The Canary Boy of Silberberg

• Chapter 1 The Cage in the Dark
• Chapter 2 Whispers of the Deep Shafts
• Chapter 3 The Breath of Silberberg
• Chapter 4 Yellow Feathers, Black Dust
• Chapter 5 The Silver Guild's Coin
• Chapter 6 Beneath the Seventh Level
• Chapter 7 Silent Signals
• Chapter 8 The Sealed Gallery
• Chapter 9 A Flame in the Bad Air
• Chapter 10 The Broken Seal
• Chapter 11 Voices Through the Stone
• Chapter 12 The Disgraced Scribe
• Chapter 13 Unmapped Veins
• Chapter 14 The Secret of Shaft Nine
• Chapter 15 A Debt Paid in Poison
• Chapter 16 Shadows Above the Mine
• Chapter 17 The Canary's Warning
• Chapter 18 Iron Locks and Hidden Truths
• Chapter 19 The Council's Gamble
• Chapter 20 Trapped in the Silence
• Chapter 21 The Rising Firedamp
• Chapter 22 A Spark in the Darkness
• Chapter 23 The Descent of the Guards
• Chapter 24 The Testimony of the Dumb
• Chapter 25 The Crumbling Guildhall
• Chapter 26 Daylight Over Silberberg

The dark beneath Silberberg did not merely lack light; it possessed weight. It pressed against a boy’s skull with the dull, persistent insistence of deep water, thick with the stench of wet slate, ancient rot, and the sharp, coppery tang of unmined silver.

Eli adjusted his grip on the handle of the brass oil lamp and waited for the cage to stop swinging. He was twelve years old, though the miners often swore he looked no older than eight, stunted as he was by a diet of cold cabbage broth and the endless shade of the lower galleries. In his left hand, he held a second cage—this one woven from split willow reeds and wire, barely larger than an apple. Inside it, perched on a thumb-sized twig of peeled birch, sat a creature no bigger than his fist.

It was a canary, bright as a freshly minted ducat in a sea of soot. Its name was Pip, though Eli had never spoken the word aloud. Eli had no voice to speak it with. A fever in his fourth winter had burned away his vocal cords, leaving his throat as silent as a stone wall. The overseers down in the pits considered this an asset. A boy who could not speak could not spread rumors among the crews, could not complain about shaved rations, and could not demand higher copper pieces for working the foulest drifts in the mountain.

Pip shifted his tiny, obsidian-black feet on the twig, his lemon-yellow feathers fluffed against the damp draft creeping up through the floorboards of the hoist. The bird cocked his head, rustling his wing-tips against the wire.

Eli raised his lamp. The yellow flame bobbed inside its thick glass chimney, casting jagged, dancing shadows across the wet timber shoring of Shaft Three.

Above them, three hundred feet through solid granite and packed earth, the bells of St. Jude’s Cathedral were likely striking five in the morning. Up there, in the air that belonged to the living, the merchant princes of the Silver Guild would be stirring in their feather beds, sipping spiced wine brought from the southern ports and counting the profits of the autumn smelting. Down here, in the cold bowels of the mountain, morning was defined only by the ringing of the heavy iron gong at the shaft head and the shuddering descent of the timber hoist.

The ropes groaned overhead, thick braided hemp dripping with rancid tallow. With a final, teeth-jarring thud, the wooden floor of the lift settled against the iron pins at the Fifth Level.

"Step lively, bird-boy," a voice growled from the gloom.

Master Torsten, the shift foreman, stepped off the platform first, his boots squelching into the thick, grey mud that pooled between the oak ties. Torsten was a broad-shouldered mountain of a man whose beard was permanently silvered with stone dust and stained brown around the mouth from chewing dried tobacco leaf. He carried a heavy iron pick over one shoulder and a dented horn lantern in his fist.

Eli stepped off after him, keeping his steps light and cautious. He automatically held Pip’s cage at chest height, watching the tiny bird with practiced, hawk-like intensity.

If Pip stayed upright, breathing fast and twitching his tail, the air was fit for men. If Pip began to pant, opening his narrow beak and fluffing his wings, the air was turning sour with chokedamp. And if Pip collapsed off his perch without a sound, Eli had perhaps ten seconds to yank the warning bell-cord and run before the invisible poison laid the whole crew flat on their faces, their lungs filling with sweet, silent death.

"Which drift today, Master Torsten?" asked a voice behind them. It was Young Hans, a lad of sixteen who had only recently been moved from the sorting tables above ground down into the heavy picks below. Hans was sweating despite the chill, his face streaked with grey mud where he had wiped his nose with a greasy sleeve.

