Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 15, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Fifty-eight in the cup, and Aeryn took the drop before she had done anything else, because a thing done first cannot be talked out of later in the day.
It went down cold, and then everything went flat and far away and stayed that way past the point where standing up too fast would have let go of a person.
Nine paces.
The pail would not leave the boards.
Sit-to-stand ran to three.
It lifted at about midday, all at once and from every direction, and she was in the room again.
Twenty-six paces, on the afternoon of a day that had cost her a drop and a morning.
Then the skim.
Six on her own, and the reach, and seven went up, and eight, and nine came halfway, and she brought it the rest of the way.
Nine, where two days ago the reach had bought her exactly one.
The box gives me a body.
The drop gives me what runs it.
She was still on the floor with that when the mountain cracked.
***
Not loud.
That was wrong before anything else was wrong.
A single dry crack, a long way off and above her, and then nothing, and she was on her feet before she had decided to be.
Dust came off the ceiling plate.
Not much.
A dry gray drift of it into the light from the fill port, and the boards under her feet did something she felt in the shins and not in her ears.
Then the second sound.
Metal.
A long tearing note that went on far past the length of anything breaking, and stopped, and started again.
That is not the mountain settling.
Then the door.
***
The slope below her was people running, and none of them running the same way.
Down at the fire somebody was shouting for Belloch.
Two men were already going up the cut ground at a flat sprint toward the sealed adit at the north end, and a third was behind them, and the shouting from the boxes was all pointed the same place they were.
The adit.
Everybody had gone to the adit.
Aeryn stood in her doorway with her hand on the frame and made herself look at what was actually moving.
Not the adit.
Above it and to the left, where the old spoil ran out along the shoulder in a long gray shelf that had been there since before anybody in this village was born, a crack had opened along the top of the bank.
She could see it from four hundred paces because it had dust coming off it in a line.
She had read that ground on her second morning on this world, flat on her back, being carried across it.
Old spoil.
Robbed rail.
A loading apron.
A sealed adit.
The spoil bank sat above the apron.
The apron sat above the third box, the fourth, the cistern, and eleven households.
And the water came off the shoulder and down the runs, and the runs went along behind the bank.
It is not the tunnel.
It is the bank, and if the bank goes, it takes the runs with it.
***
There was no shouting available to her.
Standing in her own doorway with the whole of it assembled and no way at all to put it into the air, and for about two seconds she was as useless as she had been on the first morning.
Then she went.
Down the gravel, forty paces, at a speed she had no business at.
Vekka was at the fire with three women round her and her arm out pointing at the adit, and Aeryn came in past all of them and got in front of her and held up the band.
Not the adit.
The spoil bank.
Get them off the apron.
Vekka looked at it for perhaps a heartbeat.
Then she turned round and put her voice up the slope in a way Aeryn had not heard from her and would not have thought was in her.
“Off the apron.
Everybody off the apron and down.
Belloch.
Belloch, the bank.”
The three women went.
One of them was running before Vekka had finished the sentence.
“Are you sure?”
No.
It is where the dust is.
“Aye,” Vekka said.
“That’ll do.”
***
The men on the cut ground turned when the shouting reached them, and stopped, and one of them was arguing about it.
That cost eight or ten seconds.
Then they came off it and started down, and the bank let go.
It did not roar.
It sounded like a very large amount of gravel being poured somewhere else.
The top third of the shelf came away and went down onto the loading apron and off the end of it, and took the robbed rail with it, and a length of old channel that nobody had known was still there came out of the face of it, turning over and over.
The dust reached the fire about six seconds later, and the fire went out of sight.
***
Somebody was screaming up near the third box.
Aeryn was moving before the dust cleared, and thirty paces went by before her legs told her what the afternoon was going to cost, and she kept going because the arithmetic on that was not complicated.
The path up past the second box was half blocked. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
A timber had come down across it, one of the old props out of the apron structure, longer than she was and thicker through than her thigh, and it had gone across at an angle with one end wedged into the bank.
Skarr was under the far end of it.
Not crushed.
Pinned at the hip, on her side, with her arms free and one leg out at a wrong angle and about a hand’s width of clearance between the timber and the ground.
