IV

They went down past the ninth on the third day of the deep dig, and the ground was dry.

Rok had never worked dry stone. The shaft dropped steep under the ninth level, new timber and raw rock, and the lower they went the more the wet went out of the walls. Up top a shift ended with you soaked to the knees and glad of it, since wet rock was rock you could hear. Down here the walls were dry as ash and warm as a fevered hand, and a draft moved in the dark that came from nowhere. Nobody spoke of it. You did not turn down a deep coin, and the coin was for Tally.

Brakka had put him on the ladder. Under the ninth she took the face herself and set Rok to running ore up the ladder to the boy on the landing, forty rungs and back, and he had argued it and lost the way he lost every argument with Brakka that mattered. So he ran the ladder. It was good simple work and he was fast at it.

Tally dragged a full basket up the crawl and set it at his feet and did not straighten, since there was no room. Her scales showed near-white in the low lamp. She looked at him. "It's not counting right down here," she said.

Behind her, at the face, Brakka went still with her hand flat on the stone.

Mudge was back at the pile, sorting ore by feel, coughing the flat cough the dry rock gave him. Snick had the bar. Everyone was within a few feet of Rok except the boy up top.

"Stop counting," Rok told her. He got the full basket onto his shoulder. "Today's the day, Tally. Today you get your paper. Let the counting go." She almost smiled.

He put his foot on the first rung.

He was a dozen up when the sound came. Not a crack. A crack he would have known what to do with. This was lower than sound, a thud he felt in the ladder and his teeth at once, and then the air moved, all of it at the same time, a hard shove of wind up the shaft that drove grit and lamp-smoke past him toward the ninth. The lamp below went out. Something struck his head and the world tipped.

Then the roar. Rock finding rock, load on load of it, a long falling weight that went on past what seemed possible and then went on longer. The ladder bucked under his hands. He did not decide to hold. His hands did it for him, the big ones, the ones that had dug Snick out once.

Then it stopped.

Dust came up the shaft thick as water. He could not see, and his eyes were the good kind. His ears rang one high note. The draft was gone. The warm dry air was gone. Below him now was a smell like struck flint and, where the face and the crawl had been, a wall of settled stone.

Silence. The kind with no cough in it.

His hand went to his head. Blood, warm and steady, matting the scales above his ear. He felt higher, and where the left horn should have been there was a wet stump, sheared clean at the root. No pain from it yet. His fingers kept reaching for the horn and not finding it.

He went down the rungs. Twelve, and then the count stopped mattering, and his feet found the bottom sooner than they should have. The floor of the shaft was gone. Where he had stood and hauled an hour before there was a slope of broken rock, still ticking as it settled, packed nearly to his chest. Past it, where the face was, where the crawl ran back to Tally's baskets, only stone, fitted tighter than any wall a mason could set.

He put his hand flat against it, the way Brakka had taught him. Nothing moved. Nothing on the far side was settling. Nothing on the far side was anything.

He said Brakka's name into the stone. He said the others. Then he made a fist and knocked twice, the way he did every night from his shelf.

Still here.

He waited.

Brakka would answer first. She always answered first. He knew the order in his sleep: Brakka, then Mudge slow, then Snick like he was getting away with it, then the high shelf last, quick and light. He waited for Brakka.

The stone was warm under his palm from his own hand, and it did not knock back.

He knocked again, harder. Nothing came back through the rock, not a knock, not the small one on the high shelf who was always last.

So he dug.

He found the slope with both hands and went at it, and the rock came away a fistful at a time, and behind each fistful was more, packed the same.

It was not digging. Digging is what you do to ground that will let you. This was taking a mountain apart with his fingers in the dark. The stone came away in pieces the size of his fist, and sometimes in a piece he could not move at all, and he would work around it and under it until it dropped and then start again on what had been behind it. The dry dust of it went up his nose and coated the back of his throat, and where his hands bled it turned to a grey paste, and it packed in under the big claws and up into the quick until every grip felt driven in with a hammer.

He knew what was in front of him. That was the worst of it, and he could not stop knowing it. Eleven years of learning to read what a mountain had done, and he had read this one the moment his palm touched the face: not a plug and not a slip, but the whole of the ground above sitting down. He could put a number on it if he wanted. Forty feet of it at least, maybe eighty. No air anywhere in it. And a kobold with two hands moves about a basket an hour.

He dug anyway.

He had dug like this once before, when he was a whelp at a caved-in gap with Snick's voice on the wrong side of it. There had been a voice that time. That was the difference, and he would not let himself think it.

His shoulders started burning first, then his forearms, a deep shaking that made him drop things. His hands split open on the stone. He dug with them split. He wiped his palms on his shirt and went back in, and after a while the shirt stopped taking it.

He dug for the give. For the one fistful that would come away and leave a hole with air behind it, and a hand coming through, and Brakka saying something short and unimpressed about how long he had taken.

He would have dug until it buried him too.

He did not get to.

Overhead a timber groaned, the long sound of loaded wood, and grit began to sift down onto his shoulders out of the shaft above. The rockfall was not finished. The rest of it would reach the ninth and the rungs and him whether he was still digging or not.

He did not want to leave. His hands did not want to come off the stone. It was the hardest thing his hands had ever done, harder than the claws.

He climbed.

The fresh green rungs held for the first stretch, the ones he had counted going down. Higher up, where the shove of air had torn through, a run of timber had wrenched loose and hung half into the shaft, and a length of ladder was sprung off its pins and canted out over the drop. He went up into it. The loose beam creaked at every shift of his weight.

His hands had stopped being hands somewhere in the digging. They were things on the ends of his arms that closed when he told them to and reported nothing back, and he was glad of it, because the rock up here was new-broken and sharp all along its edges. When the ladder would carry him no further he did the thing only he could do. He drove the big claws into the broken ground beside the timbers, all seam and loose block. This was the ground they had been made for, the day they broke and grew back larger. When a hold took his weight, he hauled. His feet came off the sprung ladder, and as they did the canted section tore free of its last pin and dropped away down the shaft, ladder and loose rock together, a clatter going down and down. He did not listen for the .

He hung by his hands over the drop, past the worst of the bad ground. He got one claw over the lip of sound rock above it. Then the other. The stump where his horn had been dragged against the wall and the pain came at last, white and late, and his hands paid it no mind. They never had.

He dragged himself up over the edge onto the ninth landing. Old timber, and it held. Below him the shaft gave one last slumping roar and went quiet.

He was on the ninth. The shaft ran up into the dark above him, ladder after ladder, up toward the tally shed and a sky he had never seen. His head was bleeding again. He was alone on a landing built for the living.