The Tainted City (2 page)

“You haul with Nessor today,” Jathon told me.

Nessor’s mouth curled in a brief, slight grimace. He stared over my head as if I didn’t exist. As always, I stepped up as casually as if I hadn’t noticed his disdain.

Jathon raised his voice. “Step lively, lads! We’ve still a chance for our full pay if you put your backs into hauling.”

The drovers shouted to their oxen, and the wheels groaned into motion. Nessor and I heaved the first fat burlap sack up within reach of a pair of hookmen perched on a platform beside the rope. My back and arms burned with the sack’s weight, though nowhere near as badly as they had when I first came. I’d been a frail shadow of myself then, my body still healing from my use of the deadly blood magic charm that had all too briefly reawakened my childhood Taint.

A bolt of bitter longing skewered me at the memory. If I were still Tainted, I could toss these coal sacks sky-high by will alone. Or better yet, smash my neck torc to gleaming shards and fly straight over the Whitefire Mountains to my home city of Ninavel in Arkennland.

Yeah, right. That charm was locked away in some Council vault now. Assuming the Alathians hadn’t destroyed it. And if the Taint lasted past puberty, I wouldn’t be in this fix in the first place.

Long weeks of hauling coal had restored much of my strength, though I still looked a scrawny scrap compared to the rest of Jathon’s crew. As we lifted an unending stream of sacks, my gaze drifted up the cliff. Beside the second guide wheel station, purply-brown lines of kalumite streaked the craggy sandstone.

Kalumite was innocuous enough on its own, hardly worth a decet per hundredweight in Ninavel. Yet I’d learned in my Tainted days that kalumite flecks added to copper filings in a certain precise ratio, mixed in oil and smeared over a charm’s surface, made the charm’s magic flare up in a conflagration that burned it out within seconds of the charm triggering.

The copper from the glowlight charm in my sock would provide more than enough filings, and a flask of oil, a file, and a pot of burn salve lay hidden in a crevice on a boulder by the barracks. Better yet, I had a plan to fox the mage to stop him hunting me down once I ran. All I needed now was a fingersweight of kalumite.

The oilmen had lubricated all the guide wheels yesterday, as they did once each month. And two nights ago, I’d sneaked into the storeroom and dumped a bucket of coal grit into the cask of oil marked for the second guide wheel station. Surely it wouldn’t be long now before the contaminated oil on the wheels abraded the rope enough to—

A sharp twang and an ear-rending squeal sounded above. The great wheel beside me juddered to a halt, oxen straining against taut traces.

Jathon cursed and squinted up the cliff. “Stand down, lads! A strand’s snapped and snarled a guide wheel.” His black brows lowered in a scowl, and I knew he was thinking of the minemaster’s quota. He whistled to a drover. “Run for the laddermen, and be quick.”

Beside me, Nessor thumped down a sack, his brow beetling in a frown. “Laddermen are working the Dragon’s Maw today.”

“Don’t I know it.” Jathon’s scowl grew more thunderous than ever. The Dragon’s Maw was another mine entrance a good mile off. The minemaster had decided a week back to string a secondary supply rope up the gorge wall there. It’d be high noon before the laddermen managed to stow their gear and hurry back, let alone set up to clear the snarled wheel.

The drover dashed off. I wiped sweaty hands on my trousers and straightened.

“You want that wheel cleared without waiting on the laddermen?” I asked Jathon. “I know a way that’ll have you hauling again in no time.”

Jathon cast a black look my way. “Don’t think to try some scam on me, boy. A puny charm smuggler who knows nothing of minework can get us hauling again? I think not.”

“I wasn’t just a charm smuggler in Arkennland. Outriding was my trade, and I’ve guided many a convoy across the Whitefires. I’ve climbed cliffs that’d make your laddermen piss themselves, and I can rig ropes with my eyes closed. Give me a knife and a length of hitch line, and I’ll climb up to that wheel, set a bypass, and cut the tangle free.”

Jathon swung round. His dark eyes narrowed. “Never seen a scut-man so eager to get back to work.”

“I didn’t say I’d do it for free. Though seeing as how you pulled Gedavar off me this morning, I wouldn’t ask much in return.”

Jathon’s suspicion shifted into hard appraisal. Plenty of scut-men tried to strike bargains for extra rations or shorter work shifts, though it was a whipping offense for miners to give us coin. Jathon tapped his ward-etched ring, twin to Gedavar’s, and looked pointedly at my torc. “I could order you up that cliff.”

