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After the fun and somewhat popular story of Prince Kazimir, The Debtors is intended as a sequel and a look at events 15 years down the line.
The homelands of the Rosomai, now colloquially called West Azek Territory, have transformed vastly in the last 15 years-- some say too vastly. Modern railways, ports, and towns have popped up on the open steppe. Old warriors accustomed to a millennium-long tradition of horseback archery and spear combat now struggle to catch up with a modern, industrialized world and all of its trappings.
New problems, new people, and new prospects raise a new question: Even if the Rosomai survive, will they retain their identity? Can anyone retain their identity in a realm where greed seems to be the only consideration?
The Debtors
Chapter 1:
The Cuckold
My Dear Giotto,
I think of you always. As I write. As I work. When I’m with the kittens. Angelo is truly shaping up to be his father’s son, having found himself in a debt of 50 piastres after losing a game of dice with the other schoolboys. Flora is well, or as well as a little girl without a father can be. She misses you and asks often when you will return.
Giancarlo visited yesterday to see Angelo off and look over Flora before I took my pieces to the Seamstresses’ Market. I know that Gianni is like a brother to you, but the growing days without you have been so maddening and his company is dearer to me than ever. I served him Circassid Tea and we talked for a while. I showed him the new brocade, white on velvet with paste pearls, and the conversation drifted for a while, and before long we were making love.
Do you remember the vanity mirror I inherited from my mother? Giancarlo placed it on the ground and we climbed over it, straddling it so we could see ourselves together. It was inventive, arousing, but as we coupled passionately I couldn’t help but think of you. After our eight years, you never once suggested using the mirror in this way. It just sat in the corner next to the window facing the canal.
When will you return? Your debt was for 1,500 Ducats, but you said that it would be paid off by now. Tomorrow I will see Vittorio. He works in the Magistrate’s office and might be able to negotiate for your release. He’s a colourpoint like you, handsome in the face but a thick around the middle. He has a most wonderful way with his hands, though, and he knows exactly how and where to scratch, where to stroke along the grain of the fur and where to get up underneath it, where the tail ends and the cat begins. They are delicate and dexterous hands, not the rough hands of a worker like yours, yet even when we are together I still think of your rough grasp. I always think of your return.
My love for you always,
Carla
Giotto momentarily considered crumpling up the letter and throwing it into the coal burner, but he stopped himself, neatly folding the letter into quarters and tucking it into the left pocket of his grimy trousers. His once white linen shirt and his gray trousers were now permanently stained from mud, clay, and coal dust.
“Another letter from your wife?”
A voice drifted from the drilling tower, followed by the groaning of the wood and iron frame. A sly white face, triangular, with bright orange eyes and elliptical ears popped into view.
“Not right now, Ivan,” Giotto half-mumbled. In reality, he did want to talk about it, but his mind hadn’t come to that point yet. The haze of passionate anger hadn’t yet lifted.
“You act as though you’re the only cat who’s ever been cuckolded,” Ivan clambered down the long ladder that stretched to the top of the tower. “Come on, what did she say?”
Giotto half considered arguing, but he knew Ivan. The fox would nip at the issue all evening until Giotto gave up. Better to get it over with sooner.
“Carla, my dear betrothed, mother to my two children, is in bed with my best friend and some fat lawyer.”
“What, at the same time? You Checchiatari have admirable appetites.”
“And what of it? Don’t tell me that your people don’t have these problems too.”
“Oh! The Liskai are the worst when it comes to cheating on each other, but at least when it happens someone gets shot or stabbed, loses a finger or a tail. It gets settled quickly, one way or another.”
“Isn’t that part of why you’re here, covered in grime with the likes of me?”
“I made it perfectly clear to the Fattore. I was informally borrowing the money and the horse with the consent of his niece. That’s not stealing!”
“Heh, it certainly sounds that way!” Giotto pulled the letter from his pocket, taking a nearby hammer and searching for a nail.
“My dear Checchiatari friend, have you not heard of leverage?”
“Leverage? Yeah, that’s when you apply force to a beam on a fulcrum to lift an object.”
Ivan laughed, the pitch of his voice rising as it always did when he was about to spout off something smart. Giotto made a point not to indulge him, yanking a loose nail from an old barrel and sauntering over to the steam pump.
