Under Fragile Stone by Oisin McGann Page B

torches brighter than any lantern.
    ‘Right,’ Nayalla said. ‘Let’s search this place again, from top to bottom. We have to have missed something. What about the passage we first came in through?’
    ‘I checked it,’ Noogan told her. ‘There’s nothing.’
    ‘Okay, but we can assume that there are other passages like it around, bits of what must have been the original cave this place was built inside.’
    Mirkrin had stepped down into the sunken section in the middle of the room, examining the broken metal remains that lay there. His attention was attracted by a joint he saw among the rusted pieces, his craftsman’s eye spotting something the others had missed.
    ‘These were once stairs,’ he said to himself.
    Lifting his torch, he stared upwards. The light revealed a shaft that went straight up, the top out of sight in the darkness above.
    ‘Anybody up for a climb?’ he asked.
    The ceiling was the height of three men above the ground. The miners had some rope, but nothing with which to make a grappling hook. Instead, Mirkrin and Nayalla took out their tools and extended the length of their bodies, Mirkrin wincing as he crafted his bruised flesh. Then, Nayalla climbed up onto his shoulders with the rope coiled over one shoulder and balanced there as she looked for handholds. Her head level with the lip of the shaft, she cast her eyes around her, holding her torch up for light. She threw the torch up onto a surface above her, found a grip with both hands and hoisted herself up, her lanky legs dangling for a moment before slithering up into the darkness. The end of the rope dropped down into the waiting hands of her husband.
    One by one, they hauled themselves up and found themselves on an entirely different floor of the strange system of rooms. The steady burning of their powdered torches revealed a round chamber with more rusting columns, and what looked like small trees growing around the edges of the room. Noogan spotted something off to one side and went to take a look. He knelt down to examine a pile of dusty rags on the floor and gasped. It was a skeleton, or at least what looked like one.
    ‘By the gods!’ he yelped, jumping back. ‘What’s this?’
    They all crowded in to see.
    ‘Skeleton,’ Paternasse observed. ‘But it’s not human. Don’t look like anything I’ve seen before.’
    Its eyes were huge, as was its head. It had two arms, but the forearms branched to end in two opposable hands. The hands were long and delicate. It had quite short legs, half the normal length, and its feet were small and quite dainty. The disintegrating rags were all that were left of what must have been fine robes. 
    ‘I think we’re looking at one of the owners,’ Mirkrin said quietly.
    ‘I’ve seen drawings of people like this before,’ Nayalla told them, her brow creased in an effort to remember. ‘In some scrolls my brother has. I thought the stories were myths.’
    ‘What stories?’ Paternasse enquired.

7 A NYTHING THAT D OESN’T B ELONG
    â€˜Harprag. I’d know ’is work anywhere,’ he chortled, draping the chain around his neck, adding it to the collection of heavy jewellery on his broad chest. ‘So the Myunan’s come callin’, ’as he? Whaddaya think o’ that, Pappy? That a fine piece o’ ornamentation, or what?’
    â€˜Don’t trust them Myunans,’ coughed his father, who was sitting in another chair to his right, a sour-smelling pipe between the last of his teeth. ‘Yer eyes don’t tell ya nuthin’ about them.’
    Ludditch III nodded sagely, but wished that his pappy would agree with him just for once. His father was no longer the great chieftain he had once been. The bone-rot had got him good, his elbows, wrists, knees and ankles so swollen and painful that he could no longer walk on his own, reduced to looking out over his land from the porch of the house at the top of their hill. He still tried to play the twangoe, but