Darkwood by M. E. Breen Page A

and basket up the cliff. Chopper squatted at the edge to watch the man’s progress, his face impassive. Even before the man’s head had come into view Chopper had retrieved his basket and carried it over to a set of scales. Amidst all the crude equipment of the camp, the sagging tents and dented pots, the scales looked as if they had come straight from the palace coffers: gleaming brass and calibrated to a fraction of an ounce.
    Chopper was staring at the scales intently. He frowned and weighed the man’s take a second and then a third time. The heap of stone gleamed with a soft, bright light that looked as if it came not from the reflected rays of the sun but from within the heart of the stone itself. And the color! Each tiny chip of stone burned with the full spectrum of colors, as though a rainbow had frozen and shattered into millions of pieces.
    â€œNumber Four, pat down.”
    At the sound of Chopper’s voice Annie felt the man holding her jerk to attention.
    The miner they had just pulled up was standing on his feet now. He was no more than skin draped over a skeleton; his hands, red and puffy from countless scrapes against the rock,looked too big for his body. While Annie watched, they removed each article of his clothing and inspected it. They looked in pockets and cuffs; they turned his long underwear inside out, poked into his socks. He had not been wearing shoes.
    Annie found she could not look away from his feet. Like his hands, they seemed to belong to a different, much larger body. The frost that had covered the ground in the night had not yet burned away, and she thought how painful it must be, the ice touching his skin.
    â€œTwenty minutes rest, Number Four, then start up at Thirteen,” one of the men with spiked boots said. The naked man bent down to gather his clothes from the ground where the inspectors had dropped them. He turned and walked wearily toward the tents. Red welts covered his back, some of the cuts just beginning to scab over, others still oozing blood. Beneath these were the fainter marks of earlier beatings, and beneath those the thin white lines of long-healed scars.
    The man with the mole took in Annie’s expression with satisfaction.
    â€œLight fingers, that one. A few days back we caught him with a chip under his tongue. Worth nearly a month’s rent in Dour County. But you know that.”
    All the water she’d drunk on the way over began to roil in her stomach like the sea during a storm. Annie swallowed hard, but she could not swallow the awful sweetness filling her mouth. Chopper had come to stand in front of her. He placed hishands on her shoulders and looked down at her almost affectionately.
    â€œNow you—you would never survive a beating like that. My men don’t know their own strength. They can’t tell the difference between a grown man and a child, once they get started.”
    Annie tried to twitch away, but Chopper held fast. “Do we understand each other?”
    She looked him full in the face, then bent forward and vomited an ocean onto his feet. For several moments she remained bent over, staring at the partially digested fish head resting on the top of one of his boots. He didn’t move, didn’t react in any way, except by tightening his grip on her shoulders until she winced.
    â€œIs the child diseased?” someone asked.
    Chopper let her go. “Start her at Number Four. Smirch, my boots.”
    The man with the mole looked daggers at Annie but squatted down to do as he was told.

    Hauler, though bigger and stronger than Chopper, was friendlier and stupider. He held her arm loosely. “Ready?”
    â€œWhat is it you want me to do, exactly?” Annie asked, rather impressed by the coolness of her voice. Hauler stared at her blankly for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed.
    â€œHoo!” He wiped his eyes. “Fresh!” He patted her shoulderwith a huge hand. “I don’t