DARKFALL

Of all that was woven by the Song

the Unykorn alone was unbounded by time and space …

thus did it roam beyond the mists to all worlds

leaving images of its perfection,

as an ideal to exalt the soul …

The merest flicker of its horn

became an eternal symbol of beauty and hope.

LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN

Glynn cursed roundly as she hit her head for the seventh time. She simply could not get used to walking doubled over like Groucho Marx!

Grinding her teeth, she crouched deeper and continued making her way into the minescrape tunnel. Behind her, daylight faded along with the roar of the sea against the Acanthan cliffs. At the start of the tunnels it was much louder than in the song cavern because the entrance to the minescrape tunnel was not far above the high-tide mark.

She passed a worker deeply absorbed in his excavations. He did not even turn to look at her. Solen had been right about the mine workers’ lack of curiosity. It had surprised her how few questions had been asked by the enormous woman who was the mine overseer, when she had arrived clutching Solen’s chit. Glynn had altered it slightly to transform it into a request for immediate employment, rather than for a tour. She need not have worked so hard to perfect her lettering though, since Mallin had done little more than glance at the message before shoving it carelessly into a voluminous leather apron, grunting that it was just as well Glynn had no voice since those who chattered worked too slowly.

That ought to have woken me up to what I was getting into, Glynn thought sourly, passing another dig where two people were at work.

It had taken her less than a day to come to the conclusion that she could have been an axe murderer and the overseer would not have cared as long as she worked hard. After her brief interview, she had been flown by a windwalker down to one of the entrance tunnels. She had been shown her primary dig and what was required of her, and told to work. The job was all too simple. You got on your knees or haunches and excavated the dig with a tiny scraper and a pointed hammer, eyes peeled for the pale chalky veins which held the callstones that were the mine’s yield. Callstones were like marbles and finding them was technically not much different from noodling for opals in Coober Pedy, though it was far dirtier. The mine rock was reddish, but the walls sweated a greasy black ichor.

At first she had assumed the callstones were valuable in the same way as gold or jewels, but she had since learned from overheard comments that they could carry messages from one place to another. To respond to a call, the receiving party had to have another stone. The more distant the stones were from one another, the more the call drained their power. The stones could be re-powered artificially, though they were less effective each time they were tuned. Glynn had no idea how the tuning was done, though she had the impression it took place somewhere other than on Acantha.

She had intended to ask Solen when she returned after her first day’s work. She had scrubbed the black from her skin and had laid out the remnants of the meal from the previous night, looking forward to writing her adventures for him. But as on their first night on Acantha he had stumbled in very late, reeling drunk, and he had still been snoring off his hangover when she left for work the next day. The following night he had been sober, at least to begin with. Instead of praising her for getting the job, despite her muteness, he had run his eyes over her distastefully and wondered why she bothered. Furious, she had stormed off to bathe and by the time she came out, he was gone again.

Coming suddenly upon the dig assigned her, and preoccupied by her thoughts, Glynn turned too quickly and tripped, falling hard on her hands and knees. The lantern she had been carrying rolled away, leaving her in darkness, and she suppressed a surge of terror as she scrambled after it. Fortunately the wick was still alight, or she would have had to grope her way back along the shaft to get it relit.

There were two other digs nearby, but the miners who worked them had not yet arrived. Being alone ought to have made her feel safer, but instead she wished someone would hurry up and come.

On the first day in the minescrape she had literally frozen whenever she remembered how deep inside the island she was. She kept having visions of the shaft collapsing, burying her alive. She had found that the only way to control the fear was to keep her mind occupied.

Setting the lantern down carefully, she found the exact spot where she had been working the day before, and dropped to her knees. Immediately, gritty black slime seeped through her trousers. She gasped in vexation and cursed herself for forgetting yet again to bring something to kneel on. The stains on the rough mine clothes were no matter, but the stains on her knees were almost impossible to wash off.