"The Eastern Crosscut," Torsten grunted, spitting a thick gob of tobacco juice into the sludge. "Council wants twenty carts of high-grade ore out of the deep vein before the end of the second watch. The smelters are running cool up top, and Master Councilman Vane sent word that if the yield drops again this week, half the picks on this level will find themselves working the slate quarries for half-pay."

A murmur of sour discontent rippled through the dozen men who had crowded off the hoist behind Eli. Slate quarrying was done under the grey, weeping skies of the upper valley—hard, freezing work where a slip of a chisel lost a man his fingers, and the pay barely covered a loaf of rye and a pint of small beer.

"The Eastern Crosscut?" Hans whispered, his eyes widening in the dim lantern light. "That’s near the old workings, isn't it? The ones they boarded up after the collapse three winters back?"

"Keep your mouth shut and your pick moving, lad, and the mountain won't notice you're here," Torsten snapped. He turned his heavy head toward Eli. "Alright, mute. Up to the front. You walk twenty paces ahead of the crew. You see so much as a feather droop on that yellow mite of yours, you hit the bronze rail with your hammer. You don't wait to see if he's just tired. You hit the rail and you run back to the lift. Got it?"

Eli gave a quick, sharp nod. He knew the drill. He had been doing it for three years, ever since his uncle—a broken-backed former timberman—had sold his work-pledge to the Guild for forty silver groschen and a bolt of coarse wool.

Eli reached into the leather pouch slung across his chest and pulled out a small brass hammer, no longer than his index finger. He tapped it once against the iron frame of his lamp—a dry, metallic clink—to show he was ready.

"Good," Torsten growled. "Off you go, then."

Eli moved into the dark.

The Eastern Crosscut was an old, narrow gallery, cut into the native granite seventy years ago when the town of Silberberg was still just a cluster of timber huts around a rich surface strike. The passage was low and vaulted, forcing the taller miners to walk with hunched shoulders. The timber supports here were ancient—blackened oak beams cut from the mountain’s virgin forests, bowed under the immense weight of the rock above, their surfaces covered in thick, white curtains of pale cave-mold that looked like long, frozen beards.

Eli walked slowly, his boots making a soft slop-slop in the wet silt. He kept his lamp lowered, pointing the beam toward the uneven floor to watch for deep potholes or abandoned iron track-nails that could trip a careless foot. With his other hand, he held Pip’s cage high, near the crown of the tunnel where the dangerous, lightweight gases like firedamp preferred to gather.

Firedamp was different from chokedamp. Chokedamp was heavy and lazy; it settled in the deep hollows and smothered a man like an invisible blanket of wet sand. Firedamp was lighter than air, sweet-smelling, and volatile as black powder. A stray spark from a steel pick hitting a pyrite nodule, or an open flame from a poorly sealed lamp, could turn a whole gallery into a screaming furnace in the space of a heartbeat.

Eli glanced at the bird. Pip was alert, his bright round eyes catching the reflection of the oil flame. The canary hopped from his birch perch to the side of the wire cage, pecked twice at a dried grain of millet wedged in the mesh, and chirped—a tiny, cheerful whistle that echoed faintly off the wet stone walls.

Behind Eli, the rhythmic crunch of heavy iron-shod boots and the muted clatter of picks and shovels signaled that the crew was following. The men didn't speak much once they entered the crosscut. Talk used up precious oxygen, and underground, oxygen was a currency far more valuable than the silver they pulled from the rock.

The air grew warmer as they pushed deeper toward the heart of the mountain. That was always the way of the deep shafts. The deeper you went, the more the earth seemed to remember its own ancient, sluggish heat. Sweat began to trickles down Eli’s ribs beneath his coarse linen smock. His bare feet—he wore no shoes, preferring to feel the stone beneath his soles so he could detect the subtle vibrations of shifting rock—picked their way around jagged piles of waste stone left behind by long-dead miners.

After ten minutes of careful walking, the crosscut broadened into a large, irregular chamber. This was the working face of Shaft Three, Level Five.

Here, the main vein of silver ore showed clearly in the candlelight—a thick, glistening band of dark grey lead-ore sprinkled with bright, crystalline thread-veins of pure silver, running diagonally across the pale granite like a fat, dark vein across an old man’s arm.

