Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals Read online

  ‘Better watch your step, Quarter,’ he smiled. ‘And keep those lamps lit.’

  ‘I shall, mine sergeant,’ said Nate through gritted teeth as Rudd helped him back to his feet.

  The pair entered the mineshaft, Rudd in front, Nate following close behind. Their footsteps echoed eerily down the narrow tunnel. With the sides and ceiling of the rapidly descending shaft shored up with timber scaffolding of every size and description, the miners referred to it and others like it as ‘the Sanctaphrax Forest’ – for reasons lost in the mists of time.

  ‘Bullying swindler,’ Nate muttered.

  Soon, the early-morning sunlight spilling into the tunnel behind them was replaced with the golden glow cast by lamps fixed to the vertical stanchions and cross buttresses. Maintaining that steady twilight glow in the mine was essential if the crystals of stormphrax were not to become too heavy to move. And it was the lamplighter’s responsibility to maintain it.

  ‘You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Grint himself wasn’t siphoning off the lamp oil,’ Nate whispered to his friend.

  Rudd turned. ‘But why?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nate. ‘But I’m telling you, Rudd, he’s got it in for me.’

  Rudd shook his head. ‘You’re imagining it, Nate,’ he said. He ran his finger down the faded scar on the side of his face. ‘Grint hates everyone.’

  As they got close to the bottom of the shaft, the low rumble of approaching mine wagons reverberated through the tunnel. A moment later, a team of pit prowlgrins came into view, each one gripping the rear handle of the laden wagon it pushed with bony forepaws. Overworked and underfed, the creatures were pitifully scrawny, with scars – old and new – showing through their dull, mangy fur. Behind the line of wagons came a tall shryke, urging the prowlgrins on with savage blows from her ironwood flail.

  ‘Poor things,’ Nate murmured, his jaw set with impotent rage.

  Rudd nodded. As most miners had learned to their cost, it was useless to expect the shryke drivers to treat their charges well. Grint had lost no time in recruiting the vicious bird-creatures after the death of Nate’s father, and the prowlgrins had paid the price ever since.

  As they reached the bottom of the sloping shaft, the tunnel levelled out and entered a larger chamber. Five other tunnels led off it, like the spokes of a cartwheel. Two of the tunnels were in darkness. Their funnel galleries had already been fully excavated, the lights extinguished and the shafts closed. The three other tunnels were golden with a twilight glow, and from them came the sounds of scraping and hammering. Some of the day shift were already at work.

  To their left, set into the soft rock, were the stores; a series of racks, shelves and hooks where the phraxmining equipment was kept. Rudd armed himself with his tools – a handspike, a sickle, a rasp and a pair of long-handled pincers – and slid the various handles into the leather loops which hung from his thick belt. Then he picked up the heavy double-headed pick and swung it over his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll see you at the phraxface, Nate,’ he said.

  Nate was crouching down beside a huge barrel, filling his long-spouted oilcan from a spigot. He looked up at his friend. ‘Yeah, be there after my rounds,’ he said.

  It had been Abe Quarter’s idea to give his son a specialist skill. That was why he’d taught him everything there was to know about lamplighting. He’d shown him how to trim the wicks, how to bleed the air ducts, how to synchronize the valves and, most important of all, he’d drilled him in the most accurate way of calibrating the degrees of light, until Nate could gauge twilight at a glance. As a lamplighter, it was Nate’s job to keep the mineshaft and galleries lit to exactly the right degree. Too dark, and phraxcrystals would rain down like leadwood bullets; too bright, and any miner striking a crystal with a pick would cause a massive explosion. Only twilight would do.

  With the heavy oilcan making his gait lopsided, Nate Quarter set off on his rounds. He headed along the tunnel and stopped at the first lamp, where he unscrewed the cap to the oil reservoir, inserted the spout into the hole and carefully poured in oil until the red bar inside the lamp gauge rose to the top. Then, having screwed the cap back into place, Nate snipped off the charred strands of the wick and adjusted its height. When he had satisfied himself that the drip feed and valves were working as they should, he moved on to the second lamp in the tunnel.

