[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The weather was warmer than it had been for several days, the thermometer outside the main office of the sulfur mines rising very close to the freezing point.There had been a chem storm during the small hours, with jagged streaks of purple lightning followed by a brief, torrential downpour, which had raised the level of the main river by several inches.One of the lowest levels of the mine had become flooded, meaning that several of the working shifts had to form a chain, bailing out the stinking, yellow water by hand.A senior overseer had suggested that excavation could resume once the level dropped below a man's knees.Zimyanin had smiled gently and suggested that perhaps it could begin again once the water was less than waist deep.A "suggestion" from the bald Russian was something like a message from the Almighty, hewn from granite.Three of the older workers had drowned in the first hour, but the sodden corpses had been quickly removed before Zimyanin came around on his tour of inspection.Since he'd taken over the mining complex, the Russian had managed to improve production, mainly by bringing in ruthless sec guards to drive the slave laborers on.But the linked chambers, tunnels and shafts were still chaotically undermechanized.A few gas engines powered hoists and elevators, but virtually everything in the mines was still man- and woman-powered.If a worker in a medieval sulfur mine had been miraculously transported to Zimyanin's complex, he'd have found very little changed a bird's nest of rickety wooden ladders held together by frayed lengths of rope; smoking oil lamps that gave a frail yellow light, leaving great lakes of black shadow; narrow passages where a man could hardly stand upright that linked up with other equally stooped tunnels.To reach the main working areas from the entrances in the valley floor could take more than half an hour, involving as many as twenty ladders.Descending into foul air and a slippery ocher ooze.Each work period lasted twelve hours.Food was dragged down in iron pots, so that it was as cold as stone by the time most workers received it.Two ladles of cornmeal mush and a hunk of bread were served up halfway through the shift.Rusting oil drums were filled with water and placed at the end of each main gallery in the mine.But within a few minutes a scum of yellow sulfur powder would form on its top, thickening during the twelve hours.Permission to drink was needed from the armed sec men who patrolled the mine, each of them only working below ground for three hours at a spell.Bodily functions were exercised in the darker corners of the mine.Dean Cawdor had been in worse places in his young life.The survival skills that he'd learned in ducking and dodging were invaluable in the depths of Zimyanin's mine.Even in the short time that he'd been a prisoner in the freezing north, the boy had learned what could and couldn't be done.Being small and slight, he could weave his way through the midnight crevices, slipping away from the attention of the guards and shepherding his energy by digging and carrying as little as possible.Dean also contrived to get to the food first, stuffing himself with the tasteless gruel.He watched other slave workers, not used to the hardship, turning their noses up at the food.By the time hunger drove them to accept the gray sludge, they'd already become weakened.And they'd soon be dead."I HOPE the inclement weather has not meant hardship for the workers," Zimyanin said, pausing to wipe the yellow muck from his high leather boots.His overseers were used now to the odd way that the pockmarked baron spoke to them."Sure.Yeah, Major-Commissar.No problem with them at all." His fingers crossed behind his back that the Russkie didn't learn about the drowned corpses.Zimyanin didn't have much of a reputation for liking men who lied to him.The last sec man he'd caught in an untruth had been crucified upside down over a slow fire.The Russian stood, legs slightly apart, hands locked behind his back, surveying the main galleries.The workers scurried over the scaffolding and ladders like golden ants
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]