II

The eighth ran a gang short that week, and short a gang meant the rest of them made the tally or answered for it.

Two of the narrows crews had been pulled down to timber the new shaft under the ninth, and no one came to fill the hole they left, so Gorse's slate wanted the same weight of ore off fewer backs. Brakka took the numbers the way she took bad ground, without a word, and put the five of them on the ore-pass above the crusher.

The pass was a throat of timbered rock that dropped straight down through the mountain, and everything the upper levels dug came to it. Baskets and skips tipped into the top of it all shift long, and the ore fell away roaring into the dark toward the crusher-bin two levels below, where the jaws ground it into gravel. Standing at the lip you felt the ore falling down the pass vibrate in your chest more than you heard it. The dust never settled. It hung in the lamp-smoke thick enough to chew, and it greyed every scale in the gang until they were all the same color as the rock. Rok liked the pass better than the narrows for the noise. In the narrows a kobold worked alone with the sound of his own breathing. Here the mountain was never quiet, and a kobold could shout something grand into the roar and no one could tell him to save it for the ladder.

Mudge could not work the lip for long. The dust got into his chest and stayed, and by mid-shift his cough had a wet bottom to it. Brakka set him back on the picking-belt where the air ran a shade cleaner and put Tally beside him to hold his count while she held her own. Snick worked the bars, prying loose the stone that came down too big to pass. Rok tipped baskets and kept the top of the pass clear, the job you gave the one who would not stop moving.

They were behind, and Brakka knew it, and the overseer who came by at the turn of the shift knew it too. He was a broad human in a leather coat who did not step down off the last ladder. He leaned on it and read the tally off Gorse's runner and told Brakka the number she was under by, as though she did not have it to the basket herself, and then he climbed back toward the air. The gang worked faster. On the pass, faster meant closer to the lip, and Rok fed baskets into the roaring throat with the dust stinging his eyes and the drop dragging at everything that went over.

Then a basket jammed in the pass.

It happened all at once and then not at all. A wide flat stone came down crooked and wedged a body-length into the pass, and the ore behind it stacked up hard against it, and the roar dropped out of the mountain and left a silence with a weight to it. The pass was choked. Above the plug, three levels of dug ore had nowhere to go, and a full pass with a plug in it is a powderkeg.

The proper way was the drill steel. You stood off to the side where the timber would catch you if the pass let go sudden. It was slow and it was safe, and it cost time they were already under by.

Rok did not do much the proper way. Rok looked at the plug, and he looked at the number they were under by, and he went up into the throat headfirst.

He heard Brakka start the word don't and he was already in it.

Inside, the pass was tighter than it looked from the lip, and it went up into black. He climbed it on his hands and the big claws, boots braced against one side and his back against the other, working up a hand at a time. The cold draft came down past him and dried the sweat on his face. The timbers were slick where the ore had polished them and rough where it had torn them, and the whole shaft smelled of struck rock and old grease.

Above him in the dark was the flat stone. Above the flat stone was everything the upper levels had tipped in since the horn, and Rok knew to the load what that came to, because knowing what a weight came to was the one bit of figuring he had ever been good at. He did not think about it. He climbed with it directly over his head and did not think about it, which is a different thing from not knowing.

Then the stone was there under his fingers, cold and gritted and wedged hard into the timber on both sides. He got a grip on it and worked it. It shifted. He felt it give.

Then a hand closed on his tail and another caught the strap of his belt, and Brakka tore him back and down out of it as the plug let go above him.

The column came. He felt it before he saw it, a punch of air out of the pass that took the lamp with it and filled his mouth with dust. Then the ore went past his face close enough to pull at him, a black roar the width of a hand from his nose, going down so fast it did not look like stone at all. It looked like water. It looked like the whole mountain pouring out of a hole in itself.

Then he was on his back on the floor of the level with Brakka's whole weight pinning him, and the pass emptied itself into the bin where he would have gone.

For a breath he was laughing. He was alive, and the plug was cleared, and the tally would balance, and it was the funniest thing in the world. Then he heard that no one was laughing with him.

