Working in mines was horrible labour.

  Ha! Well it was horrible for me at the time, but then I wouldn’t know horrible labour if I was suddenly forced to start doing it for the first time due to an unexpected series of unfortunate events that jeapordized my future and forced me away from my home.

  As far as choices went for back-breaking work, mining was one of the worse ones to begin with. It was quite good, then, that I was now suffering through it. A bit of misery was just what I needed, in hindsight. Not to become a better person, oh no—I’d never do that. No, just to even out the balance a bit, tip the cosmic scales to a more fair configuration.

  There’s so much unjust suffering in the world, after all, that it’s always nice when some suffering splashes onto one of the idiots who actually deserve it.

  Which isn’t to say that the labour was actually that bad either. We were given—or rather, loaned—the equipment needed for free, so there was no huge expense as might be found in many other careers. In this case the equipment happened to be quite good, too. Rogrid had not, I learned, earned its reputation and output by chance, the picks we were handed seemed well-balanced and well made, despite the clear extent of their use.

  Of course all these things are relative, and there’s really no way of making a pickaxe that leaves the task of hewing apart solid stone easy. That was the next thing I got chance to learn—the misery of toiling labour. Within the day we were being escorted down into the mines, where Gruin loudly commented upon the wasteful expansivity of the tunnels—apparently not caring to observe that our own human-high heads were merely a few inches shy of the ceilings—and I tried not to let the claustrophobia of it all get to me.

  I failed. Already the deep ground caverns were reminding me uncomfortably much of the Dungeon, and my memories there were anything but pleasant.

  Gruin on the other hand could not have been more different. He seemed to become happier with every yard deeper we descended, as if being below the earth’s surface was in some way invigorating him. I would later understand why, and can share some insight about that now.

  The Grynkori are people adapted to their environment in more ways than just the physical. They mentally calm themselves underground, need it for a sense of normalcy and stability. To them, being above sea level is disconcerting in the same way being in the middle of water is for us. If you can imagine the primal fear and nervousness you’d feel at not having a single scrap of land in sight, swimming in open ocean and all the while knowing something could rise up to grab you from beneath at any moment, then you’re at least in the right direction of how a Grynkori feels when they’re forced to live beyond their caves.

  As to why Gruin had been wandering above ground in the first place…Well, that’s a matter for later. Suffice is to say, he was doing far better than me now that we were delving into the mines, and looked happier than I’d ever seen him in our brief time travelling together.

  It didn’t take long to be shown around the endless, cramped tunnels and taught how to walk without knocking any of the uncountable support beams. Nor, despite the way fear seemed to drag it on, did our explanation of what exactly would happen if someone knocked out one of those support beams take long. After that we were deposited into the greater population of miners and told to get working.

  We did so.

  Our section of the mines was one with the fewest men working it, maybe a dozen all told. Most of these would not be mining at any given time, however. We had men tasked with hauling rubble back up out of the shaft, using a strange sort of cart mechanism. It had now heels, sitting instead on smooth would with a bottom of wood that was smoother still. The men would fill the things up with debris and ore, then simply shove it out into the open air.

  When it was my turn to do that, I gained a swift appreciation for how hard it was. The thing was heavy, probably as heavy as Gruin and I would’ve been if we’d both been carrying one of the bear that attacked us on our backs. Pushing instead of carrying, and the relative lack of friction, made the ordeal easier, but I was still tested good and proper in driving it up out of the mine.

  And by the time I was done, and had it back down, the six men who were working the stone had already managed to carve away enough rock for it to be filled right back up again.

  What I did not understand, though, in that first attempt at shoving the minecart, was that this was the high life, my job was the easy one. Soon enough I learned, when it came time to switch roles and I had to turn my pickaxe against the solid rock.

  I swung as best I could, and there was a surprising amount of space to build speed and distance from the tool, but there is a reason we make castles out of stone. The stuff is durable. Every swing I managed barely made a scratch in its surface, and I felt like most of the progress I made was in tiny little chips and flakes.

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  Practice soon told me the best way to handle my pick, that and observing how others did it. Namely Gruin. The stories of orelings—and, indeed, the name they’ve gained among my kind—were clearly based on some truth, because within a minute of starting he was already doing more work than any two of the others, and there were some men there who clearly had experience in the mine. I tried to keep the awe from my face as I watched him drive hard steel into stone with arms like the pistons on some lumber machine.

  Between swings, he actually grunted out advice to me as well, and my form benefitted immensely.