She took from her pocket the small hammer and metal rod Mallin had given her, and set the rod’s pointed end on a thin chalky vein running across the darker surrounding rock. She gave a gentle tap with the hammer to crack the chalk, then began picking it out carefully, feeling for callstones.

Minescrape workers received a flat daily fee of a quacoin – a small grey metallic disc with a figure stamped in the centre of it that looked a bit like a goat crossed with a horse. Glynn had no idea what the value of the coin was, but she did remember that Carick had told Argon that it would take three hacoin to cross from Acantha to Fomhika. She guessed a quacoin was some derivative of a hacoin. The real earnings in the minescrape came from the substantial bonuses awarded for matching callstone pairs or for single stones with regular shaping. On her first day she had found four stones, all small and irregularly shaped – the absolute minimum expected for the daily fee. The next day she had found two small but perfectly matched stones, and had earned two quacoin. The ideal was definitely quality over quantity.

She shifted slightly and began to excavate into the darker surrounding rock, widening the fissure so that she could penetrate more deeply into the chalk vein. If only I would find a whole pile of damned perfectly round callstones, Glynn thought. But no doubt that same dream had motivated the thousands of goldrush miners in her own world, and look how few had ever really struck it rich.

She dared not seek any other sort of work, because questions would certainly be asked that she could not answer. That brought her back to the biggest advantage of the minescrape. The vast majority of the workers toiling away in the black depths of the cliff pits were, exactly as Solen had said, non-Acanthans who had chosen to spend a period of time working to amass a large amount of coin. They were so supremely uninterested in anyone’s business but their own that Glynn suspected a good many of them had specific reasons for preferring the relative anonymity of the mines.

But though the cramped, clammy minescrape was not conducive to intimate conversation, people did talk. When the teams were standing idly in groups at the end of the tunnels, or in the song cavern, waiting to be taken by windwalkers in and out of the minescrape, Glynn had been able to learn a surprising amount just by listening to them.

She now knew that the nearest island, Fomhika, was also the biggest island on Keltor after Iridom, and that it was a major agricultural exporter, producing more than half of Keltor’s grain and almost all of its fermented juices, known as cirul. Its high agricultural productivity was due to the Fomhikans’ ability to enhance the growth of plants by singing to them.

Glynn grinned at the thought of singing to cabbages, even though on her own world there were plenty of people who believed music affected plants. Of course there was more to plantsinging than just singing, but it was ironic that she, who was tone deaf, was supposed to be one of the musical Fomhikans. Fortunately, not all Fomhikans could plantsing, any more than all Acanthans could levitate.

Many of the Keltans possessed powers which did not exist on earth outside science-fiction books. The interesting thing was that the powers appeared to be associated very definitely with specific islands. For instance, Acanthans could levitate, Fomhikans had green vocal cords and the Iridomi had a sense of smell strong enough to detect the medicinal value of plants. She had not been able to find out why certain powers belonged to certain areas, since whoever possessed the powers evidently did not have to be on their own island to use them. The power of healing, such as Argon had demonstrated, was common to all islands. Those who trained in healing were called white cloaks, and they were supposed to be able to diagnose and treat illnesses on some sort of spiritual level, before they showed on the physical plane. This explained Argon’s talk of chakras and colours. White cloaks could also heal the body physically, though this was considered to be a primitive form of treatment used most often in emergency after accidents.

As Fomhika was Acantha’s nearest neighbour, it was the most frequently mentioned of the other islands, but few of the mine workers were from Fomhika for it was a wealthy island whose inhabitants had little need to work the mines.

Glynn had heard a few tantalising titbits about the Draaka which suggested the woman was some sort of spiritual leader, but nothing that explained why Solen had become so grim when the Draaka’s bell rang out Glynn’s first evening in his fell.

