“I know it feels shitty,” Mitch spoke up, “but now that they’ve got food and water, it’s not such a harsh thing to leave them there for one more night. I’ll go in and let them know, of course, but Morgan’s right; we’re tired. And working in a collapsed mine when we’re tired is how accidents happen. We need clear heads and rested bodies, and then we can start again first thing in the morning.”
“We should leave a couple of sentries here overnight,” Best suggested. “Just in case there’s any more rock falls, or whatever. I’d feel better knowing someone was here, watching over things.” Perhaps it was a purely psychological need, but Lynette was inclined to agree.
“I’ll stay,” Charrice volunteered immediately. “Joen’s in that tunnel, and I’m not going to sleep anyway, without him by my side.” No doubt the young woman was terrified of becoming a widow so early in her marriage.
“I’ll stay as well,” Best said. For an aging man, it couldn’t have been an easy decision. Sleeping on hard ground would play havoc with his joints and his back. But it was one of the most feasible options, for one simple reason, and that was that there were very limited alternatives for who else might be able to stay. One of the women might volunteer, but most of them knew very little about the details and dangers of mining, meaning they would be little help if anything did happen overnight. And more to the point, a lot of them had children who would need feeding and bathing and putting to bed, with plenty of consolation about why Daddy wasn’t home again tonight. Aside from that, all of the miners had already been stuck up here for a day and a half, and expecting any of them to stay longer seemed unreasonable.
“Thank you,” Mitch said to them both. “We’ll leave what food and water we have left for you, and bring more in the morning. There’s not much wood for a fire, but there’s plenty of oil for the lamps.”
“Here, take my coat,” Morgan said, handing it to Charrice. “It’ll get colder overnight.” That inspired a flurry of temporary gifts, gloves and hats and spare bits of clothing to help both volunteers make it through the night a little more comfortably.
“Right then. All set?” Morgan asked, holding up her lantern. It was getting close to full darkness by now, and the trip back down the road was going to be a slow and tedious one.
“We’ll meet you back at the bottom,” Koradan said, he and his men gathered off to one side. “Flying down will be a lot easier for the vreki than walking.” The vreki were waiting patiently near the exit to the road, looming huge and ominous in the darkness. Their eyes reflected the lamp light in eerie red beacons, giving them a truly demonic look.
“Can the vreki fly at night?” Paul asked. “They’re not going to crash into the cliffs or anything, are they?”
“Not at all,” Koradan said with a faint smile. “First of all, vreki have excellent night vision, but they also use echolocation when they’re close to cliffs or rock formations. They can navigate at night better than you could in full daylight.” Well, weren’t his fearsome creatures just full of surprises?
“Cool,” Paul said, in a tone Lynette was not at all thrilled to be hearing. Paul was becoming far too intrigued by the flying lizards, and Lynette feared it was about to become a full blown obsession.
“We’ll let you go first, then, and we’ll follow you down,” Morgan said. The salases and the vreki made a hasty exit, and then the rest of the village clustered together around the few lamps they had to guide the way, beginning a slow, careful shuffle back down the mountain.
For the most part, Lynette walked without paying too much attention to her surroundings. She’d walked this road hundreds of times in the nine years since she’d moved here, and by following the trudging footsteps of Ann, walking directly in front of her, there was little chance of a misstep. Her mind was occupied rehashing all the strange events of the past day, and it was hard to believe it had been less than twenty-four hours since their troubling guests had landed in the paddock adjacent to the village. Not even one day ago, if someone had told her she would be making deals with demons and treating them for injuries, she’d have laughed herself into next week.
But as they reached the lower section of the road where it levelled out on the short stretch from the mountain to the village, snippets of conversation caught her attention.
“…they saved their lives, yes. But that means the demons now have claim to the men’s souls.” Ann was muttering in a harsh whisper, trying to avoid eavesdroppers and doing a poor job of it.