“Giotto, you are a simpleton! I’m talking about financial leverage,” The fox jumped the final rungs of the ladder, freeing his hands for some gesticulation.
“You use a little money to take out a loan, then you use the money from a loan to buy something big. Then, you turn around and sell this big thing for a profit, you go back to the bank, pay them back, and keep the handsome profit for yourself. Keep doing this for a while, and you’ll end up rich!”
“Ah, very clever,” Giotto remarked temperately. “So why again is it that you are currently an oil prospector for the Checchiatari Amalgamated Trading Company and not some banker or great merchant?”
Ivan grimaced, casting his eyes down, “’Cause you need money to take out a loan… and ‘cause I’m a Liskai. I’m too risky. Even if I purchase some stock, who will buy it from me? No one will take such a gamble.”
“Maybe because you’re a convicted thief?”
Giotto searched for a space in the collection of letters he had tacked to the wooden frame of the tower, each one a detailed accounting of his wife’s adulteries. Unsuccessful, he resigned to hammering the latest letter on top of one of the older ones. Ivan moved toward Giotto along the wooden platform, irked by his friend’s deliberate indifference.
“Haven’t you heard? All Liskai are thieves. That’s the way it’s been for us since the fatcats came.”
Giotto rolled his eyes, taking on a sarcastic tone, “I’m certain the conduct of the Liskai has nothing to do with your predicament. Clearly, it’s all the work of us evil cats.”
Ivan shrugged off Giotto’s dismissal, or at least artfully appeared to, but his words betrayed his grievance.
“My people used to trade throughout Azek. In our own way, we brought the nomad communities together. We had a place. Now, your ‘Company’ has deemed us criminals. They’ve written laws to keep us out of the cities, to cut us off from trade. They’ve outlawed our customs and our livelihoods. What remains for us except crime?”
Giotto tried to think of a response, but none were forthcoming. He wasn’t a wise man. That was precisely why he was here, in the oilfields of Corvo Fattore, a stinking, dead land of skeletons, skeletal buildings, and skeletal souls. Perhaps if he were smarter, or stronger, or more virtuous he could answer Ivan’s question, but if he were that person why in the world would he choose to live here?
Giotto’s eyes wandered toward movement on the horizon, silhouettes blackened against the golden, hazy hills of the steppe. Figures on ponies wandered in a wide arc around the drilling tower.
“If we don’t strike oil here within the day, we’ll have to move on and start again elsewhere.” Giotto kept his eyes on the horsemen. They seemed to watch back, but he couldn’t quite tell through the light haze.
“Do you ever envy them, Ivan?”
“The Rosomai? No. Why envy something that you cannot be?” The Liskai matched eyes with the ponies in the distance.
“I guess we all wish we were someone or someplace else.”
Ivan smirked as only foxes can, “Well, everyone’s got to be somewhere, and we’re here, and that’s just the way it is. ‘Might as well get accustomed to it.”
The burbling iron boiler on the steam engine, primed nearly a half hour prior, at last produced enough pressure to set off the whistle. The two-man prospector team could resume drilling.
“Okay, Ivan, are you ready to gamble again?”
“Always! Do we have steam pressure?”
“As long as the patch holds, this damned thing.”
Drilling towers like this had been sprouting up across West Azek for the past five years, starting at the little trading port of Corvo Fattore and blossoming across the whole territory. They all had the same vital architecture: a tower of wood beams and iron struts as tall as a three or four-story building, a heavy, hollow, rigid iron shaft, and a hardened steel bore for piercing and smashing through the layers of shale buried beneath the steppe to get to the oil beneath. A steam engine or a team of workers would lift the heavy shaft, tipped with a bore, all the way up and would let go, letting the tremendous weight plummet down, the force of momentum piercing a hole in the stone and earth. With repeated hits on the same precise spot, one could drill a shaft hundreds of feet without serious excavation. It took time, but with small crews one company could operate dozens of these towers simultaneously. One oil strike could pay for all of it in a fell swoop.
Each tower was erected and operated by its prospectors, but the materials were almost always the property of the Checchiatari Amalgamated Trading Company. If the shaft bent, the tower fractured, the steam engine seized, or the drilling bore broke, the costs of repairs went to the prospectors. Giotto knew that the steam engine he operated was a powder keg waiting to explode, that patching the boiler was a risk, but it was a risk he had to take. He was already in too much debt.
