Dragon's Kin (22 page)

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back,” he reassured her.

Kindan figured that Nuella was so sad because she had had so much fun and excitement working with Kisk and J’lantir. He imagined that she would be very bored—not to mention grouchy—until the dragonrider returned.

“J’lantir,” Kindan asked just before the dragonrider departed, “do you suppose we could teach Kisk to go
between
like a dragon?” The thought had been on his mind for a while.

“Hmm,” J’lantir murmured consideringly. “Fire-lizards can do it, so I can’t imagine that watch-whers could not.”

“It won’t work,” Nuella said sleepily. Kindan started: He had thought she was asleep. “They have to see where they’re going, and they see heat,” she explained.

“So?” Kindan said.

“Ah, I see what she means,” J’lantir said. “A dragonrider has to give the visual reference for his dragon. So only a wherhandler who could
see
heat could give a watch-wher a proper visual reference.”

“And no one can see heat,” Kindan agreed glumly.

“I can imagine it,” Nuella murmured from her perch on Kisk.

“Why did you want to know?” J’lantir asked Kindan.

“If watch-whers could go
between
they might be able to rescue people, to bring them out of cave-ins and such,” Kindan explained.

“An excellent idea, Kindan,” J’lantir agreed. “Truly excellent. It’s a shame that it won’t work.”

“Goo’ ’dea,” Nuella agreed sleepily. She yawned and rolled over, facing away from them.

“Well, thanks anyway,” Kindan said, turning to join Kisk and Nuella on the shed’s straw floor.

J’lantir reached out and tousled the youngster’s head. “It was a good try, Kindan.”

Kindan was correct in his assessment that Nuella would be grouchy until the dragonrider returned. He spent several days cheering her up, enduring endless barbed comments from her, before he got her to agree to go back into the mines for more training.

“But only if you agree to explore every bit,” Nuella demanded. When Kindan agreed, she said, “We can go down when the shifts are off.”

The miners worked in the mine only three days in every sevenday. Two other days were spent grading and bagging the mined coal, felling more timber for shoring and supports, and general work around the camp. The last two days were left free for the miners, with the exception that
everyone
had to help on Camp matters, like quarrying for stone, repairing the road, or making furniture and crockery.

The pumps were the only parts of the mine that were constantly manned. Natalon would never allow a build-up of bad air. Not only would that make it impossible for the miners to return, but it would also allow any gas that leaked out of the exposed coal to accumulate in pockets large enough to cause an explosion, like the one that had killed Kindan’s father and brothers.

“Let’s start with the street Tarik’s working on,” Nuella suggested once they were in the mine and a peeved Dalor was on watch at the hold’s entrance to the secret passageway.

Kindan readily agreed and they turned north from the mine shaft to walk toward Second Street. Kindan had learned how to keep his pace count going while he was thinking or even talking—mostly through painful thumps from Nuella when he forgot.

“You’re even more blind down here than I am, Kindan!” Nuella had cried the last time he’d been forced to admit that he’d lost his count. “That’s it! From now on, you’re going to wear a blindfold,” she had declared. “You’ll have to rely on Kisk and your pace counts to avoid banging into things.”

She’d handed him a dirty scarf that she’d brought along to use as a mask against the worst of the mine’s dust. “You can put this on.”

When Kindan protested, she had told him, “Look, what if there’s a cave-in or something and all the glows are out? What will you do then? If you know your paces, and you’re comfortable in the dark, you won’t panic. And if you don’t panic, you’ll be able to help others.”

Kindan had been convinced. From then on he had donned a blindfold the moment they had safely exited the lift at the bottom of the mine shaft. And, apart from some truly amazing bruises on his shins, Kindan had walked unscathed. The bruises had faded as he learned to keep his count and to trust his memory. But privately he admitted to himself that his mental map of the mine was nowhere near as detailed or accurate as Nuella’s.

Now Kindan felt for joists by delicate touch—having removed several splinters after the first attempt—and walked with something approaching Nuella’s flowing grace.

When they came to Second Street, the tunnel down which Tarik’s shift worked and hauled out coal, Kindan checked for supports on either side of the junction. Nuella waited patiently after her own cursory inspection.