“You could,” I agreed. “But a man does his fastest work for reward, not under threat of punishment.”

Jathon grunted and crossed his arms. “What kind of reward are we talking, here?”

Now came the tricky part. Ask for too little, and Jathon would get suspicious again. Ask for too much, and he’d laugh in my face and refuse. He might order me up the cliff anyway, but I didn’t care to count on it. Thankfully, the morning’s confrontation with Gedavar had sparked an idea.

“Make sure Gedavar stays off me. I don’t fancy getting strangled every time I blink, all thanks to an order I had no hand in. But he won’t cross a crew chief. He’ll back off if you make it plain you’d take any further ‘discipline’ poorly.”

Jathon stood silent, frowning. I kept my stance casual despite the churning of my stomach.

“Send him up, Jathon,” Nessor said, to my surprise. “If you don’t, we’ll never see that coin. We’ve all seen him crawl up those boulders by the barracks every morning like he’s got feet sticky as a blackfly’s.” He spoke with all the pleading I hadn’t dared use. Mutters of agreement came from the hookmen on their platform above.

Jathon fixed Nessor with a disgusted look. “Lost all your pay to Temmin last night, did you?” His gaze settled on me again. “A boulder’s one thing. But this cliff…wouldn’t you need iron spikes like the laddermen use?”

I snorted. “Pitons wouldn’t do much good without a partner to belay.” As his brows lowered, I hurried to assure him, “No need for partners or pitons on something this easy. See all those cracks and ledges? Khalmet’s hand, the climb’s no harder than scaling a tower stair.” That part was true enough. Water seeps and moss slimed the cliff in spots, but the cracks angling up toward the guide wheel station were dry.

Jathon glanced across the gorge to the minemaster’s office, tucked amidst a gaggle of storehouses against the opposite cliffs.

I tapped the torc around my neck. “I can’t go anywhere.” Talmaddis had warned me when he brought me to Cheltman that the torc would choke me unconscious if I got more than a quarter mile from the mining camp.

“And if you fall?”

I laughed, unable to help myself. “Fall? On this?”

“Cocky little bastard, aren’t you?” Jathon chopped a hand at a drover. “Get a spare hitch rope.” As the drover scrambled to comply, Jathon pulled his belt knife. “Fine,” he said to me. “You get that wheel unsnarled in time for us to make the quota, I’ll talk to Gedavar—but only if we meet the tally, understand?”

I interlaced my fingers in the sign for a bargain sealed, then remembered he’d never been streetside in Ninavel. “Bargain’s made.”

He handed over the knife and the drover’s coil of hempen rope. “Get to it, then.”

I tucked the knife into my belt, slung the rope across my chest, and leaped for the cliff. I didn’t have the spike-nailed boots I’d used for climbing in the Whitefires, but my work boots would serve well enough for rock as fissured as this. My blood sang as I wedged my fists in a slanting crack. Gods, it felt good to climb something more than a lump of a boulder, even if the cliff was a crumbling mess of sandstone instead of the clean, sharp granite of the Whitefire peaks.

A rush of memory overwhelmed me: the sun blazing down from an indigo sky, turning quartz-studded cliffs brilliant as icefields. Sharp peaks stretching to the horizon, and below my airy ledge, Cara’s lithe form scaling the cliff with flowing ease, her blonde hair shining near as bright as the rock.

The stab of pain this time wasn’t so easy to ignore. Cara. I missed her, desperately—and feared for her, too. Right before the Alathians dragged me off to the mines, I’d begged her to forget any ideas of rescuing me, and instead return to Ninavel to seek out the cunning bastard of a spy who represented my one last hope of saving young Melly from a life of mindburned slavery. Melly’s father Sethan had been Cara’s friend same as mine, though Cara didn’t owe Sethan the way I did. But now I lay awake nights praying Cara wouldn’t do anything too rash. Her skill in the mountains was unparalleled, but she had little experience with the darker games played by ganglords and shadow men.

Exactly why I needed to get the hell out of Alathia and sneak back to Ninavel. I stabbed fists and feet one after the other into the crack, twisting my wrists and ankles to lock each successive limb into place as I moved up the cliff. Past the first guide wheel station, the crack grew too thin for my boots. I slowed, placing my feet with care upon crumbling ledges. A shower of dirt and pebbles pattered down the cliff each time I moved.

