Llama let go of the cow.
He stepped back and put his hand on its neck for a second, and the animal shook itself and walked off to the gate with its bell going, unbothered, like something that had done its shift.
Lumi was enjoying the stage.
Somebody put a sash on her, and she let them. Somebody put a wreath of wheat on her head, and she adjusted it and turned to the south tier, the one that had booed earlier, and blew them a kiss too, and they died.
She stayed out there for a long time.
Llama stood at the back door with the pail in one hand and waited for her, and didn’t tell her to come, and didn’t look away.
“Lumi,” I said from a judge’s table I was not allowed to leave. “That was awesome.”
She came backward, half of it, still waving, and she caught her wreath as it slid, and she was still laughing when Llama got the back door open for her, and the light went out.
The chair went out from under me, and the kitchen put me on my feet by the pedestal with the scepter in my hand.
The door with the horn over it clicked shut.
The sash was gone from her shoulder. The wreath was gone. Nothing came through that frame but the two of them and the pail.
Lumi didn’t appear to notice.
“Majesty,” she said. She was breathing hard. Her hair was still up. There was a burn across her left sleeve from wrist to elbow, and both her hands were open again, and she was holding that pail out with a grin I had not seen on her face in the entire time I have known her. “Appraise it.”
I lifted the scepter.
[Attention! Appraisal.]
[Fresh Milk]Type: Thunderhide (7-Legendary)Quality: 99%Mana density: extremeFat content: extreme
Nobody said anything for a second.
“Ninety-nine,” I said.
Lumi set the pail on the table with tremendous care, and then she put both fists in the air.
And then she made butter, and she knew how. “How do you know how—” I asked.
“It has to stand,” she said. “The cream comes up. You skim the cream off the top and you churn the cream, not the milk.” She was already moving. Ladle. Shallow bowl. “It takes hours. It should be cold, ideally, and it should be still, and we have neither hours nor—”
She stopped at the churn.
She had her hand on the lid, and she was looking at the ring of runes cut into it, and she went silent.
“Llama.”
He came and looked.
“That’s a current ring,” she said. “This whole churn is—” She traced it with a finger. “You feed it, and it beats the staff for you. It’s a machine.” Her voice climbed about half a note. “This is magic technology!”
“Mm.”
“There is no honor in this,” she said, taking the lid off.
“None,” Llama agreed, and started pouring.
She fed it a thread of current.
I watched her do it, and I thought about a bowl of grain going sideways across a kitchen at four hundred kilometers an hour, and I kept my mouth shut, because this time she got it exactly right. It was a hair of white, laid into the ring, held there, steady as a hand on a pulse. The staff came alive inside the churn and worked.
Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.
She stood over it with her ruined hands on the rim and her hair coming down out of its corona and listened to it.
“There,” she said. “Hear that? It’s gone thin. The fat’s coming out.” And then, a long minute later, with her eyes shut: “There. It’s broken.”
She cut the current dead.
Inside was buttermilk and a mass of pale gold grains, and she poured the buttermilk off into a bowl, and she washed the grains in cold water from the pump, twice, three times, until the water came off them clear. Then she gathered them onto the table and pressed them with the flat of a paddle, and water came out of it, and she poured it away and pressed again, and again, and folded it over on itself, and pressed.
At the end of it there was a pale gold block on a folded cloth.
“No salt,” she said. “It’ll want salt. That’s door three.”
“Convenient.”
“Isn’t it.” She pushed her hair off her face with her forearm and looked at what she had made, and then she picked it up on the cloth and brought it to me and did not say anything at all.
[Attention! Appraisal.]
[Butter]Type: 7-LegendaryQuality: 91%
“Ninety-one,” I said.
Llama put a hand on her shoulder. She reached up without looking and put her hand over his.
Forty-four. Ninety-one. Two of six, and the average of those two was sixty-seven and a half, and we needed fifty, and the black flour that had cost her an hour and both her hands was, right now, sitting under a cushion of legendary butter and doing no harm to anybody.
“Sixty-seven point five,” I said. “We’re over.”
Lumi turned around.
“Majesty,” she said, “we are winning.“
The fire cracked. The wood rack was down to a third and falling, and there were four doors left on that wall, and I looked at the two of them standing there covered in flour and cow, and I didn’t say a single word about any of it.
“Can I heal them here?” I asked the temple. “It is between the doors, right?”
“…it is permitted,” the voice said. “Once in the Royal Palace Kitchen, the Queen has the authority.”
I grinned at both of them and let the healing magic seep into their bodies, and it was as if the fight with a crazy thunder cow-bull hadn’t happened.
“Salt,” Llama said.
