III

The morning after Snick lost his fingers, the eighth learned the deep dig was real, and that it wanted them.

A foreman came down the levels with a slate of his own and two lamp-boys to light it, and he did not talk to the gangs. He talked over them, to Gorse and the shift-bosses, and what he said was that the Consortium was putting narrows crews on the shaft under the ninth, that the upper works would run on fewer hands while it did, and that the Consortium had no use for any gang that could not make its count up here. Rok did not follow most of it. He followed the part where Brakka went still, the way she would with a palm on bad rock. Then she had them in the narrows working before the foreman had finished reading his slate.

She worked them harder that day than Rok had known her to, and she did it quiet, and it took him half the shift to understand that she was not chasing the count. She was hiding a gang.

Snick could not grip a bar. He came anyway, and he ran the crawl one-handed with a loop of rope over his shoulder and the basket handle in his teeth. He never once said how it felt, which was how they knew. Mudge was worse than the day before. The dust had gone down into him and would not come back up, and by the turn he stood between loads with his eyes shut and his hands flat on the wall, pulling each breath up like a full basket on a fraying rope. Rok did the work of two and announced, often, that he was hardly trying. And Tally counted. She held the true count in one hand and the shown count in the other, and all shift she recalculated the weight off Mudge's mark and Snick's and set it on Rok's back and Brakka's, quiet counting in the dark.

The foreman came by their stretch once, in the afternoon, with his slate and his lamp-boys, and stood at the entrance to the narrows to watch them work. Snick had his bad hand tucked into his shirt and hauled with the other and his shoulder, and grinned at the foreman the whole time, because a kobold in pain does not grin. Mudge picked ore off the belt with his back to the lamp so the man would not see him fighting for the next breath, and Tally fed him the light stone and took the heavy, and never once let a load look easy in his hands. Brakka set the pace at the face so hard and so even that a watching man would read it for a gang with strength to spare. And Rok, who had never been any good at hiding a thing in his life, hid all of it the only way he knew, by working like a kobold who wanted nothing in the world but the coin. It went on longer than any of them could afford. Rok counted his own strokes to keep from looking up, and lost the count twice, and both times it was because Mudge had gone quiet behind him and he was listening for the cough that would finish all of them.

The foreman watched them a while. Then he made a mark on his slate that none of them would ever see, and moved off to the next. Nobody breathed right until his lamp was gone.

They made the count. The five of them went up to Gorse's slate whole and pulling their share, and whatever the foreman had marked while he watched them, it had not gone against them. Not today. Rok was proud of it, loudly and to the rock, until he caught Brakka's face in the lamplight at the shed and understood that making it today only meant making it again tomorrow, and the day after, until Mudge's chest finally gave out or the gang ran out of strong backs to move the weight onto. Making the count was not winning. It was buying one more day.

Brakka laid out the choice in their den that night, when the mash was gone and Snick's hand had been dressed again and the lamp was low.

"They're choosing gangs for the deep dig," she said. "They want us on the new shaft below the ninth level. That's virgin rock, below the old line, but the order came straight from the top of the Consortium."

She said the name like bad weather that had already soaked through your clothes.

"Halloway."

She lowered her voice. "Any gang that goes down draws deep coin, more than the day-wage, for as long as there's ore in that virgin rock to take." She did not say what happened to the gangs that turned it down. She did not have to.

"There won't be enough work up top for all of us much longer. They'll wear down the ones who stay, and send us wherever they need bodies. One kobold here. Another there."

No one spoke for a moment, because they all knew what one here, one there meant. It meant Mudge alone on a strange level with no one to move the weight off his mark. It meant the end of the five, done quietly, on a slate, the way everything down here was done.

"Forbidden ground," Mudge said, when he had the breath for it. "The old line runs down there. Nobody's ever said what it's for."

"Nobody living," said Brakka.

"Bad air, and rockfalls in new ground." Mudge stopped, and his chest caught, and he waited it out. "And the dust."

He did not have to say what the dust would do to him at that depth. The next breath he dragged up was answer enough.

"Then you don't go," Rok said, before he had thought about it, which was where most of his sentences came from. "You stay up here. We'll cover you out of the deep coin. You keep the den, I'll swing your load."

Mudge looked at him with something close to the old mockery. "And the day a foreman counts four kobolds doing five kobolds' work down in forbidden ground, and finds an old cougher sitting up here keeping a den warm," he said, "what do you suppose he does with the old cougher, whelp?"

Rok had no answer. He hated having no answer.

Tally had been quiet, which for Tally meant she was counting. She counted out loud now, because numbers were the only argument she trusted: the deep coin across a season, against the price still on her paper, higher now by everything the last shift had cost them. She had it to the day. She always had it to the day. The coin cleared her paper before the first snow, she said. One season down there, and the youngest of them walked out the gate free.

She had got to her feet at some point without anybody noticing. The smallest of them, standing up in the middle of a room where everyone else was sitting down, ash-white in the low lamp and shaking with it.

Then she said the thing she had been holding since Brakka started, and she said it fast, so it would be out before anyone could stop it. "So don't. Don't do it for my paper. I'd rather owe my whole life up here with all of you than watch you go down into forbidden ground to buy me an exit. That isn't a trade. That's just me protecting my gang."

The den went quiet again. Brakka answered her the way she settled things, once and level.

"It was never a trade, Tally. It was a rule. Youngest out first. We swore it before you were big enough to lift a bar, and you don't get a vote on a thing that was true before you." Her mouth moved in a way that on someone else would have been a smile. "You just get to be the reason."

Snick lifted his bound hand off his knee, slow, and turned it over, and looked at the place the two fingers used to be. "Consortium's already taken its cut of me," he said. "Be a shame not to see what the rest of me fetches."

Mudge voted with a nod and a cough. Rok voted loudest, already three moves down the road, already seeing it whole: Tally's paper marked paid and torn in two, and Tally standing in the light at the top of the shaft with him carrying her up the last ladder to show her the sky Mudge could only ever talk about. He said all of it out loud, and Tally told him to save his breath for the ladder, and did not quite manage to say it like a kobold who was not going to cry.

Brakka let them have the moment, five kobolds in a hole choosing the one thing that felt like a way up. Then she set the last of it down, because someone had to, and it was always her.

"I put our mark on it at the shed this morning," she said. "Before I asked you. In case you said no, so I could tell you it was too late." She did not apologize for it. "And under the ninth, I go first. On virgin rock I read the roof, and nobody swings until I say so. Not even you." She looked at Rok for the last of it. "First is my place down there. Bring it to the Order in the morning if you like."

The Order would rule against her in the morning, and she would go first anyway.

They outed the lamp and lay in the dark a while, not sleeping. Rok listened to them breathe: Snick shallow around the poppy, Mudge dragging each one up the ladder, Tally quick and light on the high shelf, Brakka slow and even, like the pumps under the shed floor. He went through Tally's numbers again in his head and made them come out the same, a free kobold before the first snow, and it was the finest sum he had ever added in his life.

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

They answered up the shelves, one by one, like they did every night, and last of all, quick and light from the high shelf, the small one they were all going down into the dark to set free.

Still here.