“I’m ready,” Kindan said, turning back around with his right hand trailing along the tunnel wall. He found the turn onto Second Street and started counting the paces to the street’s joists. After fourteen paces—ten meters, the usual interval for the first set of supporting joists—he grew puzzled. After twenty-one he grew alarmed.

“Did you feel any joists?” he asked Nuella, who was walking up the street on the left-hand side, opposite Kindan.

“No,” she said, sounding concerned. “Should we go back and check again?”

Kindan struggled with the desire to remove his blindfold and won, remembering Nuella’s sharp hearing. She’d know if he took off the scarf—the sound of rustling fabric would be a dead giveaway.

“Yes,” he told her, lowering his hands.

Nuella giggled. “You were going to take your blindfold off, weren’t you?”

Kindan let his sigh answer her. He counted his paces back to the entrance, turned, and carefully walked forward, searching for the joists. He stopped at nine paces.

“I feel something here, but it’s not like a proper joist,” he said. The wood was thin, and as he stretched his hands to touch the ceiling above him, he could only make out a thin beam of wood overhead.

“It’s not thick enough,” Nuella agreed. “Or wide enough.”

“It’s like half or even a quarter the usual,” Kindan said.

It was like that the whole way down the tunnel, they discovered. Kindan’s alarm grew as they made their way down. There were numerous side avenues dug off the street, more than he would have guessed.

“It’s almost as though Tarik has started mining this street,” he said. He knew from discussion around the Camp that the mine was supposed to be thoroughly explored before full mining would commence—and that the “room” mining would begin at the far end of the mine, away from the mine shafts so that any cave-in wouldn’t block rescuers. “This is bad,” he said.

“Yes,” Nuella agreed. “Father must not know—he wouldn’t allow it.”

They completed their exploration of Second Street and all its adjoining avenues with their nerves on edge. Nuella did not object when Kindan suggested that they change their exploration to First Street the next time they entered the mine.

Kindan hadn’t forgotten his notion about watch-whers rescuing people. Every chance he got, he tried to arrange an experiment to test Kisk’s capabilities, or to teach her something new.

But when he said he wanted to see how she might excavate a trapped body, Nuella would not allow him to try.

“Look, all I want to do is cover myself with some coal and have Kisk dig me out,” he’d protested when she’d first vetoed the idea.

“What if you get hurt?” she demanded. “What will we do then?” And, despite all Kindan’s arguments to the contrary, she absolutely refused to go along with it. What surprised him was that Kisk backed her up—he had expected that the watch-wher would accept his direction without dissent.

“Okay, okay, you two ladies win,” he grumbled in the end. His comment earned him a swift jab from Nuella.

“It’s not that we’re ladies, you fool, it’s that we’re being sensible,” she snarled at him. She sighed and added, “If you’re determined to practice this, let’s do it up in Kisk’s shed first before we try it underground.”

Reluctantly, Kindan agreed.

Kindan and Kisk returned to the shed, having seen Nuella safely back to her second-floor room in the hold. Kisk was still playful. Tired, but resigned to the need to wear Kisk out, Kindan decided to teach her a modified form of hide-and-seek. He would hide under the straw, which let him lie still, quiet, and almost asleep, while she would search for him.

Kisk was excellent at finding him. Kindan made sure that she turned her back while he was hiding and told her “Don’t listen!”—with little real hope that she wouldn’t. As the game progressed, he took to gathering small stones and tossing them in different directions to try to confuse her hearing.

The flaw with that plan, of course, was that even properly buried, he’d still have to tell her when to start searching for him, and the sound of his voice would give his location away. After some experimenting, he discovered a solution: He would throw a final rock at the curtain covering the doors. When Kisk heard that, she was allowed to start looking for him.

The game got more interesting then, as Kisk took longer to find him.

On the second attempt, having tossed the last stone at the curtain, Kindan squeezed his eyes tight, reduced his breathing to the barest trickle, and tried to think of nothing but blackness, doing his best to imitate the ground beneath the straw.

As he lay there, tired and sleepy, he started dozing off.

It was then, just on the edge of sleep, that Kindan thought he saw something—a glowing shape, like someone curled up in a tight ball just like he was. No, he corrected himself in amazement, it
is
me!

