Chapter 2: Ore Beneath the Town

The cage dropped from the Ash landing at the second bell, the shift bell, and Kael rapped two knuckles on the rail before he knew he was going to.

Two raps on the doorframe when he left the house, two raps back from the bed. Mira's had come slow this morning, one knuckle's worth of knock through the wall. The rail gave him iron and nothing else. He took his hand off it and put it in his coat pocket, where the tin was.

Twelve men stood packed in the cage with their lamps hooked to the bars. Cold came up the shaft to meet them. Somewhere above, the winding gear ground out the day's first complaint, and the cage swayed on its chain, a long slow swing to the east and back.

Joren Pell stood at his shoulder. He was grey and stooped, with a front tooth gone, and he held the lamp tag for the crew's cord between two fingers as he had every morning for thirty years. The cord hung from the cage post: one knot to a man, a wood tag on every knot. You turned your tag going down. You turned it back coming up. The board at the landing was paper. The cord was what counted.

Kael's thumb found his own knot and went along the rest. Joren. Tessa. Ketter. His own. Four.

Tessa Rill had the place on his other side, wiry, with a scar through one eyebrow and her bread in a cloth. "Half of Ash saw you carry her," she said. "I heard it twice before I got my boots on."

"She couldn't stand."

"Nobody said you shouldn't." She shifted the bread. "Hask says you lost the day."

"He'll dock it."

"Then you want the double," said Dolan Ketter from the back of the cage, a heavy man with a voice like a barrel rolled downstairs. "New seam. It pays for the day you lost and the one you haven't lost yet."

"If the second cart goes out," Tessa said.

"If," said Ketter, the way a man says it of weather.

He had been twelve the first time, and the cage had swung just like this.

He had been signed on to carry lamp oil and keep out of the way, and Joren Pell, who owed nobody anything, took him down the shaft with a hand on the back of his neck. The cage stank of wet rope and onions. The cold came up through the soles of his boots, and the lamps jittered, and every man in the cage was looking at something over his head. A bolt dropped somewhere. The cage jerked, hung, swung out so far Kael's stomach stayed behind, and swung back. A grown man said a word Kael's mother would have scrubbed out of his mouth with ash.

Joren pushed the cord into his fist.

"Hold that. A knot's a man. You hold it, you count it, and you don't let go till we're up."

The rope was greasy and the knots hard as knuckles. He counted them. Nine. Wrong. He counted again, with the cage still swinging and his heart in his teeth. Nine.

"If she sticks, you knock," Joren said. "On the cage wall. Four knocks. Then the count."

Kael knocked. Three. The wall rang under his small fist.

"Four," Joren said, not unkindly. "Not three. You count yourself."

He had counted eight men and the boy. Then they were down, and the lamps flared on the rock, and the cold was only cold, and he walked off the cage on legs that belonged to somebody else.

That was seven years gone. This cage jerked, and Kael's boots came up off the floor and came down again. The whole cage lurched out to the east and hung there, the chain shrieking, a lamp spilling oil across a man's shoulder.

The Company's lift tender, a thin man in a clean coat, put his palm on the ward plate in the corner and set his jaw. The plate flashed amber under his fingers, and the cage steadied by degrees, swing by swing, the way a cart settles when someone gets a shoulder under the load. At the bottom landing the tender's seal flared on the reader plate and the plate answered with a clean ring of light and a line of small brass letters: Spark. Kael's own seal rode on his belt. On a reader it lit nothing, and the clerks wrote Unranked against it and meant nothing by the word. Every miner in the cage looked at the plate and then at the roof. They were not impressed. It was only a thing done by a ranked hand, and Kael had seen it done a hundred times, and still his eyes went to it.

Joren stepped out of the cage. Kael went after him.

He could have waited. A word at the face, quiet, with the crew bent over the first cart, would have cost nothing and been heard by no one with a badge. He stopped at the landing, where the tender was wiping his palm on his coat and the whole shift was filing past, and asked it aloud.

"Joren. Has the sing gone wrong?"

The shuffle of boots slowed. Joren did not turn.

"Four knocks, boy," he said. "Not three."

It was what he had said at twelve, in the stuck cage, in the same voice. He was giving the old answer because he had no new one. Kael waited.

"The sing's gone wrong," Joren said, to the rock. "Don't ask it where the tender can hear."