"Right then," Torsten shouted, his voice booming in the cavernous space. "Hans, Peter, take the upper bench. Set the wedges first, clear out the rotten slate before you hit the heart wood. Jacob, get the barrow under the shoot. Mute, take your post on the ledge by the air drift. Watch that bird like he's your own sainted mother."

Eli scrambled up a pile of broken rock to a narrow ledge of granite three feet above the main floor. The ledge sat directly beside an iron grating—a small, dark opening in the rock face that fed air into the lower drifts from the main ventilation shaft half a mile away.

He set his oil lamp on a flat stone, placed Pip’s cage beside it, and sat down with his knees pulled up against his chest. He pulled his brass hammer from his pocket and laid it across his bare shins, his fingers resting lightly on the cool metal.

Below him, the gallery erupted into sound.

The noise of a silver mine in full operation was a deafening, metallic rhythm. The heavy iron sledges smashed against iron wedges driven into the rock seams with a clear, ringing ping-ping-ping. Pickaxes thudded into soft shale; wooden wheelbarrows groaned on iron rails as the broken rubble was cleared away. The air filled rapidly with fine, white stone dust that turned the light of the horn lanterns into hazy, yellow balls of fog.

Eli watched the dust float in the air. It was his job to stay awake, to stay sharp, while the grown men worked themselves into lathered horses. It sounded like easy work to the surface dwellers—sitting on a stone ledge while others swung six-pound sledges—but it was a paranoid, edge-of-the-knife sort of waiting. A canary didn't give a grand speech before it died. It gave a flurry of wings, a gurgle, and then it dropped. If Eli fell asleep, or if his eyes wandered for even a minute to watch the miners work, thirty men could be dead before the shift was half over.

He focused on Pip.

The canary had adjusted to the roar of the picks. He was grooming his tail feathers with his small, sharp beak, completely unbothered by the dust or the deafening clatter of steel against stone.

Eli reached into his smock and pulled out a small piece of stale, hard rye crust he had saved from his supper the night before. He crumbled a few tiny specks between his thumb and forefinger and slid his hand into the cage door, keeping his movements slow and predictable. Pip didn't flinch. The bird hopped onto Eli’s grime-caked forefinger, pecked the bread specks off his skin with delicate precision, and gave a low, musical trill that was swallowed instantly by the thunder of the sledgehammers below.

Eli smiled faintly. It was the only warmth in his world—this small, fragile life that depended entirely on him, just as thirty grown men depended on the bird. They were two silent creatures locked in a box in the pitch dark, serving the gluttonous appetite of a mountain town that cared for neither of them.

An hour passed. Then two. The mountain vibrated with the steady, punishing rhythm of human labor.

Below the ledge, Young Hans was gasping for air, his shirt discarded, revealing his thin ribs slick with sweat and black dust. He was driving an iron wedge into a vertical crack near the base of the vein. Master Torsten stood over him, shouting directions and pointing with a greasy thumb at a fault line in the stone.

"Deeper, you fool! You're just scratching the skin! Drive the iron into the seam or we'll be here until the winter snows!"

Hans swung his sledge with a desperate, ragged cry. The iron hammer struck the wedge. A sharp, loud CRACK sounded—not the dull sound of split rock, but a high, snapping noise like a thick pine branch breaking under a heavy weight.

The work in the chamber froze instantly. Every pick stopped in mid-air. The only sound was the heavy, ragged breathing of the miners and the slow, steady drip of water from the vault ceiling.

"What was that?" one of the pickmen whispered, his eyes rolling toward the dark ceiling.

Torsten raised his lantern high, scanning the heavy timber posts supporting the roof. The oak beams looked secure, but near the upper wall, where the silver vein disappeared into the unmapped dark, a fine trickle of grey sand was pouring down through a seam in the stone, falling like the sand in an hourglass.

"Hold your horses," Torsten said, though his voice had lost its gruff edge. He stepped carefully over the rubble toward the sand stream. "It's just a settlement pocket. The rock's settling into the empty space behind the old fourth-level galleries."

Eli didn't look at Torsten. He looked at Pip.

The canary had stopped preening. His feathers were laid down flat against his body, making him look half his usual size. His neck was stretched upward toward the small iron air-vent in the rock face behind Eli's ledge.

Eli turned his head toward the vent.

A cold, faint breeze was puffing out of the small iron grille. That was wrong. The air in the ventilation shafts was supposed to be drawn upward toward the surface by the large fires kept burning night and day at the shaft heads in the upper town. Air was meant to be sucked out of this chamber, not blown in.

Eli leaned his ear closer to the iron bars of the vent.

