Garth could feel his fear uncoiling in his stomach, but he refused to let it shine from his face. Once the bells had begun to peal, Joseph had hurried him from his horse, seized their bags of instruments and powders, and hustled him towards the nearest poppet head—the gaunt iron framework above one of the shafts that supported the winding mechanisms that sent cages and carts plummeting into the unknown depths below.
“I’m sorry, lad,” Joseph had muttered, feeling Garth’s fear through the hand he had about his son’s arm. “But you’re too useful to leave above.” His mouth twisted. “And you did plead and beg to come.”
Now they stood waiting for the great cage which would carry them down the shaft; they could hear its dull scream as it sped its way to the surface. Waiting to come down with them was a small group of heavily muscled guards, all armed with swords, knives and batons and wearing helmets and breastplates over brief leather wraps about their hips. All wore sandals on their feet, and all bore the scars of old wounds. The man who had helped Garth to fasten his helmet, a tall, balding man by the name of Jack, now indicated his cloak.
“Throw that to one side, boy. It’ll only hinder you below.”
Joseph nodded at Garth to obey, tossing his own cloak to one side and rolling his shirt sleeves up. “It’s warm below, Garth.”
The next instant the machinery above them screeched and groaned. A great shape, indistinct in the clinging fog and flickering torchlight, lurched out of the shaft yawning at their feet.
“Inside.” Jack gave Garth a shove, and the youth leaped into the cage beside his father, the other guards crowding in behind them. The cage was made of dense woven wire, thick with rust, stretched over a crudely welded iron framework. It rocked, and Garth couldn’t help wondering if the chains that held it were so corroded by the sea air the cage would fall free any moment, plunging them to their deaths below.
“Are there any other physicians below?” Joseph asked of Jack.
The man smiled maniacally. “Yeah. Five or six. But two of ‘em were in the sections of the Veins that have been broached. The sea and the gloam have eaten ‘em by now. A black and watery death it be, crushed against the hanging wall.” He shrugged their deaths aside. “They take their chances, as do we.”
Garth felt physically ill, and his father’s hand tightened about his arm in support. “Ah,” Joseph said. Fog drifted into the cage and curled about their bodies.
“Can that boy do anything?” Jack asked doubtfully. Again the cage lurched under their feet, and Garth felt his stomach lurch with it. Above them the machinery whined and screeched again.
“He’s my son and my apprentice,” Joseph said calmly, as if he were standing by the banks of a pleasant stream, discussing fishing prospects. “He can handle anything to broken bones, but not crushing injuries or internal bleeding.”
“Well, I’m sure we can find him enough broken bones and gashes to keep him busy ‘til breakfast time.” Jack laughed harshly, and two of the other guards joined in. “If he still feels like it, that is. This your first time down the Veins, boy?”
Garth nodded, unable to speak. The cage was slowly beginning to move.
Jack grunted, and the cage dropped.
It fell like a stone through a crazed whirlpool. Garth cried out and grabbed at his father. He thought the world had gone mad—and indeed it sounded like it, for Jack’s laughter rang out about him, and from beneath his feet rose the echoes of disembodied cries and the clink of even stranger machinery waiting below and the foul smell Garth had noticed on the surface but intensified ten times. But worst of all was the horrifying sound of surf breaking—from below their feet!
“Stop,” said Jack after a lifetime, and amazingly they did. Only then did Garth realise that there was some internal device that controlled the cage’s movement.
“Any further and we’d drown,” Jack said conversationally, and winked at another of the guards. He was chewing something, and the thin squelch of his mouth made Garth’s stomach heave.
“Are the pumps working?” asked Joseph.
Jack nodded, the torchlight flickering weirdly over his face. “Yeah, but it’ll take until morning for the mines to be cleared of the sea water. Longer, if bodies clog the pipes.”
Garth leaned against one of the cool iron bars of the cage and wondered if he could keep from being sick.
