"Who's in charge here?" Mikeos called the question at the half dozen or so who'd stumbled from the smelter, but the taur answered.

"The Walker. He's down below. Centre shaft. Has chambers early on before the main diggings."

"The Walker?" Mikeos frowned as if troubled by a memory. "A man?"

"Corpser." The taur pulled a long red shard of wood from his shoulder and lay back, bleeding.

Mikeos spat. "Sect and corpsers! The two things you said we wouldn't meet in the ruins!"

"I said they hated it here." Jenna looked at the black haze still drifting from the smelter doorway. "But if they needed something bad enough – had no choice – they could stand it."

"What are these things anyhow?" Hemar asked, crouched close to the creature impailed on the rock-pick. "Looks like ... hell, I don't even know what it looks like." The legs along one side of the sect made a slow undulation and Hemar flinched away.

"Sect have one mind, many forms." Jenna shrugged. "Must be something hatched because it would be useful here. What bothers me is sect and men and corpsers together. Sect don't work with others – they eat them."

"Almost as if they're starting to break the rules!" Mikeos shot her a dark look, holstered his weapons, and set off toward the central and largest mineshaft.

Several miners had gathered with Mikeos at the mine-head and were giving him directions as Jenna and Hemar came up. Close by where the gunslinger stood an iron ladder jutted over the mineshaft wall. On the far side a large winding mechanism sat on a reinforced timber frame, a gantry dangling ropes down into the shaft.

"Follow the lanterns past the bridge. You'll find The Walker." A man with grey skin and no teeth in his mouth.

"Don't go down, mister." A child missing an eye, muscles twitching in the empty socket.

"Are there sect down there?" Mikeos asked.

"No, sir."

"Ever been sect round here, 'part from them face-plates?"

"No, sir. There's more of them face-huggers in the smelter. The Walker brought them in with him off the Dry one time."

A lean and mean-faced young man approached, trailing a rock-pick. "They like it in the smelter room. We'll root them out though."

"How many of you folk down there?" Mikeos asked.

"Its shift two. That's thirty-some." The shorn-headed figure that first pointed out the smelter. Jenna saw now that she was a woman, young, a girl perhaps.

Mikeos pulled the two spare revolvers from his belt and held them out, one for Jenna, one for Hemar. The dogman flinched back. "I'd shoot you by mistake." Mikeos shoved that one back into his belt, at the back this time. He gestured with the other. "Take it," he said, meeting Jenna's gaze. She reached for it, surprised at the weight although she had held a gun twice before. "Can you shoot?" he asked.

"Point and squeeze?" Jenna had never fired one before. The sisterhood of the hex did not oppose the Old Ones as she wished they would, but neither did they take up the Old One's gifts, knowing them for parts of a grand bargain into which they had elected not to enter. Guns were a thing of the Old Ones. Perhaps not their invention, but made by them, sold for coins whose only value to the Three seemed to be the value attached by those that paid them over. Sister Almah used to say that the day a man made a gun in his smithy, a product of human sweat and labour, would be the first day the sisterhood might consider such weapons.

"Point and squeeze." Mikeos nodded. He took hold of the iron ladder-head jutting above the shaft wall, slung a leg over and swung around on to it. "You next, Hemar. Don't fall. I won't catch you."

Hemar whined and moved to take hold of the ladder. "Domen aren't built for climbing." His hand shook, whether from thirst or fear Jenna couldn't say. Probably both. She swept the small crowd of miners with her stare. "One scout is dead. Watch for others returning." And she held out the gun Mikeos had given her, offering it handle first to the girl with the shorn hair. "Point and squeeze." The girl took it with wide eyes and the hint of a smile. Jenna stepped over the wall and followed the others down.

Ladder led to ladder, the exchanges made sometimes on narrow platforms cut into the shaft walls, sometimes on the vertical face of the rock. The foundations of the Ansos pillar did not rest on bed rock but bedded deep into it like a tooth in a jawbone. Jenna expected no less from the structures here. The air became blessedly less hot and less dry with every twenty yards descended. Three times she stepped on her robes, trapping cloth between her boot and the iron rungs. On the third occasion she slipped a rung. A shout, half-curse and half-plea, escaped her before she realised that the bottom of the shaft lay two more steps below her.

Jenna stepped off onto the sand-covered floor, stretching her aching fingers. Already she missed the comfort of the gun though she had only held it for a few moments.

"Here." Mikeos' voice from the gloom of a low tunnel leading off toward the foundations of the slab. Jenna hurried over, keeping her head low after the first scrape against the rock. She joined the other two in the dark, waiting for her eyes to adjust. At this depth it was almost cool and the only trace of the smelter stink was what she brought with her on her robes.

"So you know where we're going?" She asked it in a whisper, unsure who else might be listening. The silence made her loath to break it. She had thought to hear the swinging of picks and the thump of hammers, but the only sound was her own breathing.

