Raybeck shifted uncomfortably in his bunk.

  Where did Van go? Why hasn’t he come back?

  Not that Raybeck minded his bunkmate being out—aside from the reassuring sound of his snoring.

  Only, where was he? It felt like he had been gone too long. The lack of noise was strange.

  He went out, because he had to take a leak, Raybeck thought. Calm down and go back to sleep. Be glad you don’t have to listen to him sawing logs down below.

  And he tried. He clenched his eyes tightly shut and tried to find black oblivion, but his mind kept troubling him.

  Even assuming he realized that he needed to take a crap instead, it shouldn’t have taken him this long. Is there something going wrong outside? Is Van all right?

  It wasn’t as if there was much in the Salt Wastes to distract him—or any member of the mining colony. Unless Van had caught a demihuman out there.

  Damn thieving demihumans.

  If they weren’t filching food or scraps of cloth, they were stealing salt. It was true that actual sightings of the buggers were rare, but that didn’t mean they weren’t interfering with the miners’ business. Like an infestation of rats. That was why they had ultimately voted to report the tribes’ presence to the Kingdom.

  Raybeck rolled to his side. It was useless. His twice-damned restless mind would not let him sleep unless he found out what had happened to Van.

  Trying not to make too much noise and wake the other inhabitants of the bunkhouse, he slowly rose to a sitting position, lifted his legs over the edge of the bed, and then lowered himself carefully to the ground.

  Raybeck landed silently on the pads of his feet, and moving almost on tiptoe, took a few quiet steps forward.

  He only heard the soft sounds of breathing—a few scattered sleepers snoring from around the room. These snorers were no Van, though. Raybeck’s bunkmate could wake the dead with his wheezing.

  Raybeck kept walking, turning at the end of his bed and stepping toward the nearest door as quickly and quietly as he could. He wore only his loose sleeping trousers, but he did not expect to need further protection. Even if there were demihumans nearby, they would be easy to scare off and few in number.

  He paused as he drew near the door and finally—slowly, gingerly, not wanting to wake any of his bunkmates—he took a pickaxe from the line of them beside the exit. He wasn’t sure if it was his own. It probably wasn’t.

  But it had struck him suddenly that if it was demihumans holding Van up, then they must not have been as timid and easily shooed away as usual.

  Best to go armed.

  He carefully opened the door so that it barely creaked, and then he saw it in the thin light of the twilight.

  A column of smoke rising in the near distance.

  Raybeck’s eyes followed the smoke down, and they widened as he saw the foreman’s cabin ablaze.

  The inferno had somehow engulfed the whole building without alarming the other miners as yet. His nose twitched at the smell of smoke, suddenly so obvious. In his mind, new questions were blossoming.

  How did I fail to smell it sooner? But he knew the stuffy cabin walls would have delayed the smoke in getting to his nostrils. Is the foreman still inside? His child? His wife?

  Raybeck was not particularly fond of Christos, but he had no wish to stand by and let a child and a rather comely woman—though she was the only woman the miners had seen in months, which might have colored his impression—burn to death, if they were still in the cabin.

  He shook his head and leaped into action.

  Van must already be trying to save them, was his last thought on his bunkmate’s fate for some time. Raybeck rushed toward the middle of the mining camp and grabbed the large bell they used to signal mealtime, the end of the work day, and any emergencies, and he began sounding the alarm.

  He chimed the bell once, twice, a third time, and already people were coming out of their bunks in various states of dress and levels of preparedness. As questioning eyes turned to him, Raybeck shouted loudly so that anyone outside could hear him.

  “Fire! Fire! The foreman’s cabin is on fire!”

  Of course, the more alert among them had already seen the only bright object in the dimness. The house burned like a hundred campfires.

  Some men had already rushed back into their bunks to get boots and other protective gear, while others ran straight to the well to fetch buckets and water. The mining camp took fire seriously, since they only had a very limited amount of wood. It had to be replenished by either venturing up into the mountains—risking an encounter with the demihumans where most of them actually lived—or ordering lumber from the heartland. The latter was expensive. All of that limited wood was allocated as either building material or firewood for winter. They had none to waste.