Ivan worked the tower while Giotto operated the engine, shoveling and stoking coal and keeping a close eye on steam pressure and engine temperature. Ivan had to brave a rickety ladder made of dry, brittle wood and climb up the three stories to the top, but that was the easy part. The dangerous part was connecting the winch cable to the shaft while making sure everything was aligned properly. This often involved working with moving machinery and tying knots without the aid of gloves. One slip at the wrong moment and Ivan’s fingers or hands risked being trapped between the cable, wheels, shaft, or the frame, crushing or ripping them off. It was a job for a brave and dexterous person, qualities that Ivan had, much to his chagrin.
“The flywheel is spinning!” Giotto shouted up to Ivan.
“Give me a couple moments, cat!”
Ivan clambered up to the top, standing on a platform of little more than two planks lashed across a couple of supports. He whipped the cable over his shoulders and tied it to a lug on the end of the shaft, then fed the slack over a spool. He peered down the length of the shaft, tipping his body perilously over what would be a fatal chasm, and made ‘adjustments’ by nudging the shaft with his shoulder. Throughout all of this he had to be sure that his tail didn’t get caught in anything.
Content, he tied a second, smaller rope around the tower frame, then around his narrow waist. He then leaned over the edge, signaling his Checchiatari counterpart.
“OK!”
Giotto carefully maneuvered the drive belt, slipping it over the drive wheel and pulling a lever that instantly transferred the circular movement and energy of the flywheel into the drive wheel, tugging at the canvas belt and bringing the winch to life. The shaft began its slow traverse up the tower. So far, so good, Giotto thought to himself.
This would be a tricky drop. The hole they had dug was already 500 feet deep, and as it got longer so too did the possibility that the bore would break, the shaft would snag, or that they would simply run out of cable, but Giotto and Ivan had developed the drilling into an art after their successes and failures.
Suddenly, Giotto heard a dreadful sound, but not from the source he expected. The patch on the boiler was holding, but the dry and brittle canvas of the drive belt was starting to give, tearing with a characteristic snarling sound. The drilling shaft was two-thirds up the tower, but there was no way to lock it in place or guide it properly at this point. The drive belt was the only thing suspending the shaft in the air. If it snapped now, the shaft would plummet prematurely, its fate in the hands of the gods.
“Ivan! Brace yourself!”
The Liskai clutched onto the framework of the tower without further ado, and not a moment later the drive belt snapped, the sudden shift in weight and force causing the tower to lurch and twist. Ivan was right to cling to the tower by claws and even teeth, and the sudden shuddering almost tore him from the structure. The shaft plummeted downward, completely disappearing into the ground and dragging yard after yard of cable with it, all of it whizzing inches past Ivan’s head. If the cable even touched a hair on his ear, it could rip the whole thing off effortlessly along with a large chunk of his face. Graciously, it kept its distance.
With an earthy thump the bore bit into the stone beneath their feet. Did it break? Did they run out of cable? Did the shaft get warped? Did it reach the bottom? What now?
Giotto was the first to hear it, first a burble, a little crust of mud giving way, and then a steady hiss. The air around the shaft began to ripple, and it took on the faintest odor. It was little more than an aura, a vague sense of danger, but as it set in Giotto began to appreciate the reality of the situation.
“Ivan! We’ve hit a gas bubble!”
“Well, don’t just stand there, cut the boiler!” Ivan shouted with mounting desperation, fumbling at the knot he had tied on his safety rope.
Ivan was right. The growing, invisible bubble of gas could reach the burning coals of the boiler at any moment, but he had to at least try and close the air vent in order to buy the two of them a few moments to save their lives. Despite that the incredible heat of the boiler, Giotto grabbed onto the latches with his bare hands and shut the vents. There was simply no time to put on gloves. He roared in pain as the searing heat stabbed into his calloused hands, but distracted himself with the urgency of the situation.
He looked at his hands. Despite the fact that Beastfolk had thick skin on their palms and soles, and that his skin was thicker than normal due to long years of labor, blisters had already formed and burst in the few moments he had touched the hot iron, leaving slick and exposed patches of raw flesh and scraps of skin.