  As he made his way slowly towards the funnel gallery at the end of the tunnel, the noise grew louder – scraping, rasping, thudding, and the echoing clatter of the chunks of phrax-rich rubble as they tumbled down the spiralling phraxchutes and into the carts at the bottom. He entered the bottom of the first of the working funnel galleries he came to, and adjusting his goggles, looked up to see the dozen or so phraxminers clinging to the scaffolding or slung out on hanging harnesses, hard at work.

  Seeing to the lamps at each level as he went, Nate slowly climbed the rickety ladders until he was high up in the vaulted shaft. Dust and larger pieces of rock fell down through the air, tapping against his helmet and tumbling harmlessly away. This was an old shaft. The massive bolt of solid lightning that, thousands of years earlier, had plunged down through the mid-stratum of compressed earth and shattered into countless million pieces, was all but gone. Yet it was up here, where the miners now were – at the point where the forks of that lightning came together and the bolt was at its thickest – that the largest crystals of stormphrax were to be found. It made the accurate calibration of the light all the more vital.

  ‘All right, Nate?’ came a voice from just above him, shouting above the sound of the digging.

  Nate looked up and smiled. ‘Morning, Killim,’ he said.

  The tusked goblin had been a good friend of his father’s. He grinned back toothlessly.

  ‘Getting bigger every day, Nate, so you are,’ he said. ‘Bigger and uglier …’ he added, and began to laugh – a dry, wheezing laugh that turned almost at once to a raw, hacking cough. He blew out a cloud of vapour, then clutched hold of a timber strut as, doubled over, he struggled to catch his breath. Slowly, he recovered. The colour returned to his cheeks. He looked up, pulled a filthy rag from his back pocket and dabbed at his streaming blue eyes. ‘That’s better,’ he gasped. The old-timer smiled at Nate. ‘Best get back to work before the mine sergeant docks my rubble price.’

  Nate carefully checked the twilight calibration of the lamp overhead while Killim returned his attention to the phraxface. He watched as the old goblin painstakingly scraped away at the rock around a sparkling crystal of stormphrax with his handspike. Even in the twilight glow, a misplaced blow striking the crystal itself risked causing an explosion violent enough to destroy the entire mine. The old tusked goblin was a master of his trade, able to dislodge and clean a crystal in a fraction of the time it took most of the other miners. Long years of experience had given him the dexterity to work safely and fast.

  Unlike the rubble, which was crudely sieved of its tiny shards of crystal, cutting out an intact shard of stormphrax was a skilled art. Killim finished the cut and held the gleaming shard of pure lightning up to the light before placing it carefully in the lightbox at his side. The mine sergeant would pay him handsomely for it up top. Shard price was twenty times rubble price, and every miner knew it.

  As the morning passed, Nate tended to the rest of the lamps. The second funnel gallery was not as high as the first, the seam only half-excavated. Apart from one faulty feed valve, which he replaced, all the lamps were in good working order. Up one side of the long sloping entrance tunnel and down the other, Nate continued his work. The oilcan grew lighter. By the time he had finished seeing to the lamps in the newer, smaller, third chamber, it was approaching noon – not that the time of day meant much in the constant twilight glow.

  He went back to the stores, returning the empty oilcan and lamp tools to the rack, and selected a handspike and pair of pincers. Then, humming tunelessly, he readjusted his ironwood helmet and set off for the new funnel gallery.

&n
bsp; ‘How’s it going, Rudd?’ Nate called out above the noise of chipping and scratching that echoed all round him.

  Rudd turned from the phraxface and wiped his brow. The dust and sweat had mixed to form a thick muddy paste which he smeared down the side of his face. He grinned.

  ‘She’s a beauty,’ he said. He pointed to the crystal he’d been working on. ‘A stave, by the looks of things, and nicely cracked.’

  The miners had names for all the different types of lightning bolts. A splint, a stagger, a rake; a ragged sleeve, a nest of worms … It all depended on how the lightning bolt had solidified when it struck the Twilight Woods.

  Some split into two prongs, some into several, and some into countless tiny filaments, impossible to mine. A stave was a single, zigzag-shaped shaft. As a young’un, Nate had always added lightning bolts just like them to his pictures of battling skyships. He thought that was the way all lightning looked. Now he worked down in the phraxmine, he knew just how rare they actually were. Every miner longed to work on a stave, yet many would spend an entire lifetime down at the phraxface without ever seeing one.