He heard the soft padding of Kisk’s feet as she made her way over to him. In his mind’s eye, he saw the shape get closer, saw the head become more resolved—not a face, but a sort of smudged oval-shaped rainbow—and then become obscured as bright jets, the orangeish-yellow color of flame, came streaking over it. He felt Kisk’s warm breath blow gently through the straw over his face, seeming to perfectly match the flame he was imagining.

Kisk
bleeked
happily.

Laughing, he opened his eyes and burst from under the straw to wrap his arms around the watch-wher’s head. “You found me!” he said. He hugged her tightly. “You great girl, you!”

“Describe it again,” Nuella demanded the next evening. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

“I can’t, really,” Kindan replied. “It was like everything was the color of flames—”

“What’s that mean?”

Kindan pursed his lips, trying to think. “Did you ever look at something really bright—um, when you were little?”

“Like what?” Nuella asked, making a face at his question.

“Like the sun,” he said with sudden inspiration. “Or a flame.”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Well, I’ve done that,” he went on. “And afterward, I’ve closed my eyes and I still have the image in them. It starts out as bright white and then slowly fades to yellow, orange, red, green, blue . . . and out.”

“Go on.”

“Well, it was like that except that all the colors were there with the white bit being the smallest, in the center, and surrounded by different rings of color from yellow to blue.”

Nuella suddenly looked wistful. “Do you—do you suppose I could see Kisk’s images?”

“We can try,” Kindan said. “How about it, Kisk? Can you show Nuella your image when you find me?”

Kisk looked from one to the other and
chirped
a cheerful assent.

“Could you?” Nuella asked in a voice full of wonder. She closed her eyes tentatively, then squeezed them shut firmly.

“I’ll hide,” Kindan said. Kisk dutifully turned away from them. Shortly after Kindan threw his stone against the curtain, he heard Nuella gasp.

“Kindan, put your arm over your face,” she said. Kindan complied, casting aside his cover of straw as he did so. “Oh! Now the other one.”

Kindan obeyed, then impishly raised both arms over his head, clasped together.

“You put your arms up!” Nuella exclaimed. “You’re grabbing your hands—by the Egg of Faranth, I can
see
you!”

Kindan sat up and stared at her. Tears were rolling down her cheeks from her closed eyes.

The next day, he and Nuella started teaching Kisk how to find people buried under rubble. At Nuella’s suggestion, they started with having Kisk simply find individual people. Kisk loved this game and found Nuella, Kindan, Zenor, Dalor, and Master Zist—even though Dalor and Master Zist were in their respective cotholds, and Dalor was tired from his shift work.

“Dalor doesn’t get into the mine any more than I do,” Zenor grumbled before heading off to sleep. “We’re both on pumps.”

“I’ll bet Tarik would let you come into the mine,” Nuella said.

Kindan gave her a startled look.

“Maybe you could ask to change shifts,” she went on.

“Tarik?” Zenor repeated, shaking his head. “I don’t know . . .”

“Well, suit yourself,” she said. “Either stop grumbling, or switch to Tarik’s shift.”

“What was that all about?” Kindan asked after Zenor had left.

“Remember how worried you were about the supports on Tarik’s street?” Nuella asked. When Kindan nodded, she explained, “Well,
we
can’t say anything about it to my father, because then we’d have to admit that we’ve been down in the mine. But if Zenor goes down with Tarik, then he can
see
the shoddy supports that Tarik’s been putting up and warn Father.”

Kindan and Nuella were pleased when Zenor announced joyfully that he’d switch shifts. “Best of all,” he’d said, rubbing his hands gleefully, “I won’t have to do the morning feeding! Regellan even thinks
he’s
getting the best of the deal, can you imagine?”

“There, that’s sorted then,” she said complacently to Kindan when she entered Kisk’s shed that evening. Kindan looked beyond her to the curtains, which had rustled closed behind her.

“Didn’t Master Zist bring you down?” he asked.

Nuella brushed aside the comment. “No, I came down on my own.”

Kindan’s eyebrows rose. “Isn’t that dangerous? What if someone saw you?”