In the mean time, Ivan contemplated jumping off the ladder, but fear of breaking every bone in his body and surviving overwhelmed the fear of dying quickly in a fiery explosion. As he squirmed down the ladder two rungs at a time, however, the thought of breaking his legs seemed much more appealing than being burnt to a crisp. He jumped, trying not to stiffen his body as he fell, and when his body met the ground it was an unfamiliar and painful experience to be struck from beneath, every joint from his ankles to his neck stabbing him with pain. The pain subsided as quickly as it arrived, however, and he was pleasantly surprised to find that he had survived the fall intact and without injury. He was so impressed with himself, in fact, that he momentarily forgot that he was about to be burnt to a crisp.
“Ivan! What are you doing?” Giotto bellowed from a safe distance.
The fox snapped to, bursting forward and devoting every fiber of his body towards getting away from the tower. He didn’t care in which direction. He would have run straight into a pit of spears if it meant getting away from the fire.
The explosion began underground, and with a thunderous belch of flame the ground around the tower seemed to burst, a bright yellow column tearing the rickety wood and iron tower apart. The drilling shaft and its bore were ejected straight upward like a rocket. Bits of metal, splinters of wood, and clods of sizzling mud whistled past their heads, but just as soon as the explosion started it vanished, leaving behind a small plume of fire, then a knee-high tongue of flame, then a scrap of candlelight, then nothing.
“Come on.” Giotto clenched his jaw shut, muttering through his teeth. “Gods, come on. Please don’t burn!”
The burbling started again, growing and growing until black crude started sputtering forth from the earth. Giotto was justifiably worried that the oil would be set ablaze by any residual cinders, but the force of the explosion had blown most of the sparks away. From the ruins of the tower sprang a 15-foot high fountain of crude oil, steady, black, and pure.
It was the most beautiful thing the two prospectors had seen in months.
Ivan came to a sudden realization, “Giotto, did you manage to grab your wife’s letters?”
Giotto thought for a few moments, a smile spreading across his face. The caked-up grime and dust seemed to crack and protest as though he hadn’t done such a thing in weeks.
“Let them burn.”
The homelands of the Rosomai, now colloquially called West Azek Territory, have transformed vastly in the last 15 years-- some say too vastly. Modern railways, ports, and towns have popped up on the open steppe. Old warriors accustomed to a millennium-long tradition of horseback archery and spear combat now struggle to catch up with a modern, industrialized world and all of its trappings.
New problems, new people, and new prospects raise a new question: Even if the Rosomai survive, will they retain their identity? Can anyone retain their identity in a realm where greed seems to be the only consideration?
The Debtors
Chapter 1:
The Cuckold
My Dear Giotto,
I think of you always. As I write. As I work. When I’m with the kittens. Angelo is truly shaping up to be his father’s son, having found himself in a debt of 50 piastres after losing a game of dice with the other schoolboys. Flora is well, or as well as a little girl without a father can be. She misses you and asks often when you will return.
Giancarlo visited yesterday to see Angelo off and look over Flora before I took my pieces to the Seamstresses’ Market. I know that Gianni is like a brother to you, but the growing days without you have been so maddening and his company is dearer to me than ever. I served him Circassid Tea and we talked for a while. I showed him the new brocade, white on velvet with paste pearls, and the conversation drifted for a while, and before long we were making love.
Do you remember the vanity mirror I inherited from my mother? Giancarlo placed it on the ground and we climbed over it, straddling it so we could see ourselves together. It was inventive, arousing, but as we coupled passionately I couldn’t help but think of you. After our eight years, you never once suggested using the mirror in this way. It just sat in the corner next to the window facing the canal.
When will you return? Your debt was for 1,500 Ducats, but you said that it would be paid off by now. Tomorrow I will see Vittorio. He works in the Magistrate’s office and might be able to negotiate for your release. He’s a colourpoint like you, handsome in the face but a thick around the middle. He has a most wonderful way with his hands, though, and he knows exactly how and where to scratch, where to stroke along the grain of the fur and where to get up underneath it, where the tail ends and the cat begins. They are delicate and dexterous hands, not the rough hands of a worker like yours, yet even when we are together I still think of your rough grasp. I always think of your return.
