Although he was overcome with exhaustion, Reiner found it hard to fall asleep. It was true that he had sneered contemptuously at Oskar's panic, but it had struck him because he felt that terror beginning to flood his own heart as well. He, too, had been gripped by an overwhelming sense of death as the ceiling collapsed. And of guilt. He had done that. If he hadn't lost his patience and thrown Oskar against the struts, it might not have happened. He had left them all trapped. Anything that happened to them now would be his fault. If they couldn't find another way out, his fault. His fault. If something crawled up to them from the dark, unexplored tunnel and devoured them? If the air became so stale they couldn't breathe? If they went mad and devoured each other to stay alive? Their fault.
However, in the end not even the feeling of guilt managed to keep him awake. Exhaustion dragged him like a siren sweeping him beneath the waves, and he slept the sleep of the just until, later, the scratching and screaming began. He ignored it for as long as possible, filtering in and out of dreams in which it was his old dog scratching at the door, a harlot of his acquaintance brushing her hair on the creaky bed in his private apartment, a tree branch brushing the roof of his tent during the offensive against the Empire, but at last the images of rats, giant insects and vampire bats forced him to open his eyes and look around.
There was nothing to see, of course. It continued to be as dark as an orc's armpit. From the snoring, he knew the others were still asleep. With a grunt of annoyance, he rummaged in his bundle until he found the flint and steel, struck a spark on the tinder paper and lit a candle.
His movements woke some of the others, they blinked at the light as Reiner lifted the candle and searched for the source of the scratching.
It was Oskar again, moaning and scratching despondently at the pile of rocks. Reiner grimaced. It must have been hours since the gunner had been at it. His fingernails were bloody, torn off, and his fingertips were bloody shreds.
"Oskar," Reiner called him.
The gunner did not respond. Reiner stood up and advanced to him. Oskar's lips moved, and Reiner leaned in to hear what he was saying.
"Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Almost there.
Reiner rested a hand on one of Oskar's shoulders and shook him.
"Come on, Oskar. Let's go see what's tunneling down. There might be another way out, huh? Oskar jerked violently away from him."
"No! We have to dig! We'll all die if we don't dig!" he set to digging with renewed vigor, though with no better results. The rock he scratched was stained with his blood.
Reiner sighed and turned away. The others, drowsy, looked at them with frowns. Reiner looked at Gustaf.
"Gustaf, do you have anything in your briefcase that might calm him down?"
"You bet," replied the surgeon dryly. "I have just what he needs."
Reiner noticed the tone of voice and gave him a stern look.
"If he dies from what you give him, you will follow."
Gustaf shrugged and began loosening the buckles on the briefcase.
"But, Captain." Hals said. "Why don't we just put him out of his misery? He's lost his mind, the poor man. He's no use to anyone anymore, not even himself."
Reiner shook his head.
"After Erich's defection, we need every man we have. Do you think we should abandon Pavel just because he's having trouble keeping up with us?"
Hals jutted his chin forward.
"No, sir. No, I wouldn't like that."
"I feel much better now, sir." Pavel interjected anxiously. Gustaf advanced to hand him a black flask and a brass spoon.
"Take it. A spoonful will soothe you. Poppy juice. It's not poisonous at all."
Reiner took the jar.
"Thank you. I'm familiar with it."
Gustaf smiled with a sly expression.
"I have no doubt."
Reiner reddened. He removed the cork stopper from the bottle and inhaled. The cloying aroma was tempting, but he resisted the urge to take a spoonful himself. It would be so pleasant to escape from all that unpleasantness and really rest, but it wasn't a good idea. He had gone down that path once before, and had been on the verge of getting lost.
He filled the spoon and squatted down next to Oskar.
"Here, boy. This will give you strength to dig."
The gunner turned his head without stopping digging and opened his mouth. Reiner poured some of the liquid into him. He felt like a wet nurse feeding a small child, which was close enough to the truth.
He sat up and turned to the men. He sighed. It was time to face reality.
"Listen up, all of you. I want to talk to you." He paused, hesitating if he should continue, then cleared his throat and continued. "I'm the one who got you all into this mess. I made us come to these damned mountains, I chose this path instead of the other, and I threw poor Oskar against the props, which caused the roof to fall in on us. I'm willing to stop playing captain and let someone else take the job. In fact, I'm a little surprised that no one murdered me in my sleep to take over."
The others said nothing; they merely looked at him from milestone to milestone. Reiner swallowed.
"So if any of you want the job, let him say so. I'll resign, and glad to do it."
The silence dragged on until Pavel coughed.
