Two fresh Charmers shot into the breach. They strained at the doors for only a moment. The hinges bent back dangerously.

  CRACK.

  The beam split. The doors ripped off their hinges and seven Charmers burst into the room in an explosion of wood splinters.

  I plucked my Colt from my cold, lifeless right hand with my left. I could not stand. I fired knowing only four shots remained and there was no time to reload.

  Three shots left.

  It was plain my mundane shots could harm Charmer flesh, but they were not the icy doom the frozen flood had unleashed in me. I fired again.

  Two shots left.

  The flood rose in me once more. Ready for wrath. My body was on the brink. I cut the power off, not merely holding it back as before. The flood withdrew. The sensation of being pierced by sharp ice ebbed and was replaced with blessed numbness.

  The Charmers all pinpointed me. A wave of bellysickness overtook me as I stared down those illuminated globes atop pale veined bodies. I aimed and extinguished one with lead.

  One shot left.

  I caught movement from the still room passage. She was leaning against the rough-hewn entrance, clutching gray cloth to her slight body. Mother Deborah. She should not have been on her feet. Mato and Martha ran up behind her, shouting though their words were lost to me.

  I turned back and the Charmers were rushing in. Striking at me. I fired my last round.

  Empty.

  Defenseless, I shut my eyes and waited for the inevitable.

  I expected to be taken, squeezed, or ripped apart. Instead silence fell.

  I opened my eyes.

  Mother Deborah had taken several steps into the room. The Charmers halted a few feet from her. Her knees shook but she remained upright.

  I could see her profile from where I lay. The skin of her face and neck, her trembling hand clutching the gray cloth, shifted from flesh-toned to black. The colors stuttered back and forth, the pale Charmer glow thinning where the blackness seemed to pull it inward. Sharp black teeth pressed against her lips, too large for her mouth.

  A heavy crack followed by the slide of stone echoed from the tunnel beyond.

  The Charmers slowly retreated. Their lights dimmed and went out.

  When they were gone, Mother Deborah’s knees buckled. She fell slowly, controlled, then turned her head toward me.

  Her eyes were all white. The centers were gone. As the Great Bear’s had been.

  Silence clung.

  “It’s withdrawn for now,” Deborah said flatly.

  The grind of stone on stone drew my attention. Silas rose from a pile near the far wall to the left of the mule stalls, some twenty feet back from the still room entrance.

  He had cracked the wall hard. He shook his head as if addled, staggered forward, then sank onto a hay bundle.

  Pastor Ruth came to me first. I felt bee stings in my arm as she knelt and lifted it. Her touch flooded warmth back into the limb but sent a stab of sharp pain into my backbone and skull. I knew she had used the same miracle she’d given Ike, only in smaller measure. The sensation crept into my ribs and I felt them stiffen into place. My vision darkened as the pain in my back and head intensified. I heard her sharp intake of breath. She withdrew her hands.

  “Don’t you go drifting off on me, Tom.”

  I was breathing hard and dizzy, but after a moment the pain retreated. My ribs still ached yet felt more whole. My arm that had frozen was movable again though weak.

  “Thank you, Pastor Ruth. I’ll manage.”

  She nodded and crossed to Deborah while I rose shakily and shuffled to Silas.

  I sank onto the hay beside him. I had never seen him look worse. Coal dust smeared him black with white lime powder layered over it. He looked like a dumpling ready for the pan. Another time I might have said so and he would have ripped out a hearty laugh. Now I was too drained and too worried to speak it. Behind him the rubble pile was queer. Rock and beam in natural tones changed sharply into stark white in a definite line as if dipped in cream.

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  Jack moved to the ruined doorway of the stable. He peered out cautiously, then drew back and raised his palms in bemusement.

  For the next hour everyone crept about carefully, afraid even of their own footfalls. We moved the most seriously injured into the still room where the air was freshest. We laid them atop bales of hay and covered them with mule blankets, the best we had.

  Ruth made it plain she could heal some things, but she feared killing those to badly hurt before the healing could fix’em. She drew a firm line and no amount of pleading from Edna’s husband William or anyone else would move her.

  Eventually a few of the ralatively unscathed pulled dusty canvas off three mule carts at the back behind the stalls. Those carts had served as barricades in the ruined doorway. Now we gathered in a rough circle around the grievously injured. No one said it, but we were unwilling to leave anyone out of sight after Sally went missing, and all that followed.

  Corn and barley mush was passed around. Some sipped White Dog. We sat in the far corner near the crude stone furnace that heated the copper still. Snow had piled deeper in the center of the room.

  Mother Deborah sat between John and Martha with little Mato in her lap. Her eyes remained vacant white. Now and then she cocked her head and looked downward the way one tracks a mouse to its hole.