Walking next to her, Hazel was listening with polite scepticism. “Really? Where did you learn that?” she asked, a direct challenge to Ann’s nonsense.
“Well, it’s obvious!” Ann replied. “And once all the men are free, the demons can claim whatever they want. And if the men don’t give it to them, they lose their souls. Honestly, they would be better off dead than in that situation.”
“How terrible,” Hazel said, her sarcasm clear to Lynette’s ears, but somehow, Ann remained oblivious to it. “Whatever do you think they’ll ask for?”
“It could beanything,” Ann told her, sounding aghast. “They could turn them into slaves. They could ask for jewels or gold. They could force them to kill people. Any number of terrible things.”
Lynette’s lip rose in a silent snarl as she listened to the rubbish coming out of Ann’s mouth. Ann’s husband was still trapped down in the lower chamber, and while Lynette could sympathise with her anger and frustration at the lack of progress on that front, the woman’s conclusion seemed overly harsh. Was she honestly wishing her own husband dead? And aside from that, it seemed that the information she was spewing was completely made up. When Lynette had lived in Minia with Kai, she’d listened to numerous sermons from the Captain of the Guard about the dangers of demons and the evil they could inflict on people, but stealing souls had never been mentioned.
She was sorely tempted to interrupt the conversation and tell Ann that it was all bullshit… but the danger was that by merely dismissing people’s concerns, it would force them to be more clandestine in expressing their opinions, without changing their point of view in the slightest. Perhaps there was a better way to do things?
The trailing group of people finally trudged into the village, passing the blacksmith’s shop, and the communal cold store where the meat was hung in winter, and the first rows of houses with their neat gardens and chicken coops, the chickens all having put themselves to bed in their roosts now that it was dark.
Koradan and his men were waiting in the village square, having arrived long before the rest of them, and Lynette made a quick decision, acting on it before either she chickened out or the rest of the villagers wandered off back to their own houses.
“I have a proposal,” she announced loudly, holding her hand up for attention as she marched forward to stand near the salases. “These fine men have made a valiant effort to rescue our husbands and sons today,” she said, gesturing to the five of them. “And five families are once more whole, with the expectation of eight more following them tomorrow. So I propose that five families should volunteer to provide hospitality to the salases this evening. Dinner, and a bath, and a safe place to sleep for the night.” She swallowed hard, not at all certain of what she was about to say next, but determined to say it anyway, to present an example to the village. “I would be more than happy to host Koradan for the night, for his courageous efforts in saving Paul’s life. Are there four other families who would be as willing to show our appreciation?”
“Well, yes,” Mitch said, raising his hand immediately. “That’s a bloody easy decision for me. If it weren’t for these men, I’d be spending another night inside a rocky tomb. So, yes. I don’t care who comes to my house – figure it out amongst yourselves – but I can host one of you.”
A moment of silence followed, but after Mitch’s vehement approval of the idea, Lynette was suddenly far less concerned about people taking to the idea.
“Someone can come and have dinner with me,” Peter said. “I know there have been some rumours flying around about the intentions of these so-called ‘demons’. But I say if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. They’ve put in a hard day’s work to help us, so I think it’s fair play to help them in return. Is that all right with you, Raine?” he asked, turning to his daughter-in-law. Raine was married to Peter’s youngest son, Rex, and after the death of his wife, Peter had moved in with the pair of them. His other two sons had both left Varismont many years ago, seeking a more adventurous life than a mining village could provide.
“Perfectly fine with me,” Raine said. “Rex is alive. And I’ve been given a real hope that I’ll have him back by tomorrow evening. So one extra plate for dinner is no trouble for me.”
So that was three down, two to go.
“I, um… I could let someone stay with me, I suppose,” another voice spoke up, and Lynette was a little surprised to see Hetti raising her hand. “I have two young children,” she said to the salases, “so the evening might be a little disjointed. They’ll be quite upset that their father isn’t home again. But Markon would want me to be hospitable.”