  There was something of a method to breaking apart those walls, a measure of technique. You sort of…No, that’s too much unnecessary detail. Point was we ended up chipping away to break off larger chunks, meaning we were piling a lot of solid rocks onto the sled alongside stony splinters.

  But of course knowing what I was doing didn’t remove the physical toil of my labour. I had quite literally never worked this hard in my life, and if fencing practice had given me a nice introduction to swinging heavy metal around for extended periods of time, it wasn’t nearly enough to ready me for this. I ached in muscles I didn’t even know I had, and trudged out of the mines miserable and self-pitying.

  Gruin looked positively cheery.

  “What’s wrong with a bit of hard work every once in a while?” he cackled, waving his arms around as if for seemingly no reason at all, other than to show me a lack of all the soreness I felt.

  I couldn’t have done that, right now. My arms were dangling by my sides like lengths of lead, and the very thought of spending energy on anything other than walking towards the nearest chair felt very much like blasphemy. Perhaps Gruin could read my thoughts, could feel my pain, because he started laughing again. Fortunately, we reached the inn before long.

  Before I could really register anything, I ate a quick meal and fell asleep, hoping the aches would be gone by the time I woke up.

  Of course, if you’ve ever done a measure of hard labour in your life, you’ll know already that they were not. I awoke to every agony of my tortured body having grown worse, already sore to new extremes before I began to move and protesting with ever sharpened lances of discomfort after I did. I mewled like a wounded kitten, like a little girl. But it didn’t make the pain stop.

  I had an hour before work, and spent it on breakfast and sulking. Gruin spent it on breakfast and gloating. Nevermind tiredness or misery, he actually seemed somewhat excited to be heading down into the mines again, like…Well, like a man forced to tread water for weeks suddenly faced with a job where he’d be paid for standing on dry land.

  His happiness did not reduce my bitter misery, though. The opposite. It needled at me and worsened every protest I might have made. I bit my tongue only because I didn’t want to be further mocked for weakness or whinging by the Grynkori.

  Which, to be clear, would have been entirely justified. It was bloody work, and there I was acting as if I had a gut wound. Pathetic.

  Moving seemed to actually limber me up a bit, always did. Not enough to get rid of the aches by the time I was back to pick-swinging, mind, but it made a dent in them. Enough to let me keep making dents in the stone. We worked longer hours this time, but I didn’t waste as much energy at the start. It wasn’t anywhere near a balanced change. Everything about the second day was harder, and the third.

  After that, though, they started blending into one another, going runny around the edges and merging at them. Didn’t help make it more pleasant at the time, just makes it harder to recount the story decades later.

  Over the days, the weeks really, Gruin and I got to know our fellow labourers. I didn’t tell any of them the truth about why we were on the road of course, deciding instead to lie about some idiotic wonder-lust that had caused me to march away from my family. They seemed to consider that somewhat admirable.

  But then, they considered a lot of things admirable. While merchants aren’t exactly popular among nobility and other men of property, commoners have far more mixed feelings about us—and some of them view us almost as highly as they do their own lords. I thought that to be somewhat sad and pathetic back then, and this is one of those few views that I still hold today.

  Eryn was the tallest man there, save myself, and one of the less experienced miners. Despite this, he was also among the most productive—sheer size went a long way in this job and whether he was killing rocks or shoving them back up on the sled, having his amount of weight to throw around made everything easier. He was always a popular partner for the cart-shoving duties. As, for that matter, was I.

  It was Eryn I spoke with the most, friendly as he was. Quite an interesting fellow. I know that now, and I must have felt it somehow even back then, beneath the sea of my idiocy.

  Having grown up in Rogrid, Eryn obviously knew a great deal more about it than I did. We chatted, with him speaking on city life and myself on country. It was a rare opportunity to not be the default most travelled and knowledgeable person present, or rather not in such a way that left me without anything to learn from another.

  But as we talked, the topic inevitably moved onto the very mines we were working in now.

  “What was even the cause of the openings,” I asked as we shoved the cart. It’d gotten both harder and easier. My body was sore, but I was adjusting to that soreness and had long since figured out all the best ways to move without flaring it up. Eryn grunted right there alongside me, exerting himself a few seconds to ready the needed breath.

  “Surprised you didn’t hear,” he groaned, “it’s been all over the city.”

  “I’m a new arrival, remember.” I felt a touch of irritation to see him with so clear a conversational advantage. “So what was it?”

  Eryn paused a moment before speaking.

  “Men have been going missing…and dying down here.”

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