The kienspan, lunging ahead of him, shed sparks against the end of the tunnel and dazzled him. When his vision settled he found that he was sharing a confined space with a giant black bird-or something-like the ostrich-but with no wings-pawing at the ore, or maybe at Jack’s face, with talons bigger than fingers-its long bony neck twisted round almost into a knot, an arrowhead of a skull at the end, jaws open with such… big… teeth…
He only screamed once. Twice, actually, but number two didn’t count because it came from smashing his head on the ceiling in a poorly thought-out bid to stand up. He scurried back a couple of fathoms, working on blind fear and pain, stopped, listened, heard nothing but his heart.
Of course it was dead-it was all bones. And the Doctor might be a human oddity in several respects, but he wouldn’t send Jack into a monster’s lair. Jack retreated slowly, trying not to make his head ache any worse. He could hear the Doctor talking to Eliza: “There are shells scattered upon the mountains! See, this rock has a grain like wood-you can split it into layers-and look at what’s between the strata! This creature must’ve been buried in mud-probably the fine dirt that rivers carry-smashed flat, as you can see-its body decomposed leaving a void, later filled in by some other sort of rock-as sculptors cast bronze statues in plaster molds.”
“Where do you get this stuff? Who told you that one?” Jack demanded, a bloody head popping out between their feet, looking up at them.
“I reasoned it out myself,” said the Doctor. “ Someonehas to come up with new ideas.”
Jack rolled over on his belly to find the floor loosely paved with rock-slabs bearing imprints of sundry other Book-of-Revelation fauna. “What river carried this supposed dirt? We’re in the middle of a mountain of rock. There is no river, ” Jack informed the Doctor, after they had gotten Eliza on her way down the tunnel. Jack waited with her traveling-dress slung over his arm while she inched down the tunnel in her knickers and an arsch-leder.
“But there used to be,” the Doctor said, “Just as there used to be such creatures-” playing his light over impressions of fish with fins too many and jaws too big, swimming creatures shaped like grappling-hooks, dragonflies the size of crossbow-bolts.
“A river in a mountain? I don’t think so.”
“Then where did the shells come from?”
FINALLY THEY TRAVELEDto the rounded top of a mountain where an old stone tower stood, flanked by schlock-heaps instead of bastions. A half-wit could see that the Doctor had been at work here. Rising from the top of the tower was a curious windmill, spinning round sideways like a top instead of rolling like a wheel, so that it didn’t have to turn its face into the wind. The base of the tower was protected by an old-fashioned stone curtain-wall that had been repaired recently (they were afraid of being attacked by people who, however, did not have modern artillery). Likewise the gate was new, and it was bolted. A musket-toting engineer opened it for them as soon as the Doctor announced himself, and wasted no time bolting it behind them.
The tower itself was not a fit place for people to lodge. The Doctor gave Eliza a room in an adjoining house. Jack put the fear of God into all the rats he could find in her room, then climbed the stone stair that spiraled*up the inside of the tower. The tower did its part by moaning in wind-gusts like an empty jug when an idler blows over the top. From the windmill at the top a shaft, consisting of tree-trunks linked one to the next with collars and fittings hammered out of iron, dropped through the center of the tower to an engineering works on the dirt floor. The floor, then, was pierced by a large hole that was obviously the mouth of a mine-shaft. An endless chain of buckets had been rigged so that the windmill’s power raised them up from the shaft laden with water. As they went round a giant pulley they emptied into a long wooden tray: a mill-race that carried the water out through a small arched portal in the tower wall. Then the empty buckets dove back into the shaft for another go-round. In this way water was drained away from some deep part of the mines that would normally be flooded. But up here, the water was a good thing to have. After gathering a bit of head in a system of trenches outside, it powered small mill-wheels that ran bellows and trip-hammers for the smiths, and finally collected in cisterns.
Up top, Jack, who’d wisely spent some of their profits on warm clothes, had a view over a few days’ journey in every direction. The mountains (excepting one big one to the north) were not of the craggy sort, but swelling round-topped things separated by bottomless cleavages. The woods were dappled-partly leaf-trees with pale spring growth and partly needle-trees that were almost black. Here and there, pools of pasture-land lay on south-facing slopes, and of snow on north-facing ones. Villages, with their red tile rooves, were strewn about unevenly, like blood-spatters. There was a big one just below, in the gorge that divided this mountain from an even higher one to the north: a bald crag whose summit was crowned with a curious arrangement of long stones. Clouds whipped overhead, as fast and furious as the Winged Hussars, and this made Jack feel as if the tower were eternally toppling. The strangely curved blades of the Doctor’s windmill hummed over his head like poorly aimed scimitar-cuts.
“JUST A MINUTE,DOCTOR-with all due respect-you’ve replaced miners-on-treadwheels with a windmill to pump out the water-but what happens when the wind stops blowing? The water floods back in? Miners are drowned?”
“No, they simply follow the old underground drainage channel, using small ore-boats.”
“And how do these miners feel about being replaced by machines, Doctor?”
“The increase in productivity should more than-”
“How easy would it be to slip a sabot off one’s foot and ‘accidentally’ let it fall into the gears-”
“Err… maybe I’ll post guards to prevent any such sabotage. ”
“ Maybe?What will these guards cost? Where will they be housed?”
“Eliza-please-if I may just interrupt the rehearsal,” the Doctor said, “don’t do this job too well, I beg of you-avoid saying anything that will make a lasting impression on the, er, audience…”
“But I thought the whole idea was to-”
“Yes, yes-but remember drinks will be served-suppose some possible investor feels the need to step out and relieve himself at the climax of the performance, when the scales fall from your eyes and you see that this is, after all, a brilliant opportunity-”
Thus the rehearsal. Eliza performed semi-reclining on a couch, looking pale. Crawling down that cold tunnel probably had not been a good idea for one in her delicate state. It occurred to Jack that, since they had a bit of money now, there was no reason not to go down into the town he’d noticed below, find an apothecary, and buy some kind of potion or philtre that would undo the effects of the bleeding and bring pink back to her cheeks and, in general, the humour of passion back to her veins.
Of this town, which was called Bockboden, the Doctor had had little to say, save for a few mild comments such as “I wouldn’t go there,” “Don’t go there,” “It’s not a very good place to be in,” and “Avoid it.” But none of these had been reinforced by the lurid fabrications that a Vagabond would’ve used to drive the point home. It seemed an orderly town from above, but not dangerously so.