  Standing next to Rudd on the narrow platform as his friend returned to the crystal he was cutting around, Nate lifted his handspike, and began scraping and scratching at the porous rock above his head. Drips of water fell as he did so, splashing onto his goggles and trickling down inside the collar of his jacket. Little by little, he chipped delicately away at the rock. Tiny particles dropped down beneath him.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Rudd, clasping the glittering crystal – the size of his fist – to his chest. ‘Beautiful.’ He placed it carefully in his lightbox. ‘And large,’ he grunted. ‘Should get a good shard price.’

  Nate returned to the phraxface. As he prodded at the rock with the tip of the handspike, he heard the sudden change in tone that all miners listened out for. Most of the time, the porous rock made a dull rasping noise when scraped, but when a concealed crystal was near, the sound took on a silvery bell-like quality. Rudd noticed it too.

  ‘Looks like you’ve found a shard yourself, Nate,’ he said. ‘Careful now.’

  Nate didn’t need reminding. Frowning with concentration, he scratched at the surface of the rock. Fine dust sprinkled down through the air. He worked at a small section of the rock, picking away patiently until, with a soft crunch, a larger piece of rock fell away to reveal the glinting tip of the jagged crystal above.

  ‘Magnificent!’ said Nate delightedly as he set to work digging out the embedded crystal from the surrounding rock. Finally, with a soft grating sound, the glittering shard came free. Nate placed it in his own lightbox. ‘Absolutely magnificent!’

  • CHAPTER FOUR •

  For the rest of the shift, they worked nonstop on the seam; Nate, Rudd and the other dozen miners who had been assigned to the fifth funnel gallery that morning, cutting slabs of phrax-rich rubble but not finding any more shards. Compared with Rudd, Nate was slow, stopping increasingly often to catch his breath and rub his aching shoulders. The hefty cloddertrog never seemed to tire. By the time the siren went, signalling the end of the day’s work, the mine crew had all but filled three of the wagons with rubble.

  ‘Most we’ve ever done in a single shift,’ said Rudd as he gathered up his tools and headed down the ladder. ‘And two shards between us! Grint will have to give us a good price.’

  Nate followed him close behind. ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ he muttered.

  At the bottom of the shaft, the scuttlers – the lowest and most menial workers in the mine – were already busy sweeping and shovelling away the debris ready for the next shift. As he jumped down to the ground, Nate’s ankle went over on a piece of rock, and he stumbled against one of the squat goblins, knocking his broom from his bony hands.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Nate, retrieving the broom and handing it back. ‘Oh, it’s you, Slip.’

  The scuttler – a bandy-legged grey goblin with a look of permanent terror in his eyes – nodded.

  ‘Yes, it’s me, Slip,’ he said, his voice husky and halting. ‘Grey goblin, from the nether reaches, nineteen years of age and in his twelfth year of service …’

  Nate listened patiently. Scuttlers lived most of their lives down in the mines, always there to keep the oil drums full and the tunnels free of vermin. Although they were far below the Twilight Woods, the forest’s pernicious influence permeated the underground tunnels, seeping through with every droplet of water and breathed in with each particle of phraxdust. The miners, with their shift work and distant living quarters, were in little danger, but for the scuttlers it was simply a matter of time before they ended up completely deranged. That was why, at any opportunity, they would repeat details of their lives, in a vain effort to keep their minds from slipping away for ever.

  ‘Bad infestation, Slip uncovered. Piebald rats. Last night,’ he said, his husky voice stopping and starting as he concentrated hard. ‘Battered nine of them, did Slip. One, two, three, four, five, six …’ He counted off the number slowly and deliberately. ‘Seven, eight, nine. All dead. And Slip laid traps, for the rest …’

  ‘Come on, Nate.’ Rudd’s voice floated back along the tunnel.

