Silvana spoke in a low voice at Kang Mujin’s back as he moved to step into the passage.
“If the signal cuts out entirely, or if you haven’t come back by the time the sun sinks, I’m following you in.”
Kang Mujin gave a short nod.
Doria squatted in the shade of a boulder and glared at the mouth of the shaft. Ordinarily he would have had a word to add about everything from the mine’s timbering to the color of the ore, but now he only rubbed the haft of his traveling hammer with his thick hands.
“Ring it twice, loud, from inside. If a way needs opening, I’ll come.”
“I hope it won’t come to that.”
“Ahem. You don’t say that sort of thing in a mine. If it doesn’t cave in, count yourself lucky; if it does, you dig through properly.”
Kang Mujin lowered his body and went into the shaft.
Some twenty paces past the entrance the sunlight cut off, and in its place the red glow of ore-lamps hung along the walls licked faintly at the damp floor. The tunnel was narrow enough that two grown men could barely slip past each other, and the ceiling was so low that even Doria would have had to bend his back. Black mold had bloomed on the wooden supports, and in places the rock had pressed down and burst them, and that was not merely from long years of use. In their haste to chase the vein they had set the supports too far apart and left the water-seeping fissures unplugged; it was a structure that put the day’s output ahead of the lives of the people who cut the ore.
Kang Mujin laid his left hand against the wall.
The metal buried in the stone came pushing into his palm. The iron vein ran downward at a slant as a dark red band, and beside it were poor-quality pyrite and a small amount of copper. Broken chisels and worn pick blades lay scattered on the floor, and deeper in he felt dozens of iron shackles, each of them moving at its own speed. Fast ones, slow ones, ones that hardly moved at all. Following the tremor of the chains, the footsteps and pick-strokes of people reached his fingertips, and there were more of them than what he had heard from Silvana.
Holding his breath, Kang Mujin advanced to the first fork. From the right came the sound of cart wheels scraping along rails; from the left, a rough voice and the crack of a whip splitting the air.
“Fill three carts before the next shift change. Any specimen that falls short of the standard is cut from the food ration.”
The tone was calm, and for that very reason the content of the order came through all the more clearly.
Kang Mujin pressed himself into a hollow in the wall and looked in. Two demons with red skin and horns curving backward stood beneath a torch, wearing plate-scale armor stamped on the chest with the same emblem he had seen in the forest. The mark of a horned tower with three lines of chain descending beneath it.
One demon shoved his boot against the shoulder of a kneeling old human. The old man gripped the broken haft of a pick and tried to rise, but the shackles at his ankles were linked too short for him to straighten up properly.
“My tool broke.”
“Which is why your productivity has fallen.”
“Give me a new pick and I’ll fill the quota.”
“The loss of the tool is on you as well.”
The demon loosened the whip at his waist.
Kang Mujin felt the broken pick blade lying on the floor. The grain of the iron was coarse and the carbon had pooled to one side, but if it had been properly heated and hammered even once before use, it would never have broken like that.
The instant the whip rose, Kang Mujin crooked his fingers.
The pick blade sprang up off the floor and struck the whip’s handle, and the demon’s hand bent sideways, and before he could even groan, Kang Mujin walked out of the darkness.
“Who’s there?”
The other demon drew a curved blade. In the moment the edge cleared the scabbard, Kang Mujin read the thickness of that iron and the state of its tempering; the spine was hardened too far, and invisible cracks had spread through the tang.
When he spread his palm, the curved blade stopped dead in the demon’s hand. The edge shuddered as his opponent forced strength into his arm, but when Kang Mujin pushed the grain of the metal the other way, the tang snapped with a short bursting sound and the blade fell to the floor.
Kang Mujin closed the distance and struck the demon’s solar plexus with his hammer. The plate-scale armor crumpled inward and his opponent coughed out his breath and went down, and the demon holding the whip reached for the horn at his belt.
The iron fittings of the belt twisted suddenly, and while the ring binding the horn tightened and trapped his fingers, Kang Mujin stepped straight in and drove the hammer’s haft up under his jaw.
When both demons had fallen to the floor, the old man looked up at Kang Mujin, and between the hollows around his eyes and his cracked lips it was hard to guess his age.
“You… you’re not a guard?”
Instead of answering, Kang Mujin crouched in front of the old man’s ankles. The shackles were caked stiff with old blood and ore dust, and instead of a keyhole the lock had a wedge driven into it, a structure made to be fastened fast and not easily undone.
He pressed the head of the wedge with his thumb.
