Separate? Garth looked at his father anxiously.
“You’ll be fine, lad,” Joseph said, his eyes holding Garth’s. “Just do as I trained you.”
Garth swallowed and nodded.
“Besides,” Jack said cheerfully, his chewing increasing noisily, “it doesn’t really matter if you lose one or two. The Veins is a good place to practise. Nothing fattens a graveyard like an apprentice physician—and best to fatten with the likes of these cursed souls than good folk from above.”
“Jack? The lad will need water. To wash wounds.”
Jack spoke to one of the other guards, and he hurried away. “Well, water at least we have in plenty. You ready, boy?”
Garth nodded again, gave his father one last glance, and then let Jack hustle him down a tunnel, several of the other guards following.
They walked down a rough sloping tunnel into a darkness that ate all sense of time. Every twenty or so paces a sad torch sputtered fitfully on the wall; all each did was lighten the pitch blackness into grey gloom for a pitifully small circle.
“How far do these tunnels extend, Jack?” Garth asked after an eternity. Perhaps conversation would serve to keep the darkness at bay better than the torches would.
“Another half a league straight down, boy. We’re already half a league under the surface.”
Garth stumbled, appalled. “But that would mean…!”
“Yeah,” Jack grunted. “We’re well under the level of the sea now. But we’re in no danger. The sea, curse her evil waves, will not flood in any further. ‘Tis the lower levels that have been dampened, not these upper courses.”
Garth hefted his bag in his hand. Behind him a guard had caught them up, carrying two pails of water slopping from his hands. Sea water, Garth supposed. “Does this happen often?”
“The sea broaching the Veins? Often enough. Generally once or twice a year. The tunnels stretch almost a league in either direction from the central shafts. Plenty of places for the sea to broach the hanging wall.”
“The hanging wall?” Garth panted, sweat running down his body in the warm and humid air.
Jack abruptly slapped the roof of the tunnel, only a hand-span above his head. “The hanging wall.”
“Oh,” Garth said inadequately. How many thousands of tonnes of rock were currently hanging above his head? And how much sea water?
The tunnel narrowed, and the hanging wall drew closer the further they went. Small piles of gloam littered the floor, and soon Garth and the guards were forced to walk with their heads and shoulders hunched and at times twisted sideways in order to squeeze through the narrower portions of the tunnel.
“Why so narrow?” Garth gasped.
“Don’t need to build wider,” Jack replied. “Just enough for one man and his pick and shovel to get through, ‘tis all that’s needed.”
“Then how do they get the gloam to the surface?” Did they have to carry it back along these narrow veins by the fistful? Garth could not see any other way.
“There’s another shaft further along. Only narrow, but wide enough for the gloam baskets. It’s lifted to the surface from there.”
Garth trembled. The closeness of the tunnel walls, as the hanging wall, was constricting. What would happen if something further went wrong? How would he escape? The darkness crowded him, while the air was stifling and the stench appalling. His lungs were desperate for air, yet Garth was loathe to breathe in anything but shallow gasps.
How could anyone live out their lives down here?
“Ahead,” one of the forward guards rasped, and Garth jerked in surprise. No-one had spoken for some time, and the sudden speech had startled him out of his despondent reverie. Ahead?
“Section 205,” Jack explained, and Garth blinked. Section 205? Oh, yes, that’s where there were some injured prisoners. It seemed a lifetime ago that he and his father had descended into this crazed world.
Then he stumbled and would have fallen had not Jack seized his arm. At his feet was a drop of about a pace, and beyond that yawned a cavern the size of the kitchen at home—but so long had Garth been crawling through the narrow tunnels it seemed as big and as welcoming as a banquet hall.
He dropped down, almost falling again as his stiffened knees cramped, and looked about. Several torches burned here, and the extra light seemed luxurious.
Directly across from Garth the tunnel continued further into the earth, but to his left huddled a group of nine men—the gang that had been caught in a minor collapse of the hanging wall. All were chained, and all regarded him with either apathy or thinly veiled hostility. Who was this, come to disturb their lingering death?
The two guards, who had been standing watch until the party arrived, greeted their comrades with over-loud voices.
The prisoners remained silent.
“Well, hop to it,” Jack said at his back, and Garth jumped yet again. Grasping his bag a little more tightly in his hand, he slowly advanced towards the huddle of men.
Gods, but they were filthy! Garth could not stop an expression of distaste flickering across his face, and the prisoner nearest to him sneered.
“If I’d known the pretty boy was coming, I would have washed and dressed.”
“Enough!” Jack barked, and Garth could feel him raise his sword arm behind him.
“That won’t be needed, Jack,” he said, turning his head, and Jack slowly lowered his sword.
“Don’t take no nonsense from them, boy,” he said. “They’re lucky you’re here at all.”
“If we were lucky we’d all be dead under the waters,” the prisoner muttered, so low only Garth could hear him.
He squatted down by the man. “Are you hurt?”
The prisoner thought about sneering again, but didn’t have the heart. He pointed to his knee. “A falling rock caught it.”
Garth motioned a guard to bring a torch, and the man pushed it into a slot in the wall above Garth’s head, then withdrew. Garth bent closer for a look, and only barely managed to restrain a gasp. The man’s knee had been badly mangled by the rock, and Garth did not know how he could sit there without moaning.
He did not yet understand that, in the Veins, constant pain was a condition of life itself.
Garth took a deep breath, and went to work.
The guard who had brought the water had left the pails by Garth’s side, and now he carefully washed away the tarry gloam dust and the blood from the prisoner’s knee—it came as a considerable shock to realise that the man’s flesh was sickly pale underneath its layers of gloam. Once the filth and blood had been washed away, Garth saw the injury was not as bad as he’d first thought. Several deep gashes, but not a crushing injury. He reached behind him to his bag, selected several suturing instruments and thread, and stitched the man back together again.
Then he laid his hands on the man’s knee.
The man’s eyes widened, and he stirred for the first time. “You have the Touch!” he whispered, and his whisper carried down the line of prisoners.
Garth tried to smile at him, but he felt such deep sadness flood into him from the man’s flesh that he found it all but impossible. He had never felt this before. Malignant growths, yes, and pain and virulent infections—but overwhelming sadness? He realised that chronic sadness was so endemic throughout the Veins that it had literally seeped into this man’s flesh.
He lifted his hands from the man’s knee, unable to bear any more, but the man reached forward and touched his hands briefly. “Thank you,” he whispered.
Garth’s eyes swam with tears, and he had to blink them away as he moved onto the next prisoner.
Behind him the guards, grown bored with the proceedings, had settled into a circle and were tossing a dice.
Garth had no idea how long he worked. All he knew was that he worked his way silently down the line of nine prisoners. All had been wounded to some extent; two had suffered broken arms as they reflexively raised their arms against the collapse of the hanging wall; one had an indented skull (and was now so drowsy and unresponsive that Garth knew he was not long for this life; at least his escape was close); another had several of his teeth chipped away and his nose broken awry. On them all Garth laid his hands, and tried to impart what comfort and encourage what healing that be could.
From them all he felt the deep and almost overwhelming sadness that had become a part of their very flesh.
Finally he came to the last prisoner. The man had a bad laceration above his right elbow, and Garth pulled the second pail of water close. It was almost gone. He would have to be careful.
Wringing out the by-now bloody cloth, Garth carefully sponged away at the man’s arm, still vaguely surprised to find white flesh under so many layers of grime. The man winced, and Garth glanced at him. He had a finer face than the others, with a striking aquiline nose, and hair that seemed naturally black. For an instant their eyes caught, and Garth flinched at the misery he saw reflected in the man’s deep blue eyes.