"I'm sorry, Captain." he said. "We're just foot soldiers. Sons of peasants and merchants and such. You're a nobleman. You're destined for command. It's your job."
"But it sucks the way I'm doing it! Look where we are! I did this! We're stuck here because I lost my patience. You should have mutinied by now."
"No, Captain." Hals interjected. "We don't blame you for all that. You have done all you could and no one can ask more of you. It's when a captain starts worrying more about his own skin than the skin of his men... That's when... mmm... well, when things can happen."
Reiner blushed, embarrassed. They thought so highly of him, and he was such a villain! His own skin was precisely what he was worried about. He had taken command because he wanted the rest of the men to be around to protect him if things went awry. If he wanted to pass the baton to someone more competent, it was only because he was putting himself in danger by doing his job so terribly wrong. He sighed.
"Very well. If no one wants to carry the load..." He turned around and began rolling up his blanket. "Let's find a way out of this hole."
By the time the others had gathered their gear and swallowed a sober breakfast, Oskar was sitting against the stones and had his eyes closed.
"Well done, Gustaf." Reiner said. "Bandage his wounds and tend to him. He is your patient now. Keep him moving."
"It will be my pleasure, sir." Gustaf said, but he did not mean it sincerely.
Gustaf bandaged Oskar's fingers and set him on his feet, while Hals lit two of the precious torches and Barrister's dull lantern. Then they all slung their packs over their shoulders and marched off into the darkness. Giano was in the lead, twenty paces ahead of the rest, advancing cautiously through the tunnel with the lantern barely open. Reiner and Franz led the group. Ulf walked behind them, then came Pavel leaning on Hals and Oskar leaning on Gustaf. They came to a place where a regular breeze was blowing which gave Reiner some hope. The moving air meant an exit to the outside. What was curious was that the breeze was sometimes cold and sometimes warm.
The tunnel led into another almost immediately, this one with two iron rails running down the center attached to wooden sleepers. Part of the track was missing and the sleepers were rotten.
"Which way?" asked Giano as he turned toward them.
"Let the wind be your guide." Reiner replied. "Follow whichever passage it blows through."
Giano turned into the wind and the others followed the glow of the flashlight, moving deeper into the mine. The tunnel descended and turned irregularly as it followed a vein of ore through the earth, and the deeper they went into it the more crossings and detour they left behind. Sometimes it opened up into wide areas provided with columns where a particularly abundant deposit had been found, and then narrowed again.
After a quarter of an hour had passed, Giano came running back, waving his free hand.
"Put out the torches!" he whispered. "Put out the torches."
Reiner and Hals stuck the tips of the torches into the dust on the floor, and Giano closed the curtain of the lantern all the way. They were surprised to discover that they were not totally in the dark. A faint oscillating glow reached them from the other side of a bend in the tunnel, and the sound of heavy feet echoed in the distance.
"Barbarians." Giano whispered.
Reiner and the others drew their weapons and held their breath as the light grew brighter and the footsteps louder. They began to hear grumpy voices mumbling in a primitive language. Reiner realized that he was gripping the saber so tightly that his knuckles ached. But after a long moment, when the sound gave them the impression that they had the Norsemen beside them, speaking in their ears, the voices and the light died away again and then disappeared altogether.
The group heaved a collective sigh of relief.
"Well." Reiner said, trying to speak in a jocular tone. "Now I'm pretty sure there's another way out."
"Yes." said Hals." Through them."
They relit the torches, then turned around the bend and entered an intersection. The wind was coming from the direction followed by the barbarians. The rails were also heading that way. They followed them.
"Don't even think of catching up with them," Reiner warned Giano. The mercenary smiled at him and returned to his forward post.
Before long they began to hear metallic sounds and groans, and the whisper of hundreds of voices shouting and talking. Hoarse shouts rose above the murmur, as well as creaks and thumps. A steady red glow seeped into the tunnel, and the gusts of wind were alternately hot and cold. He began to smell sweat, smoke and death.
As he passed a tunnel to the right, Reiner was slapped by a blast of hot air from a furnace. He stopped. A branch of the track branched off into the tunnel. At the other end, a red light reflected off the rock walls, and there the metallic clang and roar was louder.
"Giano!" He called in a low voice. "Come here."
Reiner led his companions into the tunnel and advanced cautiously toward the red light. Some thirty paces ahead, the tunnel ended abruptly in a rough arch through which they saw clouds of smoke rising from the bottom. Beyond the arch there was no floor, only two short lengths of twisted rail and the splintered remains of a sleeper hanging over a vertical drop.