He walked away. He did not look at Kael again for the whole of the long walk down the drift, and neither did the rest of the crew, who had heard.

The new seam lay at the far end of the East Cut, a drift opened a month back. The rock was fresh enough to be the colour of a bruise. Hask had chalked the day's roll on a board at the gate, with the sums beside it: the seam paid the double only if the second full cart went to the landing. A second cart meant a third mark. A third mark meant something toward a bond and something toward the fortnight, and Kael had read the chalk twice before he took his lamp.

He did not load. Not yet. His father's rule had outlived him by four years and was older than the oil in Kael's lamp: check the beam before the wage. Tomas Veyran had been a pulse tender and had died in the Low Gallery fire, the Board's finding had closed it, and nobody in the house said the word.

The gauge on its slate bracket read steady. The slate said the face was rated, in a clerk's round hand. The beam over the cart line was green timber, sweating at the joints, and the main strut under it stood a little off true.

"Leave it," Joren said, from the rail.

"A minute," Kael said. "Before the first cart."

"Quota's by the cart," said Tessa.

"A minute."

"Tell it to the slate, then. It's the only thing down here that listens, and it says rated."

Kael went under the beam.

He walked it slowly, keeping his hand on the wall. The timber over his head hung just beyond reach of his fingers. He stopped. Something small lay on the floor against the rock, curled and dry. A beetle. A line of them, in fact, one every arm's length along the base of the new seam, laid out neat as buttons on a coat.

He crouched. They were dead, all of them, with their legs drawn up, and he could not see what had killed them.

Then he heard the tick.

It came from the timber, not loud. A dry click, like a fingernail on a cup, from the beam over his head. A pause. Another tick. He had heard nothing of it with the carts running; here, with the crew silent at the rail, it came clear.

The lamp relay passed its round at the end of the drift: a brightening of every lamp on the line, then a slow fall back. Every miner on the Cut kept time by it. Kael counted tick against the round. The timber clicked three breaths after the lamps brightened, and again, each time, three breaths after. But the gauge on its bracket did not so much as flicker.

It was no Current. Current did not reach through rail and rock; he knew that much from watching the tender. The old crews called it counting the room: rounds and timber, and when a beam complained.

Beside the last post of the shored length, a square plate the size of his hand was screwed to the stone. The survey plate. It should have carried the survey number and the date of the last inspection. The face of the metal had been scraped blank, the grooves of the figures filled with grit and shining at the edges. Whoever had done it had used a blade and had not been gentle.

"That's the Company's," Joren said behind him. "Leave it."

Kael left it. He looked at it a long while first.

The first cart started behind. By the time he'd walked the seam, the other three were waiting, and Tessa Rill leaned against her pick handle with her arms folded and said nothing at all, which from Tessa was an opinion. He took his shovel and began loading, and the first cart went to the landing late, and the clock on the quota chalk had already won a quarter of an hour on him.

The wheel bound at the track switch on the second cart, loaded to the rim and creaking, the near wheel locking at the points so that the axle ground against its seat. The crew stood back, and Ketter kicked the wheel and swore.

Kael got down. He pulled the wedge block out of his belt, shaved a sliver off it with his knife, and seated it hard into the axle housing with the heel of his hand, and spun the wheel. It ran true. He put his palm on the housing and felt it sit.

"That'll hold," he said.

He stood. The beam was above him. The track ran under it for the full length of the seam, the only rail the second cart had, and the second cart was the third mark, and the tin at home was nearly empty.

That morning the lamp over the table had dipped again. He had been at the basin with his back turned and had not heard it, and had seen her hand rise to her ear in the dark of the window glass. The fortnight to the fourteenth had begun to run, whatever he did.

He kept the beetles to himself, and the tick. He told himself it was a bad beam and the beam had stood a month, and told himself the crew would not thank him for a lost quota. Then he pushed the cart onto the rail, under the beam, and the wheels ran clean.

Ketter began to hum.

It was the song of the last lamp festival, the one the whole town sang over the ward flame, and he hummed it slow and a little off the beat, under the tick that only Kael could hear. It was nothing like his mother's six notes. Every child in Ash knew this one. It slid in and out of time with the timber. Kael loaded. Joren loaded. Tessa unwrapped a heel of bread from her pocket, held it out at arm's length toward the humming miner, and said, "If it hums, I am not eating it."