“Garth,” Joseph whispered urgently in his ear as Jack opened the door of the cage and motioned the guards out. “There are men dying down here. We can do nothing about the dead—and they care little if their bodies clog up some pipe—but the living are still alive and in pain and just as afraid as you. And yet you will be able to escape in the morning. Do you understand me?”
Garth nodded. “Yes,” he said, standing straight again. “I’m sorry, father. I’ll be all right.”
“Good lad.” Joseph squeezed his arm one last time and motioned him out of the cage.
They stepped into a cavern roughly carved from the black rock, the openings of several tunnels yawning hungrily out of the darkness. Moisture ran down the cavern’s rough walls in glistening, inky rivulets, and Garth started as a great drop fell on his helmet.
“The gloam always sweats, boy,” Jack said roughly. “The sea thunders another hundred paces below us. We’re safe enough here. From the waters, that is.”
Again he laughed, and Garth found himself wondering just how sane Jack really was.
A group of men huddled to one side, by the dark opening of a tunnel, and Garth looked them over curiously. There were nine of them, naked save for rough loincloths, their skin as black as the gloam itself. Dust, he realised, rather than natural skin colour. Chains bound their ankles.
“This gang was just about to descend when the sea, cursed be her name, broke through.” Another guard stepped forth from the tunnel and saluted Jack. He grinned. “‘Twas their lucky day.”
From the look on the men’s faces Garth thought their luck had run out a long while ago, but he said nothing.
“Where do you want us to go?” asked Joseph.
Jack sniffed and raised his eyebrows at the new guard. “They’re both competent, though the boy’ll only treat the broken bones and sliced flesh.”
“Well, we’ve enough for the both of them,” the guard said, wiping his nose along his arm. He looked as though he could use their help himself; there was a gash that ran the length of his cheekbone, and one, deeper, that had cut into his upper arm. “I’ll take the older man. There’s a portion of the tunnel that has collapsed on a gang further down. Jack, take the boy to Section 205. The sudden change of air pressure when the sea rushed in caused several sections of the hanging wall to collapse. A few broken bones, ‘tis all, but the cursed men mutter and refuse to move until they’re fixed.”
Separate? Garth looked at his father anxiously.
“You’ll be fine, lad,” Joseph said, his eyes holding Garth’s. “Just do as I trained you.”
Garth swallowed and nodded.
“Besides,” Jack said cheerfully, his chewing increasing noisily, “it doesn’t really matter if you lose one or two. The Veins is a good place to practise. Nothing fattens a graveyard like an apprentice physician—and best to fatten with the likes of these cursed souls than good folk from above.”
“Jack? The lad will need water. To wash wounds.”
Jack spoke to one of the other guards, and he hurried away. “Well, water at least we have in plenty. You ready, boy?”
Garth nodded again, gave his father one last glance, and then let Jack hustle him down a tunnel, several of the other guards following.
They walked down a rough sloping tunnel into a darkness that ate all sense of time. Every twenty or so paces a sad torch sputtered fitfully on the wall; all each did was lighten the pitch blackness into grey gloom for a pitifully small circle.
“How far do these tunnels extend, Jack?” Garth asked after an eternity. Perhaps conversation would serve to keep the darkness at bay better than the torches would.
br /> “Another half a league straight down, boy. We’re already half a league under the surface.”
Garth stumbled, appalled. “But that would mean…!”
“Yeah,” Jack grunted. “We’re well under the level of the sea now. But we’re in no danger. The sea, curse her evil waves, will not flood in any further. ‘Tis the lower levels that have been dampened, not these upper courses.”
Garth hefted his bag in his hand. Behind him a guard had caught them up, carrying two pails of water slopping from his hands. Sea water, Garth supposed. “Does this happen often?”
“The sea broaching the Veins? Often enough. Generally once or twice a year. The tunnels stretch almost a league in either direction from the central shafts. Plenty of places for the sea to broach the hanging wall.”
“The hanging wall?” Garth panted, sweat running down his body in the warm and humid air.
