He glanced to the lantern hanging from his leather waistbelt. The oil flame jiggered and snapped behind the pebbled glass.
His chest tightened to a hard knot.
Down the tunnel, the other prisoners hollered and screamed, accompanied by a rattle of chains as they tried to flee. But it was too late. Stone groaned with an ominous intensity—followed by a thunderous clap. The ground jolted up, throwing Rhaif into the air. The boulder next to him bounced high, rebounded off the roof, and crashed to a floor now riven with cracks.
Rhaif landed hard on his rear and scuttled backward as the tunnel continued its collapse. His lantern, mercifully still intact, bobbled atop his knee breeches. Before him, a massive slab of the roof broke free and smashed to rubble and dust. More fissures chased him down the tunnel, coursing across roof, walls, and floor.
A choking black cloud rolled over him, heavy with sand and chalk.
He coughed to keep from drowning in that silt. He hurriedly rolled to his feet and rushed away. The flickering flame at his thigh looked like a lone fireflit lost and bouncing through a dark bower. Its light was too feeble to pierce the thick veil of dust. Still, he kept running, both arms out. His ankle chains rang with each step, giving strident voice to his distress.
In his haste to escape, his hip struck an outcropping. He spun, and glass shattered at his hip. A few pieces pierced his roughspun breeches and sliced his leg. He winced and slowed, taking great care not to lose his lamp’s flame. Only the overseer had a flint to relight it if it should go out.
That must not happen.
He had witnessed other prisoners punished with darkness. Poor souls lowered into pits without lanterns, sealed down there for days on end. They often came out frail, maddened creatures. It was Rhaif’s greatest fear: an eternal darkness without end. How could it not? He had lived all his three decades up in the Guld’guhl territories on the eastern edge of the Crown, at the fringe of the sun-blasted world, where night never fell and the lands were a sandy ruin, where heinous creatures made their home, alongside tribes of savages who eked out a meager, violent existence. Having lived all his life under a Guld’guhl sun, he held night to be no more than a rumor, a darkness to be feared.
As he hobbled free of the worst of the dust cloud, he finally stopped. He unhooked his lantern and lifted it high. He took care doing so, fearing too much jostling might knock the flame from its oiled taper.
“Just stay where you are,” he warned the pale flicker.
As the dust thinned, he listened to the settling of rock behind him. The pounding of his heart grew quieter, too. He checked the passageway. The cave-in had stopped a hundred steps away, completely collapsing the tunnel. A few stray rocks fell from the roof. A timber support shattered with a loud pop, enough to make him jump back.
Still, it looked like the worst was over.
But what now?
He sneezed loudly, startling himself, then turned and searched around him. He did not know this level of the mine, not that he hadn’t heard stories. Earlier, roused from their piles of hay in the mine gaol, he and a dozen others had been kicked and threatened with cudgels to this remote area of the chalk mine. There, they had been lowered on hempen ropes tied to an empty ore cart, winched down by the ox-driven windlass somewhere outside the pit mouth. It was said this section of the mine had been long abandoned. Some said its shafts and tunnels had dried out centuries ago, but most believed it was accursed, haunted by spirits, plagued by malicious ilklins.
Rhaif hadn’t placed much stock in such tales. He knew some miners who snuck crusts of bread into crevices in the rocks; overseers who did the same with coins, mostly brass pinches, once even a silver eyrie. All to appease such spirits.
Not him.
He had learned in the back alleys of Anvil to trust only that which he could touch with his hands or see with his own eyes. He took no account of gods, of stories of ghostlies and spookens. Living in Anvil, he’d learned there was plenty enough to be afraid of. What went bump in the night in Anvil was not some haunting, but someone trying to steal what was yours.
Then again, he was often the one doing the bumping.
Anvil was the territory’s main port. It hunkered along the sea, a squalid pisshole, if ever there was a place. It was a city of cutthroats and rogues of every ilk. It shat and sweated like a living creature, ripe with corruption, pestilence, and decay. By season, by storm, by fair weather, it never changed. Its bay was constantly festooned with the sails of a hundred ships, its dockside a continual brawl.
The saying went that no one lived in Anvil, they only survived it.
Rhaif sighed.
How I miss it …
Not that he held out any expectation of ever seeing it again. Betrayed by his own guild, he ended up being buried a hundred leagues to the south, sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the mines. His offense: crossing the wrong thief, the master of their guild, Llyra hy March. He thought it ill-fitting a punishment for simply stealing from the woman’s former lover, the archsheriff of Anvil. The man was too tempting a mark, and Llyra was not someone prone to pining, let alone loyalty. In fact, Rhaif himself had shared the warmth of her bed many a time.
He shook his head.
Even now, he remained stymied. To be so harshly punished, he suspected there had been more afoot than he had been privy to.
No matter, here I am.
But where was here?
As the dust settled to a haze, he reached a free hand to the secret pouch sewn into his breeches. He removed the wayglass, an item he had pilfered from an overseer of another crew and quickly hidden away. The loss was blamed on those other prisoners, who each lost a finger until someone confessed to stop the torture and claimed he got scared and threw it down a privy shaft. No one bothered to search the filth.
Rhaif lifted the wayglass to the flicker of flame. The sliver of lodestone shivered back and forth. It refused to settle. Strange. He had stolen it in the vague hope of one day making his escape. Though truth be told, he had noted the opportunity to nab it—and could not resist. After he had been buried down here for nearly two years, the thought of freedom was always on his mind. And a wayglass could prove useful. He figured if he ever had the opportunity to escape the overseer’s eye and take flight through some deserted section of mine, such a tool might point him in the right direction.
Like now.
He turned in a circle. He had come to a stop at a crossroad of tunnels. He tried to fathom the best path. He dreamed of his freedom, but he also valued his own hide. If it meant living, he would happily return to the whip and cudgel. Death was an escape he would rather avoid.
He decided on one tunnel, choosing it only because the lodestone shivered a little less in that direction.
“Good enough.”
* * *
AFTER SEVERAL HUNDRED paces, Rhaif was thoroughly lost.
By now, he sensed he was going in circles, slowly traversing downward, as if marching into his own grave. As to the wayglass, it only confounded him. The lodestone now spun round and round the glass, as if as baffled as him.
Maybe this place is accursed.
He turned at another tunnel, growing frantic. His heart pounded in his throat. He had at best a half-day of lamp oil left. His ears strained for any telltale sign of the mine proper: shouted orders, the ring of hammers, the cries of the whipped. But all he heard was his panted breath and his occasional mumbled curses.