“Don’t,” Skarr said.
“Don’t, you’ll not, get somebody.”
Aeryn got down on the path beside her and put a hand flat on the ground under the timber to find out how much air was in there.
“There’s nobody coming; they’re all at the adit.” Skarr was talking fast and evenly, which was worse than screaming would have been.
“Ma’s at the fire.
Torrin’s up top.
Go and get Torrin.”
Aeryn shook her head once.
“Then go and get anybody.”
She shook it again, and got her forearm across the girl’s chest and held it there for a second, which was the only instruction she had that did not need writing.
Skarr stopped talking.
“Right,” she said, after a moment.
“Right.
You’re not going.
Fine.”
***
A man could have lifted that end.
Torrin could have lifted it.
She could not lift that end, and there was no version of the next thirty seconds in which she lifted that end.
So she stopped trying to and looked at the other one.
The timber was wedged into the bank at the high end and lying across Skarr at the low end, and the whole of its weight was going through the point where it crossed her.
There was a rock in the path about a pace up from Skarr’s hip, a hand and a half high, and it was already almost under the timber.
Not lift.
Turn.
Aeryn got her shoulder under the shaft on the uphill side of the rock, where the arm was longest, and the weight was least, and set her feet, and put her back into it.
It did not move.
The feet went again, lower, and the angle was wrong and knew it was wrong, and reset again with her hip against the bank so that her legs were pushing along the line of the timber and not up against it.
Then it came.
Not far.
It went up perhaps two fingers and rolled, and the whole shaft turned over the rock the way a bar turns over a fulcrum, and the low end came off Skarr’s hip and dropped onto the stone beside her.
“Go,” Aeryn wrote, one-handed, still braced.
She did not need to.
Skarr was already out and dragging herself clear on her elbows.
***
Then the slope above them moved again.
Not the bank.
What was left of the bank, settling, and a sheet of loose stuff coming down over the lip of the apron in a long rattling curtain about eighty paces to their right.
“Up,” Skarr said.
“Up, up, get up.”
Aeryn got Skarr’s arm over her shoulder and started down the path.
They made fifty paces.
Fifty, counted, because she had been counting everything for two weeks, and the counting did not stop for this.
At fifty, her legs stopped being an instrument.
There was no warning in it, the same as the hand on the crate, and she went down onto one knee on the path with a sixteen-year-old girl’s weight on her shoulder and could not get up again.
Skarr took her own weight off and went down beside her.
“Right,” she said, breathing hard.
“Right.
That’s fine.
That’s fine.”
***
Boots on the path, coming fast.
Ashkar came round the bend above them at a speed that had nothing careful in it, and stopped when he saw them, and his hands came halfway up and stopped as well.
He did not touch her.
Aeryn watched a man arrive at a doorway he had been turned out of four times and stand in it.
“Can you walk,” he said.
Yes.
He looked past her, down the path, at the distance between where she was kneeling and where the boxes started.
“How far?”
She looked at it as well, and gave him the true figure, because there was no other kind available.
Not that far.
Ashkar came the two paces and put his arm out.
It took about as long to decide as deciding nothing takes.
Then she took it, and he got her up, and he took her weight down the path with Skarr limping on the other side and did not say one word about any of it the whole way down.
***
They put her on a bench at the fire because the alternative was carrying her, and everybody there could see that the alternative was carrying her.
Belloch had the men counting heads.
The count came out whole.
A man off the second box with a leg he was not putting weight on, another one holding his arm against his chest and refusing to have it looked at, a woman with her face laid open along the cheekbone from something that had come off the apron edge, and a boy with his scalp opened.
Nobody under the bank.
Everybody had been coming off the apron for about forty seconds before it went.
Aeryn sat on the bench with her hands on her knees and her arms shaking, filthy to the elbow, and listened to a village work out what had happened.
Torrin came down from the second box with his hat in his hand and stood looking up the path.
“That’s a prop off the old apron,” he said.
“That’s longer than I am and thicker than my leg.”
“It is.”
Nobody answered him for a moment.
“She did,” Skarr said.
Torrin looked at Aeryn on the bench, and then back up the path, and then at Vekka.