  Unfortunately, they also had limited water. Just a single well, in the center of the settlement, distant from the foreman’s cabin.

  The men with the buckets rushed toward the fire.

  Having done his duty and sounded the alarm, Raybeck took a moment to return to his bunk and dress himself more appropriately to fight fire. He needed his heavy boots and a shirt at least.

  There, multiple groggy men in half-dressed states asked him what was going on. He repeated his explanation from before at the top of his voice.

  “The foreman’s cabin is on fire!”

  That got more of the men out of bed and lit the fire under those who were already up.

  When Raybeck stepped back outside, most of the camp was roused. All hands fought the fire, and although he contributed his few bucketfuls of water, he was free to think of other things. His focused attention was not needed for this problem.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  So Raybeck wondered: What had started the fire? Had anyone escaped? It seemed not, because he did not see Christos or his family anywhere. Where was Van? How did Raybeck’s bunkmate fit into this?

  It took the camp two hours to finish fighting the fire, which had already grown quite out of control by the time Raybeck saw it and alerted everyone.

  Every miner participated, but most of them were useless. There were only so many buckets, and it took almost the first full hour before someone’s brain woke up enough to come up with a relay system. One man threw the water, and a line refilled the bucket and passed it back.

  That was the beginning of more meaningful progress. They still didn’t save the cabin. But perhaps parts of it could be salvaged. The wood of the flooring looked like it might still be usable in places.

  Once the fire was extinguished, the miners had a late, troubled breakfast. The sun was out by then, but no one felt any more secure with the onset of daylight. Questions burned in all their minds.

  Some of the miners recalled Raybeck had been the first to sound the alarm, so they bombarded him with questions.

  “What started the fire?”

  “What woke you up?”

  “Who do you think started the fire?”

  “Did you hear there are men missing?”

  “I heard the beastfolk started the fire. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Did you see anything?”

  With few facts, a theory of events nevertheless shaped up. It was the beastfolk. Had to be.

  After breakfast, when everyone felt a bit steadier, the miners took a headcount of survivors. It was at that point that Raybeck revealed that Van was missing. To his surprise, there were two others who had vanished in the night. Not men he knew.

  This did not count the foreman and his family, whose bodies were assumed to be amid the blackened wreckage of the ruined cabin but not readily identifiable amid the twisted, blackened remains of furniture, household items, and tools.

  The most senior man after Christos was Laurent, so he convened the miners into a meeting after they had all finished eating. Every adult miner—and there were only a few minors here—was a member of the Mining Guild of Enh, with a voice in such assemblies.

  Meetings, discussions, and voting were how the miners typically made important decisions. After the night’s events, it was clear that major decisions needed to be made.

  “Everyone,” Laurent said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of clattering cutlery as the last of the group finished eating, “I propose that we convene a meeting in bunkhouse five. We must decide what is to be done following last night’s tragic events.”

  He kept his own views quiet, Raybeck noted with approval. Laurent was trying not to influence the direction of the meeting from the outset. He would make a better leader than Christos had.

  Once they had moved into the largest of the bunkhouses and pushed the furniture against the walls so there was standing room for the entire group, Laurent occupied the center space, lowered his eyes, and led them in a brief prayer.

  “Lord Vika and Lady Astara, please guide our deliberations with both your cunning and your compassion. Please watch over those who have mysteriously left us, be they alive or dead. Like all of us, they will lean on your everlasting strength and boundless love. We place all our trust in thee.”

  It was a fairly traditional, almost boring invocation.

  But it put the room immediately into a better frame of mind. With any luck, the gods would smile upon this meeting, and the miners would achieve good results.

  “As I see it, there are two questions to deliberate over,” said Laurent. “What happened, and what is to be done? Unless anyone has other major business to address. Who would like to speak first?”

