Prologue

The survey came up from the ninth shaft folded wrong, soft at the corners, because the surveyor had carried it against his chest on the ladders rather than trust it to a satchel. The satchel contained boring samples. The man behind the desk noticed and approved. He had carried paper that way himself, in the years when he still went down.

He was alone in the works office with one lamp, at an hour when the only sounds were the pumps knocking slow under the floor and the rain finding the seams in the shed roof. He spread the survey under the light, weighted its corners with an inkwell and the company seal, and read it for the fourth time.

The vein should not have been there. Every map of the district said so. Forty fathoms below the ninth shaft, where the charter's old boundary line ran flat across the page, the samples had come back showing gold in widths no sane man would put his name to without verifying, which the surveyor had done, twice, in a shaking hand at the bottom of the paper.

The man read the figures again and his chest tightened, a side effect of being wealthy and well fed, he told himself. But it was never enough, there was always more.

He was not a dreamer. He had a distaste for dreamers; the works were built with the debts of dreamers he had bought out for pennies. He had climbed the company ladder from the lowest position, smelter boy at nine, and every rung after that bought with money he had himself earned. The hands lying flat on the survey were broad and capable, and he was proud of them the way a craftsman is proud of keeping his tools clean and serviceable.

So he did not dream about the vein. He calculated a provision estimate on it. Hoisting from that depth, timbering in new ground, air to move, and water above all. The ninth shaft already sweated, and everything the district knew about the deep rock said it would flood.

Below the fault, the rock runs dry.

The thought arrived whole, the way his best thoughts always did, and it happened to be true. He could see it now on the surveyor's section: the fault dipping away, the borings beneath it coming up clean. Dry as the inside of a jar. He could not have said where he had learned to read that out of a sample. Thirty years of rock, he told himself. A man learns things.

He drew the lamp closer and looked at the boundary line.

It was older than the company. Older than the charter, which had only inherited it, deed by deed, the way armies inherit new lands. No engineer had drawn it; it followed no fault and respected no seam. A clause from the first grants forbade works below a stated depth, for reasons no living man remembered, maybe they thought Karth was hollow. He had asked, once, of an old solicitor who dealt in mineral rights. Custom, the solicitor had said, and shrugged. The old surveys mark that line the way they mark churchyards.

A line drawn by dead men is only ink.

That one pleased him so much he sat back with it. It was exactly the sort of thing he was known for saying at the board table, and he copied it onto the pad at his elbow, word for word, to produce later as though it had just come to him.

The board. He could run the vote in his head without troubling to hold it. Careful men. He had made them all rich, and it had made them all careful, and not one of them had ever sat where he was sitting.

They will vote for it after it pays. Men of that kind always do. The question is only whose name is on the order the day the gold comes up.

His. He had assembled his conglomerate out of three drowned workings and a smelter the bank refused to finance, and nobody had handed him any part of it. Any man in the district could have read this same survey. He knew, the way he knew good ore in his hand, that only one of them would act on it. And he felt a warmth spread through him at how well his own mind kept him company at this desk, at this hour.

There remained the crews.

The deep rounds would be narrow, at least until the seam proved out. Narrow rounds meant kobold gangs. They fit where powder was wasted, they cost half per fathom in timber and wage, and they did not complain in any way that reached his office. All acceptable losses for his provision estimate.

He was a fair employer; he kept the accounting of it in his head and could quote it. The winter he had paid the fever doctor for the Hollis girl out of his own pocket. The hoistman kept on at full wage with a ruined hand. It was a long ledger and he was quietly pleased with every line of it. There was nothing in it about kobolds. There was nothing against them either. The ledger simply had no column where they would go, and it did not occur to him to rule one.

The rain kept on. The pumps knocked. He took a clean sheet and wrote the order in his own hand, because clerks talk and this would not be talked about until it was gold: Sink below the ninth shaft on the surveyed bearing, works to proceed continuous. He dated it, and sat a moment with the pen held up, a man at the edge of the boldest stroke of his life.

Smelter boy at nine. He could hear the old men then, tobacco voices in the office, saying something about the deep of this district. What had they said?

Old men had their reasons to keep the deep for later. Perhaps they were saving it for you.

He smiled at his own turn of phrase. That went on the pad too.

He signed in the firm, legible hand he was proud of, blotted the wet ink, and pressed the company seal down hard enough to feel the desk through it. Then he trimmed the lamp and sat a while with his order, in the small warm light, admiring the boldest idea he had ever had.