Snick sat against the wall a little way down the level, holding his right hand in his left. He had been working the bar beside Brakka. When she threw it down to catch Rok's tail, it went into the pass, and Snick grabbed for it, because a good tool was not a thing they could afford to lose. The plug took the tool, and two of his fingers to the second knuckle, before it tore loose. His face was pale. He was not making the joke he would have been making. Tally already had the hand wrapped in a strip off her own shirt and was winding another, counting the turns under her breath.

The laugh went out of Rok all at once. He got to Snick and started to apologize, and Snick looked up at him, glassy-eyed, and said, "Don't."

They carried Snick up to the tally shed, and Gorse sent the runner for the mine's healer. The healer took the ruined fingers off clean at the knuckle and seared the stumps and charged for the searing. Gorse marked it against the gang's paper in his flat exact hand: the healer's fee, the time the pass had stood dead, the good tool gone down the crusher. Rok stood in the shed and watched the numbers go on, and watched the little stack of days they had saved off Tally's paper get shorter in front of him, without a single thing being carried out that a hand could hold.

That was the part he could never get his fingers around. In the narrows, when the rock took something, you could see what it took. Here it was chalk on a slate, and there was no arguing with chalk, and the harder they worked the more they came to owe. Brakka watched Gorse write and said it the way she said most true things, once and quietly. The ledger was the deepest hole in the mountain, she said, and the only one they would never let you climb out of. Then she took Snick under his good arm, and they went down to the den.

Supper was mash and the last of the salt fish, and no one had the stomach to go and steal better. Snick sat propped against the wall with his hand bound and his eyes bright from the healer's poppy, and when the worst of the shaking had gone out of him he looked across the den at Rok and gave him the only thing that could have made the night bearable.

"Order's in session," Snick said. "Get the medal."

The Ancient and Honorable Order of Still Breathing kept one medal. It was a flake of fool's gold the size of a thumbclaw, drilled through with a nail and strung on a bootlace. Snick had turned it out of a waste pile eight years back and declared it treasure, and it was worth nothing, and there was not a kobold in that den who would have traded it for a week of meals.

Mudge was its Keeper on account of being oldest.

Getting up took him a while. He had to stop twice for his chest, and Tally put a hand under his elbow, and he let her, which he would not have done a year ago. But he got up. The Order did not recognise a Keeper sitting down.

He held the lace out at arm's length in the low lamplight, and the whole den said the citation with him, because the words were the whole point.

For deeds of uncommon stupidity, survived.

"Kneel," Mudge said.

"We're all already kneeling," Snick said from the wall, his voice gone thin and far away. "It's a low room." And that was how they knew he would keep his hand, and most of the rest of himself.

Mudge hung the lace over Rok's head, and the fool's gold settled on his chest and threw the lamplight around, and Rok wore the world's stupidest medal like the crown of a small and violent kingdom, and held the moment for as long as they would let him. Then Brakka reached over and flicked his ear, hard.

"You would have gone down the throat with the ore," she said. "Into the bin. And I would be scraping you off the gravel to make my count."

"But I didn't," Rok said. It was his whole philosophy, and he held it with the faith other creatures keep for their gods.

"One day your bravery is going to cost more than you can pay." Brakka's eyes went to Snick's bound hand when she said it, and stayed there a moment, and then she let it go, because the Order had ruled and the Order outranked her.

The lamp went out, and no one moved to relight it. For a while the den was only breathing, Snick's a little ragged around the poppy, Mudge's carrying the wet bottom the dust had left in him, and it took Rok a moment to know that he was lying there counting the breaths the way Tally counted, glad of every uneven one.

Then Brakka's knuckles went twice against the wall.

Still here.

Twice from Mudge, slow, around a cough. Twice from Snick, left-handed and stubborn about it. Rok knocked his own, and pressed his palm flat to the stone after, one beat, because tonight he wanted to feel the wall give the answer back.

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

Rok lay a long time with the fool's gold on his chest, and did not once think about what Brakka had said. It took some serious effort.