Foundation v(cc-1 Read online

  Foundation

  ( Valdemar (12): Collegium Chronicles - 1 )

  Mercedes Lackey

  Foundation

  The Collegium Chronicles, Book 1

  Dedicated to the memory of Alex the Grey

  and the continuing research of Dr. Irene Pepperberg.

  www.alexfoundation.org

  Chapter 1

  Mags did not shiver in the cold; his body was used to it by now. Besides, it was warmer down here in the mine than it was up there, up at the sluices, and almost warmer than it was in the doss room, at least until everyone got packed in and the heat of their bodies combined enough that they could sleep.

  He knelt in the shaft in the approved manner, rock just a few finger lengths from his nose, his knees fitted into smooth hollows that he himself had painstakingly cut out. His lamp, strapped to his forehead, cast a dim light on the rock face in front of him. That was the only part of him that was warm—his forehead behind the reflector of the oil lamp.

  Around him, behind him in the darkness, came the sounds of tapping and echoes of tapping. He had just begun his half day down here, but of course, he was hungry already. The porridge of barley and oats that they all got for their breakfast didn’t last for very long. But he was used to that; in fact, the times when he wasn’t hungry were branded in his memory.

  There had been the day that the cook had fallen ill and the bread had burned and been thrown out by the helpers rather than saved to feed to the children over a period of days—he’d just come off the sluices in time to see the bread in buckets waiting to go into the pig trough. He’d rounded up the rest, and they had all snatched themselves burned loaves before they could be fed to the pigs. They’d gone to sleep quickly that night, stomachs tightly packed with the bread. There was the day he’d stumbled across a cache of apples—probably stolen by one of the house servants—and had eaten his fill. And of course, the day, once a year, when the village priest visited to inspect, a day when they all were washed, given decent clothing, and fed an enormous meal of bread and soup.

  His mouth watered just thinking about the soup, and his stomach growled. This afternoon, maybe he could slip off to the piggery again and get at one of the buckets of scraps before they went into the trough. Demmon had found half a meat pasty in one once, the foul bugger, and gloated about it. He was always snitching things and not sharing. And he was always scanting on the work, too, never putting props in his seam, leaving it for the next shift. Served him right he’d got caught in that cave-in. Share around, that was the rule. That way if the grub you snitched was bad, nobody got too sick to work, and if it was good, you all got a taste. Share the warmth, share the rags you snitched so that everybody had some cover, ’cause if someone got cold-sick, it meant you all had to make up for him.

  The only thing you couldn’t share was the work in the seam. There was only room for one in the little tunnels that riddled the rock like wormholes.

  Mags carefully positioned his chisel and tapped at a likely spot in the seam with his hammer. It was a good broad seam, this one, as wide as the tunnel was tall, which meant there was no problem with spending most of his time hammering out waste rock and getting shouted at for not bringing up any sparklies today. In fact, he had three good ones so far, the yellow ones. They were all in the pouch around his neck that he’d bring out at the end of his shift. Master Cole liked the yellow ones. He liked the green ones even better, but his sons usually worked seams that had the green ones in them. He didn’t trust the orphans on those seams, though what he thought the orphans would do with a big green sparkly, Mags couldn’t imagine. Where would they go with it? Who’d buy a gemstone from a scrawny, raggedy brat? And that assumed they could somehow get off the property in the first place.

  This mine produced a lot of different sparklies. Yellow, a pale green that wasn’t as good as the dark green ones, dark red, purple ones of all sorts of shades, a paler yellow than the ones Mags had in this seam, a pale blue, and a clear with silver threads running through it. More of that last than anything else, and it was what the youngest mined. When you had more experience, you moved up to the pale yellow and dark red. Then the pale green and the purple. Then the dark yellow and the pale blue. Those took a good eye and a good hand.

  Mags’ tapping released a chunk of rock. There was nothing in it that he could see, but it wasn’t waste—it would go up to the hammer-mill and the sluices. He shoved it behind him for the collector, the youngest kid of all, who would pull out all the rocks from the tunnels and throw them in the donkey cart.

  He set his chisel into a good spot and began tapping again. One more sparkly and he’d get a second slice of barley bread with his broth. Oh, that would be good.

  There were two sounds in the mine where he was, the tapping and the steady drip of water. Closer to the mouth, you could hear the bellows that drove fresh air down here, and the creaking of the pumps that pulled water out. Not that they’d drown if the pumps failed, but Master Cole had learned that working in water rusted the tools and meant sparklies were lost. So no working in water.

  The rock fractured suddenly and dropped off the face, and there, catching the light was another yellow sparkly as big as Mags’ thumb. Extra bread for sure!

  But first he had to get it out without breaking it.

  He pulled off the rag he kept wrapped around his throat, folded it a few times, and set it on the floor of the tunnel just under the stone. If it already had fractures in it, falling on that wouldn’t shatter it. If the gem cutters shattered it later, it was hardly his problem.

  Setting his chisel as delicately as he could, he began flaking bits of rock from the face around the sparkly. A tap, a pause to check his progress, another tap, another pause. It was serious, intense work. One slip of the chisel, and so much for the extra bread, and there would be a beating to boot. The others, the sons, could tell from the changed rhythm that he had found something good.