The iron rang faintly as it was pushed inward, and the teeth of the shackle came apart, and Kang Mujin spread it open to either side so as not to touch the wounds.
“Can you walk?”
The old man looked down at his stripped ankles, then braced himself on the wall and stood.
“If I have to walk.”
“The way out is behind you. Don’t go out yet. Pass the word quietly to the others.”
The old man’s lips moved but no sound came, and instead he reached for the fallen demon’s curved blade.
Kang Mujin put his foot on the blade first.
“Leave that behind.”
“And when those things wake up?”
Kang Mujin ran his hand over the demons’ armor, and the edges of the iron plates stretched and interlocked, wrapping around their arms and legs, then fastened themselves to the rails on the floor. The two demons were bound to the cart track, armor and all.
“They won’t get up.”
The old man withdrew into the darkness, looking back at them again and again.
Kang Mujin set his hand to the wall once more, and the iron of the entire shaft came to him more sharply than before. The swords and spears the guards carried numbered thirteen in all, five bunches of keys hung at their belts, and three crossbows were gathered over toward the surface workshop. But the slaves’ shackles numbered more than forty, and Kang Mujin pushed his senses out a little further. Beyond the southern ridge, at a spot clearly removed from all the other signals, a single spear stood alone, and from how little it moved it seemed to be a sentry holding a watch post outside the approach. It appeared unconnected to what was happening inside the shaft, so Kang Mujin pushed that signal into a corner of his mind and focused inward again.
Among them, one was moving with unusual violence.
It was the lower left shaft. Each time the chain drew taut and slackened, one shackle wrenched harder than the rest, and beside it three spearheads swung quickly.
Kang Mujin quickened his pace.
As the slope steepened, the air grew fouler. Water, sweat, and the smell of rusted iron clung together, and on the floor the bloodstains had dried black along with the ore dust, and when he reached the chamber below, curses and a beast’s growl came layered over each other.
A man with the ears of a wolf was on his knees.
Beneath his tangled ash-gray hair one ear had been torn, and whip marks lay layered across his bare torso. A thick iron collar had been locked around his neck and the chains at his hands and feet ran to a stake at the center of the chamber, and even so, three demon soldiers ringed him in a half-circle, unwilling to step closer.
A broken spear shaft lay at the man’s feet.
“Lower your head, slave.”
The demon standing in front pressed the point of his spear against the man’s shoulder, and instead of ducking, the man bared his teeth.
“You can’t even speak to me without a leash on me.”
The spearhead stabbed into his shoulder and blood ran, but the man did not give ground; he pushed himself forward until the chains pulled tight.
“Come close, just once. I’ll tear your throat out.”
The demon drew back the spear and then kicked him in the chest. As his body went over backward, the black brand on his right wrist was exposed. The emblem seared in with iron was the same as the mark on the armor, and over a long-healed scar there were traces of it being burned in again. Each time the mine and the trading company changed hands, they had stamped their mark of ownership on the same spot.
Kang Mujin’s hand wrapped around the hammer’s haft.
One of the demons caught the sense of a presence and turned his head.
“Who—”
Kang Mujin stamped on the floor.
The old iron track crossing the chamber bucked, and three fastening spikes tore out of the stone and flew like arrows, pinning the spear shaft and wrist guard of the demon who had turned first into the wall.
The other two rushed him at the same time.
In the cramped chamber the spears were long. The point on the left went for his chest first, and the spear on the right came in at an angle to cut off his retreat, but Kang Mujin slipped half a step inside and shoved the first shaft aside with his elbow. At the same time he dragged the iron of the spearhead downward until the tip drove into the floor, and stepping on the shaft, he struck the back of his opponent’s hand with the hammer.
The spear fell with the sound of bone breaking.
The second demon’s blade grazed his side. Kang Mujin twisted his body, but his outer coat was torn open in a long line and the cold edge scored shallowly across his skin, and his opponent did not miss the opening, pulling back the spear to thrust again.
Kang Mujin did not seize the spearhead barehanded; he held his palm upright and felt the iron inside it. The poor-quality iron had been forced straight, its grain stretched to one side, so he gathered his strength at the weakest point and twisted. The spearhead bent sideways and the demon’s stance collapsed, and Kang Mujin’s hammer traveled by way of the elbow joint and came to rest beside his temple.
Avoiding the falling body, Kang Mujin went straight to the demon pinned to the wall. When his opponent opened his mouth, the gorget of the armor rose up and shut his jaw, and when the hammer’s haft dug into his solar plexus the demon’s eyes rolled back and he went limp.
