Vansen felt rather than heard a ragged sound—a shout from below—and most of the prisoners hurried to the pulleys above the deep, square pit, while others went to bring the wagon nearer. The slaves hauling on the ropes grunted and moaned until they had hauled a huge wooden basket up from the unseen depths, then they swung the basket out on a hinged arm until it dangled over the bed of the huge wagon. When they tipped it down several dozen corpses fell out in a limply flopping heap.

Vansen almost lost his grip on Gyir, or the fairy nearly lost his hold on Vansen.

One of bodies slid off the top of the pile and tumbled onto the stone floor beside the cart wheel, limp as a grain sack. The yellow fairy bent with another prisoner to lift the body—in life it had been a goblin, Vansen guessed, although the small creature’s hairy pelt was so caked with dust it was hard to be certain. There were no obvious marks of violence, at least not anything fatal: long weals ran across the dead goblin’s back, crisscrossed through the fur like roads being swallowed by undergrowth, but the skin had scarred long ago: it had not been the whipping that had killed this creature.

The yellow forest-fairy went about its grisly chores as though sleepwalking, which was just as well, since Ferras Vansen found it hard to watch what the creature was doing. It wrestled another fallen body back onto the cart, a bumpy-skinned corpse of the star-nosed thing’s own type, with blood on its face but no other sign of violence. Vansen caught only the briefest moment of hesitation as the creature saw one of its own kind, then it turned away without looking at the face, pulling an emptiness over its thoughts that Vansen could feel. Nevertheless, it did not linger beside the corpse of its star-nosed kin, but walked around the back of the cart just as the creaking vehicle began to roll away from the pit. The yellow fairy bent one last time to pick up the corpse of a hard-shelled creature whose half-closed eyes and sagging mouth were the only parts of its face not covered by leathery plates of skin. The buglike thing was clearly heavier than the yellow fairy had expected; after a moment’s struggle, he decided to drag it instead of trying to lift it. As he pulled it scraping across the floor one of the other prisoners came to help—something that Vansen found oddly touching—and together they heaved the shelled thing back onto the cart.

Beyond the doorway at the chamber’s far end, a more or less level track led away into darkness. Within a few hundred paces the track grew deep with dust and the wagon slowed, then stopped. The yellow fairy and several other prisoners stepped up and pushed until it the wheels came free and began to roll again. Another thumping crash shook the cavern—Vansen could not hear it so much as he could see the way it knocked the yellow fairy and everything around him off-kilter—and for a moment the eyes through which he was looking stared straight down into nothingness: on the left side the path dropped away and the shadows stretched so deep the torchlight could not find their ending.