  “Mags! That’d better not be a green one!” shouted Jarrik Pieters down the tunnel.

  “Ain’t!” he grunted. “Yaller.”

  “Don’t break it!” Jarrik shouted back unnecessarily. He could just see Jarrik yelling from his own seam, round face red with exertion and almost-anger, bushy brows furrowing, brown hair (already going thin on top) stringy with sweat, and little, deep-set eyes sparkling greedily at the thought of another sparkly in the pouch. And big mouth gaped wide to yell at Mags not to break it. As if he would! What did Jarrik think he was, an idiot?

  Yah, that’s exactly what he thinks you are. Or worse. Much worse. An idiot and Bad Blood.

  Mags heard that a lot. And the other kiddies heard it said of him a lot. Not that any of them knew what it meant.

  Most of the new kiddies were picked up to come live and work here once a year when Cole went out and about with his wagon, looking for orphans, kiddies abandoned, lost parents, and generally unwanted. He liked to get them around eleven years old, though he’d take them as young as nine if they were strong and looked like they could do the work. A few had come from as much as two weeks’ walk away, sent to meet Cole’s wagon by people who wanted ’em off their hands, and right quick.

  Ah, but Mags was a different case altogether. Mags was local. And he’d been working for Cole for as long as he could remember.

  And for as long as he could remember, every time a member of the Pieters felt like verbally abusing someone, Mags got The Lecture.

  Yer Bad Blood, boy. Yer Bad Blood, and it’s damn lucky for you that yer here, an’ we can put ye to work an’ keep those idle hands busy, or ye’d be dancin’ at rope’s end already.

  Bad Blood, because his parents were bandits and had been killed in a raid by the Royal Guard. Bad Blood, because he’d been found in a cradle
in the bandit camp after. Bad Blood, so bad that no one had wanted to take him in and he’d been left at the local Temple of the Trine with priests who were probably not at all happy about being saddled with the care of an infant. But then along had come Cole Pieters.

  Out of the kindness, the pure kindness of my heart, I tool ye. No one else wanted ye, not even the godly priests. They all knew what ye were. They all figgered one day ye’d turn on ’em. I am a bloody saint, I am, fer takin’ a chance with you.

  And so the infant had begun life in the Pieters household with the imaginative name of “the Brat.” And from the moment his tiny hands could actually do anything, he’d been put to work, an unpaid, poorly fed, scantily clad, dirty little drudge. He was told, and he believed it, that he’d worked before he could walk, dragging a wad of rag-strips as he crawled, all unknowingly cleaning the floor with it. He’d been Brat for years, going from job to job in the household, from floor duster to spit turner, from pot washer to garden weeder until he was big enough to see over the side of the sluices. And that was when he’d gone to work at the mine.

  And that was when he’d gotten the name of Mags.

  Tap, pause. Tap, pause. He put his nose as close to the stone as he could and still see, examining the rock minutely.

  He remembered that day. His only instruction had been to watch the older kiddies, do what they did, and look for things that sparkled and had color. He got the stuff that had already been picked over, no one really expected him to find anything. But as he had washed the gravel over and over again in his basin, watching not only the gravel in the pan but making sure he checked the stuff in the sluice as well, he had spotted something. It was no bigger than a grain of wheat, but it was bright, brilliant green. And then he found a yellow one, and a purple, and another green, a third green, and by the time the day was over, he turned over to his astonished overseer a little pile of tiny gem shards, a pile big enough to cover the palm of his hand.

  “By the gods, Brat, ye’ve got th’ eyes of a Magpie!” Endal Pieters had exclaimed. And it was the same the next day, and the next, until they started calling him “little Magpie,” then Mags, and then—that was his name.

  Carefully, Mags put thumb and forefinger to either side of the sparkly, and wiggled it, or tried to. Was it loose? Could he pull it out, like a baby tooth? That was always better than chipping it out.

  He felt the thing give a little, heard the tiniest sound of grinding and—it popped out of its socket—in two pieces, not one, but they were both pretty big. He just wouldn’t say anything. Two sparklies meant a slice of bread,

  “I ain’t hearing hammering!” Jarrik shouted. “I ain’t hearing hammering, Mags!”

  “Pulled two!” he grunted back, took the time to get a drink from his bottle, and tucked the sparklies into the bag around his neck.

  “That don’t mean no skylarkin’!” Jarrik shouted back. That was his favorite word for shirking lately.

  “Gotta pee!” Mags retorted—which he didn’t, but his calves and thighs were beginning to cramp something fierce, and he could hear the donkey cart coming. He’d have to clear the tunnel, or at least stop working and cram himself in the end while the kiddie cleaned out the rock, so Jarrik shouted back his grudging permission and Mags backed himself down the tunnel he was working and into the larger shaft. The kiddie—named Felan, skinny, dirt-covered, lank-haired, and wearing patched up burlap breeks and shirt—didn’t even look at him, just plunged into the workings with his burlap bag. But Mags didn’t expect him to talk; he remembered when he’d been the donkey-boy and had been backhanded for talking to the miners.

