Chapter 7: The Mine

The silence that followed Merchant Gary’s departure was heavy, broken only by the distant, muffled shouting of his caravan guards down in the courtyard. They were unloading the heavy sacks of wheat into the castle cellars.

Jack stood near his writing desk, staring at the empty wooden surface where his family’s silver had sat just minutes ago. His fingers tightened around the brass head of his cane. He had saved his people from immediate starvation, but the price had been absolute. The castle treasury was now completely bare.

“Twenty-four hours,” Jack whispered to the empty room.

That was how much time he had left on his promise to Giles and the villagers. If he did not deliver a massive, burning pile of coal to the village by tomorrow evening, they would take the carriage horses and abandon the valley. The grain he had just purchased would simply be loaded onto their handcarts and hauled south, leaving him to freeze to death alone in a grand, empty castle.

He could not afford to waste a single second.

Jack hobbled over to his wardrobe, pulling the oak doors open. Inside, Rusty, Dusty, and Bones stood perfectly rigid in the darkness, their blank eye sockets staring forward.

“We are going down,” Jack commanded mentally, sending the thought along the three thin, grey threads anchored to his chest. “We have work to do.”

The skeletons stepped out of the wardrobe in a coordinated sequence. Jack dragged the bear-skin rug aside, pulled the iron ring, and opened the stone trapdoor once more. The soothing draft of the crypts rushed up to greet him, immediately clearing the dry, stinging heat in his throat.

Descending the steep stairs was slightly easier this time. The cold mana radiating from the subterranean walls seemed to act like a physical brace for Jack’s weak legs, easing the sharp pain in his joints. Rusty led the way, holding the single, flickering tallow candle high to cast long, dancing shadows against the stone.

At the bottom of the steps, Jack turned away from the grand sarcophagi of his ancestors and led his small crew toward the rear storage alcoves.

This was where the castle’s old maintenance gear was kept. He moved past pile after pile of rotted leather harnesses and rusted horse-shoes until he found what he was looking for: a heavy wooden rack holding several old iron-headed pickaxes and a pair of flat, wide coal shovels.

The wooden shafts of the pickaxes were grey and dry, splitting with age, but the heavy iron heads were thick and solid.

“Dusty. Bones. Take these,” Jack ordered, pointing to the tools.

The giant skeleton stepped forward first. Bones wrapped his long fingers around the wood of a pickaxe. He lifted it with a single, effortless motion. Dusty took the second pickaxe, his crooked neck tilting as he gripped the handle with his left hand, his right hand still resting near the hilt of his rusted sword.

With their tools in hand, Jack led them to the deepest, most neglected corner of the crypts.

Here, the smooth, carved masonry of the tombs gave way to the dark bedrock of the mountain. The air was different in this section; it was thick, stale, and smelled faintly of sulfur.

Jack stopped in front of a weak, crumbling stone wall. It was made of rough, mismatched river stones held together by yellowing, dried mortar. It had been built quickly and hastily decades ago, blocking off a narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel that spiraled deeper into the earth.

According to the memories of the old John Frost-Grip, this was the direct link to the old coal mine. When the deep shafts collapsed and the toxic gases began to seep upward, the family had bricked up this passage to keep the suffocating drafts from filling the castle tombs.

“Bones,” Jack commanded mentally, focusing his mind on the heaviest of the three threads. “Break this wall down. Gently.”

The giant skeleton stepped forward, raising the pickaxe high above its skull. There was no hesitation, Bones simply swung.

CRACK.

The iron point of the pickaxe slammed directly into the center of the masonry. A shower of dry, yellow dust exploded outward, and two of the loose river stones shattered, falling to the floor with a heavy clack.

CRACK. CRACK.

Bones swung with a tireless, terrifying rhythm. Every strike was perfectly identical to the last, delivered with the mechanical precision of a watermill. Dusty joined in, his smaller frame swinging his pickaxe with equal vigor, though his crooked neck made his swings look slightly off-balance.

Within ten minutes, a wide, jagged breach had been torn through the center of the wall.

A heavy, dark opening yawned before them, leading down into a steep, descending tunnel. Almost instantly, a wave of warm, thick air rushed out of the hole.

Jack stepped forward, holding his candle toward the opening to see inside.

But the moment the candle flame crossed the threshold of the broken wall, something strange happened. The bright orange flame didn’t flicker or dance in a draft. Instead, it rapidly shrank, turning a dull, ghostly blue, before sputtering out entirely.

The dark rushed in, absolute and suffocating.

Jack took a single, instinctive breath, and his eyes immediately began to water. Something seemed to press down on his throat. The air was dead. It felt thick and greasy in his windpipe, completely devoid of life, carrying a choking stench of stagnant coal dust and old sulfur.

Choke-damp.

Jack scrambled backward, his cane clattering against the stone as he fell to his knees. He coughed violently, his chest heaving as he dragged the clean, cold death mana of the outer crypts back into his lungs to clear the poison. He sat on the floor, panting, his heart hammering wildly against his ribs.

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A human miner stepping into that tunnel would have dropped dead in less than three minutes, their lungs seizing up as they suffocated in the dark.

“Relight,” Jack gasped mentally, his head spinning.

Beside him, Rusty clicked his fingers. A tiny spark of grey mana flared from his bone tip, catching the wick of the tallow candle. The bright orange flame bloomed once more, illuminating Jack’s pale, sweaty face.

Jack looked at the dark tunnel, and then at his three skeletons.

Rusty, Dusty, and Bones stood perfectly still, their empty eye sockets staring into the suffocating blackness. They didn’t have lungs. They didn’t need to breathe, they didn’t have eyes to sting from the sulfur, and the dead air of the choke-damp vein was entirely harmless to their empty ribcages.

“The perfect miners,” Jack whispered, a cold, triumphant feeling swelling in his chest.

He stood up, brushing the stone dust from his trousers, and leaned on his cane.

“Rusty, Dusty, Bones,” Jack commanded, his mental voice ringing clear and sharp through the spiritual links. “Enter the shaft. Go down until you find the black coal seam. Use the pickaxes to dig out the hard, shiny stones. Pile them here, on this side of the broken wall.”

The three skeletons turned in unison.

Dusty and Bones stepped through the jagged breach first, their ivory bones vanishing into the thick, suffocating darkness of the coal tunnel. Rusty followed, carrying the candle holder to provide a faint, steady light for their work, though they didn’t truly need it to see.