The chamber fell quiet.
The wolf beastkin man glared up at Kang Mujin where he had fallen, and his eyes were a tawny brown, and though hunger had hollowed his cheeks, his gaze alone had not dulled.
“Why is a human here?”
“I came to undo chains.”
“Is there such a thing as a human who fights among demons?”
“I am not a demon.”
Kang Mujin sat down in front of the man and examined the iron collar first. Barbs were set on the inside to bite into the flesh, built so that the harder it was pulled the wider the wounds would open, and while spreading the iron itself was not difficult, forcing it all at once would have let the rusted barbs scrape away meat.
“Don’t move.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Undo it.”
Kang Mujin read the temperature and thickness of the collar with his fingertips and divided his strength into several strands. He loosened the interlocked section first, curled the tips of the barbs inward into rounds, and then slowly spread the ring open along the curve of the neck.
Cold iron dropped to the floor.
The man did not rub his neck. Instead he watched in silence as the chains at his wrists and ankles came free one after another, and only after the last link fell did he open and close his fingers a few times.
“What is your name?”
“Why ask a slave for a name?”
“Because you aren’t a slave.”
The man’s ears moved just slightly, and he ran his eyes in turn over Kang Mujin’s face, the fallen demons, and the opened shackles at his feet.
“Rakan.”
“I am Kang Mujin.”
“So, Kang Mujin. You mean to leave the doors open and tell everyone to run?”
“That is my intention.”
Rakan let out a short breath as if the whole thing were absurd, and it was a sound closer to a cough than a laugh.
“Do you know how many are locked up in here?”
“Forty-two.”
This time the look in Rakan’s eyes changed.
“How would you know that?”
“Iron cannot hide.”
Kang Mujin rose to his feet.
“If you can move, gather the others. And find out how many can fight.”
Rakan braced himself on the wall and stood as well. His legs, so long bound in chains, buckled once, but he took a spear shaft from a fallen demon and leaned on it like a staff.
“You talk like you’re giving orders.”
“It is a request.”
“Same difference.”
Grumbling, Rakan nonetheless headed straight for the adjoining shaft, and a few steps on, without turning around, he asked:
“And if we’re caught while running?”
“I will see that you are not caught.”
“How am I supposed to believe that?”
Kang Mujin gathered the weapons of the fallen demons and pressed them with his hand, and the spearheads and curved blades bent and fused into a single lump.
“Watch, and then decide.”
Rakan pricked up his ears for a moment, then walked on.
Kang Mujin came out of the chamber and swept the iron of the shaft. The guards he had put down first were still bound to the track and the force above ground was not moving, but perhaps because the shift change was drawing near, two bunches of keys far off had begun moving in the same direction.
There was not much time.
He went to the nearest shackle first. In every shaft, humans, beastkin, and horned demi-humans lay collapsed before the ore face or stood holding picks, and when Kang Mujin appeared, some backed away and some hid their shackles, calling it a demon’s trap. Kang Mujin did not explain at length; he bent his knees, examined the wounds, and opened the iron.
From a child whose wrist was swollen he split the ring in half and drew it off to the side, and the old man’s shackle, where skin and rust had fused together, he washed clear of caked blood with poured water before undoing it. The locking mechanisms were all different, but the workmanship was uniformly crude, so they could be undone without keys, though to open them without hurting anyone he had to vary the direction of his force every time.
By around the twentieth, sweat was running at Kang Mujin’s temples. The blessing of iron told him the condition of the metal, but what to change and how was his own judgment to make, and with every ring the thickness of the flesh and the placement of the wounds differed, so that the slightest misapplied force could damage bones already weakened. He hurried, but he did not rush his hands.
“Next.”
When Rakan came back leading people, there was more strength in his voice than before.
“Twenty-three who can walk. Eleven who can move if supported. The rest have to be carried. As for those fit to fight… seven, counting me.”
Behind him stood human miners, boar beastkin, and demi-human women with small horns, and most of them held picks or broken hafts, but each gripped a weapon in their own way.
Kang Mujin spoke as he undid the last shackle.
“Not fighting comes first. Send the wounded to the fork near the entrance first.”
“And leave the guards?”
“The relief shift is coming down.”
“Then we have to stop them.”
“If we clash here, our line of retreat is blocked.”
Rakan pulled back his lip and showed his teeth, but did not argue, seeming to judge that Kang Mujin knew better than he did, who did not know the layout of the shafts.
“So what are you going to do?”