My heart beat faster as I neared the offending wheel. The guide station was a simple scaffold of iron bars bolted over a sloping ledge. I unslung the rope from my chest, shook it out, and tied one end round my waist. Four feet into the rope, I tied a quick clover knot around the lowest scaffold bar. Dangerous to leave so much slack, since the force of even a short fall on a slack hemp rope could easily snap it, but I needed the freedom of movement if I wanted that kalumite.

I glanced down the cliff, and froze. Beyond the upturned, black-streaked faces of haulers and drovers, a lanky man in a blue and gray uniform was picking his way over the mudflats.

Talmaddis, the Council mage. Fuck! The miners didn’t know the kalumite-and-copper trick, but a mage might. If he guessed my intent on the cliff, my chances of escape would vanish quick as frost on a firestone charm.

I mastered panic. He might only have glanced out the minemaster’s window, seen me climbing, and decided to investigate. If I could scrape and stow the kalumite before he got close enough to spy me properly, I might still have a chance.

Hurriedly, I adjusted my stance to block my right hand from view and set the edge of Jathon’s knife against a fat purple vein of kalumite. With my left hand, I picked at a dangling strand of snarled rope.

A low, grumbling roar froze my knife hand mid-scrape. Startled shouts rang from below, Jathon’s gravelly voice rising over the rest.

“Earthquake! Get clear—”

The roar swelled to drown him out. The cliff shook my feet from the ledge like a horse shivering a fly from its hide. In pure, useless reflex, I tried to halt my fall with the Taint, as if I were still a snot-nosed kid rather than a good decade past my Change.

The dead spot in my mind didn’t so much as twitch. I dropped like a stone. The rope attaching me to the guide wheel station snapped taut, near cutting me in two, and I slammed into the rock below the ledge. I twisted and made a desperate grab for a handhold, even as the vicious pull on my waist vanished.

I got one hand on the ledge rim, had an instant to register the rope end slithering past, the fibers sliced clean through—and lost my grip on the still-shuddering rock.

Air whistling past, the spiked teeth of the pullwheel rising to meet me, and all I could think was
Oh, fuck—

Something yanked me sideways. The pullwheel flashed past. My plunge abruptly slowed to leave me hovering with my nose and chest not a hands-width from the ground.

For a moment I could only gasp, unbelieving. Then I looked up and saw Talmaddis on his knees in the muck, eyes shut and one hand extended toward me, the rings on his fingers glowing softly silver. Behind him huddled a group of open-mouthed haulers. The white rush of shock faded, and I laughed, shakily.

“Wouldn’t want to lose your prize hostage,” I said.

Talmaddis didn’t answer, only lowered his hand. I splatted down into mud. The ground no longer shuddered, though the clatter of falling rocks echoed through the gorge and waterfalls of sand hissed between ledges.

A tortured shriek of metal from above made us all jerk and duck. I rolled, getting a glimpse of thrashing haul rope and a dense spiderweb of black bars, rapidly growing larger.

The pullwheel station from the clifftop—Khalmet’s hand, it’d crush us all—

Talmaddis shouted a string of words, in a high, keening wail. Fiery lines streaked the onrushing iron. The fire spread, the bars crumbling to ash in its wake. I scrabbled to my feet and staggered back, still half expecting to be crushed flat.

All that reached me was a rain of embers. My heart felt like it might leap straight out of my chest. The miners cowering beside me were whey-faced, some babbling prayers.

Talmaddis’s curly head was bowed, his hands braced in the mud and his shoulders trembling. His breath came in rattling gasps. Jathon was shouting, urging men away from the cliff. The smarter ones had run, dark forms scurrying to the relative safety of the reedy flats near the stream winding through the camp. Yelling men boiled out of the mine tunnel. On the opposite side of the gorge, another swarm erupted from the night shift’s barracks. Several cabins had collapsed into a jackstraw of logs.

I took a step backward, then another. I should run. Now, while Talmaddis was too drained to cast another spell, and the overseers too busy to bother about a stray prisoner. I could find another band of kalumite somewhere further down the gorge, get my snapthroat charm off before anyone thought to hunt me…

“Mage!” Gedavar pushed past me. His eyes stared white from a face black with coal dust. “The quake—the main tunnel’s collapsed at the Broketurn junction! Three hundred men trapped beyond, and the blacklights have gone red, means the air’s turning bad—can that cursed magic of yours break through the rubble?”

Talmaddis raised his head. His olive skin had gone sickly grey, the laugh lines bracketing his mouth turned deep as chasms. “I’ve nothing left,” he said in a raw whisper. “But my casting was more than enough to trigger the Watch’s detection spells. They’ll come…”