At last Aton caught on. “Water!” he exclaimed, taking the narrow neck of his skin into his mouth and sucking thirstily. The liquid was cool, comparatively, and delicious.

The woman looked on approvingly. “Worth more’n garnets,” she said. “We just grind it out of the ’denser, here, and everybody’s happy. Just so long’s they stay right side of ol’ Skinny.”

Aton got the message. This woman had power, in whatever subterranean hierarchy existed here.

She went on to introduce the others. “Folks, this here’s Five. These two’re my pushers, this shift, Sam and Horny. Down this way we got ol’ man Chessy. He makes whole chess sets out of broken garnet stone, or whatever it is. Nice work.” Aton nodded, surprised again. Outside, those figurines were worth a fortune, both for the material and the craftsmanship—yet here the artisan was revealed as a gray old man squatting nakedly and poking with a battered knife. “This other’s Prenty to him. They got an understanding.”

The apprentice was a young woman, hardly out of her teens, but quite well formed and pretty. Aton wondered what crime she could have committed to be sentenced to Chthon at such an age. He imagined that their “understanding” was more to gratify the old man’s ego than his romantic prowess. Reputation must be most important here—a good point to remember.

Ma Skinny led the way to the man with the baskets. “Tally, here,” she said. “Good man with figures, good eye for garnets. Don’t cross him.” Tally was sorting the little stones by colour: a basket each for shades of red and brown, dimly distinguishable in the imperfect light. An attractive girl resorted them into graduated sizes. “That’s Silly,” Ma said. “Her name, I mean—Selene, Silly. You’ll learn.” The girl looked up and giggled.

“Everybody’s got a job,” Ma finished. “You run around a little, Five, get settled, and we’ll fix you up with something. No hurry.” Too casually, then: “You smuggled in some tools.”

“Tools?”

Her alert eye was on his bound book. She wouldn’t ask the question. Aton opened it. “LOE,” he said. “A text. They let me bring one thing.” She turned away, wordless, disgusted.

That was the tone of it. Once acclimatized to the heat and wind and able to find his way around the interlocking tunnels by sound and sight, Aton found prison life to be surprisingly easy. Too easy—there could be no enduring drive toward escape, in such a situation. The inhabitants were contended, as he was not. He would have to find a catalyst.