I almost tripped, which would’ve probably killed either one or both of me and Eryn as the cart slid back to bowl us both over beneath almost a ton of stone.

  “What do you mean!?” I snapped, glaring at him now. Don’t know why, it wasn’t his fault that people were getting killed, right? Perhaps I was irritated at not having been told sooner, it’s hard to remember from back then.

  “Started about a month ago, one miner just disappeared. The week after two more went, then another after that, and then four at once—sometimes we find blood, discarded tools, bits of…meat. But never a full body.”

  Far from scared, Eryn was telling the story with something of relish in his voice. He seemed to be thoroughly amused by my reaction, as if, to him, this was all some theoretical thing. As if he suspected all the disappeared men might one day pull him behind a rock to share their genius work-avoidance strategy.

  Well, I wasn’t quite so optimistic as that obviously.

  “Isn’t anything being done about it!?” I snapped, feeling my chest tighten as I started breathing hard with sheer panic. That, of all things, was dangerous. If there’s any environment you don’t want to be inhaling a more-than-necessary amount of, it’s mines.

  “What would they do?” Eryn seemed genuinely surprised by the question, as if I’d just asked him why the king hadn’t led a cavalry charge down into the mines.

  “I don’t know—send in the guards?”

  He snorted at that. “Right, the guards. Moment they suspect there’s a fair fight coming, something suddenly stops being their problem. They’re fine at beating drunkards but don’t expect them to have anything resembling an actual fight any time soon.”

  That was, sadly, about in-line with what I’d seen of the guards myself, so far, and so I did not embarrass myself by trying to argue against it. I kept thinking though.

  “There must be something that can be done, right? We could bloody die!”

  Eryn grinned sourly.

  “Yeah, we could die. But until there stops being more replacement miners that won’t be motive enough for anything expensive enough to help, give it a dozen more deaths, I’d say, and the overseers or guildmen might decide they’d cut costs by just forking over the coin to have this problem dealt with. Until then…”

  We continued shoving the cart up until it emerged from the mine, quickly dragged back by the thick rope leading it to the surface—you didn’t think we’d been pushing all that weight alone did you?—and making it no longer our problem.

  No, now the stone back down in the depths was our problem. I started towards it, suddenly finding the darkness beyond more foreboding and hungry-looking than it had been before. What exactly was waiting down there, to have killed so many miners in just a month?

  “What’s the grin for?” Eryn asked, eying me with unhidden nerves and just a shade of uncertainty. I considered telling the truth, but the thought of letting him know I was scared still needled my delicate pride.

  “Well, I might get the chance to see a real monster down there,” I replied flippantly. The joke didn’t have the effect I’d hoped for, making Eryn stare more rather than less and thoroughly failing to break the ice between us. We headed down quickly in any case.

  Fortunately, no undead, demon or wretchling raid came to assail us while we were down there. Unfortunately, that meant we still had work. Gruin had done his usual business of cleaving into the wall, having, by now, sheared several inches from the stone in a mere half-hour. That was unusual even for him, and I reckoned we must’ve hit a soft patch.

  I found it harder to focus on that, though. It’s about time I laid out the actual interior of these mines so you can envision what our position within them was.

  To begin with, there was the main tunnel we’d been digging. This was essentially a method of reaching the depths where concentrations of valuable ore tended to be higher. For the most part, we were working to extract iron and coal. Those were the twin treasures of Rogrid’s lands, and what had made the place so valuable. Arvharest itself, just twenty leagues away, had its great forges fed and fattened on the output of iron and coal hewn from the undergrounds of Rogrid. High quality and, of course, abundant.

  Ideal depth had already been reached in this mine, just a few miles from the city, when Gruin and I first arrived, however. What we were doing now was stretching out ‘tendrils’ by digging more tunnels more sidelong, branching around the depths most likely to boast such treasures in every direction. If any of us ever hit iron, gathering it up would become the priority for a while. Coal reserves tended to be more uniform, gathered in larger volumes within the same place. I’d heard of entire mines dedicated solely to gathering up that single substance, lasting entire generations.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The problems were rarely digging, with digging. More often than coal or iron, we’d hit water. That meant even more tedious work of extracting the water in question, because working through it was practically impossible and outright dangerous. Gruin helpfully informed us all that his people had advanced machinery made to pump away the flooding in such tunnels, allowing them to remove gallons every second and clear out a cavity in the stone with maybe ten minutes of idling elsewhere.

  We did not. Our methods involved a bucket, pretty much. A bucket each, and a long walk to carry them all to the vertical shafts where men at the top would wait and draw them out by ropes.