"Stay close." Mikeos moved on, ignoring her question.

A few yards brought them to a chamber hollowed around some natural void, a store-room stacked with crates and barrels, the walls set with hooks from which hung rope, lanterns, picks, and other tools. A single lantern, wick trimmed low, hung above the exit. Mikeos scanned the place once and moved on through, stopping only when Jenna stopped.

"What is it?"

Jenna didn't know. Some flickering reflection of lamplight had caught at the corner of her eye. Something in the pattern of it drew her, some hint of the hex lattice perhaps in the pulses of light, some memory of dark green leaves against the sun. Either way she turned, walked deeper into the gloom and took the object from the far wall. A short saw with long bladed teeth.

"What's that for?" he asked.

Jenna had no idea.

"Rock-saw?" Hemar cocked his head.

"I gave you a gun!" Mikeos said, his gaze running the length of her, searching a sign of it beneath her robes.

"They needed it up there." Jenna jabbed a finger toward the ceiling.

Mikeos and Hemar exchanged a glance, Hemar's long tongue lolling pink from his jaw. For a heartbeat she hated them both.

"It's done," Mikeos said. With a shrug he turned away and led on.

Where the tunnel reached the end of the bedrock a fissure, natural or created when the Old Ones's slab was sunk, ran across the rough-hewn corridor, reaching up and down beyond the reach of Jenna's night sight. It exposed the surface of the slab, pierced by a neat circular passage leading into its depths. A bridge of ropes and planks spanned the five-yard gap.

"Dark wurm." Jenna and Mikeos said it together. She had taken him into the foundations of Ansos to a place where the Old Ones might be remembered and spoken of. Dark wurms gnawed there too, riddling the deep places with their burrows. Without an army of miners the only real means of reaching the ruins' hidden places was to exploit wurm tunnels, hewing a path from one to the next where possible.

Despite fears prompted by fairy tales, the bridge proved only mildly rickety and the chasm below appeared to hide no trolls. The three of them passed into the wurn tunnel and moved on. Ahead the faintest light glowed, weaker than any firefly. Mikeos passed two side tunnels, aiming for the light. It proved to be another lantern, this one set on a boulder at the junction of three tunnels, two wurm-bored, one dug through the bedrock with picks.

Another distant light beckoned them down this man-made passage. Jenna followed Mikeos, seeing him only as an outline when he blocked her line of sight to the next lantern. She'd known the same ancient darkness in the passages beneath Ansos, but at least there she had learned the layout. Here she stumbled on every lump or bump, and walked blind, one hand out before her, one trailing the wall. She knew the hex for seeing in deep places but to attempt it and fail would rob what little of her courage remained. She suspected she could no longer draw on the power of Ansos, but suspecting and knowing are two different things. To try and fail would allow her fears to congeal into unpalatable fact.

Every fifty paces Jenna's fingers passed an opening, the shape of each suggesting an alcove. She counted them along with her paces. The world made more sense reduced to numbers sometimes. They had just passed the fourth alcove when a distant rumbling overwrote the sound of their footsteps on the stone. It came closer, louder.

"Quick, in here." She grabbed for Mikeos, found his arm, and dragged him back. Behind her Hemar managed to avoid a collision and squeeze into the alcove with them. The rumbling grew louder, with creaking and grunting added to the mix. The faint whisper of light only hinted at the two men pushing the laden mine-truck as they passed by.

With the miners rumbling into the distance Mikeos resumed the trek. They reached the next lantern and spotted another, this one brighter and less distant. The hewn passage had joined a large wurm tunnel and the faint sound of pick and hammer echoed along it. Somewhere up ahead men would be labouring at the work-faces, prying machinery and cables from the rock that embedded it, following the seams of technology and ripping it out wholesale for the smelter. Some called such work a blasphemy. The hunska shamans call it an assault on the Three, but in Ansos the wisdom of the sisterhood told it otherwise. The Three had moved beyond mere mechanism, the eldest said. These were fossils of older, cruder days and it made no odds if men picked over the bones. The hex witches paid good money for pieces saved from the furnace. Jenna herself had spent many months poring over single pieces of the Old Ones' makings, trying to impose some meaning on them. She had learned nothing in all that time, nothing that answered a single why or how.

The brightness of the lantern led them away from the wurm tunnel, away from the sounds of digging, along a smaller man-hewn passage to an empty antechamber before a large and well-fitted timber door.

"Corpser." Hemar sniffed, nose twitching. "Definitely corpser." He closed his eyes as if trying to capture some memory, shook his head, closed his mouth.

Mikeos drew his gun, moved to the door, held his ear close to it and his breath still. Returning to them he shrugged. "I'll go in. Hemar stick behind me. Jenna ... anyone comes up the tunnel ... wave your saw at them."

Mikeos approached the door, took hold of the iron handle, and pushed on through.

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