“I hate you.”
The comment caused a stir. He heard men whisper all around him. They were too many to keep voices straight, but their fear had a prickling scent that needled his skin.
“God Above, we’ll need chains for that one,” said the one called Captain. “They call him Robert. He’s got an ugly look in his eye. We’ll put him down with the blind mute. What the one can’t see and hear, the other can’t make trouble with.”
“You think the blind lad will last a week with that madman, Captain? He’ll get shoved off the treadmill. He’ll get et alive.”
“They’re all dead men anyway, Foucher. What are you worrying for?”
“The duke is displeased we didn’t meet our quota last year.”
“Due to the flooding. These wheels should fix that.”
“With all the troubles in the border country and the civil war in Salia, the duke wants more this year. More iron. More weapons.”
“Then get them down there and to work! What else did you bring me?”
“Criminals. The usual ruffians and wandering good-for-nothings. Thieves, mostly. I’ve sent them to the quarry master.”
“We may need more in the shafts to clear out those two rockfalls.”
“Better them than us. I fear that whispering, I don’t mind telling you, Captain.”
“I won’t send you down into the deep shafts, Foucher. You’ve served me well. Your bones won’t be gnawed by the goblins!” He laughed again, so hearty a sound that were it not for the comment that had preceded it one might be tempted to join in.
Such cues gave him, the one called Silent, little enough to go on. The haft of a spear or staff prodded him in the buttocks, and he stumbled forward as the men around him roared to see his confusion. He was pushed to the brink of an open hole out of which air poured with a sharp, dry scent that he had smelled before.
What memory teased him?
Creatures scuffling in the dark.
He brushed his fingers over the bronze armband, his only possession, and images flared like lamplight illuminating a black cavern:
He drags Kel and Beor back from the brink of a gaping fissure while a searing wind rushing up from the abyss stings his eyes. His beloved Adica lives, and they have rescued her from the Ashioi, who stand cursing them on the other side of the fissure. In the shadows beyond the shifting light, skrolin chatter in whispering voices as they vanish into the rock. The bronze armband throbs against the skin of his upper arm; when darkness falls, it lights with the uncanny gleam of magic.
“Get on!”
A hand cuffed him on the ear—out of nowhere—right where it was swollen. The pain shattered inside his skull and broke his memory into a thousand shards.
“Go on! Set your foot on the rung. There. There! What a fool!”
“Go easy on the man, Foucher. He can’t help he’s blind.”
“Maybe so. Maybe not.”
“What’s that armband he’s wearing? It looks valuable.”
“Master Richard warned me of that. He said it burns any man who touches it.”
“Does it?”
“If you’d seen the look on his greedy face, you’d have believed him, too. I say we can wait and take it off him when he dies.”
“I wonder …” mused the Captain, but their voices faded as he descended into a clamor of rumbling and cracking and echoes.
A wooden rung slipped under his questing foot. He found purchase and climbed down, because he had no other place to go. Others led him, passing him from one hand to another down a shaft and down a second until it seemed the rock itself pressed around him, whispering of its age and of this violation of its secret parts. Now again he smelled burning oil and a gasp of smoke. Once he slipped into a ditch full of streaming water.
At length they chained him to stand on a curved wood walkway that was a huge wheel. They prodded him until he realized that they wanted him to walk and, by walking, turn the wheel beneath him. Water gurgled and sloshed, riding up from the depths and spilling away in a rush above him. The steady groan and rumble of other wheels turned above him under the tread of other feet.
He walked, chains rattling, and after a time got the hang of it, more sure of his footing, not fearing that he would stumble and fall and plunge endlessly into the darkness that lay everywhere around him. The wood slats of the wheel slid smoothly beneath his feet, worn down by the countless measured steps of the hapless slaves who had gone before him.
Had they died here, too?
Yet he found it so hard to think because his head hurt. It never stopped hurting.