  Gruin tended to skip that duty, by popular vote. We were actually left to do our jobs with some measure of autonomy, it just wasn’t efficient to send an overseer down into every shaft after all, and it didn’t take any of us long to notice how bad the oreling was at anything involving distance and legs.

  “Inefficient,” he spat, while working alongside me one day, “bloody…inefficient.”

  Even I studied him, even then. There were an uncountable number of things that separated the Grynkori from humanity in physiology, but plenty that went for the mental as well as the physical. Of course those days I just assumed every oddity he had was the result of a difference in mind.

  Not true. Never true, among beings of developed intellect. Oh there are some differences between the races of this world—the real races I mean, not just people who talk different and have a few shades separating their skin tones— but it’s rarely a good idea to assume that anything is innate until you know for certain. You would be quite amazed how many undeniable differences come from culture and experience rather than disparities of the blood.

  I know I was.

  But this behaviour now, the way Gruin practically flinched at every imperfection before him, is one of the quirks I’ve come to think is somehow innate to the Grynkori, even now. There seems some crucial part of their psychology that craves to eradicate everything extraneous and wasteful from their presence. More than that, too. It was some abstracted urge. It seemed a Grynkori’s eyes were always on imagined heights, not the ones before them. However far from flawless their methods become, they will always aim to shrink the gap with the very same amount of vigour.

  Needless to say, their technology absolutely shits on ours and probably always will.

  It was a problem for Gruin at the time though. He didn’t have his people’s technology, not unless there were hidden intricacies to that heavily dented iron hammer he carried, and the mine around us certainly wasn’t fit to be renovated at the word of one oreling who kept swearing at everybody anyway.

  More days went by. I’d like to say the fear abated, as I got used to working through it, but I don’t think it really did. There’s a funny phenomenon that emerges when you’re made to ignore your own survival instincts for too long, a sort of horrid apathy that wraps itself around you. I felt that in no shortage, and it consumed anything else I might have processed about the situation.

  I did, of course, tell Gruin about what I’d been warned about, and it seemed to cheer him up a ridiculous sum.

  “Monsters,” he happily noted, “let’s not go looking fo them just yet, wait to see if someone puts a reward up first. Then we kill them. Might be our ticket out of here.”

  I was absolutely disgusted by the suggestion, of course. He was standing there telling me we ought to just let some horrible beast kill again so we could get paid? What if it killed me?

  “Surely there’s a safer way to go about this,” I suggested, “for everyone.” Gruin snorted.

  “If you can think of a way to influence this situation, be my guest. Far as I’m concerned there isn’t one. We can go poking around for the thing first, if you want to lose this job.”

  Framed like that, I had to begrudgingly admit the idea sounded less appealing. I was, despite the constant complaints, aware that we’d gotten quite lucky in securing this work. If we fucked these employers off too much, there’d not be another job like it. Whatever supplies we had on us now would be the ones we set off out of Rogrid with.

  Those supplies, as it happened, were not very extensive at all. Maybe one tenth again what we’d come here with, an extra half-day of eating assuming we rationed well and were lucky. That started a new surge of depression on my part as it occured to me just how long we’d had to work to muster up even that much.

  God, if we wanted another week of food we’d be here for…months?

  Anyway, someone else got his head eaten two days later.

  We didn’t see what did it, but we actually did hear the incident itself. Or at least I assume we did. We caught the sound of screaming and then a loud crunching noise right from where it happened. Be a bit weird if that was just coincidence, eh? We rushed over to the site of the deed as fast as we could but of course it was long too late. Whatever had done it was gone, and so was the poor miner’s cranium and brain matter.

  I wasn’t sure why everything else had been left, but I did notice that. My brain seemed to snag onto the matter like something catching my coattails, pulling me still for a second. I’d just started thinking it through, had almost drawn it to its natural conclusion, when someone had to ruin the whole train of thought by screaming right beside my head.

  Eryn, it was. Though he was more a feral animal in Eryn’s skin at the time, panic having taken him in that all-consuming way it sometimes did with the truly cowardly or the truly scared. Maybe he was both at once, because the frenzy of fear seemed particularly extreme here.

  “What the fuck?” he groaned, stumbling back from the grizzly site, “what the fuck?!”

  Miners like to think of themselves as tough and practical folks, and to some extent they’re not wrong. Neither are the soldiers who think the same, or the sailors, or any other career of big, burly men who need to memorise a long list of particulars to avoid a premature grave. The fact is that these people are not tougher so much as just skilled at surviving in particular, tough environments.

  Take them out of one and you’ll see how thick the bullshit goes. Miners know how to deal with rock falls and sudden flooding, not with beheaded allies and stalking monsters. Panic spread fast.

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