Beneath the faint whistle of the draft, he heard something else. It was not the sound of picks, nor the groan of shifting rock, nor the trickle of sand.

It was a soft, wet sound—like the bubbling of a porridge pot left too long over a fire.

Gurgle. Plop. Gurgle.

Pip suddenly flapped his wings frantically, dropping from his perch to the wooden floor of his cage. He let out a sharp, panicked squeak, his tiny beak opening wide as he gasped for air that had suddenly turned cold and heavy with the smell of sweet, rotting eggs.

Eli didn't hesitate. He didn't wait to see if the bird would fall.

He raised his right arm and brought the small brass hammer down hard against the iron frame of his oil lamp.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

The sharp, high-pitched metallic shrieks cut straight through the heavy silence of the gallery.

Below the ledge, Torsten spun around, his face dark with sudden anger. "What are you doing, mute? The air’s clear! The bird’s just spooked by the—"

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Eli slammed the hammer against the brass again, his eyes wide with terror. He pointed frantically with his left hand—not at the roof, but at the iron ventilation grille in the rock wall.

Pip keeled over inside the willow cage, his tiny yellow feet clutching at the air, his wings shuddering violently.

"Gasss!" someone screamed from the back of the chamber. "The bad air’s coming through the vent!"

"Out! Out!" Torsten roared, his voice cracking into a panic as he dropped his horn lantern. "Drop the picks! To the hoist! Clear the gallery!"

The heavy silence instantly shattered into chaotic, trampling terror. Thirty men dropped their tools and bolted toward the narrow neck of the Eastern Crosscut like cattle spooked by lightning. Barrows were tipped over, stone jars were smashed, and boots crushed into the mud as the crew clawed over one another to reach the main shaft.

Eli grabbed Pip’s cage, scooped up his oil lamp, and scrambled down from the granite ledge.

As he landed in the mud at the base of the rock wall, he looked back at the iron grille once more.

A thick, grey fog—sluggish and greasy, smelling overpowering of decay and stale copper—was pouring through the iron bars of the vent like water breaking through a cracked dam. But it wasn't just gas.

In the yellow beam of his swinging oil lamp, Eli saw something else through the bars of the sealed air drift.

It was a piece of worked wood, freshly splintered and broken—not an old timber beam from eighty years ago, but a brand-new, planed plank of pine, marked distinctly with a stencil of bright red paint.

It was the mark of the Merchant Council—the double-headed crane seal that was used only on locked, sealed Guild vaults above ground.

Before Eli could stare any longer, a rough hand grabbed the back of his smock collar and yanked him backward off his feet.

"Move, you mute idiot!" Torsten screamed, half-dragging, half-throwing the boy down the dark, twisting length of the crosscut as the heavy, sweet poison came rolling out of the wall behind them.

The timber hoist creaked violently as it ascended, its fat hemp cables groaning under a weight they were never meant to haul at such speed. Thirty men, packed shoulder-to-shoulder into a cage built for fifteen, pressed against one another in panicked silence. The only sound was the wet, rattling gasps of miners who had swallowed a mouth full of the sour sulfur air before reaching the lift, and the erratic, desperate flutter of tiny wings inside Eli’s reed cage.

Eli stood pinned against Master Torsten’s thick ribcage, his chest squeezed so tight he could barely draw breath. With both arms raised above his head, he held the willow cage close to the hoist ceiling, where the air was still relatively cool. Pip was lying on his side on the birch twig, his small black eyes half-lidded, his chest rising and falling in shallow, frantic twitches. But he was alive.

When the hoist finally slammed into the iron catches of the Third Level staging hall, the wooden gates had barely cleared the floor before the miners surged forward, tumbling onto the dry flagstones like flour sacks dumped from a wagon.

"Make room, damn you!" Torsten barked, elbowing his way through the sprawling crew. He dropped to his knees on the stone, coughing up a wad of thick grey phlegm, his heavy face flushed purple. "Clear the shaft head! Don't block the lift!"

The Third Level was the main artery of Shaft Three, a broad, timber-braced hall lit by smoky tallow torches fixed to iron sconces every ten paces. Here, the air was drawn fresh from the surface by the massive draft furnaces burning above ground, and the miners collapsed against the walls, gulping the clean, cold current down their raw throats as if it were sweet ale.

Young Hans lay on his back, his fingers clutching his throat, his bare torso trembling violently. "The bad air..." he croaked, his voice scraping like gravel on slate. "It came out of the rock wall. Rocks don't breathe sulfur like that. That was damp from the low pits, Master Torsten. That was death."