“Salt,” Lumi agreed, and went to get the cellar dish.
She came back with a shallow stone dish, a soup-bowl thing with a lid on a little chain, and held it up so I could see she had the right one.
“Cellar,” she said.
“Cellar.” I put my palm flat on the third door, over the little cut cellar with its lid, and the wood went warm under my hand. “Not real,” I said, because it was the only thing I had for them going in. “None of it. And I’ll be right there, and I still can’t lift a finger—”
“—so don’t look at you for it,” Lumi said. “I remember, Majesty.” And she opened the door.
The cold came first.
A dim, close, mineral cold, and a smell like the sea gone hard. We stood in a low gallery lit by lamps in iron cages, and the walls were not stone. They were salt. Grey and pitted near the floor, and where a lamp caught them, shot through with something paler that threw the light back in pieces.
Lumi was in grey.
That was the second thing. Her robes were gone. She stood there in a shapeless sack of undyed wool, sleeves cut off at the elbow, a number stitched at the breast, her braid stuffed down the back of it. Llama the same; the plate gone, the shield gone off his back, a wool tunic straining across the shoulders and a pick in his hand instead. They had put a pick in Lumi’s hand too. Neither of them had anything else.
I looked down at myself and I was exactly as I always was, but translucent. No one in that gallery was ever going to see me, and I could have screamed the roof down and moved nothing.
“Is Charlie here?” Llama asked, looking for me.
Lumi glanced around and furrowed her brows. “She must be watching from somewhere, like last time. Let’s go?”
Llama nodded without adding anything and walked forward.
“Two,” a voice said, bored.
A man sat at a plank table wedged into a niche in the salt, a ledger open in front of him, a lamp at his elbow. Empire coat, brass buttons dulled with dust, a face that had processed ten thousand of these and kept none.
“New intake. Ten years apiece.” He dipped a pen. “Okay, you two. You mine to the grade board or you mine forever. Hit the gold-grade quota in a month, and the Empire takes a year off the sentence. Two years if you clear it twice.” He turned the ledger and pushed it to the edge of the table with the pen laid across it. “Most don’t. Most do grey till they’re old. Marks there, both of you.”
Llama looked at the pen and didn’t take it.
“We’re not signing anything,” he said.
The overseer looked up for the first time. Mildly. “You are, or you go back up the way you came. And there’s no way you came.” He nodded at the gallery behind us, where the door hung in the salt. “That’s not an exit. Empire portals work only one way. Sign or don’t. The salt’s the same either way.”
The door was ours.
We’d walk out of it the second the dish was full, and this man would go on being bored in a mine that stopped existing the moment we left. He had ten years of authority over two people who’d be gone before his lamp guttered.
I hated him anyway.
Llama set the pick over his shoulder and turned his back on the table, and the overseer sighed and went back to his ledger.
“Grade board’s on the wall,” he said to the page. “Bag’s by the post. Don’t die in the deep, it’s annoying paperwork.”
The grade board was a slab of slate bolted to the salt, painted in a clerk’s neat hand, and it priced the mountain by color.
GREY: 25% to 30%BRONZE: 40% to 45%SILVER: 50% to 55%GOLD: 65% to 70%
And at the bottom, in red, PREMIUM: 75% and above, with a second line under it in smaller letters: DEEP GALLERIES. AUTHORIZED CREWS ONLY.
Under all of it, scratched deep into the salt with a nail by someone who was not the clerk:
everyone’s authorized. they just don’t come back.
Llama read it from top to bottom.
“Grey’s here. Grey’s at the door.” He tipped his head at the mouth of the gallery. “And grey sinks our average, honey, and bronze doesn’t clear even half. Silver clears and nothing past it, it still drags our average down. Gold holds the line.” His eyes went to the red line at the bottom and stayed there a second. “Premium? Gold?”
“Gold,” Lumi decided instantly.
“Gold.” He didn’t look at the red line again and walked away.
They took the bag off the post, one canvas sack, folded, absurdly small, and they went down, and I went with them, because I go where they go and I don’t get a say in the direction either.
The galleries grew colder and brighter as we dropped.
The grey gave way to something cleaner, then to walls that stopped being walls and became windows into themselves; salt gone clear, the magic lamplight going into it and coming back changed, blues and faint golds hanging in the crystal like weather caught mid-storm. Convicts worked the higher seams as we passed, grey figures swinging into grey rock, and none of them looked up, and none of them could have seen me if they had.
Then the passage opened, and the gold seam was in front of us, and I forgot for a second that I was furious about being useless.
It was beautiful.
