and tapped at a likely spot in the seam with his hammer. It
was a good broad seam, this one, as wide as the tunnel was tall, which meant there
was no problem with spending most of his time hammering out waste rock and getting
shouted at for not bringing up any sparklies today. This had been Jak’s seam. Was
that why Jak was here?

But Jak hadn’t died here. Jak had died of eating something bad, up on the surface.
Probably those berries. Mags knew they were poison, they all know those plump, dark
berries were poison. Jak knew too. But when you were starving and a bully had stolen
your bread, maybe those berries were a little too tempting.

Maybe Jak was here because Mags hadn’t shared with him.

This was a good seam. Why hadn’t Jak managed to bring out enough sparklies to get
him extra bread? He should have been able to.

Mags’ tapping released a chunk of rock. There was nothing in it that he could see,
but it wasn’t waste—it would go up to the hammer-mill and the sluices. He set his
chisel into a good spot and began tapping again. One more sparkly and he’d get a second
slice of barley bread with his broth.

Jak could have done that every day in this seam.

“If ye were hungry, ’twas yer own fau’t,” he said, under his breath, as the sad eyes
watched the back of his head. “Ye hear me? Lookit this seam! Yer own fau’t.”

That was what Master Cole said all the time. It was easy enough to earn bread, all
you had to do was work for it. It was another lie of course, because if you found
yourself in a
really
good seam, Cole would switch one of his sons to it. But that was what he told the
ghost, lying to it as he and the rest were lied to. Maybe Jak even believed that,
seeing Mags pulling out the sparklies now.

There were two sounds in the mine where he was, the tapping and the steady drip of
water. They provided a counterpoint to his own tapping and his muttering to the ghost.
The rock fractured suddenly and dropped off the face, and there, catching the light
was another yellow sparkly; not very big, but Mags’ sharp eyes never missed a sparkly.
He pulled the rag he kept wrapped around his throat off, folded it a few times and
set it on the floor of the tunnel just under the stone. Setting his chisel as delicately
as he could, he began flaking bits of rock from the face around the sparkly. A tap,
a pause to check his progress, another tap, another pause. It was serious, intense
work. One slip of the chisel, and there would be nothing but chips and a beating.

The feeling of eyes on the back of his neck suddenly intensified, and he felt a cold
hand touch the middle of his back. He jumped, the chisel slipped, and the stone shattered.

Hoping the Pieters boys hadn’t noticed the change in rhythm, he shoved the chips with
the rest of the waste for the sluice and went back to cutting the rock face.

But now besides the sweat of terror of the ghost, he was drenched in the cold sweat
of fear of a beating. “What’d ye do thet fer?” he whispered harshly. “Ye want me t’die
too?”

Yes. . . .

He almost froze. So Jak was after—what? Company? No, he and Jak had barely exchanged
a few words, ever. No, it had to be something else. It had to be about what
he
was.

Yer Bad Blood, boy. Yer Bad Blood, and it’s damn lucky for you that yer here, an’
we can put ye to work an’ keep those idle hands busy, or ye’d be dancin’ at rope’s
end already.

He could hear that in his mind, hear what Cole Pieters said of him. Was that why the
ghost was haunting him? Because he was Bad Blood?

Out of the kindness, the pure kindness of my heart, I took ye. No one else wanted
ye, not even the godly priests. They all knew what ye were. They all figgered one
day ye’d turn on ’em. I’m a bloody saint, I am, fer takin’ a chance with you.

Did he deserve this miserable excuse for a life? Did he deserve to be dead?

Or should he just have died with his parents, and all this time the gods had been
trying to kill him, and he just wasn’t cooperating with them and dying proper-like?

To hell wi’ ye, gods! Ye sendin’ ghosts t’do yer work now?
Tap, pause. Tap, pause. He put his nose as close to the stone as he could and still
see, examining the rock minutely.

To hell with gods. To hell with what they wanted. To hell with Jak and his sad story.
There were no good stories here. Every kiddy here was unwanted, burdens on their villages,
bastards left on doorsteps, kiddies left orphaned—they arrived, more often than not,
with tear-streaked faces, and most of the time, their faces remained tear-streaked,
day in, day out. There was little enough to be happy about here. Good days meant someone
found food in the pigs’ buckets before the pigs got their slop. Good days meant you
hurt less. Good days meant one of the god-men was going to visit, and you got put
into long shirts made of sacks that you pulled on over your rags so it looked like
you had clean clothing. The shirts itched, but you weren’t allowed to scratch. And
you got two slices of bread and better soup, made with peas, and just for that night
you didn’t sleep hungry. Those were good days, and they didn’t happen often.