  Ye ain’t here t’ talk! Yer here t’ work!

  Mags stretched his legs as he walked to the played-out seam they were using as the latrine. True waste rock went in here, burying the leavings before they started to smell too bad. The donkey-boy was in charge of that, too.

  Mags didn’t know the kiddie all that well. So far as he was aware, the boy hadn’t spoken a word since he’d arrived. Well, that should make him poplar with Jarrik, whose every other sentence was “Too much skylarkin’!” or “Too much jibber-abber!” accompanied with the back of the hand.

  Truth to tell, he didn’t really want to know the kiddie’s story. There were no good stories here. Every kiddie here was—wanted, burdens on their villages, bastards left on doorsteps, kiddies left orphaned—they arrived, more often than not with tear-streaked faces, and most of the time, their faces remained tear-streaked. There was little enough to be happy about here, after all.

  The food was just enough to keep you alive and no more unless you somehow found or snatched some. They all slept together in a single cellar room without a fireplace, a room right under the barn and filled with hay and straw too old for the farm animals to eat. At least it wasn’t drafty, and being underground it kept from going below freezing and wasn’t too hot in the summer. They each got one threadbare blanket, so the best way to sleep was all bundled together in a ball like a wad of puppies, sharing body heat and coverings. Of course, that meant there were a lot of gropings among the older kiddies, but they all knew better than to futter. Everyone knew the story of Missa, who’d futtered and got a big belly. She got beaten and dosed until she lost the baby, and she was never right in the head after. And all the boys old enough to have been the daddy got a beating apiece. So nobody futtered.

  Mags couldn’t figure out where Missa’d got the energy or the interest to do it anyway. He was always so bone-tired at the end of the day that he fell asleep as soon as he got warm, and there was nothing about anybody’s skinny body that made him want to put off sleep for even an instant. Maybe it was different for girls, they just had to lay there. Or maybe it would be different when he got older, in the spring and summer, when you didn’t ball up all together shivering. But right now his jakko was as tired as the rest of him, and wasn’t interested in a thing. Maybe when he was fourteen. He was only thirteen now, or at least, that was what Master Cole told the priest last time he came.

  He kind of hoped it would stay that way. The idea of a few moments of sleep less to appease a part of him that had suddenly got ideas of its own had no appeal.

  By the time he made it to the end of the played-out seam, he needed to be there anyway. So it was just as well he’d lied. It wasn’t bad; the donkey-boy had recently dumped rock here. He managed to shake the last of the cramps out on the way back, and crawled back into his tunnel, taking a shoring timber with him.

  He always put in so many timbers that Master Cole sometimes shouted at him, but he never had a cave-in, and Master Cole couldn’t argue with that. He’d noticed on his way out that by his standards, the roof was overdue for a prop, so he brought one in and hammered it in place before going back to work.

  Once again, he arranged himself at the face, and began working a little lower. Off in the distance, he heard two of the other kiddies start a timid conversation, quickly hushed when Jarrik roared “No jibber-jabber!”

  He was starting to cramp again. All right, time to pull a fake. He had enough stones, he wasn’t going to get into trouble unless someone caught him at it—and to do that, they’d have to crawl down this tunnel and he would hear them coming. He stretched himself out, right leg first, then left, all the while tap-tap-pausing on the rock at the side of the tunnel with the chisel alone. Then he flipped over on his back and lay at full length, staring up at the ceiling only a little way above his face, still tapping.

  He could only do this when the donkey-boy had cleared out the mined rock. His skin was tough, but not that tough. But the donkey-boy was thorough, he scraped out everything down to the dust, leaving Mags with nice, smooth rock to lie on. Cold, but smooth.

  As he lay there, staring at the rock, he heard faint sniffling coming from off in the distance. Jarrik couldn’t hear it, likely, or he’d be shouting about that, too. And then there would be a lecture over noon meal about how lucky they all were, how good Master Cole was to give them all shelter and food and clothing, be
cause no one wanted them, not any of them. And how Master Cole was losing money over them, they were such worthless workers, not even earning their keep.

  Now, Mags had no idea what the sparklies were all really called, much less what they were worth, but he had a pretty good idea that all that about not earning their keep was a big, fat lie. Because Master Cole’s house didn’t get any shabbier, he didn’t get any thinner, his wife didn’t get raggedy, and his daughters were finding husbands just fine. And all those things took money. So if they weren’t earning their keep, then where was all the money coming from?

  Of course, the priest tut-tutted and agreed with him when he said these things.

  Master Cole would have them all down here, all day and well into the night, if he thought it was possible. But while Mags was still in the house, before he’d gotten big enough to join the sluicing crew, Master Cole had figured out that when he rotated his crews on half a day at the sluice and half a day in the mine, they didn’t get sick as often, and weren’t crippled from the unnatural positions they had to take down here. Now the only people he had working for him that were bent over and knotted were the ones that dated from before that period, and the ones that had been unfortunate enough to survive a shaft collapse.