A whole gallery of it, floor to lost ceiling, the crystal shot through with a warm deep vein that held the lamplight and gave it back gold, and the cold air came off it smelling of the sea. The most beautiful thing I’d seen since the door shut on daylight.
Then the beautiful thing moved.
Part of the seam came away from the wall.
It stood up out of the gold on legs of crystal, and it kept standing up, past Llama’s height, past the reach of the lamps, a thing built of the same salt as the gallery and lit from inside by the same trapped gold. I couldn’t find a face on it. It had arms, or things that did the work of arms, long and faceted and ending in blunt clubs, and when it set them down the floor took the weight in a long grinding crack.
It put itself between us and the gold, and waited.
“That’s new,” Lumi said.
She raised her hand, and I saw her decide to try it anyway, before she’d let herself believe it wouldn’t work.
A thread of white left her fingers and hit it square in the chest.
It went in and lit the whole thing up from the inside, every facet flaring gold-white at once, and for a moment it was the single most spectacular object in the room… and then it ran.
Straight down through the crystal, into the legs, into the floor, into the mountain.
Gone.
The guardian didn’t so much as slow. It had swallowed a legendary mage’s lightning like a good roof swallows rain and grounded it into the world without a mark. “...right,” Lumi said. “It’s rock. It’s a rock. It goes to ground.”
She lowered the hand.
“Save it,” I said uselessly, because she already had and couldn’t hear me.
Llama put himself between her and it.
He had a pick and a wool shirt and nothing on his arm, and it changed nothing about where he stood. The guardian brought a club down and he took it on the pick haft and his braced knees and the floor under them.
The haft screamed but held, and he didn’t go down, and he didn’t give ground, and salt dust sifted off the ceiling.
“Lumi,” he said through his teeth. “Where.”
She was already looking; her eyes tracked a line up its flank. “The shoulder. The big one on your side. There’s a plane through it, it’s not solid, it’s stacked, it wants to split along—” she pointed, “— there. Hit it there. Hard. Flat.”
He hit it there. Hard. Flat.
Nothing. A white scar on the crystal, a chip, and the other club already coming around, and Lumi shoving off the wall to not to be where it landed. It hit where she’d been, and the floor cratered.
“Again,” she said from the ground. “Same spot. It’s a stack, open the same seam—”
He hit it again. Same spot. A line opened in the crystal, thin, gold light bleeding out of it.
“There! Again!”
I stood four meters back with a head full of frost magic and both hands free.
I could have put a wall of ice between Llama and that club. I could have frozen the thing’s legs to its own floor. Frost was the one thing I had ever been genuinely good at, and the temple had built me a room with a crystal monster in it and a queen who couldn’t breathe cold on it. I understood the joke.
I understood exactly who it was on.
“Left,” I said, because a voice was all I had. “Llama—the club, to your left —”
He was already moving. He didn’t hear me. Nobody in that gallery heard me, and I called the strikes anyway, down in a hole in the ground, because I wasn’t going to watch in silence.
It took eight hits on the same plane, and on the eighth the shoulder came off.
It sheared clean, a slab of gold-lit crystal the size of a door parting from the body along the line Lumi had found, and it fell and broke the floor, and the guardian lurched, one club gone, and Llama didn’t wait to be told what that meant. He got both hands on the pick and drove it up into the open wound where the shoulder had been, into the stacked heart of the thing, and levered.
The whole guardian came apart along a hundred planes at once, a slow bright collapse, the gold going out of it as it fell, until there was nothing standing in front of the seam but a heap of dead crystal and two people breathing hard.
Llama had a gash up one forearm where a facet had opened him. Lumi was favoring a knee. Neither of them said anything about it.
“Salt,” Llama said, and picked up the pick.
The mining was the simple part, and after everything it had taken to earn the right to do it, that was almost funny.
He set the pick to the gold vein, and it came away in slabs. He filled the little cellar dish in four strokes. Two fistfuls. A shallow dish of gold salt, coarse and warm-colored and glittering faintly, sitting in the bottom of a bag that could have held fifty times as much. The pair smiled at each other. Lumi quickly hugged Llama, and they turned.
The path back up was where the other five were waiting.
They came out of a side gallery in a loose line across the passage, grey like us, picks like us. The one in front was big. Not Llama-big, but big, with a salt-scar down one cheek and his pick held low and comfortable.
“New crew,” he said. “First deep haul. Congratulations.” He nodded at the bag. “Seniors take a cut. Everything past silver goes up the line. You keep enough grey to make quota, we keep the rest, everybody’s friends.” He put out a hand. “The bag.”
Llama glanced at himself and Lumi, in the same outfits as the men blocking their way, the same weapons. Two against five.
“No,” Llama said.