I

Rok heard the stone shift before anyone else did, a dry tick over his head like a knuckle on a door. He stopped swinging and laid his palm flat against the rock, the way Brakka had taught him, to feel whether the ground was moving or only settling.

The narrows held still. Water dripping somewhere behind the rock face, slow. Tally's baskets scraping away down the crawl, the passage back out, too low to stand in. Nothing moved under his hand.

"Nothing," he said to Bell. Bell was his pickaxe. Rok named the things that kept him alive, and had named this one for the sound it made on good stone: a clean ring, "like a chapel bell," Mudge said, though nobody in the gang had ever heard a chapel. He spat on his palms, found his swing again, and the narrows filled back up with the only music he knew.

The narrows off the eighth level stood a hand and a half over his head at their tallest, which was the whole reason he was in them. Men needed headroom and room to die lying flat; kobolds folded up small and could be replaced for the cost of the cart that brought them.

Kobolds were the smallest of everything that had dragon in it, a fact Rok raised more often than anybody wanted. Somewhere a long way back of all of them there had been something enormous with wings. What had come down out of all that to a kobold was the scales, the claws, the eyes that worked in the dark, the tail, and a body that fit neatly into a hole where powder would have been wasted. Mudge said the big kinds took the size and left them the leftovers. Rok understood that the leftovers were the good part, and said so often, and at length.

It was a working the width of a body and no more. The rock was never further from his face than his own arm, and he had learned young to keep his head down, because horns and a low roof argue and the roof wins every time. The air came down thin from the eighth and arrived warm and already used, and it carried the smell of the place, which was wet stone and lamp-smoke and the burnt-metal sharpness steel makes going into rock, and under all of that the sourness of five bodies working hard in a hole with nowhere for it to go. Rok had been breathing it since he was old enough to hold a pick. He would not have called it good. He would have called it his.

He was good in them. He wanted that known. He told it to new stone regularly, in case the stone had not heard.

"Talking to the wall again," Tally said, coming up the crawl backwards, dragging her basket. She was the youngest of them and the smallest, ash-scaled almost white, quick, and she counted everything without meaning to: loads, taps, drips, the links on a chain. She'd counted Rok's snores once and got to four hundred. Rok disputed the figure. She told anyone who would listen.

"I'm introducing myself," Rok said. "It's new ground. It should know who's working it."

"It's rock."

"It's my rock."

Working the narrows was a thing the five of them did without talking.

Brakka took the face beside Rok. She was the biggest of them, grey-scaled and going darker across the shoulders, built like something that had been poured into a mould and left to set, and she swung with less effort than anybody Rok had ever watched. Between strokes she put a palm to the roof, every dozen or so, feeling for the shift before it came. She had been doing it so long that she did it in her sleep. Rok had seen her do it in her sleep.

Tally filled and counted at their backs. Snick ran the full baskets up the crawl and the empties down, a lean whip of a kobold with a chipped snout and one eye that had never opened the whole way, quick enough that the gang had long stopped being surprised when small things went missing near him. And back in the dark Mudge sorted the good ore from the dead by the weight of it in his hands. He was the oldest kobold Rok had ever met, dull-scaled and going loose in the skin. His eyes had gone soft years back, and his hands still knew ore better than anybody's on the level.

They passed one another in a space too tight to turn around in and never touched by accident. When the roof ticked they stopped on Brakka's raised hand and waited, and when the hand fell they worked again, the whole of it going on without a word, shift after shift, the only rhythm Rok had ever kept time to.

Brakka had gathered them one at a time, each picked off the Consortium's books with nothing behind him worth keeping. The mountain made them family.

The horn blew, one long low note down the shafts, and the narrows gang crawled out into the eighth and walked bent-backed to the tally shed with the day's count.

The tallyman was a human named Gorse, long-necked, going bald in a way he had stopped arguing with, and gone the colour of something kept in a drawer, which is what the mine did to a man who worked it without ever going down it. He sat on a stool built for him and kept a slate and did not look down when he talked to a kobold. Loads were counted and set against the ledger. Everything was charged against the ledger. Meal, bunk-space, tool-steel, and the sharpening of tool-steel. The ledger was the cleverest thing the Consortium had ever created, Brakka liked to say: a hole that got deeper the harder you tried to fill it. Every kobold in Deepvein worked under a paper of indenture, and every paper answered, in the end, to one name at the top of the Consortium. Halloway. None of them had ever seen him.

Rok watched Mudge's count come up short again. The old kobold's baskets had been getting lighter for a year, the cough that had been eating him since last winter. He did what the gang always did, which was nothing anyone could see. Two of his own loads had gone down the crawl on Mudge's mark that day. Two of Brakka's, too, he'd wager, and one of Tally's. Gorse marked the slate and did not care and never noticed, and the five of them stayed five, and that was the whole of the arrangement and nobody had ever once said it out loud.

"Titanclaw," Gorse read off the slate, bored. "Short one lamp oil ration."

"The mountain needed it," Rok said. "It'll give it back."