Kang Mujin looked down at the rails in the floor. Ore carts loaded with rock stood on the incline that ran up to the sorting yard above, and though the braking gear was rusted, the axles themselves were still serviceable. If the guards inside the shaft gathered in one place, the way could be blocked.
“I need to make a noise.”
Kang Mujin gathered the chains he had undone. Chains of differing lengths crawled up off the floor, threaded between the cart axles and the supports and wound themselves tight, and he straightened out two of the brake irons with his hands and left only the last one engaged.
“Move the people. If there’s a loud noise from above, get against the wall.”
“And you?”
“I’ll call the remaining guards.”
Rakan blocked his path.
“You mean to do it all alone?”
“The passage is narrow.”
“So am I.”
Rakan adjusted his grip on the spear shaft with his wounded shoulder, and his legs were trembling just from standing, but there was no sign of him backing down.
Kang Mujin looked at him for a moment, then picked up a short curved blade from a fallen demon, and the balance of the blade was poor and the grip was small for Rakan’s hand, but it was the best of what they had. He ran his fingers along the spine, pressing the fine cracks closed, and handed it to Rakan.
“Only hold off the ones coming from behind.”
Rakan took the curved blade.
“Not an order, a request?”
“That is right.”
“Then I’ll put it down as a debt.”
From far off came the sound of iron plate underfoot, drawing nearer.
Kang Mujin pushed an empty ore cart out and set it in the middle of the shaft. A moment later four demon guards appeared beyond the bend in the passage, and behind them came two soldiers with crossbows.
The demon in the lead spotted the opened shackles.
“Sound the al—”
Kang Mujin struck the side of the cart with his hammer.
A deep, dull reverberation spread through the whole shaft, and at the same moment the iron rings holding the ore-lamps to the ceiling came loose and they dropped, and when the light went out the chamber sank into darkness in an instant.
Crossbow strings snapped.
Kang Mujin felt the two arrowheads and stretched out his hand. One buried itself in the cart’s side panel, but the other, its course not fully turned, grazed his arm, and hot pain spread, but he did not fall back and instead shoved the cart forward.
The guards planted their spears to block the wheels.
Kang Mujin released the chains wound around the axle, and the cart, unable to hold against its own weight, began to move down the incline, and with every jolt of the wheels against the rails it gathered speed.
“Get clear!”
The demons threw themselves into the side shafts, but the two in the lead could not get out and were driven along by the cart’s front panel into the loading bin at the end of the track.
Crash!
The rock rang and dust poured down from the ceiling, and a roar that must have carried outside went rolling far along the shaft. Within that vibration, Kang Mujin felt faintly that the signal of the lone spear hovering beyond the southern ridge suddenly wavered and then stopped where it was. As if a hand that had been gripping it had let go, the spear stood in place and moved no more, and it was an unfamiliar sensation, but the passage in front of him came first, so Kang Mujin did not hold on to that lingering trace and threw himself into the dust.
One fallen demon tried to draw the sword at his waist, but the scabbard had stuck fast to his armor and would not move, and when the hammer came down on his wrist a scream broke out.
A soldier who had taken cover in a side shaft thrust his spear.
Kang Mujin tilted his head aside to avoid the edge. As the point grazed his cheek he drove in under the shaft, shoved his shoulder into his opponent’s chest, then hooked the hammer’s head on the knee guard and pulled. As the demon lost his balance, Rakan rushed him from behind.
The curved blade bit in between the armor and the arm, and Rakan could not drive it home because of his wounds, but he threw his body into it and pinned his opponent to the floor.
“You said to hold the rear!”
“You came forward.”
“This is the only way through!”
While Rakan was growling, the remaining crossbowman finished reloading, and the small sound of string and catch engaging rang out in the dark.
Kang Mujin read the direction, but Rakan was in the line of fire.
When he clenched his hand, the crossbow’s trigger bent and the bolt would not release. In the moment the soldier shook his weapon in confusion, a single arrow flew from the direction of the shaft entrance, punched through the body of the crossbow, and pinned it to the wall.
“Everyone, keep your heads down!”
Silvana’s voice rang out beyond the dust. A second arrow followed and skewered the shoulder of a charging demon, and Doria came running with his head nearly striking the low ceiling, swinging his traveling hammer.
“Ahem! That’s a mighty loud signal!”
His hammer knocked the last guard’s shield aside, and Kang Mujin went in through the opening and struck up under the breastplate, and the iron scales folded inward and the demon coughed out his breath and fell.
