Burrowing Worm

Pale and spined, a worm of the deep workings whose round mouth is fringed with feelers. Men hear it in the rock long before any of them sees it.

Each mining country owns a worm, and each tells it alike: that the rock gives it away before the eye does, and that living depends on standing the right side of the timbers when it breaks through. Redlode’s iron runs in veins, and a lode there is chased instead of followed; four generations of such chasing have left a tangle with no plan to it, nor any plan ever made, into which men go by what their fathers remembered of the cutting. That tangle, the iron men say, is the worm’s doing, since it had the straight ways first. In the chapel yard the coal men of the county, whose seams run on a plan a child might draw, call that an excuse for bad cutting, and do not lower their voices. Deep miners of either trade say the thing dislikes the light. Their lamps stay lit.

Where the hole is made decides the realm’s answer. Sarrum requires a Black Lantern officer at any break into unplanned ground, and he brings with him the field discipline of uncertain ground, by which men stand spaced at the break and not crowded, lamps are carried under one hand, and nothing on the far side is answered lightly. The northern march finds old workings perilous first in the plain sense, with ground that moves and plans scarcely better than guessing; and there two parishes whose bounds pass through workings no man has entered in four generations walk to the lip and call across it. Out in the concessions abroad there are monster clearers, paid by the head after the fashion of any bounty man, and a breach-watch clerk employed for nothing but to record what the ground has done since yesterday.

Abroad, it is the quartermaster of a working who must be asked, for the duty is his of declaring whether a collapse had its beginning in poor timber, in something older than timber, in sabotage, or in the waking of something deeper than the first survey supposed. The four camps of a working, engineers, miners’ priests, interpreters and local hands, hold four views of the cause, and every camp tells the worm. Where all agree is in the sequence. Odd behaviour in the ground comes first, small things that only the men underground remark; unwillingness among the men comes after; then an incident, and weeks later a greater one upon the same level. Worm-tellers in three countries give that order without variation, and add one thing more: the men who refused to go down were in the right.

As witnesses describe it

A huge pale worm rears in a cavern on short clawed forelimbs, its segments ridged and set with spines, its round mouth full of teeth and hung about with long feelers in motion.