He, Rodgard and Melowin set about moving the rubble from the main entrance. It was tedious but steady work, and each time they’d cleared a metre or so, a couple of the miners would scurry in and set up a support frame to hold up the ceiling. The passage they were creating was only about a metre wide and a little more than that high – an uncomfortable height for a salas to try and walk through, and not much better for the humans. Outside the mine, Ashd and Mergh used their claws to move the debris away from the entrance, kicking it to the side to keep it out of the way.
They set lanterns along the passage, one every five metres or so, which left it fairly dim for the humans, but provided plenty of light for the salases to see by.
Once they reached the rear wall of the entrance cave, they ran into a problem. “A slab of the ceiling has come down,” Koradan explained to Mitch and Best, holding the lantern up as well as he could. Here, there was a bit more space, a larger chamber where the roof had held when the earthquake hit, allowing all three of them to stand upright and assess the damage. “We could get the vreki to move the slab, but if we do, I think there’s a fair risk of more of the ceiling coming down, which would make getting past this point even harder.”
The two men stood and stared at the slab for a long moment, and Koradan made no attempt to interrupt them. He wasn’t by any means claustrophobic, but being buried alive inside a mine was still a nightmare that he’d rather not face. And so, as eager as he was to reach the trapped men, he was just as eager to follow proper procedure to make sure they had a secure exit route.
“The right side of the slab is touching the ceiling,” Mitch said, after a long moment of thought. “But the left side is lower. And it looks like there’s already a hairline crack in it. Bring the light over.”
They all crowded in to have a closer look, and sure enough, there was a thin crack running down the edge of the slab. “If we can chip away this section and move it, but leave the rest in place, we should be able to wriggle past into the rest of the tunnel.”
Doing so would create a space only about two feet wide and high – only just big enough for Koradan to slide through. “That would severely limit our ability to move any more debris out of the tunnel,” Koradan said.
“Right now, we don’t even know how much of the tunnel has collapsed,” Best pointed out. “Perhaps the best thing for now would be to move this section and then see what we can see behind it?”
It was as sound a plan as any other, so the two men left and Rodgard came in with chisels and hammers, and he and Koradan chipped away at the slab until the left section fell free. “Fuck me, it’s going to take a vreki to drag this thing out of here,” Rodgard said, scowling at the chunk of rock. It probably weighed half a tonne, and with the narrow space, he and Rodgard would struggle to move it more than a foot or two.
Koradan shrugged. “Then let’s get a rope around it and get one of them to drag it out.”
Koradan blinked as he emerged from the tunnel a few minutes later, relaying the news to the miners. Rodgard took the end of a long rope in to secure it around the rock, and then Mergh carefully dragged it out, she and Rodgard working together as a seamless unit via their telepathic link, despite the fact that they couldn’t see each other.
It had been a while since he was outside the cave, and Koradan took the time to look around and see how everyone else was doing. Over on the left side of the canyon, Lynette was treating the cuts and bruises of the miners. Up the far end, near the exit towards the road, Koradan could see Alti leading Vernon slowly out of the gorge, Vernon’s arm now splinted and wrapped in a bandage. Two women were with them, and Koradan guessed that they would have been Vernon and Alti’s wives. The plan was for Vernon to head back to the village and rest, though it would be a long, slow walk back down the mountain for him.
A few of the miners and some of the younger and fitter women were preparing a steady supply of planks and supports to prop up the tunnel as they opened it up, but the majority of the villagers had nothing to do, leaving them to stand around idly, gawking at the vreki or offering encouragement on the progress made at the mine entrance.
But given the situation, there was no chance of any of them wanting to be anywhere else, regardless of how useful they were currently being. A sizable chunk of their village was still trapped underground, and even if they’d gone back to the village, Koradan suspected that none of them would have been able to do any useful work, too caught up in their fears and imagining every dire scenario coming to pass up on the mountain.
The idea brought to mind the thought of what was happening back in Chalandros, about the crowds of people swarming around the gate, each of them desperate for a chance at survival, however slim the odds.
For Koradan, that’s what this was really about. If they could convince the humans that an alliance with the ‘demons’ was beneficial to them, they had something to build upon, a place from which to take another step in the right direction, a chance to save another handful of their people from certain death.
“I owe you an apology,” a voice said from beside him, and Koradan turned in surprise to see Lynette standing beside him. He hadn’t heard her approach. He glanced over to where she’d been working on her patients and saw that the last of them had finished being treated. “I was rude to you this morning,” Lynette said, not quite able to look at him. “You were right. You have saved five of our men’s lives, and you’re working very hard on saving some more. And I am grateful for that. Even if none of the men down there are my direct family, they are all friends and neighbours, people I’ve known for years. Every one of them that we lose will leave a hole in our village. It’s just that… It’s very difficult to reconcile…” She turned away, her lips pressed together tightly. “This is not what I expected when demons landed in our village,” she tried again, once she’d gained a little control of herself. “It’s been an adjustment.”
“I understand,” Koradan said. To be honest, he was disappointed with how firmly Lynette was clinging to her old views, but even this was a courageous attempt to move beyond her own prejudices. And he was grateful for the effort. “Change is never easy.”
“Koradan!” Rodgard called from inside the cave. “Come and look at this!”
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” he said to Lynette.
“Sure,” she replied, with a smile that was less forced than most of hers had been lately. “Go do your thing.”
Back inside the cave, Koradan shimmied along on his knees until he reached the section of the cave that had just been cleared. “It looks like there’s a reasonably long section of the tunnel that’s free from here on,” Rodgard said, shoving his lantern as far into the gap as he could reach. “Listen to this.” He picked up a small rock and tossed it down the tunnel. It clattered away, bouncing once, twice, then skittering to a stop. From the faint echoes that came back at them, it sounded like the tunnel was not just long, but wide.
“Sounds like a good section of the tunnel is still intact,” Koradan said. “But there’s got to be another blockage between here and the men, or they’d be up here by now.”
“Hello!” Rodgard yelled into the tunnel. They both waited, holding their breath, but there was no reply.
“Maybe they’re too far down,” Koradan said.
“Maybe they’re already dead,” Rodgard replied.
“I have an idea,” Koradan said. “Toss me that hammer.” Rodgard did, and Koradan found a solid section of the rock wall. He tapped the hammer against it three times, hard and loud. The pair of them sat absolutely still, waiting, listening…
Tap, tap, tap…
“Gods above!” Rodgard crowed, happier than Koradan had seen him since they’d left Iddishmeil. “Did you hear that?”
“I heard it. Wait a second. Be quiet,” Koradan said, then he tapped again, four hits this time.