  A younger man, barely an adult, jumped up and called out, “We know what happened. It was those damned beastfolk!”

  Raybeck shook his head at the disregard for procedure. All around, though, there were low mumbles of agreement.

  “Young man, I offer no feedback on your theory, but we do have procedures to decide who speaks and on what topic,” Laurent said firmly. “Otherwise we end up talking over one another.”

  Another miner raised his hand from within the crowd, and Laurent walked over to him and handed him a large, white stone—actually a big salt crystal that the miners kept around for these meetings.

  “I question whether the beastfolk were involved at all,” said the speaker, whose voice Raybeck was not sure he recognized. When the mine was functioning well, these meetings were infrequent. He could sometimes go months without hearing the voice of a man from outside his own bunkhouse. “What possible benefit could they have to gain from attacking us? No man here remembers when the beastfolk settled in these mountains. They have been squatting there for longer than the mine has been open. More likely, there is some new player in the region trying to drive the Kingdom out. Perhaps the elves have returned.”

  Another hand shot up, and Laurent walked over to deliver the salt crystal. The meeting proceeded in that way for several hours.

  The next few people rejected the idea that the beastfolk were innocent of the attack.

  “There was a great quantity of blood in two of the latrines. I saw it. At least two people bled to death. Only the beastfolk would be so savage!”

  “Regardless of any evidence, we have to act as if the beastfolk are guilty unless proven otherwise. It’s the only way to stay safe.”

  There were one or two speakers between the first two and the end who defended the demihumans, but the miners ultimately decided that they must be the culprits.

  They were the only logical enemies to consider. No one lived in close quarters with the miners except the beastfolk—whose existence was threatened by the miners’ decision to report their presence to the Kingdom.

  New enemies did not simply spring from the desert sands.

  But for Raybeck, some pieces were not quite adding up.

  Would the demihumans do this?

  Raybeck and the other men had heard rumors of what the Kingdom’s soldiers did to demihumans discovered unlawfully living within Nietian territory, but they had voted to report them anyway. It was the law; they might as well take advantage of it to solve their theft problem. The demihumans had never stolen anything that the miners badly needed, but why should they have to worry about thieves at all? That was supposed to be the benefit of living out in the middle of nowhere. If the rumors were true, the soldiers would put an end to the theft.

  It made sense to assume the demihumans were trying to get their revenge now. They knew their days were numbered, and it wouldn’t have been hard to guess who had informed the soldiers of their presence.

  But the demihumans had never been violent before. To escalate immediately to murder seemed unlike them. Despite what some of the miners who spoke intimated, beastfolk were not naturally savage any more than humans were.

  Once the miners had settled on the beastfolk as responsible, however, the meeting flowed reasonably well again.

  The miners agreed to set watches that night, they drew lots to decide who would be watchmen and what shifts each would take, and they distributed weapons to everyone to carry at all times. They might be low level compared with soldiers, and not one of them was trained in combat. But they knew how to swing a pickaxe well enough to be dangerous.

  Almost as an afterthought, someone suggested they alert the Army.

  “Where would we even find them?” Raybeck asked—speaking up, to his chagrin, without waiting for the salt crystal to be passed to him.

  Heimar, who had been Raybeck’s mentor, raised his hand and patiently waited to be given the hunk of salt before responding.

  “They set up shop near the foot of Mount Aros,” he replied. “I’ve seen the smoke. Shouldn’t be more than a handful of miles away.”

  The miners had a back and forth about who should go, and how many, and when, but the matters were settled amicably in the end.

  The group voted that twenty of their number should go to inform the Army. They needed to move in strength if there was a violent enemy prowling the desert, but they also had to keep their surviving buildings and camp safe. It was possible the goal of the attack had been to destroy their buildings with fire, but that had simply proven too impractical to do in one night.

  By the time they had decided this, it was time for dinner. The miners agreed to put off the journey itself until the next morning. No one wanted to travel in the dark after the previous night.

  That would only delay them sounding the alarm to the Army for a single day, and what could happen in a day anyway?

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