Jack abruptly slapped the roof of the tunnel, only a hand-span above his head. “The hanging wall.”
“Oh,” Garth said inadequately. How many thousands of tonnes of rock were currently hanging above his head? And how much sea water?
The tunnel narrowed, and the hanging wall drew closer the further they went. Small piles of gloam littered the floor, and soon Garth and the guards were forced to walk with their heads and shoulders hunched and at times twisted sideways in order to squeeze through the narrower portions of the tunnel.
“Why so narrow?” Garth gasped.
“Don’t need to build wider,” Jack replied. “Just enough for one man and his pick and shovel to get through, ‘tis all that’s needed.”
“Then how do they get the gloam to the surface?” Did they have to carry it back along these narrow veins by the fistful? Garth could not see any other way.
“There’s another shaft further along. Only narrow, but wide enough for the gloam baskets. It’s lifted to the surface from there.”
Garth trembled. The closeness of the tunnel walls, as the hanging wall, was constricting. What would happen if something further went wrong? How would he escape? The darkness crowded him, while the air was stifling and the stench appalling. His lungs were desperate for air, yet Garth was loathe to breathe in anything but shallow gasps.
How could anyone live out their lives down here?
“Ahead,” one of the forward guards rasped, and Garth jerked in surprise. No-one had spoken for some time, and the sudden speech had startled him out of his despondent reverie. Ahead?
“Section 205,” Jack explained, and Garth blinked. Section 205? Oh, yes, that’s where there were some injured prisoners. It seemed a lifetime ago that he and his father had descended into this crazed world.
Then he stumbled and would have fallen had not Jack seized his arm. At his feet was a drop of about a pace, and beyond that yawned a cavern the size of the kitchen at home—but so long had Garth been crawling through the narrow tunnels it seemed as big and as welcoming as a banquet hall.
He dropped down, almost falling again as his stiffened knees cramped, and looked about. Several torches burned here, and the extra light seemed luxurious.
Directly across from Garth the tunnel continued further into the earth, but to his left huddled a group of nine men—the gang that had been caught in a minor collapse of the hanging wall. All were chained, and all regarded him with either apathy or thinly veiled hostility. Who was this, come to disturb their lingering death?
The two guards, who had been standing watch until the party arrived, greeted their comrades with over-loud voices.
The prisoners remained silent.
“Well, hop to it,” Jack said at his back, and Garth jumped yet again. Grasping his bag a little more tightly in his hand, he slowly advanced towards the huddle of men.
Gods, but they were filthy! Garth could not stop an expression of distaste flickering across his face, and the prisoner nearest to him sneered.
“If I’d known the pretty boy was coming, I would have washed and dressed.”
“Enough!” Jack barked, and Garth could feel him raise his sword arm behind him.
“That won’t be needed, Jack,” he said, turning his head, and Jack slowly lowered his sword.
“Don’t take no nonsense from them, boy,” he said. “They’re lucky you’re here at all.”
“If we were lucky we’d all be dead under the waters,” the prisoner muttered, so low only Garth could hear him.
He squatted down by the man. “Are you hurt?”
The prisoner thought about sneering again, but didn’t have the heart. He pointed to his knee. “A falling rock caught it.”
Garth motioned a guard to bring a torch, and the man pushed it into a slot in the wall above Garth’s head, then withdrew. Garth bent closer for a look, and only barely managed to restrain a gasp. The man’s knee had been badly mangled by the rock, and Garth did not know how he could sit there without moaning.
He did not yet understand that, in the Veins, constant pain was a condition of life itself.
Garth took a deep breath, and went to work.
The guard who had brought the water had left the pails by Garth’s side, and now he carefully washed away the tarry gloam dust and the blood from the prisoner’s knee—it came as a considerable shock to realise that the man’s flesh was sickly pale underneath its layers of gloam. Once the filth and blood had been washed away, Garth saw the injury was not as bad as he’d first thought. Several deep gashes, but not a crushing injury. He reached behind him to his bag, selected several suturing instruments and thread, and stitched the man back together again.
