“Oh.” Nuella paused. “Do you think so?” she asked, her tone wistful.
“Yes,” he replied firmly, relieved that he’d managed not to burst out laughing at her response. It seemed he knew who Nuella was sweet on, too!
“Don’t you dare tell him,” she warned him icily.
This time, Nuella made a point of letting Kindan lead the way through the secret passageway from the hold to the mine. He had to reassure Kisk that he would be right back before the watch-wher would let him leave them. Quickly he scouted out the area around the pumps, making certain that it was possible to get from the secret door to the lifts. Then he came back for Nuella and Kisk.
He led them to the lifts without alarm, although his heart raced as they clambered onto the platform and he began to lower them down. The mine lifts were built to operate in paralleclass="underline" When one was lowered, the other was raised, so that there was always a lift at the top and the bottom of the mine shaft. Kindan was sure that the noise of the lifts would be heard throughout the mine on such a still night.
As soon as they reached the bottom, he hustled them off the lift and over into a spot unlit by glows. When his pulse had slowed enough for him to think, he peered around to see the lay of the land.
“Come on,” Nuella said impatiently, pushing past Kindan and turning to the left.
“We’re heading south,” Kindan observed quietly.
“I know,” Nuella replied testily. “South is where Father’s shift is digging the new street.”
Natalon had adopted the convention of calling tunnels dug through the length of the coal seam “streets,” and the tunnels dug through the width of the coal seam were called “avenues.” In Natalon’s mine, “streets” ran east-west, while “avenues” ran north-south.
There were already two streets dug into the coal seam, both north of the main mine shaft. Natalon’s new street was being dug one-third of the way between the current mine shaft and the newly dug shaft that Toldur’s crew had just finished. What the miners called “main avenue” had been dug following the edge of the coal seam north and south of the first mine shaft. It met and went beyond the new mine shaft toward the very edges of the coal seam. Natalon had ordered the tunneling southward to stop short of the end of the seam as he wanted to avoid the chance of tunneling into water under the lake.
The coal seam was thick, nearly two and a half meters. In making the streets, the miners had to dig out coal. As they progressed in their mining, they would divide the huge coal seam into “rooms,” leaving pillars of coal to support the rock above the seam. Now that the surface seams were all depleted on Pern, this “room and pillar” mining was the only method practical with the tools and manpower available.
Each of the east-west running streets followed the sloping coal seam as it angled deeper into the mountain range. Kindan knew that there were several north-south avenues cut between the older streets, but the miners had not yet started on a connecting avenue to Natalon’s newest east-west street.
“The glows are dim around here,” he said, looking at one flickering glow mounted on a joist.
“Really? I’d hardly noticed,” Nuella replied with a grin. Kindan snorted.
“How come you’re in front?” he asked a few paces later.
Nuella raised her arms slowly to either side. She shook her head. “I don’t know, the tunnel’s wide enough for all of us.”
Kindan bit back a tart reply, shook his head ruefully, and caught up to Nuella’s left side. Kisk poked her head between the two of them.
“Here’s the turn,” he said when they reached the new street.
“I know,” Nuella said.
Kindan didn’t bother to ask her how she knew; he had been around her long enough to guess that she’d either heard the difference in the sound of their footsteps or felt a breeze, or smelled new air, or something. There were times, he admitted to himself, when he had a hard time believing that she was blind.
Nuella turned right, into the new street.
“Wait!” Kindan called.
“Why?” she demanded.
“These supports,” he said. “There are an awful lot of them.” He ran a critical eye up and down the thick timbers that held the huge supporting beam overhead. There were three such joists in close succession, spaced within a meter. He walked past the opening to the new street and saw that there was a matching set of three joists on the far side of the new tunnel. “There are three joists on either side of the entrance.”
“I heard Father say he always puts in extra support when he starts a new tunnel,” Nuella said. She added, “He and Uncle Tarik were arguing at the time, actually. Uncle Tarik said that Father was being too worried and that a single joist would do just as well, but Father said you can never be too careful. Uncle Tarik said that there was no point in taking in all the extra time and effort so it was a waste.”
“I’ll bet he did! Him and his talk of people being ‘lazy’!”
Kindan noted as they went down the new street that there were three more joists on it, too, about two meters beyond the entrance. The glows were slightly brighter there, no doubt because Natalon and his shift would have wanted fresh glows to work with.
Kindan kept pace as he walked down the new street. Just as on the main avenue, tracks ran down the center for the coal carts. Nuella stumbled once on a poorly driven stake but recovered quickly. Her look dared Kindan to say something. He kept quiet.
The tracks ended when they had gone forty-eight meters down the new road. Kindan could clearly see the pick marks in the wall facing them just a few meters beyond.
Nuella continued forward, her right hand held up, palm out.
She stopped when her fingertips stroked the still-trapped coal. She felt the entire length of the wall, grimacing when she couldn’t reach the top.
She turned toward Kindan. “I always wanted to know what it was like where my father works,” she told him shyly. Then she grinned. “It’s not bad!”
Kindan, looking at the dimming light and the dirty coal of the walls, shook his head in disbelief.
Nuella took in deep lungfuls of air. “Smell anything?” she asked after a moment.
Kindan sniffed. “Nope. The air’s a bit stale, maybe.”
“Well, Father said that part of the reason he wanted to make this new road was to see if there might be more of that bad smell Dask mentioned,” she told him. “He was afraid that if there was, it would show that the mine was too dangerous to work. Uncle Tarik said that’s what happened to his mine.” Nuella’s tone clearly showed that she didn’t believe him.
“But the accident was on Second Street,” Kindan protested. Second Street was the northernmost tunnel through the coal seam.
Nuella nodded. “That’s what Uncle Tarik said. But Father said that if the problem was at the west end of the field, it would probably stretch the whole way. If it was only at the northwest end of the field, then we could still work the southern part, unless we got too close to the lake.”
“Well, I don’t smell anything,” Kindan repeated.
“What about Kisk?” Nuella asked.
“What about her?”
“Well, isn’t she supposed to notice those sorts of things?” Nuella suggested.
“I suppose.”
“So,” she replied testily, “why don’t you ask her what she smells?”
Kindan finally understood that Nuella planned to start the watch-wher’s education there and then. With smelling.
“What can you smell, Kisk?”
The watch-wher made an inquiring noise.
“Come on, smell the air. See what you can smell. I smell coal and stale air, how about you?”
“Less talking, Kindan, more thinking,” Nuella snapped.
“What do you know about it?” he snapped back.
“I know just as much about training a watch-wher as you,” she responded. “More, in fact.”