The other islands were a mystery. Glynn had been unable to learn anything much of Myrmidor or the myrmidons. She had assumed they were tall and athletic in appearance as she was, but it seemed Fomhikans also shared these visual characteristics. The interesting thing was that myrmidons were women only, and that though they dwelt on Myrmidor, they had often come from other islands to become myrmidons. She would have loved to know more about them, but they appeared to be almost as taboo a subject as the soulweavers they guarded. On the rare occasions the misty isle was mentioned – and no one here ever called it Darkfall – people became furtive and started looking over their shoulders.

If only Solen were not so useless, she could have satisfied her curiosity by writing down questions for him to answer, but when she had tried he had waved her away.

A dull gleam in the chalk drove all thought of myrmidons from Glynn’s mind and she concentrated hard on levering the callstone out gently. When it lay on her palm, she was pleased to find she had located a doublet. They were very small and of different sizes, but both were almost perfectly round. Setting them carefully in the bucket of sawdust she had been given for that purpose, she began clearing the chalk away again with renewed energy, her mind returning to its inventory.

She had heard some intriguing talk about a vigilante called the Shadowman who was believed by most to live on Fomhika, though there was considerable debate as to whether he actually was Fomhikan. He seemed to be a Robin Hood figure. Glynn had got the impression that the man travelled constantly all over Keltor, and that his gang was spread over the islands, but no one knew for sure because his identity was unknown. One man had called him ‘the fang of justice that bites when all else fails’, but he had spoken very quietly for it seemed that Jurass hated the Shadowman almost as much as he hated soulweavers.

She had done well, Glynn concluded, but she had yet to hear something that would give her a clue as to why and how she had come to Keltor.

Sitting back on her heels, she stretched to ease her aching back, and thought with fleeting anger of how Solen had left her alone on her first night in the fell. He had not returned until the following morning, half carried and half dragged by two loutish friends, all three of them drunk as skunks.

‘Hah. Sol’ns visi … isitor. Good … G’dev’ning,’ one of the men had greeted her.

The other had doffed an absurd cap and bowed deeply, mumbling something before falling flat on his face at her feet. Between them, Solen had simply swayed and blinked owlishly, obviously nearly stupefied with drinking.

‘M’Rian. How d’ja do? Hev t’get goin’,’ announced the man still standing. He helped the other one to his feet. ‘Duty, y’see. Thisus S … Sorad.’

With the ineffectual aid of his friends, Solen miraculously managed to change his drink-sodden clothes for his wing suit. Leaving, he had glanced at her and for an instant those queer purple eyes of his seemed perfectly sober. But then he had stumbled out singing a ridiculous bawdy song about a girl called Saviona.

‘G’bye,’ the man with the hat had mumbled and almost fell off the ledge in his hurry to catch up with the others.

Glynn sighed at the memory and began to hammer anew. Even if Solen believed her and wanted to help her, he might well blurt out her story, when drunk, to one of his friends. It was better this way.

Her voice began to return the day after she had started in the minescrape and she took it as a good omen. She had told Solen, but he advised her to stay mute. As usual he was drunk when he gave this advice, and on his way out to a night of ‘noble gambling’. She had taken his suggestion and kept quiet, but only while she built a cover story for herself. She was almost ready to try it out on Solen. Although he had said she should pretend to be a Fomhikan, when she told him her story she meant to give the impression that it was based on fragments of returning memory. If it convinced him, it would convince anyone.

Spotting another small callstone, she dug it out. Three. Unfortunately it was very small, but she was getting there. Shifting position, she caught the eye of the old woman who worked the dig alongside hers. So absorbed had she been in her foraging and her thoughts that Glynn had not even heard her approach.

‘Hot today,’ the woman grunted and unsheathed the one prominent and startlingly white tooth she seemed to have left.

Glynn gave her an incredulous look because the minescrape was bone-chillingly cold, but the old woman appeared to be perfectly serious. She was even sweating.