“No woman moves mine timber.”
“Apparently this one does,” Vekka said, and did not look up from the boy’s scalp.
“Long Count.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“I’m not saying a thing against her.” Torrin turned his hat over.
“I’m saying that’s eleven households stood on that apron, and it’s a prop off it, and somebody moved it, and I’d like to know how.
Because if there’s a way of moving one, I want the men knowing it by tomorrow.”
That landed somewhere Aeryn had not expected it to.
Vekka finished with the boy and straightened up and looked at her.
“Well,” she said.
“There’s a question with something in it.”
Aeryn got the band up, and her hand was not steady enough, and she put the arm down and started again and got four words out.
A rock.
Turn, not lift.
Torrin came over and read it, moving his lips.
“Turn it,” he said.
Put anything under it.
The weight goes down the shaft and not through you.
“Huh,” Torrin said, and went off up the slope to look at the rock, and took two men with him.
Aeryn sat on the bench and watched three men she had never spoken to walk up a path to check her arithmetic.
***
It was Torrin’s wife who said the other thing.
“She went up there.”
“She did,” Vekka said.
“On her own.
Nobody with her.” The woman had her arms folded, and she was not saying it to Aeryn, and she was standing where Aeryn could hear every word of it.
“Toward it.
While it was still coming down.”
“Aye.”
“That’s not,” she said, and stopped, and started again.
“There’s a reason we don’t.
It isn’t that we can’t.”
“I know what the reason is.”
“Then say something about it.”
Vekka wrung out the cloth she had been using on the boy and put it over the rim of the bowl and took her time about it.
“Her girl’s alive,” she said.
“Yours is up at the third box, and she’d have been on that apron in another two breaths, and she isn’t, because a woman none of you will talk to got in front of me and held her arm up.” She picked up the bowl.
“You can have the rule, or you can have the two of them.
Tell me which and I’ll write it on the wall for you.”
Nobody said anything to that.
“Right,” Vekka said, and went off up the slope with the bowl.
***
Vaelith arrived at the end of it, having come down off the timber run at whatever speed a man that old moves at when he has heard the mountain go, and he did not go to the injured first.
He went to her, and put two fingers on her wrist, and stood there with his eyes somewhere else while he counted.
Then he took the wrist away and looked at it as though it had said something rude.
Say it.
“Your reserve is gone,” he said.
“That is not the word I would have used a fortnight ago, and it is the word I am using now, and I want you to notice that I have stopped pretending I do not know what I am looking at.”
Noted.
“You will not be doing that again tomorrow.”
How long.
“I have no idea,” Vaelith said.
“That is not me declining to tell you.
I have never had a hand on anybody in this state, and I could not put a figure on it if you offered me one.”
Which left the figure to her, and she was not in a condition to be honest about it and made herself be anyway.
Two days if she was lucky.
Three if she was not, and a woman who had just gone down on one knee on a path with a girl on her shoulder did not get to call herself lucky.
Call it three.
Which put the third box on the twenty-second and the fourth nowhere at all.
Ten days.
Then it is one box, and it was always going to be one box, and I have just spent the difference on a girl’s hip.
There was no minding in her about it anywhere, and she made a note of the absence, because it was new.
***
The dust settled off the face at about dark.
What the bank had taken with it was the top of the loading apron, thirty paces of robbed rail nobody had used in a hundred years, and the whole outer skin of the shoulder above it.
What it had left was a hole.
Aeryn saw it from the bench, across four hundred paces of failing light, and could not have got up to it if the mountain had asked her personally.
A cut face where the spoil had been.
And in the cut face, high up, the open mouth of a channel, squared and mortared and made, running back into the mountain in a direction that had nothing to do with the adit and nothing to do with the shaft.
Water was coming out of it.
Not much.
A thread, catching the last of the light on its way down the new face.
It had been coming out of it, behind a hundred years of spoil, for as long as anybody in this village had been alive, and none of them had known, and it had been going somewhere.
Everything on this face came off the shoulder and ran, and the boy had told her so while he was filling her tank, and she had taken it for a fact about weather.
This one had been running somewhere else.
Aeryn sat on the bench with her arms shaking and watched the thread of it until the light went.