  Nate smiled at the scuttler. ‘I’d best be going,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, best be going,’ said Slip. ‘Best be off. But afore you do,’ he said, his voice lowering to an intimate gravelly rasp. ‘Afore you leave, there’s something Slip wants to tell you.’ He reached out and grasped the sleeve of Nate’s jacket. ‘A warning, Nate, ’coz your father, good he was to us scuttlers. Gave us time up top …’

  ‘A warning?’ said Nate softly.

  ‘The mine sergeant,’ said Slip, nodding vigorously. ‘Grayle Grint. I mean, Grint Grayle. Slip heard him say that flogging wasn’t enough – that next time, he’d fix you for good, Nate Quarter. So, watch out for yourself.’

  ‘Fix me for good? But how?’

  ‘He didn’t say,’ said Slip. ‘Not exactly. But Grint knew your father didn’t trust him, Nate. And then he had that accident. Now Grint’s suspicious of you. And we don’t want no more accidents, do we, Nate? No more accidents.’

  ‘No,’ said Nate thoughtfully. ‘No, we don’t. You see anything suspicious, you come and tell me, Slip.’

  The grey goblin nodded, his piercing blue eyes wide. ‘Slip’ll tell you, Nate. Don’t you fear. Old Slip’ll keep a watch out …’

  Clapping the scuttler gratefully on the shoulder, Nate set off after Rudd. He found him leaning against the timber-lined wall at the bottom of the sloping tunnel of ‘the Sanctaphrax Forest’. All round them, like a herd of tilder moving through the trees, the other miners were passing in between the wooden props which jutted up at all angles from floor to ceiling as they made their way to the surface.

  ‘What kept you?’ asked Rudd.

  ‘Slip,’ said Nate.

  ‘What, that little scuttler?’

  Nate nodded. ‘Confirmed my suspicions,’ he said, ‘that Grint Grayle does have it in for me. Slip overheard him—’

  ‘Been underground too long, that one,’ Rudd interrupted. ‘You can’t trust the word of a twilight-touched scuttler.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ Nate began.

  ‘I swear, Nate, you’re too friendly for your own good,’ said Rudd. ‘You get the weirdest little creatures latching onto you …’

  ‘Like you, you mean?’ said Nate, laughing, and it was Rudd’s turn to punch him on the arm.

  They emerged from the fake twilight of the tunnels into the genuine dusk of the forest, the low orange sun sinking down towards the horizon. Nate and Rudd exchanged greetings with the miners on the night shift, just arriving to begin work. Then they stopped at the tally wagon and gave in their lightboxes, and had their shift earnings calculated.

  ‘Day shift, ain’t yer,’ clucked the scrawny shryke in the wagon and checked her list. ‘A shard. Good size …’ She placed it on the scales and added small ironwood weights until the two trays balanced. ‘Will get you … fifty
gladers. And then your rubble price … Three wagons full at five gladers … Minus deductions …’

  ‘Deductions?’ said Nate, staring hard into the shryke’s yellow eyes.

  ‘Mine sergeant’s upped the stockade tax,’ she said. The bird-creature’s cold eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t like it, you can sleep out in the woods.’

  She cackled as she peeled off promissory notes from a bundle in her taloned fist.

  ‘Thirty-five gladers. Don’t spend them all at once!’

  Nate bristled, his fists clenched. But Rudd lay a calming hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Take it,’ he urged. ‘Thirty-five gladers ain’t bad for a single shift, Nate, and we don’t need the trouble …’

  Reluctantly, Nate took the notes and placed them in the inside pocket of his tunic. Minutes later, Rudd did the same.

  ‘It’s not right,’ Nate muttered as they left the tally wagon and its escort of brawny mine guards behind at the mine entrance.

  Along with the other miners, the pair of them headed back towards the camp. His hunger and his tiredness seemed to melt away as Nate pounded over the creaking boards, replaced instead by burning resentment at the mine sergeant and his cronies. The other miners, though, like Rudd, seemed content that their shift was over and they were back at last above ground – and with money in their pockets.

  They marched on noisily through the increasingly shadow-filled forest. The sun set and darkness swept in across the sky, high above the canopy, pitching the forest below into the impenetrable gloom of night. By the time they came to the fork in the track, the rowdy miners had already relit their helmet lamps, and the yellow beams of light were bouncing from tree trunk to tree trunk.