"Shut your mouth, Hans," Torsten growled, pushing himself up by his knees and leaning heavily against an oak support beam. He scanned the ragged group, his sharp eyes settling on Eli, who was crouching in the shadow of a stone buttress, carefully dripping a single drop of water from his finger into Pip’s tiny beak. The bird took the water weakly, shuddering once before righting himself on his feet.

Torsten walked over, his heavy boots striking the dry stone with slow, deliberate thuds. He looked down at the boy, then at the wicker cage.

"Bird survived," Torsten said flatly.

Eli offered a brief nod, keeping his eyes lowered.

"You knocked early," Torsten continued, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register that didn't carry down the gallery. "If you'd hit that hammer three seconds later, half the crew would be lying face down in the slush back there. You did good, boy." He paused, his thick brow furrowing until his iron-grey eyebrows met. "What made you look at the vent? Gas doesn't roll backwards through an intake line unless the draft fans up top stop spinning, and I can hear the big wheel humming from here."

Eli kept his head down, his thumbs tracing the rough wicker wire of the cage. He could not tell Torsten what he had seen. He couldn't speak of the splintered pine board, white as fresh linen against the ancient granite, or the wet red stencil of the double-headed crane. Even if he had his voice, telling a shift foreman that the Merchant Council’s private seal was hiding behind a wall of poison in an old, abandoned drift sounded like the rambling of a fever-mad lad.

Instead, Eli simply pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then touched his ear, shaking his head slightly to indicate he had merely heard the bubbling sound before the gas broke through.

Torsten grunted, wiping a smear of black grease from his chin. "Aye. The ear of a mute is sharper than a deaf miner's pick, I suppose. Keep it to yourself. The Council doesn't like panic, and Master Councilman Vane likes it even less when a whole shift loses three hours of coal and silver because of a bit of bad air."

The foreman turned back to the rest of the crew, who were beginning to sit up, rubbing their chest muscles and muttering among themselves.

"Listen up, the lot of you!" Torsten shouted, his voice echoing down the long, arching tunnel toward the central haulage tracks. "Level Five Eastern Crosscut is closed until the shift engineers drop down with the lime masks to seal that drift. You'll take your picks to Level Four, West Gallery. It's low grade, it's cramped, and you'll hate every foot of it, but it's dry and the air is clean. Shift ain't over. Move your legs!"

A chorus of heavy groans went up from the crew, but no one argued. Underground, an overseer's order was law, second only to the whim of the mountain itself. The miners picked up their dropped tools, slung their iron horns over their shoulders, and began to file down the side passage toward the western workings.

Eli lagged behind, letting the footfalls of the crew fade into the distance.

He didn't follow them toward the West Gallery immediately. Instead, he slipped into a narrow niche in the rock wall—a shallow alcove where the pit ponies were hitched during shift changes. The ponies were off working the middle rail today, leaving the alcove dark and silent, smelling of dry oats, sour straw, and leather harness.

Eli sat down on an overturned grain tub, placing Pip's cage on his lap. The bird was breathing normally now, his yellow feathers smoothing back into place as he gave his wings a quick, vigorous shake.

In the dim light cast by his oil lamp, Eli reached into his linen tunic and pulled out a small, flat wooden slab and a piece of soft chalk. It was a chalk-board his uncle had given him years ago to write basic tally numbers when he hauled ore buckets at the sorting tables. Eli held the chalk in his ink-stained fingers, but he didn't write numbers.

He drew a shape. A simple rectangle, split down the middle with jagged lines to represent broken wood. And inside the rectangle, he carefully traced the outline he had seen through the iron grille: two neck-curves, two sharp beaks turned back-to-back, and a pair of spread wings. The double-headed crane.

Why would the Council be building inside the mountain?

Silberberg was a city built entirely on top of silver, but it was governed from the high stone towers of the Upper Market. The Guild of Merchant Princes owned every hammer, every rail, every ounce of ore, and every life that descended into the dark. But their work was supposed to happen above—in the ledger houses, the mint, and the grand council hall where they set the weight of the groschen and the price of grain.

Down here, the world belonged to the stone, the wood-props, and the men who bled against the rock.

A sudden sound made Eli freeze.

It was not the heavy clatter of miners' boots, nor the sharp ring of iron tools. It was the soft, rapid patter-patter of thin leather soles—the kind of shoes worn only by clerks, scribes, and council pages who rarely set foot lower than the first-level administrative offices.