My love for you always,
Carla
Giotto momentarily considered crumpling up the letter and throwing it into the coal burner, but he stopped himself, neatly folding the letter into quarters and tucking it into the left pocket of his grimy trousers. His once white linen shirt and his gray trousers were now permanently stained from mud, clay, and coal dust.
“Another letter from your wife?”
A voice drifted from the drilling tower, followed by the groaning of the wood and iron frame. A sly white face, triangular, with bright orange eyes and elliptical ears popped into view.
“Not right now, Ivan,” Giotto half-mumbled. In reality, he did want to talk about it, but his mind hadn’t come to that point yet. The haze of passionate anger hadn’t yet lifted.
“You act as though you’re the only cat who’s ever been cuckolded,” Ivan clambered down the long ladder that stretched to the top of the tower. “Come on, what did she say?”
Giotto half considered arguing, but he knew Ivan. The fox would nip at the issue all evening until Giotto gave up. Better to get it over with sooner.
“Carla, my dear betrothed, mother to my two children, is in bed with my best friend and some fat lawyer.”
“What, at the same time? You Checchiatari have admirable appetites.”
“And what of it? Don’t tell me that your people don’t have these problems too.”
“Oh! The Liskai are the worst when it comes to cheating on each other, but at least when it happens someone gets shot or stabbed, loses a finger or a tail. It gets settled quickly, one way or another.”
“Isn’t that part of why you’re here, covered in grime with the likes of me?”
“I made it perfectly clear to the Fattore. I was informally borrowing the money and the horse with the consent of his niece. That’s not stealing!”
“Heh, it certainly sounds that way!” Giotto pulled the letter from his pocket, taking a nearby hammer and searching for a nail.
“My dear Checchiatari friend, have you not heard of leverage?”
“Leverage? Yeah, that’s when you apply force to a beam on a fulcrum to lift an object.”
Ivan laughed, the pitch of his voice rising as it always did when he was about to spout off something smart. Giotto made a point not to indulge him, yanking a loose nail from an old barrel and sauntering over to the steam pump.
“Giotto, you are a simpleton! I’m talking about financial leverage,” The fox jumped the final rungs of the ladder, freeing his hands for some gesticulation.
“You use a little money to take out a loan, then you use the money from a loan to buy something big. Then, you turn around and sell this big thing for a profit, you go back to the bank, pay them back, and keep the handsome profit for yourself. Keep doing this for a while, and you’ll end up rich!”
“Ah, very clever,” Giotto remarked temperately. “So why again is it that you are currently an oil prospector for the Checchiatari Amalgamated Trading Company and not some banker or great merchant?”
Ivan grimaced, casting his eyes down, “’Cause you need money to take out a loan… and ‘cause I’m a Liskai. I’m too risky. Even if I purchase some stock, who will buy it from me? No one will take such a gamble.”
“Maybe because you’re a convicted thief?”
Giotto searched for a space in the collection of letters he had tacked to the wooden frame of the tower, each one a detailed accounting of his wife’s adulteries. Unsuccessful, he resigned to hammering the latest letter on top of one of the older ones. Ivan moved toward Giotto along the wooden platform, irked by his friend’s deliberate indifference.
“Haven’t you heard? All Liskai are thieves. That’s the way it’s been for us since the fatcats came.”
Giotto rolled his eyes, taking on a sarcastic tone, “I’m certain the conduct of the Liskai has nothing to do with your predicament. Clearly, it’s all the work of us evil cats.”
Ivan shrugged off Giotto’s dismissal, or at least artfully appeared to, but his words betrayed his grievance.
“My people used to trade throughout Azek. In our own way, we brought the nomad communities together. We had a place. Now, your ‘Company’ has deemed us criminals. They’ve written laws to keep us out of the cities, to cut us off from trade. They’ve outlawed our customs and our livelihoods. What remains for us except crime?”
Giotto tried to think of a response, but none were forthcoming. He wasn’t a wise man. That was precisely why he was here, in the oilfields of Corvo Fattore, a stinking, dead land of skeletons, skeletal buildings, and skeletal souls. Perhaps if he were smarter, or stronger, or more virtuous he could answer Ivan’s question, but if he were that person why in the world would he choose to live here?
