SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Gerhardt took a breath, and it was plain he had turned these words over in his own head many nights running.

”The ones who walked out say it started deep, young master. Not a fresh vein. One of the old worked-out stretches, far down, ground we cut through and left behind years ago.” His hand rose to the red ring on the map without touching it. ”There was nothing there worth digging. There should have been nothing there at all.”

”And before that?” Trafalgar asked. ”The days ahead of it. Anything out of the ordinary.”

”Now that you press me on it.” Gerhardt’s brow drew down. ”There were tremors. Small ones, in a mountain that does not tremble. Sounds from below, deep enough that the men blamed the water. And a crew went down a week before it broke and never came back up. We wrote them off as a cave-in. We had no reason to think otherwise at the time.” He paused. ”I have had reason to think otherwise since.”

”One breed of monster, or several?”

”Several. That is another piece of it that never rang true to me.” The old knight shook his head slowly. ”A brood is a brood. One thing breeds, one thing floods the tunnels. This was not one thing. It was a dozen sorts of thing, all of them boiling up out of the same dark at once, as though something had reached down and stirred the whole deep with a stick.”

Trafalgar filed each answer away without moving his face, and behind it the pieces were fitting together into a picture he did not care for.

”There is one more thing,” Gerhardt said. ”The part I understand least, and the part that kept this city alive. They do not give chase. When our men ran, the beasts came after them to the mouth of the shaft and no further. They tore apart everything at the high post, and then they turned around and went back down. They always go back inward. Whatever is down there, they guard it before they hunt us.” He met Trafalgar’s eyes. ”It is why they have not come to eat this city. They will not leave the deep for long enough to try.”

The room went quiet, and into that quiet Trafalgar arrived at the only conclusion the facts allowed.

’A worked-out seam with nothing in it. Tremors, a lost crew, a dozen breeds coming up as one, all of them nailed to the deep and guarding it like a nest.’ His jaw did not move, but something cold turned over behind his ribs. ’Something put all of this here.’

He kept every word of it off his tongue. He had no proof, and half-formed suspicion spoken aloud in a room of frightened men bought nothing but panic. There would be time to name it once he had walked the deep himself and seen what the survivors had seen.

”You have given me more than the report would have,” he said. ”Now the practical side of it.”

He set two fingers on the map, over the city.

”First, this place holds without me. Gerhardt, you and your people reorganize what defenses you have around the chokes we have, and you hold the walls while we go up the mountain. If anything comes down while I am in that mine, this city survives on its own. I am not leaving to clear a shaft and coming back to a graveyard.”

”Understood, young master.”

”Second.” His fingers moved to the red ring. ”We are not retaking the post. Retaking the post is worthless. I could burn every tunnel clear and plant a banner on the shaft, and inside a season it would all crawl back. Whatever they are guarding down there is what this is about. We reach it, and we end it. Everything above that is housekeeping.”

Moses shifted at the back of the room, a low mountain of a man, and though he said nothing, Trafalgar caught the small approval in the set of his jaw. The captain had watched him weigh the whole mess and cut it down to the one thing worth cutting, and he was writing it all down behind those purple eyes to carry back to Valttair. That was fine. Let him.

”Third, we split. Moses takes the mouth of the mine and whatever front the fighting makes. He can hold one longer than any wall in this city.” Trafalgar glanced at the half-demon. ”I go down into the deep, and I go alone. That is not open to discussion.”

”That is how I would have called it myself.” Moses inclined his head, and the agreement in it was real.

Gerhardt stepped forward, spine straightening under old armor. ”Young master, I would ask to go up with you. I have fought this mountain my whole life. I know those tunnels.”

”You would be wasted in them.” Trafalgar did not soften it, because the old man would have heard the softening and resented it. ”You are worth ten times more holding this city upright than dying in a hole to prove a point. The people out there follow you. If you fall, the walls fall an hour later. Stay, and hold what I cannot be in two places to hold.”

Something eased in the old knight’s face, and he bowed his head. He had offered because honor demanded he offer. He was glad, underneath it, to be told to stay and keep his people breathing.

A younger voice cut in from the doorway, one of the survivors, a miner with a burn healing badly up one arm. ”Let us in with you. Those things killed my brother. Half of us have someone down that shaft. We want to be there when it dies.”

”No.” Trafalgar did not even weigh it. ”I understand it, and the answer is no. You would die on the approach and I would gain nothing but corpses to step over. Grief does not make a man harder to kill. It makes him slower. You want them dead. So do I. Leave the dying to the two of us and hold this city with Gerhardt. That is how you get your revenge and keep your life at the same time.”

The miner’s jaw worked, but he had no argument, and he stepped back.

”We move on the mine at first light.” Trafalgar straightened off the table. ”See the men fed and rested tonight. I want to look at what we are walking into before then.”

He left them to the map and went out into the cold.

The wind had thinned, and the snow had eased to a slow drift. From the wall the mountain rose black and enormous against a bruised sky, and near its base the mouth of the mine gaped, a wound of pure dark in the rock, farther off than any ordinary eye could make out in that gloom.

Trafalgar’s eyes were not ordinary, and no one in this world was ever going to learn why. At least for now.

He let his sight reach across the distance, and the far dark resolved as though he stood a stride from it, every detail of that black opening laid out plain and cold before him.

And there, moving at the mouth of the mine, patient and unhurried where they should have been asleep, were the things that had emptied a mining town of two thousand souls.