Kang Mujin immediately checked the metal around him.
There were no weapons moving in the nearby passages, and only after confirming that did he think again of the southern spear that had gone still earlier. The spear had been abandoned at the watch post, but the dagger at the sentry’s belt and the nails in his boots were receding quickly toward the southern outpost. What he had to take hold of at this moment were the more than forty people left in the darkness.
“There are forty-two in the lower shaft. Many are wounded.”
Silvana kept her bowstring from slackening as she searched the darkness, and whether because she had come straight in upon hearing the cart’s impact, her breathing was a little fast, though her voice had not lost its composure.
“I subdued the three guards at the entrance. It was before the sun had sunk, but I judged that sound to be the signal.”
“You did well.”
Doria looked back and forth between the wrecked cart and the buckled rails, then roughly stroked his beard.
“First craftsman I’ve seen use an ore cart for a signal. Pity about the axle.”
“It can be repaired.”
“Of course it has to be repaired.”
Grumbling, he headed straight down toward the lower shaft. When he found an old human coming up with a wounded man on his back, he wordlessly took the load and the pick in his place, and Silvana alternated between the elven tongue and the common tongue of the continent to guide the people toward the entrance.
Rakan leaned against the wall and caught his breath. The tip of the curved blade in his hand rested on the floor, and cold sweat ran from his forehead down his jaw and seeped into the old shackle scar on his neck.
When Kang Mujin approached, he raised his head.
“Were there guards outside too?”
“It seems there were.”
“And that elf and dwarf are on your side?”
“They are my companions.”
Rakan watched Silvana and Doria moving the wounded for a while, then flipped over his own fallen shackle with the tip of the curved blade.
“Is this really finished?”
“Here, it is.”
“There are other mines.”
Rakan’s voice dropped lower, and he raised his head to look into the dark interior of the shaft.
“I was sold here from somewhere else. Before I came here the cages were full of people there too. It isn’t only demons. There are those who hand people over for money, and those who look the other way on the roads.”
Kang Mujin did not interrupt him.
One shackle ending did not mean the whole chain vanished. The plate-scale armor of this mine, the numbered weapons, the fixed shifts and quotas were all traces of a larger organization, and the one sentry who had slipped away soundlessly a short while ago would carry this news somewhere into that organization.
Kang Mujin picked up the shackle from the floor, and Rakan’s blood and hair had dried to the inside of it, and beside the lock the emblem of the horned tower was engraved small.
“Tell me later what you know.”
Rakan narrowed his eyes.
“Later?”
“First, let us get out.”
Kang Mujin turned and took the nearest wounded person onto his back, and it was a small horned child, so light that the weight was less than a sack of ore. On the child’s wrist the mark where the shackle had been stripped away remained an angry red.
The people filed out of the shaft in a line. Those who had been long in the dark actually slowed their steps when the light of the entrance came into view, and several covered their eyes and sank down where they stood. Yet no one wept loudly or cheered; they only breathed in the outside air, checked one another’s faces, and ran their hands over their freed wrists, again and again.
Kang Mujin stayed in the shaft until the last, checking the movement of iron, and he gathered the fallen demons’ weapons in one place and bent them together, and fixed their armor to the track so their arms and legs could not move. Where the mine’s supports were missing their metal reinforcements he cut lengths of broken rail and set them in as splints, for having freed them, he could not leave the shaft to collapse and swallow the people.
When he came out, the sun hung on the western ridge.
Silvana was binding a wounded person’s injuries and looked up at Kang Mujin, and Doria sat on a boulder beside the entrance knocking the dust off his hammer, and Rakan stood a little apart, watching the mine. The mark of the collar remained on his neck and the repeated brand on his wrist, but at least there was no longer any iron fastened to his body.
Kang Mujin took from his pocket the chain link he had picked up in the forest and the ring he had just undone in the mine, and they were iron of different sizes, but the same emblem was stamped on both.
Doria looked down at them and twisted his beard.
“Made in the same place.”
“Yes.”
Silvana’s hands stopped in the middle of tying a bandage.
“Does that mean it doesn’t end with one mine?”
Kang Mujin held the two rings stacked together, and the cold iron knocked against itself in his hand with a low sound.
“The chain runs on.”
When he looked back at the mine, the emblem of the horned tower carved into the rock above the entrance sank black into the evening shadow.
“I will follow it to the end.”
Where the sentry who had slipped away to the south had gone, no one knew. Wherever the news he carried arrived, before this night was out someone would learn that this mine had been emptied.
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