Men and women of all ages worked in the mines in equal number. Workers tended to frequent the same areas for periods of time so, even after a day and a half, she was familiar with those working in her region of the minescrape.

The old woman’s name was Teesa and she worked her dig with a lumpish teenager called Baltic, whose eyes followed Glynn in a way that made her uneasy. She told herself he was only staring because she was something new in his limited universe, but occasionally she caught a gleam of slyness in his expression that suggested he had some sort of furtive intelligence.

All three of them turned at the sound of boots on the stone to watch the arrival of the proxy hired by the regular worker of the dig to work his claim so that it would not be reallocated by Mallin. The proxy had arrived the previous morning saying the regular minescraper was ill. In spite of Glynn’s determination not to become friendly with anyone, she had been unable to stop herself warming to the down-to-earth, stocky little Lev, with his sharp sense of humour and bent nose. She watched surreptitiously as he knelt down on a small square of carpet, laid his cloak and lantern aside and examined the dig, humming to himself. Absurdly, something about him made her want to laugh. He was unfailingly cheerful and, most importantly, he seemed to be able to talk without expecting any response from other people. Indeed, he was quite capable of carrying on both sides of a conversation all by himself! It was he who had talked of the Shadowman until Teesa had hissed at him to shut up before the legion was sent after them all.

Legionnaires were windwalkers and the internal police force of the island. They wore blue or purple cloaks and trimmings over matt-black body suits. Each of the islands had its own legion which was differentiated from the others by the predominant colour of its attire. The various legions had their own leaders and rank structure, but ultimately each was responsible to the chieftain of its host island.

Glynn noticed that Lev was watching her. ‘I heard you were near drowned in the open water on your way to Acantha,’ he said with a grin that implied it was a good joke to nearly drown yourself.

Glynn tried to smile, but she was worried that Mallin had passed on this information about her and it was now common knowledge. Maybe Solen had talked about her when he was drunk. It made her nervous to think of herself as the object of gossip, though the gossip tallied well enough with her cover story.

Lev seemed to be waiting for some sort of reaction so she touched her throat in vague apology and shrugged.

‘Heard you had swallowed bittermute algae. But I did not think the mute effect lasted more than a day or so.’ Lev’s voice was casual, but Glynn felt herself accused.

Fortunately, just then they heard Mallin approaching their part of the minescrape and Lev returned hastily to his dig. Emptying their buckets and recording the number of stones to keep track of each worker’s haul, Mallin weighed Glynn’s three stones in her palm.

‘You will have to work harder than you have been doing. Plenty more hungry for the pit.’

She was referring to the fact that the turnover of minescrapers was high, and there were always queues waiting to replace anyone who did not measure up. Given how swiftly she had been hired, Glynn imagined initially that work must be easy to obtain in the mines. But that was not so. There were waiting-lists, and most mine workers had proxies like Lev to safeguard their position should they fall ill. This made her swift hire a puzzle until Glynn figured out that it must have been Solen’s message that gave her an edge. She could not, in her wildest imagination, see a lotus-eater like Solen having anything in common with Mallin, but no doubt his post as legionnaire gave him some power.

‘We will see.’ Mallin turned to Lev, who explained that he had only just come in, but Mallin slapped him on the back and said she knew she could rely on him to top the quota.

When she had gone down the next level, Lev gave Glynn a sympathetic look. ‘She knows me,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘But it is no pleasure to me that she does. I have been here too long. Do not make my mistake. Find yourself a darklin and retire.’

‘So easy,’ Teesa cackled, sitting on the other side of the black corridor and unwrapping her lunch from a basket. ‘Easy as finding blue sether on the flatlands.’

Baltic grunted at her and she put some bread into his grimy hands. He stuffed it into his mouth with the peculiar humming noise he made whenever he ate, piggy eyes on Glynn.