Then he laid his hands on the man’s knee.
The man’s eyes widened, and he stirred for the first time. “You have the Touch!” he whispered, and his whisper carried down the line of prisoners.
Garth tried to smile at him, but he felt such deep sadness flood into him from the man’s flesh that he found it all but impossible. He had never felt this before. Malignant growths, yes, and pain and virulent infections—but overwhelming sadness? He realised that chronic sadness was so endemic throughout the Veins that it had literally seeped into this man’s flesh.
He lifted his hands from the man’s knee, unable to bear any more, but the man reached forward and touched his hands briefly. “Thank you,” he whispered.
Garth’s eyes swam with tears, and he had to blink them away as he moved onto the next prisoner.
Behind him the guards, grown bored with the proceedings, had settled into a circle and were tossing a dice.
Garth had no idea how long he worked. All he knew was that he worked his way silently down the line of nine prisoners. All had been wounded to some extent; two had suffered broken arms as they reflexively raised their arms against the collapse of the hanging wall; one had an indented skull (and was now so drowsy and unresponsive that Garth knew he was not long for this life; at least his escape was close); another had several of his teeth chipped away and his nose broken awry. On them all Garth laid his hands, and tried to impart what comfort and encourage what healing that be could.
From them all he felt the deep and almost overwhelming sadness that had become a part of their very flesh.
Finally he came to the last prisoner. The man had a bad laceration above his right elbow, and Garth pulled the second pail of water close. It was almost gone. He would have to be careful.
Wringing out the by-now bloody cloth, Garth carefully sponged away at the man’s arm, still vaguely surprised to find white flesh under so many layers of grime. The man winced, and Garth glanced at him. He had a finer face than the others, with a striking aquiline nose, and hair that seemed naturally black. For an instant their eyes caught, and Garth flinched at the misery he saw reflected in the man’s deep blue eyes.
The sadness from this one would be worst of all.
Garth bent back to the arm. He had cleaned most of the flesh about the wound now…but what was this? A further abrasion? He cleaned a little higher up the man’s biceps. There was something here…ah! An old scar. G
arth peered a little closer.
“A burn,” he muttered. “And old. How did you get that?”
But the man turned aside his head, and Garth rubbed away at the rest of the old burn tissue in silence. It covered most of the man’s upper biceps. Gods, but he was lucky to survive that, Garth thought, for surely it must have become infected. Impelled by curiosity more than anything else, he wrapped his hands about the old scar, ignoring the fresher wound, feeling for the extent of the old injury.
What he felt seep through the scar tissue altered his entire existence.
FIVE
LOT No. 859
Garth knew what it was instantly.
It had only been three days since he had last felt this…difference. The ink used to tattoo the image of the Manteceros into the flesh of the heir to the throne changed the flesh it was bonded to.
So Cavor’s flesh had been changed.
So this flesh had been changed.
His hands shook, and the man’s head turned back to him. “What’s wrong?”
Garth instinctively looked over at the guards. They were still involved in their game of dice and did not notice him. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. Something told him it would be death to suddenly shout to the world that this man was…was…
“Maximilian,” he whispered, and made himself meet the man’s eyes.
The man’s teeth bared in a gesture that was half grin, half snarl. “I am Lot No. 859. I have no name.”
Garth’s hands continued to shake; if anything they had got worse. Joseph had told them of this; all prisoners were assigned lot numbers when they arrived at the Veins. Their names and every record of their previous lives were struck from the record books.
“Maximilian,” Garth repeated, more strongly this time, but still only a whisper.
“Treat my wound,” the prisoner snarled, his hostility tangible, “and then leave me alone. The dark has made you demented.”
Garth’s hand tightened about the man’s biceps. “I can feel it! The Manteceros has been tattooed into your arm—and someone has made this cruel attempt to burn it out.”