And the priests, the god-men, would look at the shirts and not at the thin faces,
the bony limbs, and tell everyone how lucky they were to have a good master like Cole
Pieters, someone who was teaching them a trade, feeding and clothing them. Then there
would be a long blather about gods, but not too long, because Pieters wanted them
back at the mine. And then the god-man would go have a fine meat dinner with the Pieterses,
then go away, and the shirts would be snatched away, and it was all the same again.
It was always the same. Nothing ever changed, and no one would come to rescue them.

“Gabble gabble gabble.”

He started. That wasn’t the whisper of a ghost, and it wasn’t any of the kiddies or
one of Cole Pieters’ sons. It wasn’t even words he recognized!

“Gabble gabble gabble!”

He clutched at his chisel and hammer as the mine started to darken and fade around
him. What was going on? Was his lamp—

I left the mine—

Everything was dark, and he felt as if he was falling. And the back of his head hurt.

I left the mine. Dallen rescued me. Dallen and . . . and . . .

He felt someone grab him by the hair. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t fight, he couldn’t
even open his eyes. Suddenly he was breathing in smoke, thick, sweet . . . he coughed,
but that only drove it farther into his lungs. He tried to hold his breath, but eventually
he had to breathe anyway, breathe in great, shuddering gulps of the thick, too-sweet
air heavy with the smoke. He thought he might throw up, he suddenly had so much vertigo.
He heard someone grunt, and felt himself falling sideways.

It was dark. There wasn’t much oil in his lamp, and he’d turned it way down. The last
one to use it must have taken it off and turned it way up to warm his hands by. You
could do that, but it was stupid to. He’d felt when he got the lamp that it was low
on oil, but they only got refilled at the beginning of the night shift, and there
was no point in asking for more oil So he’d dropped it to the tiniest flame he could
and not have it blow out. You didn’t need a light to get to the end of the shaft,
and if you were working a poor seam, well, you didn’t need much light for that, either.

As he knew, this wasn’t a good seam. He’d been taken off Jak’s old seam as soon as
he started bringing out lots of sparklies. Davven was working it now, the suck-up.
He could chip away at this thing for candlemarks without needing to see, and save
the light for when he worked at the thin vein that held the sparklies. You had to
cut away the bad rock before you could get to the good stuff.

He’d noticed on his way out that by his standards, the roof was overdue for a prop,
so he brought one in and hammered it in place before going back to work. He arranged
himself at the face and began working high, above the seam. He’d work down, in strips,
and maybe there’d be something worthwhile when he got to the right rock. He had to
bring
something
out or he wouldn’t get fed at all.

At least the ghost wasn’t in this seam.

But suddenly, he began to cramp. Legs, then arms, knotting up in an instant, and so
fiercely that it made him cry out. He expected to hear one of Cole’s sons yelling
when he did.
“No jibber-jabber!”
But instead, his arms and legs just burned . . . burned . . . felt as if someone
had bound them up.

“Gabble gabble gabble!”

His throat burned too. Why did his throat burn? It felt the way it had when he’d inhaled
some noxious smoke from when the Pieters boys had been burning a carcass of something
that had died and started to rot before they found it. He coughed and whimpered, coughed
again.

It was too dark to see, but again, someone grabbed his head by the hair, this time
pulling him up. He opened his mouth to protest, and what felt like the wooden mouth
of a waterskin was jammed into his teeth. A few drops of liquid dribbled onto his
tongue, thirst overcame him, and he sucked at it, greedily, ignoring the musty, odd
taste, bitter and sweet at the same time. He drank worse water every day, water murky
and gritty with the waste from the mine, water green with algae from the barrels at
the mine-head that were never cleaned, water slimy out of the bottles they were given
when they went down to work, bottles that were never cleaned either.

The hand let go of his hair, and he fell back into darkness. Hot darkness. Hot, sticky
darkness.

So hot.

* * *

Mags worked away at the sluice. It was hot, so hot. In summer, working the sluices
was the best job. There was sun and fresh air, and if you got hot you just splashed
some water over you, but for some reason, the water was just as hot as the air today,
and splashing water over himself didn’t make any difference. It was hard work, right
enough, swirling the heavy pans of gravel around and around in the running water,
and his arms and back ached something terrible. He felt all cramped up again, but
at least he wasn’t hungry. And it was no worse than mining the seam. It was summer,
and this must have been afternoon shift. He couldn’t remember. It would be work for
long hours, because this was the afternoon shift, and work didn’t stop till the sun
went down. Well, that wasn’t so bad. You didn’t really want to go to bed early in
the summer, when you could sluice in the sun and let the heat soak into you, especially
after a turn in the mine in the cold. Even if the sluice water was as hot as the air
right now.