Chapter 28: The Shrinking Pile

The cellar beneath the castle was usually a quiet place, filled only with the faint scratching of mice and the smell of damp earth. But lately, it had become the busiest room in the entire estate.

Jack slowly descended the stone steps. The iron door at the bottom was propped wide open. Inside the large, vaulted storage room, Giles was standing with a piece of charcoal in his hand, making tally marks on a wooden board.

The big carpenter looked tired, but it was the good kind of tired—the exhaustion of a man who was building something rather than waiting to die.

“Good morning, Giles,” Jack said, stepping into the dim light of the cellar lanterns.

“Morning, Lord Jack,” Giles replied, lowering his charcoal board. He gestured toward the back of the room. “I was just doing the daily count before the men arrive to haul the day’s rations.”

Jack looked at the back wall.

A few weeks ago, this room had been packed floor-to-ceiling with bulging burlap sacks of high-grade coal. It had looked like an insurmountable mountain of fuel. The villagers had wept at the sight of it.

Now, the mountain was a small hill.

There were perhaps fifteen sacks left. The empty space in the cellar was glaringly obvious.

“It is shrinking fast,” Jack noted, keeping his expression neutral.

“Too fast, My Lord,” Giles sighed, rubbing his thick beard. “I am not complaining, you understand. The heat is a blessing. But the quantity is starting to worry me. The greenhouse furnace burns day and night to keep the soil warm. Barnaby’s forge is roaring constantly to make the iron grates and brackets for the new cabins. And speaking of the cabins…”

Giles tapped his charcoal against the wooden board.

“The first Winter Cabin was a masterpiece,” Giles continued. “It keeps four families sweltering hot using only a handful of coal. But we are building four more cabins. Once they are all finished and the Great Hall is completely emptied, we will have five separate hypocaust hearths running at the same time. The daily consumption is going to double.”

Jack nodded slowly. Giles was a practical man. He could see the bottom of the barrel approaching.

“At the current rate, Lord Jack, this ancestral reserve will be completely gone in less than two weeks,” Giles said, his voice dropping to a low, serious tone. “I have to ask. Is there another vault? Another hidden room of family coal?”

Jack looked at the small pile of sacks.

The truth was, there was no ancestral reserve. The coal sitting in this room had been frantically mined by Rusty, Dusty, and Bones over the course of a few incredibly nights in the deep, toxic veins beneath the crypts.

Jack could easily send the Night Shift skeletons back down into the dark to mine more. His core was stable, and his lungs were healed. He could manage the mental strain.

But the logistics of the cover story were breaking down.

Mining the coal wasn’t the bottleneck; hauling it was. Bringing tons of heavy black rock up through the narrow, winding stairs of the crypts and secretly arranging it in this cellar while the castle slept was a risky operation. If a villager woke up early and saw a skeletal hand dragging a sack through the lower corridors, Jack’s entire cover story would collapse.

More importantly, Jack needed to increase production to industrial levels. Fifteen skeletons working in secret could only do so much. He had forty able-bodied human villagers sitting around during the day who were desperate to earn their keep. He needed the humans to mine the coal.

But humans couldn’t mine the crypt vein. The deep shafts were flooded with deadly gas.

“I am worried, there is no second vault in the castle,” Jack said calmly.

Giles’s face fell. The familiar shadow of winter panic briefly crossed his eyes. “Then… what do we do when this runs out? We will freeze in our new cabins.”

“We will not freeze,” Jack promised, raising his cane slightly. “We are going to go directly to the source. The reserve in this cellar was just to buy us time to prepare. I have a plan to secure a permanent supply.”

“The old Frost-Grip mine?” Giles asked, his eyes widening in alarm. “My Lord, you can’t. The men will not go down there. The upper veins collapsed years ago, and the air turned foul. It is filled with choke-damp. A man breathes that air, and his lungs stop working. He just falls asleep and never wakes up.”

“I am aware of the danger, Giles,” Jack said smoothly. “I am not asking the men to go down there today. Just keep building the Winter Cabins. Let me worry about the mountain.”

Giles hesitated, but after everything the young lord had achieved—the greenhouse, the armored mages, the warm floors—the carpenter simply nodded his head. “As you command, Lord Jack.”

Jack left the cellar and made his way back up to the main floor. He found Karen in the kitchens, scrubbing a wooden cutting board.

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“Karen, bring your coat,” Jack ordered. “We are taking a walk outside the walls.”

Karen looked surprised, quickly drying her hands. “Outside the walls? My Lord, it is bitterly cold today, and the snow is deep. Where are we going?”

“To the old coal mine,” Jack said.

Half an hour later, Jack and Karen were trudging up a narrow path on the side of the mountain, about a half-mile from the castle gates. The snow here was untouched, deep and difficult to walk through. Jack leaned heavily on his cane, taking his time, letting his healed lungs draw in the sharp, freezing air.

Karen walked closely beside him, looking nervously at the jagged rocks looming above them.

“I remember when the mine was closed,” Karen said quietly, her breath pluming in the air. “I was only a little girl. Your father ordered it sealed after twelve miners died in a single afternoon. They didn’t even scream. The bad air just rolled out of the deep tunnels and took them.”

“Choke-damp,” Jack muttered. It was an invisible gas that settled in unventilated shafts.

They reached a wide, flat clearing carved directly into the side of the mountain. At the back of the clearing was a massive opening in the rock face, framed by thick, rotting wooden support beams.

This was the main entrance to the Frost-Grip coal mine.

It was completely boarded up. Heavy planks were nailed horizontally across the entrance, forming a solid wooden wall. A faded sign with the Frost-Grip family crest was nailed to the center, bearing a harsh warning to stay away.