In the beginning, the camp consisted of a sprawl of tents, but in time those gave way to crude barracks and finally to permanent buildings of stone and imported wood and pens and shanties for the goblin and hobgoblin slaves. Iverton even boasted a tavern and gaming hall, a stable and blacksmith’s shop, a trading post, and a dozen houses for the families who operated the businesses. There were large pens for goats, pigs, and sheep, a coop for chickens, and a long, tilled section for a garden when the weather cooperated.
Iverton’s population nowadays hovered between two hundred and three hundred fifteen knights-from five wings to a full compgroup. The number varied according to the rotation and the amount of ore mined at any given time from the shafts. In addition, there were forty hired laborers, a half dozen business owners, and three thousand slaves. Nearly all of the latter were goblins, who were small creatures that could be easily herded into pens.
From her mountainside perch, Mudwort snarled at the Dark Knights standing before Marshal Montrill. In perfect lines and in full armor, they were kneeling with bowed heads.
After a moment of silence, their voices rose as a sonorous hum. Mudwort picked her way through the drone and recognized some of the words. It was the knights’ Blood Oath, she knew, and they would repeat it five times. Interspersed among the words was something the knights called the Code-but neither ritual interested the goblin. In fact, Mudwort considered it all a blather, a useless waste of time and saliva.
The Dark Knights should listen, instead, to other words, words that truly mattered: Mudwort’s words.
Mudwort had tried to tell the Dark Knights about the coming earthquake, though she didn’t call it a quake. Mudwort had no word for what was imminent because she didn’t know precisely what it was. She only knew that something bad was going to happen, as the stones she recently had touched in the mine felt … nervous. Yes, they were nervous stones, almost as though they were living things.
Mudwort became frightened by the way the rocks seemed to tremble in her hands, and so the previous day she’d told a Dark Knight taskmaster that something bad was going to happen and that everyone should leave the mine and not come back until the bad thing had passed. But the stupid knight would not listen to her, nor would the other knights she risked speaking to when her shift ended. She should have known better; the knights only pretended to listen to the goblins’ snuffling pleas for mercy or their begging for extra rations and water; they thought goblin words were all twaddle and worthless.
The knights treated all the goblins as worthless.
And when she tried to tell the knights a second and a third time about the coming something-even using a smattering of words in their own ugly-sounding tongue, shouting them out from the slave pen-they still dismissed her and, later, beat her for the noise she had made. The lacerations from the whip still burned her back, and the wounds opened and bled freshly as she trundled with her fellows into the shaft and to a deep chamber and stretched with the pick to begin work on her section of the wall.
She had warned her clansmen too, whispering to them late the night before and encouraging them to pass the word to the other slaves working in the other shafts and chambers, including the smattering of hobgoblins among them. Only a few goblins believed her. Some said they did, but she knew they were just being respectful. Most called her mad behind her back and some even to her face, laughing when she claimed the rocks were nervous. In the dozen years Mudwort had been a slave in the Nerakan mine, she’d never been sociable and had talked more to herself and the walls of the mine than to her fellows.
She couldn’t fault them for thinking her crazy.
In the slave pens, she usually claimed a corner, where she sat, back against the post, meditating or at least making the pretense. The others gave her as much space as possible. Mudwort had something special about her, and they alternately feared and revered her-the latter particularly when it was cold and she did something to warm the ground beneath them.
At dinner she was usually last in line. She was overly skinny for a goblin-food held little interest for her. A one-eared hobgoblin often forced her to eat to keep her strength up. He was called Direfang and was the closest thing Mudwort had to a friend. Direfang was probably the only one who honestly halfway believed her when she told him that something bad was going to happen to the mine.
But the broad-shouldered hobgoblin told her ruefully that there was nothing he could do about the coming something. There was nothing he could do about anything; hob and gob slaves had no power in that world. Though he had advanced to the position of foreman, he couldn’t order the goblins out of the mines, not even to keep them safe from whatever it was Mudwort was predicting. And he wouldn’t dare argue with the Dark Knights over the matter. Mudwort had gotten nowhere by calling to the knights, and Direfang had no desire to be whipped as she had or to make the knights so angry that they revoked his meager foreman privileges.
Mudwort became certain of the coming something just the previous morning. In one of the shafts in the very deepest part of the Nerakan mine, she was chipping with her pick at a wall of iron-heavy ore when a shiver passed through her. She picked up chunks to put in her sack, and felt the difference. It was like the stones were trying to tell her something, warn her about something bad that was coming. But she admitted she couldn’t thoroughly understand the warning.
“Mad, maybe,” Mudwort had said to herself at the time. “Mind-breaking, maybe. Mind-sour and sad.”
She was working at that same station, pausing because the whip marks still hurt and because she was doing her best to listen to the stones. She pressed her ear against the wall. Mudwort always had been interested in rocks, as a youngling playing with them, sucking on them, or arranging them into patterns that others thought nonsensical. Until she’d been enslaved, she hadn’t known that rocks had names.
But they did, according to the knights. At that moment she was mining for hematite. It was a metallic gray stone, occasionally earthy brown, with thin, bright red streaks in it. It was relatively brittle, as far as rocks went, and sometimes there were crystals in it that sparkled in the lantern light. She’d previously mined in a higher shaft for magnetite, a black stone with a shiny luster. It was heavier and broke at uneven, sharp angles under her pick. She preferred mining for hematite. Her sacks were not quite so heavy when filled with the metallic stone, and her arms did not ache so badly when carrying the sacks to the mine entrance.
The shaft wall felt cool to her ear, the sensation washing through her and easing the pain of her back. She stuck out her tongue and tasted the wall, finding the ore dusty and not unpleasant. Then she ran her fingers across the wall, ignoring the complaint of a stoop-shouldered goblin behind her.
“Trouble, Mudwort,” he lectured. “Whip, no work. Work, no whip.”
She dismissively waggled her fingers at him then ran her hands across the wall again. The stone felt different that day too, even more anxious, almost shivering. Worse than the previous morning, she decided after a moment.
“Trouble, yes,” Mudwort agreed. “Trouble here. But trouble what?”
The stoop-shouldered goblin shook his head in disgust, spitting in Mudwort’s direction. He turned back to his wall and found a spot where the hematite was particularly dark and started swinging his pick energetically at the spot.
The chamber they worked in had a low ceiling, like nearly every place in the mines. But goblins could easily stand upright there. The walls were dark and the lantern light meager, and that chamber-like most of the others-appeared to be closing in on the slaves. The closeness of the walls kept them in a constant state of skittishness. The air was perpetually stale, the stench of the miners’ sweat so strong it often caused them to gag and work even faster so they could fill up their sacks and carry them to the mine entrance, where they had a chance to suck down better air.