Gorse looked at him for a while. Kobolds were not, as a rule, funny to humans. Then he marked the oil against Rok's paper and jerked his chin at the door, and Snick was already pulling Rok out of the shed by the belt before anything could be added to that entry, hissing first at anything stupid, that's you, which was more or less the whole creed of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Still Breathing, so it was hard to take as a scolding.

The den was down, the way everything of theirs was down. The Consortium spent its timber and its lamp-oil on the working levels and left the deep to the kobolds, who could see in the dark and would sleep wherever they were let, so the sleeping shaft ran on below the ore into a warren the surveys no longer bothered with. The five of them went down it by feel, past other dens where other gangs were settling the way they were about to settle, the dark full of breathing on every side. The pumps knocked somewhere under all of it, slow and even, and if they ever stopped the whole works would drown inside a week. Water ran everywhere down here, threading the walls and dripping off the low ceilings into the tin cups set to catch it, because the one thing the deep offered for free was water, and a kobold learned young to take whatever came free.

There was a cup for each of them on a ledge just inside the den, and coming in off a shift the first thing any of them did was drink and then wash the worst of the dust off the face and the hands. The working level was one thing and the den was another, and what little you could do to keep them apart, you did.

Supper in the den was barley mash and a thumb of salt fish each, and whatever Snick produced from inside his shirt, which tonight was half a wheel of the overseers' aged cheese, stolen at what he described as tremendous personal risk. Snick had been banned by name from the tally shed, and counted the fact among his achievements. Brakka cut it five ways, the cropped stub of her tail (a rockfall, years back) twitching as she worked.

The den was theirs the way the narrows were theirs: a dead-end chamber off the sleeping shaft, dry, low even for kobolds, with shelf-bunks cut into the wall by kobolds two generations before them.

It was warm, which nothing else down there was. Five bodies in a dead-end hole with one door will heat a room whether they intend to or not, and the rock held it, and coming in off a shift was like being taken back inside something. The shelves were worn shiny down the middle where bodies had lain on them for forty years, and the floor between them was worn the same. The low ceiling was black with the smoke of every lamp that had ever been lit in there.

Their initials were still in the rock, down by the floor where the Consortium never looked. Rok knew all nine marks by touch. He had gone over them so many times in the dark that he could tell the confident ones from the ones cut by somebody who was not sure they would be there long enough for it to matter. He had invented names for all nine, and Brakka let him.

After supper the den settled the way it settled, and Mudge told a story, because Mudge always told a story. Tonight it was Rok's name, which was Mudge's doing and Mudge's favorite, and he told it the way he told everything, as though none of them had been there. How a whelp-aged Rok had gone at a collapsed gap with his bare hands because Snick's voice was on the wrong side of it. How he'd broken every claw on his right hand to the quick against the stone and kept on, until Brakka hauled him back by the tail and finished it proper with a bar. Snick came out spitting dust and laughing. The claws grew back larger. Titanclaw, Mudge crowned him that night, mostly mocking, and Rok took the name whole, the way he took everything, as though it had always been his and the world had finally gotten around to acknowledging it. It went on the Consortium's ledger the next quarter-day, because Rok badgered the clerk until writing it was cheaper than denying it.

"Show the hand," Snick said, because that was part of the telling.

Rok held up the big claws in the lamplight. They were half again the size of the ones on his left hand, thick as a man's thumb at the root and worn blunt across the tips from eleven years of stone, and they did not match anything else about him. Everyone pretended to be impressed, and Rok did not have to pretend to be proud.

Later, when the lamp was pinched out (oil cost, and their eyes were better without it anyway), Mudge told the sky story. Rok asked for it maybe every tenth night, and this was a tenth night, with sleep still far off.

Mudge had seen the sky once. A boy, many years ago, hauled up top with a punishment-gang to pick spilled ore out of the yard mud, one bell before dawn to one bell after. He told it the same every time. How the cold up there had no walls to it. How the light came up from everywhere at once, from behind the edge of the world, and went from grey to a color he still had no name for. And then the part Rok waited for, the part that made the story true: how he'd looked up, and up, and there was no roof to read, nothing to lay a palm against and tell whether it would hold. A ceiling so far past reach that no shoring in creation could carry it, and every man and kobold in the yard walking around beneath it like that was nothing.

"I dropped flat," Mudge said, into the dark, same as always. "Flat in the mud, holding on. They laughed me back down the shaft. I was glad to go, and that's the truth, and I don't care how it sits."

"I'd stand it," Rok said. Every tenth night he said it, and meant it more each time, and had no idea he meant it. "A roof that's held that long is a roof you can trust."

"It's held this long without you introducing yourself to it," Tally said from her shelf. "That's likely why."

The den laughed itself quiet, and then it was quiet a while, in the good way, everyone breathing, nobody gone.

Brakka's knuckles went twice against the wall. Goodnight. Still here.

Twice from Mudge's shelf, slow. Twice from Snick, who could even knock on stone like he was getting away with something. Rok answered his own, palm flat after, one beat, feeling the whole den's night settle.

And last, from the high shelf, quick and light: Tally, still here.

Rok slept.