Words stared back up at him, a language far away in time or place. Symbols and letters combined, all of them mysterious, and none of them for him. He imagined these words spoken as the strange whispers he had heard in his head, and the idea seemed to fit.
“Hope,” he said. She paused and turned. “What’s this?”
She glanced down at his feet and kicked sand back across the carved stone. “History,” she said, turning away again.
More to ask later, Rafe thought. There were more things to life than he could have imagined, more than his parents had ever told him, and he felt small and alone in this place. All eyes seemed to be staring at him, and back here in the streets behind streets they mostly belonged to people he had no desire to mix with. Fledgers stared with yellow eyes, coal miners shoved him aside without even noticing, other people mingled and argued and occasionally fought. And the buildings themselves were equally as threatening. One tall stone block, drilled with toothed windows, was spiked with long obsidian prongs, thrusting out into the street and up at the sliver of sky. Parts of an unknown machine maybe, or more likely adornments, a few of the spikes held sticky remnants. Black birds darted down and alighted on the spikes, picking at the mess, screeching as they took off again and flew straight back up. Even they seemed afraid to land for too long.
Hope turned right into a narrow, uneven doorway, and glanced back at Rafe. “We have to go in here,” she said, nodding with her head. “I’ve been through here before. It’s safe.”
Rafe looked into the doorway. The entire inside of this building was a machine, vast and old. Hope was hunching down and entering a veined hole that looked like a giant’s intestine, hollowed out by time, contents gone away to dust. Rafe stepped forward and watched her worm her way in, and he caught a brief but potent whiff of old dry rot. He stepped back again and bumped into someone, receiving an elbow in the ribs for his trouble. The face of the building bulged out above him. The machine-whatever it was, whatever strange task it had been built to perform-hung over him as if ready to tumble at any moment. Its outside was ridged and bumped with projections weathered smooth over the decades, metal edges rusted, stone creases worn.
“Come on,” Hope said. “It’s not far.” And then she crawled into shadow.
Rafe followed. It was that or remain where he was, lost, so far from his uncle Vance that he would surely never find his way back.
They passed through the machine. It was dark and heavy. Rafe felt the thing pressing down at him, like a huge presence paused with its foot held ready to stomp.
On the other side there was another, narrower street, the faces of buildings so close that Rafe could almost stretch out both arms and touch them. People shoved by to and fro, some of them eyeing him suspiciously, others ignoring him. He could see addiction in their eyes: alcohol; fledge; rhellim. And there were other forms of abuse going on here of which Rafe had no knowledge. One man held a fleshy bag in front of his mouth, breathing in and out quickly as his eyes rolled up in his skull and his face seemed to darken. A woman sat cross-legged in a window above the street, sighing as a swarm of insects drew blood from self-inflicted gashes across her shoulders and neck. He had never imagined any of this. He was a farm boy, just like Hope had said, and the more he saw the more nervous he became.
“Hope,” he said, and the witch turned to look at him. She must have seen the panic in his eyes because she put a hand on his shoulder and smiled. Her tattoos smiled with her, and Rafe felt calmer.
“We’re nearly there,” Hope said. “My place. We can sit and eat and talk. I want to know what happened to you, and I think… I think I may have some things to tell you.”
“About what?”
“About why you’re here.”
“My parents were killed,” he said. He expected to see the flash of a red robe at any moment. But they were ignored, just another couple of unknowns in this refuge for the unknown. “That’s why I’m here.”
“No,” Hope whispered, “I think you know they weren’t your real parents. And you being here is fate.” She smiled, held his hand and led the way.
Tim Lebbon
Dusk
Chapter 5
THE MINES WERErich on the day Trey Barossa left. The seam of fledge was wide, the mood among the miners high, the song at the end of the dig vibrant. On his food break Trey had sat back, chewed a fistful of fledge and drifted, penetrated the earth, moved through a mile of rock to flit against Sonda Susard’s mind, and there he had sensed an interest. He was a part of her thoughts, and he liked that. He hoped that given time she would cast her mind back and see what he thought of her.
Wending their way through the shafts toward home, songs echoing back in carefully judged harmonies, it could have always been like this. There had never been machines to help them mine. There had never been machines to take fledge up to the surface. Things, Trey could have believed, had been like this forever.
Trey followed along near the rear of the line. The song echoed back to him, each echo intricately timed with allowance for tunnel travel and multiple reverberation from the mine walls, so that every miner heard a slightly different song. In the pitch black he could feel the sound waves impacting his skin, stirring the fine hairs on his face and around his ears. He added his own few words where appropriate and heard them blending with the whole, being swallowed and modified and expanded by echoes already living along the tunnel tonight. The song left the group and found its own routes back to the fledge face they had recently left. Sometimes it would remain there and fade into the earth itself, enriching it. Other times it would escape into a crack or vent too fine for any of the miners to work their way through, and on occasion a song would be heard ages away in another part of the mine, hours or days after its original singing. It was not magic, this strange transference, though irresponsible parents often told children that lie. It was simply one of the strange ways of the mine. It was easy to get lost down here.
Trey held out his arms as he walked, trailing his fingers along the rock walls when he came close enough. There would be some subdued light back in their homes, but mostly they worked and lived in total darkness. They had been excavating the current fledge vein for a thousand shifts now, and any one of them could have found his or her way back to the home-cave with nothing to guide their way. Every day after their shift there were signs: the scents of cooking, strength and direction drawing them on; the gentle hum of occupation, a background noise made of the bleat of goats, the muttering of people, the pounding feet of larking children. And the home-cave itself exuded a gravity, something apart from the senses that also gave out its own strong signal. Down here in the mines, death was always close by. Safety, and family, were strong draws.
So he touched the walls of the old tunnel, marveling that everyone who had worked on this particular stretch was now long dead and gone. He felt individual pick marks in the rock, and made out signature impacts: here, a left-handed miner had made his mark; there, someone right-handed; here, someone who had used their pick sideways instead of straight up and down. There were more definite signatures too, and Trey recognized one or two carved names from the countless other times he had run his fingers along these walls. He wondered at the history behind them, who they had been, whether any of them had ever gone topside. These tunnels held history in their rocky embrace, more ancient the nearer they came to the home-cave.
As usual, when they came to the suddenly smoothed seam in the rock that marked the time when machines had been at work, Trey took his hands away.