‘Maybe so,’ Lev sighed, sitting too, and pulling a bun wrapped in cloth from his pocket. He offered Glynn half. Taking it, she smiled inwardly at herself. To begin with she had been revolted at the thought of eating in the dirty minescrape, but now she sat down with the others without a qualm. She unwrapped her own lunch – a flat sort of pie with a black pasty filling – broke it in four and offered it to the others. Sharing food was common in the minescrape, and it made for variety in an otherwise dreary day. She purchased her meals from a stall in the song cavern each morning.

‘Easy into the minescrape and hard out,’ Teesa said through a mouthful of pie. Baltic had finished his and now sidled closer to Glynn. She wiped the mine dust off her hands, pretending not to see him.

‘True spoken,’ Lev admitted cheerfully. ‘Gambling away my family’s holding was easy and that is what brought me to this rocky bit of an island. I had drunk too much cirul at the time, but there was no going back on it. A bet is a bet, so I sent my sister to live with relatives, and came here with the last of our coin. And in spite of the gambling that is my only solace, I have earned almost enough to claim back the land I lost, but it has been a hard road back, right enough.’

‘I have heard that before. Leave while you can this time,’ Teesa advised. Baltic reached out to touch Glynn’s boot. She ignored him, hoping he would become bored when she did not react.

‘I have been thinking I might stay on a bit. Earn enough for the land and some over. Then I would be ahead, you see. It would not all have been for nothing.’

Glynn wondered how many goldminers would have given themselves a similar argument for staying with their shafts, and was saddened at the thought of Lev ending his days here.

‘Should have got handfasted long back, but you are an old fool,’ grunted Teesa. ‘A woman would have kept you from losing the holding.’

‘That is true, no doubt,’ Lev said seriously. Then he broke into an impish grin and turned to direct an arch look at Glynn. ‘But who would have me?’

She felt herself blush. Without warning, Baltic launched himself at Lev, snarling like a dog.

The older man pushed the boy away roughly, and Teesa flung her arms around her grandson, kissing him and hissing at Lev to keep his dirty hands to himself.

‘Teach your boy to keep his hands where they are wanted,’ Lev said mildly. ‘The next man might not be so gentle, nor the next woman so forgiving.’

Teesa glared at Glynn. ‘My Baltic would not want one who looked so like a myrmidon she-demon.’ She pushed the drooling Baltic back to their dig and turned her back on them, bristling with outrage.

‘Do not mind her,’ Lev said easily. ‘Or her wild accusations. No myrmidon would come to Acantha in these times and she knows it.’

‘Am I a myrmidon then? I was born on Myrmidor, as well you know. It is the spear maids that give themselves to the soulweavers and the rest of us are tarred with the same brush,’ Lev said to Teesa’s back. ‘And I would thank you not to go bandying my sept around in these dark days. A man could be killed.’

‘Should have stayed on your own sept then,’ Teesa snapped, but she sounded less angry.

‘Now how could I, Teesa my love, with the whole world calling me to look at it?’ he said in a wheedling voice.

She gave a pleased snort. ‘You should have taken the loss and year-ended with some maid who was not set on carrying the spear for the Darkfall hags.’

‘It was not in me to stay home and maybe that is truly why I gambled so much,’ Lev said, returning to his own dig with a sigh. ‘I wanted to see the world and the farm bound me. Most people never travel further than a few days from where they were born, let alone from sept to sept. But I wanted to see how other islands look and hear what songs people sing there and what stories they tell. I wanted to see sky sether growing on the Black Tower and bathe in the Iridomi fire lakes. I wanted to feel the red sand winds on Vespi. But, more than anything else, I wanted to sail through the Turin Straits where the water shines even on the darkest night, and mountains of ice rise from the waves. A man should not die before seeing all the wonders of the world.’

‘And how many of those dreams have come to pass since you left Myrmidor, old man?’ Teesa sneered good-naturedly.

Lev looked philosophical. ‘Ah well. I am not dead. Maybe the Song will gift me with a darklin yet.’

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