Redoubt by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey [Lackey, Mercedes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101597583
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2012-10-02T07:00:00+00:00

7

There were glimpses of eyes in the rock, the cold touch of a clawlike hand. Mags tried not to look, tried not to think about them. But he thought he could see them anyway. He knew who they belonged to, too, but he tried not to think of the name.

Jak. I was Jak.

He could almost, but not quite, hear the name being whispered. He chipped away at the rock in a cold sweat. He knelt in the shaft just as he always did, rock just a few finger lengths from his nose, his knees fitted into smooth hollows that he himself had painstakingly cut out. After all, the Cole boys were only listening for the sounds of rock being cut, and a little work in making smooth places for your legs to fit now meant a lot less pain later. His lamp, strapped to his forehead, cast a dim light on the rock face in front of him. One little flame, in that lamp, fed by oil, with a metal reflector behind it. You didn’t want the flame to burn too high, it’d burn the skin of your forehead. You turned it as low as you dared.

Except that meant shadows, and in the shadows, were the hints, the glints, of a pair of eyes.

Hungry eyes, the eyes of someone who had scrabbled for life and had it taken away from him anyway.

Jak. I was Jak.

“Leave me be,” Mags whispered. “Leave me be, I nivver hurt ye, I nivver took from ye. I nivver shoved ye t’edge of huddle i’ th’ col’. Leave me be. Go fin’ Bon. ‘E’s th’ ’un thet stole yer bread. Go bother Calli. She nobbled yer blanket.”

Around him, behind him in the darkness, came the sounds of tapping, and echoes of tapping. He had just begun his half-day down here, but of course, he was hungry already. They were all, always hungry. The porridge of barley and oats that they all got for their breakfast didn’t last for very long. Especially not when you were working as hard as you could, chipping away the rock. But he was used to that; in fact, the times when he wasn’t hungry were branded in his memory. There weren’t more than a handful of them, and most of them were connected with visits from priests, those cursed god-men who promised everything after you were dead.

They must have been branded in Jak’s memory too, or at least, whatever memory a ghost had. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe now that Jak was dead he knew what the god-men told was all lies. It was all the same rubbish anyway. Suffer on earth and be rewarded in a heaven Mags didn’t believe in, by gods who didn’t see fit to do something about misery right now. Sometimes, when he had a moment to think, and something turned his mind toward these gods the priests were so big about, he wanted to hit the priests, hit the gods if they existed. But that took energy, and mostly he didn’t have the energy to waste.

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