SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The mountain quit listening after a while, and Trafalgar went on down into the part of it no map had bothered to name.

The tunnel shed its manners as it dropped. Near the mouth it had at least resembled something men had cut; down here the walls bent at angles no crew would have left, the floor spilled into long slides, and the crystal thinned from fat threads to a cold dusting until the light failed and threw him back on the grey his own eyes made of the dark. He read the ground as he walked, the way a place that punishes bad reading had taught him, and it told a story he liked even less than the one above.

The first of it was the smell, old rot gone flat and dry and sweet, the reek of a thing long finished dying. He found the source a dozen strides on. Carcasses, and not the grey shards the ice-born left, but livestock: goats, by what the frost had spared, hauled down and staked along a widening in the tunnel, bones gnawed bare, tethers knotted to iron pegs driven into the stone.

’Bait,’ he thought, crouching over the nearest peg without touching it. ’Someone fed them.’

That answered a question that had itched at him since the city. A brood floods a valley and moves on; these hadn’t. A pack holds no shaft out of loyalty. It stays where the eating comes easy, and someone had made the eating easy, feeding the beasts on a schedule to keep them fat and rooted while it did its work in the dark.

Farther down, the blood, older than the black smears the outbreak left up top. Months older, cracked into the grain and gone the brown of dead leaves, where no beast had cause to bleed and no miner to stand. Someone had worked here well before the mountain broke open, weeks of it by the look, quiet and patient, out past the reach of anyone who might have asked what the tremors were.

And they had left things behind. The first snagged in a drift of frost against the wall: a slim rod of dark metal tipped with a cradle of fine wire gone dull with cold, the work of a man at a bench, not a rock face. He turned it over in his gauntlet. It told him nothing he could read and all he needed to know. No miner carried this, no beast dropped it. It had ridden down the mountain in a careful hand that knew exactly what it was for.

The last of it was the smallest thing down there, and it clinched the rest. The floor was swept. Only in patches, here and there down the descent where frost and grit and drag-marks should have lain thickest, wiped to bare rock and left that way, the neatness jumping out of the ruin like a made bed in a burned house. No beast tidies up after itself, and no cave-in scrubs a floor. Someone had gone back through behind their own work and rubbed out every print of it, with the flat, unhurried care of a person who owned all the time in the world and no fear of being caught at it.

’Swept too well,’ he thought, and the chill of it owed nothing to the mine. ’A man in a hurry leaves a mess. This one wanted anyone who came down after him to find nothing at all, and never once dreamed anyone would.’

Out of habit he reached for the other thing, the wrongness. He knew the filth the Void dragged behind it, the way it soured the air and tugged at something under his skin that wasn’t his, and part of him half expected to find it threaded through the stone, a torn place leaking rot up into the mountain. He found none. No rift, no corruption, not a breath of the Void in the whole deep. This had come about by ordinary hands, with goats and iron pegs and a swept floor, and that was the worse answer. A rift was nobody’s fault. A rift carried no name behind it. This one did.

And the pattern kept handing him the same name. Rivena’s ground, her post and her mine and her people to answer for, and she’d walked off the whole of it half a year ago without a word to anyone about where or why. The charitable reading was carelessness, her territory left to rot while she chased whatever pulled her away, the mountain cracking open in the gap she left. He didn’t buy it, and hadn’t for a while.

He had no proof, only the swept floor and the foreign tool and the old blood, and a cold certainty in the oldest part of this body that his dear sister was no careless woman. Rivena forgot nothing. Rivena left no door open by accident. Whatever else she was, this body remembered it in a place beneath thought, down in the marrow, a crawl of cold he’d never managed to name and long since gave up trying.

Which left the other reading: that she hadn’t neglected this place at all, that the gap was no accident and neither was the rest of it, and that somewhere past the staked goats and the scrubbed floor lay a choice she’d made on purpose, for a reason he couldn’t yet see. Shut in the castle now, walls and Caelum’s eyes on her both, though he doubted that was more than an inconvenience to a woman built like her.

He set the tool back exactly as it had lain. ’No proof,’ he reminded himself. ’Only a direction. And I’ve walked on a great deal less.’

He’d have liked another hour of quiet. The mountain declined. He felt them before he heard them, that pressure of cold bodies moving at once, a drop in the air like the breath before a storm, and the sound came rolling up the tunnel a beat behind.

The grinding hiss of the ice-born past counting, more of it than the whole mouth of the mine had thrown at him and Moses combined. The noise he’d made splitting that one startled thing open hadn’t died where it fell; it had carried down into all that waiting dark and everything keeping it, and the deep was answering now, back up the slope.

He rolled the stiffness from his shoulders and let a slow breath go. ’So... they noticed,’ he thought, dry and unsurprised. ’Argh, of course they did. No such luck, ever. Can’t lose focus down here, though. One wrong step in this dark and it stops being a walk.’ He turned to face the noise climbing toward him. ’Well. Let’s get on with it.’

He wouldn’t meet them in the open. He backed up the slope to a throat he’d passed, where the tunnel pinched to a gap barely wide enough for two of the tall ones abreast, the floor underfoot ringing hollow over a worked-out gallery the miners had gutted from below years ago. He planted his feet in the narrow, Maledicta light in both hands, and let the mine carry half the work. If they wanted him, they’d come through a door only two could use at once, and everything behind those two would jam into a press with nowhere to go.

They came. The first wave hit the gap and bled its numbers into it like a flood losing its teeth against a sluice. Two forced through shoulder to shoulder and he took them both on the crossing, one high and one low [Crosswind Edge], and they burst apart and clogged the throat with their own shards for the ones behind to climb. A runner scrabbled up the wall to come over the top; he caught it off the stone mid-leap [Arc Slash] and split it before its claws found him. Another shoved through and swallowed a diagonal up through the chest [Severing Fang] that folded it back onto the two behind.

For a dozen breaths it was almost easy. Then the press built heavier, the weight of the ones still shoving up driving the mass forward faster than he could carve the front away, and the gap began to give. So he stopped carving and went at the ground instead, hauling Maledicta over his head and driving the blade straight down into the floor of the throat [Earthsplitter].

The two-stage cleave split the stone and didn’t stop at the surface. The worked-out hollow beneath had been waiting years for the excuse, and the whole floor of the pinch caved through at once, the packed front of the swarm dropping into the black of the old gallery below in a roar of shattering rock and flaring crystal and grey bodies. The shockwave pitched the ones behind off their feet, and he came down off the high lip of the break, cut through the stunned few that had kept their footing, and dropped past the torn floor into the shaft that ran on beneath it.

’That’ll hold them,’ he thought. ’For a while.’ The break had swallowed the front of the swarm and stranded the rest, and left the shaft below open, falling away into dark toward whatever lay at the bottom. He went down it.

A hundred strides on, where the tunnel bent one last time and dropped toward the deepest dark of all, the way ahead choked shut again, and not with stone this time.

The walls were alive. The ice-born hung packed across every face of the last throat, floor and walls and ceiling, a living carpet of frost and pale burning eyes stacked three deep, more of them than the mouth of the mine and the slope behind him put together.

Every last one faced inward and down, guarding the road below with the whole frozen weight of the brood. They hadn’t come for him. They hadn’t needed to. Whatever was worth guarding lay already at their backs, and their one task was to keep him off it.

Trafalgar stopped at the edge of the light and looked at the wall of them, and understood the walk was over.

’There it is,’ he thought, and something cold and certain took root low in him. ’The real door. And they saved the whole crowd for it.’

Hey, when you want the extra chapters? This week, or at the start of the month? I owe you four chapters, for now. ;)