He had expected to find people here, but there was no one. Even Chartise, the Chief of the Rising, had vanished. But the rising still turned. A great construct of wood and steel, it was pushed by a team of fifty mules, each of them tethered in its own enclosure, each of them forever stepping forward to bite at the food that hung from a huge cogged wheel just above and ahead of them. And this wheel was slowly spun on its axis by the constant motion of the mules. If they stopped in unison they might never start again, but once the rising was begun they only halted when forced to do so. The construct kept turning, and the cogged wheels and giant oiled pulleys continued to lift the timber platforms up, up, topside. The rising was the closest thing there was in the mines to a living, working machine. The mules were its living part; the rising, adapted by Trey’s ancestors soon after the Cataclysmic War, the machine.

Trey should have been awed. This was beyond belief. But he was way past any outside influence, immersed as he was in a miasma of grief, sadness and terror. Every creak from the rising was the sound of the Nax bearing down on him, saving him as their final sacrificial victim because he had woken them, he had cast himself too far and disturbed them from their endless sleep . . .

Trey fell onto one of the moving platforms and was carried higher than he had ever been.

Time passed. He slept. He raved and raged. And even when he felt sunlight on his skin, helping hands shading his eyes and giving him water, hands that touched him and communicated along with the gentle voice as if their owner knew the language of the mines . . . even then, he did not believe that he had escaped.

The heat on his face married with the cool certainty that he never would.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

KOSAR THE THIEF had not been to Pavisse for a long time.

He had been in Trengborne for most of the three years since he had been caught and punished, and that slowing down of life had suited him. He had been a traveler for most of his fifty years. He had seen many things, and stolen more than a few of them. That little, unassuming farming village had quickly become a sort of home, and he had barely strayed beyond its borders in all that time. There had been those there that shunned him because of his scars, but a greater number accepted him, though grudgingly. And it was the first place where he had felt accepted since he was a child.