Giotto’s eyes wandered toward movement on the horizon, silhouettes blackened against the golden, hazy hills of the steppe. Figures on ponies wandered in a wide arc around the drilling tower.
“If we don’t strike oil here within the day, we’ll have to move on and start again elsewhere.” Giotto kept his eyes on the horsemen. They seemed to watch back, but he couldn’t quite tell through the light haze.
“Do you ever envy them, Ivan?”
“The Rosomai? No. Why envy something that you cannot be?” The Liskai matched eyes with the ponies in the distance.
“I guess we all wish we were someone or someplace else.”
Ivan smirked as only foxes can, “Well, everyone’s got to be somewhere, and we’re here, and that’s just the way it is. ‘Might as well get accustomed to it.”
The burbling iron boiler on the steam engine, primed nearly a half hour prior, at last produced enough pressure to set off the whistle. The two-man prospector team could resume drilling.
“Okay, Ivan, are you ready to gamble again?”
“Always! Do we have steam pressure?”
“As long as the patch holds, this damned thing.”
Drilling towers like this had been sprouting up across West Azek for the past five years, starting at the little trading port of Corvo Fattore and blossoming across the whole territory. They all had the same vital architecture: a tower of wood beams and iron struts as tall as a three or four-story building, a heavy, hollow, rigid iron shaft, and a hardened steel bore for piercing and smashing through the layers of shale buried beneath the steppe to get to the oil beneath. A steam engine or a team of workers would lift the heavy shaft, tipped with a bore, all the way up and would let go, letting the tremendous weight plummet down, the force of momentum piercing a hole in the stone and earth. With repeated hits on the same precise spot, one could drill a shaft hundreds of feet without serious excavation. It took time, but with small crews one company could operate dozens of these towers simultaneously. One oil strike could pay for all of it in a fell swoop.
Each tower was erected and operated by its prospectors, but the materials were almost always the property of the Checchiatari Amalgamated Trading Company. If the shaft bent, the tower fractured, the steam engine seized, or the drilling bore broke, the costs of repairs went to the prospectors. Giotto knew that the steam engine he operated was a powder keg waiting to explode, that patching the boiler was a risk, but it was a risk he had to take. He was already in too much debt.
Ivan worked the tower while Giotto operated the engine, shoveling and stoking coal and keeping a close eye on steam pressure and engine temperature. Ivan had to brave a rickety ladder made of dry, brittle wood and climb up the three stories to the top, but that was the easy part. The dangerous part was connecting the winch cable to the shaft while making sure everything was aligned properly. This often involved working with moving machinery and tying knots without the aid of gloves. One slip at the wrong moment and Ivan’s fingers or hands risked being trapped between the cable, wheels, shaft, or the frame, crushing or ripping them off. It was a job for a brave and dexterous person, qualities that Ivan had, much to his chagrin.
“The flywheel is spinning!” Giotto shouted up to Ivan.
“Give me a couple moments, cat!”
Ivan clambered up to the top, standing on a platform of little more than two planks lashed across a couple of supports. He whipped the cable over his shoulders and tied it to a lug on the end of the shaft, then fed the slack over a spool. He peered down the length of the shaft, tipping his body perilously over what would be a fatal chasm, and made ‘adjustments’ by nudging the shaft with his shoulder. Throughout all of this he had to be sure that his tail didn’t get caught in anything.
Content, he tied a second, smaller rope around the tower frame, then around his narrow waist. He then leaned over the edge, signaling his Checchiatari counterpart.
“OK!”
Giotto carefully maneuvered the drive belt, slipping it over the drive wheel and pulling a lever that instantly transferred the circular movement and energy of the flywheel into the drive wheel, tugging at the canvas belt and bringing the winch to life. The shaft began its slow traverse up the tower. So far, so good, Giotto thought to himself.
This would be a tricky drop. The hole they had dug was already 500 feet deep, and as it got longer so too did the possibility that the bore would break, the shaft would snag, or that they would simply run out of cable, but Giotto and Ivan had developed the drilling into an art after their successes and failures.
