Cradle: Foundation (Cradle Collected Book 1) by Will Wight

Author:Will Wight [Wight, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hidden Gnome Publishing
Published: 2017-10-13T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The square hallway was wide enough for all twenty miners and their five Sandviper escorts. Three of the guards moved in front, two in back, but most of the prisoners didn't seem to need guarding. They stumbled along with empty gazes, all of them with wounds both old and fresh.

Each of the prisoners, including Lindon, carried one of the scripted iron barrels that Fisher Gesha had called mining equipment. It was light enough for the rest of them, with their Iron bodies, but Lindon's arms began to burn after half an hour of carrying it. By the time he started sweating and pushing to keep up with the rest of the pack, they still hadn't passed the first hallway.

The hall itself would have been worth a closer look, if it didn't take all his concentration to stay upright with the barrel. Script ran along the walls, with runes etched deeper than his fingers and wider than his hand. It must have continued for miles, judging by how long they'd traveled.

He couldn't even comprehend the scale of a circle like that. It must only be a small part of whatever mechanism drew in vital aura from all over the region, which made it more ambitious than anything he'd ever imagined.

They finally came to a stop in a room shaped like a cylinder, where five other hallways identical to their own had ended. The room was smaller than he'd expected, and while they weren't crowded, he could see why the Sandvipers hadn't taken more miners.

His first question, when one of the guards raised a torch, was why this room had been made of a different type of stone. Unlike the blocks of the hallway, these were splashed with darker shades of color, as though the blocks had been spattered with...

He missed a step.

Fragments of bone were more common than pebbles on the floor. All clean, and none larger than his thumbnail. A distinct scent of copper and rot lingered in the air, and the stone was stained twice as high as his head.

Whatever happened here, it hadn't left any bodies. The dead had been blasted apart.

The old miners had begun to huddle together, setting their barrels down in the center and gripping the handles. A handful, including Lindon and Yerin, glanced around as though waiting for instruction.

The same guard Lindon had seen before, the bored-looking Sandviper woman with the sword, tapped her weapon against the stone to gather their attention. “The activation script for your harvesters is on your handles,” she said, in the tone of someone who had repeated the same instructions for so long that the words came out on their own. “If you stop mining, we leave you here. If you run, we leave you here. If you harass or disobey a guard, we leave you here. Meal comes at midday. When battle starts, don't panic or run, just trust us to cover you. You panic, and we'll leave you here.”

With that, she turned and took up a position covering two tunnel mouths.

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