The small hamlet had been built on top of a small hill in the middle of a valley, and gave us a clear view out over the land below. The road crossed through the hamlet and then down towards a wooden barricade which had been built across the place where the sides of the valley were closest. From here, we could see a number of carts gathering up, and I guessed that was where the convoys gathered before the final push to Toreck.

  From the top, I could clearly see terraced fields planted on the shallow gradient of the hill’s rich-looking soil, separated by channels which supplied water from a small stream that emerged near the hamlet. The houses looked like they had been built with a mix of recovered materials, nothing uniform. The oldest looked like it had been here for years, while the newest, the tenth by my count, was just having its roof finished by a pair of young men who had stripped to the waist in the sun as they manhandled the piles of slate up a ladder to secure them to the wooden slats.

  An old woman, hair long since turned to silver, a wizened hand holding a stout walking stick, almost reached the summit of the hill. She slipped slightly, dropped the bag her other hand had been holding and grabbed her stick with both hands to stop herself from falling over. G responded before the rest of us had fully processed what was happening and picked up her bag for her and offered it to her.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said, somehow taking his arm and not her bag and then having him escort her to the closest house. “Put my shopping down there, lad. This old lady gives you her gratitude,” she told him as she lowered herself into her rocking chair and looked out over the village.

  “You kids don’t seem like the usual vagabonds we have coming through our home,” she said, looking the five of us over.

  “Just passing through, Ma’am,” G said politely. She snorted.

  “We have a task to explore an area not too far to the west of here,” I called out.

  “The only thing that way is the abandoned mine… we had to block up the entrance ever since it got invaded by those damn beasts.” She took the end of her walking stick and whacked the door with it. “Dana! Come here!”

  A moment later, the door opened, and a girl barely into her teens stuck her head out the door. “Yes, Grandma?”

  “Put the shopping in the kitchen and then go and fetch your brother. I have a job for him.”

  “Yes, Grandma.” She grabbed the basket with both hands and hauled it inside. A moment later, I could hear her screaming, “Johny! Grandma wants you!” from somewhere on the other side of the building.

  “Rather than having you traipsing all over our crops like that last fool who came through dressed like you, girl,” she nodded at me, “I’ll have my great-grandson show you the way. Get you out of our hair sooner.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am,” G said politely.

  “Don’t thank me, boy. This ain't for your benefit. Your type always brings trouble for us, and it’s trouble I’d best avoid. Lost my husband to damn fool adventurers, not losing any more of my kin. Ahh, Johny,” she said to the boy who couldn’t have been much more than ten at best, who came around the corner of the small house. “Take these adventurers to the old mine. Make sure they know how to close the gate behind them. Don’t. I know full well your foolish brother showed you how before he left for Toreck. Take them, show them, come back. You are not to set foot in there. Am I clear?” her voice brooked no debate.

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  The lad led us down the road to just before one of the terraces and then along a cobblestone path that had been laid alongside the irrigation channel. Once we had walked around to the west side of the hamlet, we came across a path which led us down the side of the hill and towards the cliffs at the bottom. At the end of the path, there was a pair of metal doors in the side of the cliff.

  “Not sure why she made a big deal of this,” he said to us, the first words he had said the whole trip. “You turn this handle to the left and this one to the right.” He demonstrated with the two wheels in the centre of each door, both spun once, away from each other, then stopped with a loud clunk. The doors then swung open, revealing wheels on the inside of the doors as well and a lot of locking mechanisms on the edge. The doors opened to reveal a corridor of five metres, which ended on another pair of double doors. “You’ll need to close and lock this side before that side will open.”

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  “What’s on the other side?” Jacobs asked.

  “Don’t know, mister, I don’t know anyone who has dared to do more than touch those wheels… never mind lock these ones before doing it.”

  “Thanks, kid,” Jacobs told him and passed him something.

  The kid looked down at the gold coin in his hand. “I don’t have any change…” he said.