Suddenly, Giotto heard a dreadful sound, but not from the source he expected. The patch on the boiler was holding, but the dry and brittle canvas of the drive belt was starting to give, tearing with a characteristic snarling sound. The drilling shaft was two-thirds up the tower, but there was no way to lock it in place or guide it properly at this point. The drive belt was the only thing suspending the shaft in the air. If it snapped now, the shaft would plummet prematurely, its fate in the hands of the gods.
“Ivan! Brace yourself!”
The Liskai clutched onto the framework of the tower without further ado, and not a moment later the drive belt snapped, the sudden shift in weight and force causing the tower to lurch and twist. Ivan was right to cling to the tower by claws and even teeth, and the sudden shuddering almost tore him from the structure. The shaft plummeted downward, completely disappearing into the ground and dragging yard after yard of cable with it, all of it whizzing inches past Ivan’s head. If the cable even touched a hair on his ear, it could rip the whole thing off effortlessly along with a large chunk of his face. Graciously, it kept its distance.
With an earthy thump the bore bit into the stone beneath their feet. Did it break? Did they run out of cable? Did the shaft get warped? Did it reach the bottom? What now?
Giotto was the first to hear it, first a burble, a little crust of mud giving way, and then a steady hiss. The air around the shaft began to ripple, and it took on the faintest odor. It was little more than an aura, a vague sense of danger, but as it set in Giotto began to appreciate the reality of the situation.
“Ivan! We’ve hit a gas bubble!”
“Well, don’t just stand there, cut the boiler!” Ivan shouted with mounting desperation, fumbling at the knot he had tied on his safety rope.
Ivan was right. The growing, invisible bubble of gas could reach the burning coals of the boiler at any moment, but he had to at least try and close the air vent in order to buy the two of them a few moments to save their lives. Despite that the incredible heat of the boiler, Giotto grabbed onto the latches with his bare hands and shut the vents. There was simply no time to put on gloves. He roared in pain as the searing heat stabbed into his calloused hands, but distracted himself with the urgency of the situation.
He looked at his hands. Despite the fact that Beastfolk had thick skin on their palms and soles, and that his skin was thicker than normal due to long years of labor, blisters had already formed and burst in the few moments he had touched the hot iron, leaving slick and exposed patches of raw flesh and scraps of skin.
In the mean time, Ivan contemplated jumping off the ladder, but fear of breaking every bone in his body and surviving overwhelmed the fear of dying quickly in a fiery explosion. As he squirmed down the ladder two rungs at a time, however, the thought of breaking his legs seemed much more appealing than being burnt to a crisp. He jumped, trying not to stiffen his body as he fell, and when his body met the ground it was an unfamiliar and painful experience to be struck from beneath, every joint from his ankles to his neck stabbing him with pain. The pain subsided as quickly as it arrived, however, and he was pleasantly surprised to find that he had survived the fall intact and without injury. He was so impressed with himself, in fact, that he momentarily forgot that he was about to be burnt to a crisp.
“Ivan! What are you doing?” Giotto bellowed from a safe distance.
The fox snapped to, bursting forward and devoting every fiber of his body towards getting away from the tower. He didn’t care in which direction. He would have run straight into a pit of spears if it meant getting away from the fire.
The explosion began underground, and with a thunderous belch of flame the ground around the tower seemed to burst, a bright yellow column tearing the rickety wood and iron tower apart. The drilling shaft and its bore were ejected straight upward like a rocket. Bits of metal, splinters of wood, and clods of sizzling mud whistled past their heads, but just as soon as the explosion started it vanished, leaving behind a small plume of fire, then a knee-high tongue of flame, then a scrap of candlelight, then nothing.
“Come on.” Giotto clenched his jaw shut, muttering through his teeth. “Gods, come on. Please don’t burn!”
The burbling started again, growing and growing until black crude started sputtering forth from the earth. Giotto was justifiably worried that the oil would be set ablaze by any residual cinders, but the force of the explosion had blown most of the sparks away. From the ruins of the tower sprang a 15-foot high fountain of crude oil, steady, black, and pure.
It was the most beautiful thing the two prospectors had seen in months.
Ivan came to a sudden realization, “Giotto, did you manage to grab your wife’s letters?”
Giotto thought for a few moments, a smile spreading across his face. The caked-up grime and dust seemed to crack and protest as though he hadn’t done such a thing in weeks.
“Let them burn.”
Category Story / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 85 x 120px
File Size 49 kB
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