We made good distance that first day, the road climbing steadily out of Corvane's flat surrounding farmland into country that got rockier and more folded with every mile, low grey stone breaking through thin soil in long ribs like something buried had started pushing its way back up into the light. By the second day the trees had thinned out a good deal, pine and something scrubbier taking over from the broadleaf we'd walked under further south, and the air had gone cold enough in the mornings that our breath hung visible for the first hour or so after we broke camp, a small white ghost of every word anyone spoke.
It was on the second evening, making camp in a hollow off the road that Namey had picked with more care than usual, that we ran into the merchant.
He came up the road from the north at a pace that told us plainly he'd been traveling harder than his cart or his horse strictly liked, a heavyset man with a face gone red from either wind or drink or both, and he pulled up short at the sight of our fire, clearly weighing whether four strangers around a flame in the middle of nowhere counted as a risk worth stopping for or a risk worth riding past.
"Evening," Savage called out, in the easy, unthreatening register she saved for moments like this, the one that made her sound almost nothing like the woman I'd watched put a boot through a mercenary's chest two days earlier. "Fire's warm if you want to share it. We don't bite."
He studied us a while longer before he finally decided the offer was worth the risk, climbing down off his cart with the stiff, careful movements of a man who'd been sitting too long on a hard bench, and settled near the fire with a grateful groan that had nothing performed in it at all.
"Where you headed," he asked, once he'd warmed his hands enough to talk without his teeth chattering through it.
"Highhollow," I said, before I'd thought better of saying it plainly to a stranger.
Something crossed his face at that, quick and involuntary, gone almost before I caught it, but not quite fast enough.
"Not much reason to go to Highhollow these days," he said, careful now, in the specific careful tone of a man deciding how much honesty he could afford to spend on people he'd only just met. "Used to be. Good ore up in those hills, once. Not so much anymore, not the kind worth the trip, unless you're one of the ones working the new contracts."
"New contracts," Namey said, and I could hear the effort it cost him to keep his voice as flat and unremarkable as he made it come out.
"Some company bought up the old claims a few years back," the merchant said. "Threnody, they call themselves. Reopened the deep shafts nobody'd worked in a generation, brought in their own crews, paid better than the town had seen in years. I hauled goods up there myself, twice, before I decided the money wasn't worth what I kept hearing coming up out of those shafts at night."
"What did you hear," I asked.
He was quiet a moment, poking at the fire with a stick that didn't need poking, and when he answered his voice had dropped low enough that I had to lean in slightly to catch all of it.
"Crying," he said. "Not the kind a man makes when he's hurt. The kind that sounds like it's coming from somewhere further down than a throat ought to reach. Foreman told me it was just wind through the old ventilation shafts, and maybe it was. I didn't stick around long enough to find out for certain, and I haven't taken a Threnody contract since, whatever they're paying." He shrugged, an uneasy roll of heavy shoulders. "Whole town's gone strange around it, if you ask me. Folks up there don't talk much about the mine anymore. Not to travelers, not to each other either, from what I could tell. Like everybody's decided together it's safer not to notice out loud."
"You mentioned old claims," Savage said, careful, keeping her voice as idle as she could manage. "Anyone still up there from before Threnody bought in? Old families, old names?"
"A few," the merchant said. "Most of the old mining families sold out or moved on once the deep shafts started producing again under new management. There's a woman runs the boarding house who's been there longer than the company, if memory serves. Ilse, I think. She'd know the old names better than anyone left, if the old names are what you're after."
He didn't ask why we were after them, which told me he'd already decided he didn't want to know badly enough to risk the question, and we let him have that. We shared what food we could spare, and he shared what little else he knew about the road ahead, the passes still open this time of year and the ones already starting to close with the first real cold, and by morning he was gone north the way he'd come, back the way he wouldn't take Threnody's coin for anymore, and we were left with a fire gone to embers and a great deal more to think about than we'd had the night before.
"Crying that sounds like it's coming from somewhere further down than a throat ought to reach," Namey repeated, once we were walking again, turning the phrase over like it might give up a second meaning if he handled it enough. "I don't love that description, Jon. I want to be clear about how much I don't love it."
"None of us love it," Savage said.
"Modified cores," Namey said, mostly to himself. "Variant seven, live. If that's what they've been shipping out of Highhollow this whole time, and if whatever's making that sound up in those shafts is where the variant actually gets modified in the first place, then we're not walking toward a mine anymore. We're walking toward the part of the operation that makes the thing that gets shipped."