  “It’s yours,” Jacobs told him.

  “Thanks, mister!” The kid turned and ran, probably hoping to get away before Jacobs changed his mind. We all just watched him go, with a shake of our heads.

  “This the place?” Peachy asked as she gave the space a good look.

  “Looks that way,” I said, double-checking my map.

  The loud clunk that followed shortly after the room was plunged into darkness was a little unsettling. It had elements of finality to it. Like we were sealing our fate somehow. Darksider’s lantern flickered as he managed to light the wick, and we could see the far end of the short corridor. Peachy cast the middle of the door in shadow as she spun the two wheels at the same time. Her timing might have been off, or their alignment was, as clunks on these doors weren’t as synchronised as the first ones had been.

  The doors opened into a large musky-smelling chamber. A large metal table big enough to sit twelve people was off to one side, with long benches on either side of it. A simple kitchen built into the wall on the other side gave the impression that this was some kind of food preparation area. Opposite it, and to our right, alcoves opened up to show simple bunks built into the walls like a capsule hotel. Besides that, there was an area with 4 shower heads. Cobwebs spread throughout the place revealed it had been quite some time since anyone had last come through here, though prints in the dust on the floor and sides showed someone had in the not-too-distant past. Prints which suggested repeated journeys deeper into the complex.

  “Food, showers, beds, I’m guessing that door leads to toilets…” Jacobs said, waving at the door between the showers and bunks. “Some kind of bunk house? But just inside an airlock?”

  “She called it a mine… think this is where they came between shifts?” Darksider said.

  “On-site accommodation? But we are minutes away from Landing by car,” Peachy added.

  We crossed the room and went through the door on the far side. It led to another corridor which seemed to curve around to the right, Darksider’s light revealing a door to the right and that the left side of the corridor was glass. With the light held in the right spot, so that we could look out the windows without seeing just our own reflections, we got a look at the cavern beyond. I could see why it was called a mine. The light from our lanterns spread out over what looked like a huge grinding wheel on the end of a claw. From the terraces below, it looked like it would cut a strip out, shift sideways and repeat.

  “That is some industrial-level strip mining…” G said.

  “A lot of effort though… I mean, why not start on the surface? This feels like they were doing it illegally…” I said suspiciously.

  Darksider aimed his lantern at the roof, where we could see it had been heavily reinforced. “I wonder what they were mining, though, that made that much engineering cost-effective.”

  The door led into a dead control room. Unresponsive cobweb-covered terminals, the odd mug abandoned in the departure of whoever was here. The explorer who came before us tried several of the terminals and opened up most of the drawers. Judging by the placement of an empty plastic folder against the far wall, the corresponding skid mark in the dust running up to it, and the scattered pile of darker dust where the file must have once lived, they had gotten annoyed when the contents of the folder had disintegrated after all this time. We walked back to the corridor and followed the footprints as they led around and up some stairs.

  On the second floor down, we found a door with the high voltage symbol on it. Inside, we found a generator and a small stack of empty fuel cells in the corner, covered in thick dust. I grabbed one for future reference.

  The stairs led us down five stories to the bottom of the mine. Without glass in the way, Peachy and Darksider’s lamps were showing a better picture of how this place once worked. It looked like the big arm, which dominated our view up top, would dig into the sides of the cliff and deposit what it ate onto a conveyor belt. That belt poured it into a crusher, which turned it into smaller lumps. Another conveyor took those lumps to some kind of filtering machine, which split the output onto two different belts. One deposited into a waiting container, the other just seemed to dump it onto a pile to the side.

  It was also clear that someone had decided that someone else's junk was their treasure. There was plenty of evidence that someone had been sorting through the discard pile, and from the nearby pickaxes and the state of that section of wall compared to the rest of the face, they had also been mining manually.

  “It looks like they were discarding the iron with the other stuff… were they after a specific alloy?” Darksider commented.

  “What was that?” Peachy asked, her head snapping to look deeper into the caves.