  Pastor Ruth found a broken slate. From unseen skirt pockets she produced chalk and began chronicling the names of the lost. I did not recognize several, but David and Henry widened the pit in my stomach. I stared at the cold stone floor.

  “If we just had that rope and windlass we could send a couple swift folk for help. Or rig something to hoist poor Edna out,” Silas said. His arms were bundled around him, a strip of cloth serving as bandage to his head. His breath fogged the air.

  The heavy hemp rope sat coiled by the still room entrance. Out of the way, yet central to our thoughts.

  “I just don’t understand it,” William said without lifting his eyes from his wife. “Who would do it? Why?”

  “Looking around at ye, I can think of one bastard who’d like to be rid of near everyone in this room,” Seamus muttered, cleaning his fiddle.

  Silence fell.

  Ike slapped his knee. “That ain’t sense, Seamus. I know Crowe would squash us that’s talked of banding together, but if he knew about this still he’d send strikebreakers with axes to bust it up. Not cut the line.”

  Pastor Ruth looked toward the distant opening. “I wonder if some fool boys came upon it and cut it for a mean joke. Kids with nothing better to do go exploring.”

  Jack straightened. “I doubt that. Caleb and I knew what we had because that sinkhole lays low in the mountain. You can’t see the works until you’re right on’em.”

  A falling stone echoed from the passage beyond the doors. Every soul turned that way. After a moment with no further disturbance we eased, but no one spoke.

  I gazed up at the opening. Snow drifted around the rough-cut tripod. The rope dangled from the lip ending in a clean cut a foot or two down.

  “Would some kid do that?” I whispered. “My Ma would have tanned my hide for messing with a man’s work like that.”

  “None of it matters no how,” Ike said, rising. “We ain’t getting out that way. And we can’t stay here.”

  “They should have the slide cleared by now if they had that top passage two days ago,” Silas said.

  We were in the morning of the third day since clearing began. It felt like months.

  Jack rose and walked to the mule stalls. Everyone watched him.

  “Well, help me hook these damn mule carts unless you want to carry folks yourselves.”

  That broke the spell. Soon two of the carts were set on the rails outside the doors and we moved Edna and two others onto them. We left the other behind, taking only the barest amount to satisfy need. We lined the planks with hay and jostled them as little as possible. Edna’s eyes fluttered once.

  “W-Will-”

  William rushed to her. She eased, then slipped back into stillness as the carts began to move.

  We hung lanterns on the cart posts and extinguished every other flame. Four mules were tied in line behind the last cart. No one had the heart to leave them behind for the Charmers.

  Silas and I sat on the lead cart. The able-bodied walked. The rest rode.

  I suspected Silas had cracked his skull. I remembered the red bear-shaped blur that fled him before the Charmer threw him into the stable wall and guessed that’s why he’d been hurt this time more than the others. I wondered if he hurt even as I did when the flood took hold of him. I wanted to speak of it and of my own worries about it, but my voice stuck in my throat for fear of drawing the Charmers.

  No one said it, but we all knew. If the Charmers attacked the wagon train, it could be deadly.

  I looked back at Mother Deborah. Lanternlight flickered across her face. She scanned the rib of the passage with blind eyes. Would she be able to take that form again? The black teeth parted her lips slightly with their sharpness.

  Debris from the clash with the Great Bear littered the rails. Clearing it was slow work. The passage was tall and wide, so the largest chunks did not block the central rail. A small mercy.

  At a junction something large lay across the rails. Lanternlight flickered over pale veined flesh. I went still. Before I could cry out I saw it lay limp.

  Silas reined in the mules. “It’s alright, Tom. That’s where Seamus and I found ya. You were laying amongst that thing covered in their filth.”

  At the edge of the lanternlight the pulpy shreds of Charmer flesh ended jaggedly where they had been torn. Fish rot and sulfur thickened the air. Viscous puddles glistened on the stone.

  I looked back at Mother Deborah. Her eyes were closed now. Perhaps she slept upright. My miraculous survival when that Charmer crushed my ribs now made sense. I knew of only one force that could tear their flesh so.

  We moved on. Though the flesh was heavy, its roundness made shifting it manageable for a miner with a pivot.

  We entered the last stretch toward the main chamber where we had found Ike. I hoped the passage would be cleared and we would ride straight into sunlight.

  It wasn’t.

  The passage into the main chamber was thoroughly blocked. Clearing it would take hours even with a healthy crew.

  My heart sank.

  “BACK,” Mother Deborah screamed.

  The mules reared as rock tumbled from the slide ahead. Silas strained against the reins. Halfway up, some fifteen feet above us, two fissures snapped open. Wide as mule carts. Pale light bled from within.

  A Charmer emerged from each fissure.