The Last King of Erebos

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 6

Read by Hand

The heat met him a dozen paces in.

The seal had held most of it in the gallery, and now it pressed past him toward the yard, wet and heavy and sour with sulfur. Beyond the entrance there was no light at all. Hades made none. The stone told him where the floor went and where the walls stood, and he walked down into the dark without slowing.

The gallery sloped downward for some distance before it reached the damage. He felt the overseers' work before he came to it, in the places where it bore down on the stone: timber props and stacked stone piers along both walls, standing at uneven intervals, crowded together in some places and sparse in others, as though each had been added wherever the last had seemed to fail. Spoil and broken supports lay across the floor. Somewhere to his left, water ran down the wall and pooled where the floor dipped.

He found the fissure by its sound, a steady hiss at the far end of the gallery, where the newest cut had opened into the deposit. The stone there was hot enough to feel through the soles of his boots. He laid his bare hand on the face of the rock and read the seam beneath his palm until he found the veins that would take light. He set a small working into them.

The seam lit. Light ran out along the branches of the deposit and stopped short wherever the stone was flawed. Its color would not hold still. Where he looked directly at a vein, it burned violet; at the edge of his sight it slid toward aqua, and slid back when he turned his head. It showed him the fracture running down beneath the seam into the floor, the white thread of vapor rising from it, and the gallery behind him.

The dead had been carried out. Their picks lay where they had dropped them, the hafts bleached and split by the steam.

He had stepped over them in the dark.

He spread his fingers against the rock, and focused his mind on the firmament answered. He followed the fracture down through the floor of the gallery, past the seam, into rock that grew hotter at every fathom as it plunged into the earth. The flame showed him the rest. Far below, water lay under the weight of the mountain, driven upward by the heat beneath it, and it had found the old fracture the baetylus had grown along and climbed it. The dig had followed the seam. The seam had led them to the channel. The last cut had opened it.

Nine fathoms down, the channel narrowed to the width of his hand.

He could have closed the whole fracture at once, from top to bottom, but the water would only have gone looking for another way up, and these mountains held more than enough of them. Instead he went to the narrow place and closed that, drawing the stone together across the channel and holding it until it was as sound as the rock around it. Then he worked upward a little at a time and filled the fracture behind it.

The hiss thinned and stopped. Along the left wall, the running water slowed, broke into beads, and stood.

It had taken less time than the Warden's account of it.

Hades lifted his hand from the wall. The gallery was silent except for the tick of cooling stone. He turned his attention to the overseers' props.

Not one of them stood near the fracture. They had been set to carry the roof, and the roof had never been the danger. Hades drew the stone out from under the nearest, and it toppled and struck the floor. He did the same to the next, and the next, until none were standing. The gallery held. None of them had been holding anything.

Above him, the seam had begun to dim.

Near the rupture, where the wall had cracked but not fallen, someone had scored the rock with the point of a pick: a short, deep line cut across the end of a crack. A hand's width farther on, where the crack had continued, there was a second line. Then a third.

Hades followed them along the wall in the failing light.

Each mark had been cut where the crack ended on the day it was made. Three marks, three days. The crack had grown a hand's width each day, and each day someone had come back to measure it.

The overseers had called it settling, but settling did not move a hand's width a day.

The marks had been made by hand. Whoever cut them had not been permitted Dynamis, and had not used it. They were evenly spaced and cut to the same depth, each line square to the crack it measured, with a care the props behind him had never been given. He had seen that exactness before, in ink. Requests had come from Poseidon's court for baetylus from the underworld, every measure specified to a degree he had once thought excessive. He had questioned the quantities, and concluded that they were justified.

He laid his palm beside the third mark and read the stone again, the crack and the rock around it. Every mark was right.

Unsigned, they were scratches on a wall. Kleitos would have questions, and would want to know whom to ask.

Beneath the third mark, he laid a fingertip against the wall and drew it along the stone. The rock gave way ahead of his touch. The letters came up clean-edged, cut deeper than the pick marks above them.

DAMNAMENEUS

He cut nothing else.

Above him, the last of the color went out of the seam.

Then he carved the face of the wall, marks and name together, and pried it loose from the mountain.

The yard had emptied while he was below. The men who had worked along the outer supports were gone, and the carts still stood beside the tracks where they had been abandoned, their loads untouched. Beyond the processing houses, the vents breathed their pale columns into the air above the settlement.

Minos waited at the shaft-head.

Hades lowered the slab into the nearest empty cart. The axles creaked, and the cart settled on its wheels.

Beside Minos stood the board where the overseers posted the day's assignments, a broad panel of slate ruled into rows. The names of the condemned ran down it in chalk, wiped and rewritten with each shift, each beside its station. One line had been cut into the slate.

Damnameneus of Telchine. The deepest workings, without privilege of rank or former occupation. By order of the king.

Hades read it.

He knew the words. He had spoken them in the Audience Chamber. They had concerned the man's labor.

Minos followed his glance to the board and said nothing.

"This goes to Kleitos. Tell him it was read by hand."

The Judge looked at the slab, at the three marks along its face and the name beneath them.

"Tonight, my lord?"

"Tonight. Under guard, through the Pyle. Send the overseers' records with it."

"It will be done."

Minos did not move to go. For the second time that day, he hesitated.

"Shall the prisoner be told, my lord?"

"He has been absolved."

Minos inclined his head, accepting the answer.

Across the basin, lamps were coming on in the settlement, one window after another. He did not know which of them was Damnameneus's.