Reiner crept forward and peered into the huge cave whose floor was a good twelve meters below. The others huddled behind him and craned their necks. Just below the opening was the source of the smoke: two giant pyramid-shaped stone furnaces, each as big as a house. Smoke poured from square holes at the apex. Two endless rows of slaves poured buckets of black rocks with red streaks through the holes. The slaves climbed like ants up the sides of the pyramids, emptied the load into the smoking chimneys, and then returned to the other end of the cave, where there were great mountains of reddish ore with which they refilled the buckets to return to the furnace again and again.
"So much ore!" said Ulf, dumbfounded. "This rivals any iron forge, how do barbarians know such advanced forging techniques?".
To the right of the furnaces the cave dwindled to a dark hole into which more iron rails penetrated. A long line of slaves six deep shuffled through the hole. They wore shackles around their ankles and spikes over their shoulders. Huge Nordic overseers drove them forward, bellowing and cracking whips above their heads. They held huge mastiffs that lunged at the slaves and barked at them.
Other slaves pushed large wooden wagons out of the hole, and then drove them up long ramps supported by wooden structures that towered over the mounds of ore. They would dump the contents of the wagons onto the mounds, then lower them down the ramp and carry them back into the hole.
The slaves were men, women and children, but so emaciated and starving, so subdued and covered with filth that it was difficult to determine their sex and age. They all looked like stooped old men, with thinning straight hair, wrinkled faces, indifferent. Their eyes were as expressionless as dry clay. Many were horribly mutilated, missing fingers, hands, arms or eyes. Some limped on crude wooden legs. Whip marks made a lattice pattern on their bare backs, and areas of shiny scar tissue from countless burns covered their arms and legs. However, the foremen had no mercy for them; they kicked or whipped those who straggled or paused in their work, and mercilessly beat anyone who showed the slightest sign of rebellion.
Franz clenched his fists.
"You animals! I'll kill you all!"
At the back of the furnaces were more slaves pouring split logs into the roaring fires, while others were driving huge bellows as big as rich noblemen's beds. At the front, slaves in heavy aprons and thick gloves dragged stone molds carved into the shape of large kite-like loaves of bread that they passed under steady streams of white-red molten iron. When a mold had been filled, it was dragged aside and replaced by another. When the iron ingots had cooled, they were removed by pounding the molds with wooden mallets and loaded onto wagons.
Reiner watched one of the wagons being rolled to a chamber on the other side. It was hard to see through the smoke, but he thought he could make out forge fires and the lustrous bodies of blacksmiths, forging breastplates and weapons with terrifying diligence and gathering them into huge piles. And beyond... He squinted his eyes to shield them from an intense white light. What new horror was this? It almost seemed... Her heart skipped a beat when she realized that she was looking outside, and that it was daylight. He hadn't realized how much he had longed for it. But as his eyes adjusted to the bright light, he saw buildings and stables and Chaos soldiers pacing back and forth and, most daunting of all, the great stone fortification they had seen as they had entered the valley the night before.
Hals sighed.
"Will we have to go through all that?"
"We'll find a way, boy." Reiner said. "Don't worry." But he wished someone could tell him how.
He was about to ask for suggestions, when something caught his attention. A broad column of Nordic warriors was heading into the caves from outside. They appeared to be the same ones who had pushed them there, but instead of the ragged leather breastplates and looted armor pieces they wore before, they now sported shining metal armor covering their chests, backs, shoulders and arms. Well-fitting helmets concealed their shaggy heads, and long chain mail skirts covered their legs. All were new armor, without dents or blemishes, and the spears, axes and swords that rested on their shoulders were also freshly forged and their sharp edges reflected the red glow of the furnaces.
The column snaked out of the cave and penetrated the enclosure on the other side with no end in sight. It looked like an army on the march, but where were they headed? There wasn't enough room in the furnace cavern for everyone. Had they gone to kill all the slaves? That didn't make sense. Would there be barracks somewhere inside the caves?
The head of the column snaked past the furnaces and mountains of ore, scattering slaves left and right, and went straight into the shaft tunnel.
"Where are they going?" he muttered.
"Perhaps there has been a rebellion inside the mines?" Franz suggested hopefully.
Reiner shook his head.
"Look at those poor people. Do you think they have the energy to rebel? Not to mention the will to do it."
"Captain." Pavel said. "Look!"
Reiner turned his eyes toward the cave entrance. The end of the column of soldiers was finally in sight, and it carried a sting in its tail. A phalanx of slaves was pulling a huge cannon perched atop an immense chariot. Ulf breathed in, horrified.
"A cannon!" he whispered. "They have a cannon."
- "Impossible!" Hals declared as he advanced between them. "The barbarians don't have cannons. They don't know how to build them."
"Then someone has taught them." Reiner said.