Eli slid the chalk-board back into his tunic, covered the chimney of his oil lamp with his sleeve to kill the light, and pressed his back flat against the cold stone of the pony alcove.

Two men were walking down the main haulage track of Level Three.

The first was a tall, thin man wrapped in a heavy wool cloak despite the warm draft of the shaft. Even in the gloom, Eli recognized the distinctive cut of the cloak—dark blue wool bordered with pale mink fur. It belonged to Master Scribe Hauer, the man who recorded the shift tallies and weight logs at the central hoist office.

The second man was shorter, broader, and walked with a sharp, impatient stride. He wore no cloak, revealing a stiff leather doublet trimmed with silver thread and high, polished boots that seemed entirely out of place in the damp grit of the third level.

"I told you, Master Vane," Hauer was saying, his voice nervous and shrill, like the sound of a dry quill scratching on cheap parchment. "The pressure in the lower galleries is rising. The timbermen say the sound from Shaft Nine is getting louder every night. If the wall gives way before the winter melt—"

"The wall will hold as long as it needs to hold," the shorter man cut in. His voice was smooth, flat, and completely devoid of warmth—the voice of Councilman Vane, the treasurer of the Silver Guild. "How many men were in the Eastern Crosscut when the drift vented?"

"Thirty, sir," Hauer replied, his voice trembling slightly. "Torsten brought them up to Level Three. Nobody died. The boy tapped the warning before the heavy gas hit."

Vane stopped walking, just ten paces from the alcove where Eli sat holding his breath. Eli watched through a crack in the wooden hitching rail as Vane turned his cold, sharp face toward the scribe. The councilman’s features looked as though they had been carved from the same hard granite as the vault walls, with thin lips and pale eyes that reflected the dim torchlight like mica.

"The boy," Vane repeated quietly. "The mute?"

"Yes, sir. Old Uncle Gort's nephew. He tests the air for Torsten's shift."

"A boy who cannot speak is a useful tool," Vane said, his fingers idly twisting a heavy silver signet ring on his right hand. "But a boy who sees things he ought not to see is merely an inconvenience. Was he near the ventilation grille?"

"He was stationed right beside it, sir," Hauer said, swallowing hard. "Torsten said the boy slammed his hammer on the lamp the moment the smell came through."

Vane was silent for a long moment. Overhead, a drop of cold water fell from a ceiling joint, striking the iron track with a faint ping.

"The lower section of Shaft Nine must be sealed completely by tomorrow morning," Vane said, his voice dropping so low Eli had to lean forward to catch the words. "Tell the shift engineers that a deep seam of sour-damp was struck. Brick up the gallery entry at Level Five. Use the dark mortar. No one goes past the crosscut without a written pass signed by my hand."

"And the timber... the timber from the upper stores?" Hauer asked hesitantly. "The timbermen are asking why three wagonloads of fresh pine were lowered down Shaft Seven last night without being logged in the inventory."

Vane took a step closer to the scribe, his shadow stretching long and dark across the curved tunnel ceiling.

"The timbermen are paid to cut wood and set props, Master Hauer. They are not paid to read inventory ledgers. If anyone asks again, tell them the wood was used to shore up the foundation beneath the Guildhall. If you value your post—and your tongue—you will ensure the books balance by midnight."

Vane turned on his heel and began walking back toward the central hoist, his polished boots clicking rhythmically against the stone. Hauer hesitated for a second, pulling his fur-lined cloak tighter around his skinny shoulders, before hurrying after the councilman like a scolded hound.

Eli remained frozen in the alcove long after the sound of their footsteps had died away into the dark.

Inside the willow cage, Pip gave a small, restless hop, his tiny claws clicking against the birch twig.

Eli reached into his pocket and pulled out the brass hammer. He held it in his palm, looking at the small, dented head that had saved thirty lives an hour ago.

He didn't know what Shaft Nine was, nor did he know why the Council was secretly hauling tons of fresh pine into the deepest, most dangerous levels of the mountain while telling the miners the galleries were collapsed and empty. But he knew one thing with absolute certainty.

The mountain was keeping secrets, and the men who ruled Silberberg were willing to let the deep pits fill with poison to make sure those secrets stayed buried.

Eli stood up, picked up his oil lamp, and unhooked Pip’s cage from the hitching post. He didn't head down toward the West Gallery to join Torsten’s crew. Instead, he turned his back on the light of the main shaft and slipped quietly into the dark, narrow service passage that led down toward the forgotten, unmapped veins of the lower mountain.

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