Ketter laughed. Joren, who did not, made a noise in his nose. For the first time in two days Kael felt his mouth go up at the corner, and let it. The cart rolled out to the landing without a hitch. The crew cheered him in the manner of men who meant to be insulted in return. "Veyran, you walk like you're carrying your own coffin," said Ketter, and Tessa said the coffin was lucky to have him.

He had one hand on the cart rail when the beam let go a chip.

It was no larger than a thumb. It came down out of the dark without a sound, struck the iron rail with a crack, and glanced into Tessa's palm where she had set it to push. It opened her hand from the web of the thumb to the heel.

His stomach dropped. His own hands, still on the rail where he had set the axle, would not let go of it.

Tessa held her palm up in the lamplight and studied it like a card dealt wrong. The blood came in a bead, then a thread, then a sheet. She did not cry out. She wrapped the hand in the cloth from her bread and pressed down.

"You looked at that beam a full minute," she said, dry, and not loud. "Before you loaded. You loaded anyway."

Nobody else said anything. The cheer had gone out of the drift as though a lamp had been lowered over it.

Foreman Hask came down to the face alone, which meant someone had gone up for him. He walked the seam with his chalk in one hand and his roster in the other and glanced at neither. He stopped at Tessa and looked at her hand.

"Who's the hand?"

"Rill," said Joren.

"Go up. It goes on the sheet."

"How long off?" Tessa asked.

"A day. Two, if it turns."

"Two days is a week of bread." She stood with the bound palm held against her chest. "I'll work it bound."

Hask just crooked a finger at Kael and walked him down the seam to the last post, where the lamps thinned and the crew could not hear, and stopped there, and said, "Veyran."

"The beam's bad."

"The slate says rated."

"The beam's bad. The gauge doesn't see it. There's a tick in the timber, off the lamp round." Kael was already pulling the tin out of his coat. "And the plate's been scraped."

Hask looked at the plate. His eyes went off it like a hand off a hot pan. "Quarter-wash crew scoured the posts last week. Takes the paint off."

"It's a survey plate. It's stamped."

"Veyran."

Kael opened his tin. The charcoal inside was worn to stubs, his own, the tin dented from six years in his pocket. He tore the back off a ration slip, laid it over the scraped plate, and rubbed the stub across it, in the open, with Hask watching. The grooves came up under the paper in lines of black. A row of figures, fainter than it should be, the last two doubtful.

"It's a number," he said.

"Put that away."

"It's in writing." He took the tally slip from his belt, wrote two lines on it in the same charcoal, and handed it over. The beam is bad. Do not run the pulse on this seam. He did not leave out his name. "I loaded under that beam myself. That one's mine."

Hask held the slip. His mouth moved on something. "I've worked this mine twenty-six years," he said. "And that plate..."

He did not finish it. The sentence stood in the air between them with its door open, and Kael waited for the rest of it, and Hask looked at the water seeping off the wall into the gutter.

"Scoured," Hask said. "The quarter-wash."

He tore the slip in two. He did it slowly, so it could be seen, and dropped both halves into the seep, where the ink ran and the charcoal floated. Kael watched them go. The rubbing was in his hand, folded; it was the only copy there was.

"Whole double's docked. The injury and the delay." Hask chalked a line on the roster. "Premium with the rest. You're back on the new seam at the plain rate, Veyran."

"The pulse."

"Posted. Day after next, at the shift bell." Hask put the chalk away. "And Veyran. You stop the crew, the tool invoice has your name on it."

He went up. He did not look back at the hand wrapped in its bread cloth, or at the cart, or at Tessa, who had not moved from where she stood.

Kael read the rubbing a third time by lamp. He knew the first four figures by heart. The last two he could not make out, and he left them blank in his head, as the plate had left them.

At the landing, the roll for the day after next hung beside the pulse notice on the board, in Hask's chalk. Joren Pell. Tessa Rill, with a small black note beside it where a clerk had added her palm. Dolan Ketter. A name he had never seen: Nadi Tarn, from another crew, whose tag hung on a fifth knot wired into the cord that morning, the wire still bright. The strut stood on the line below them, the green one, the one he did not trust, with the new seam's whole cart line under it.

His own name came last, at the plain rate.