Blackdown Stope

The coal country of the Sarrum county has been dug since long before anyone kept a plan of it, and the older workings lie under the newer ones unmapped and unowned. One spring morning in 4606 a stope being worked in the New Lode, one of the four pit settlements the county lumps together as Blackdown, broke through into one of those forgotten workings. Eight men were below when the face opened. None of them came up.

What followed took four days. Nineteen men went in after the eight, in parties of four and five, and each party knew what had happened to the one before it. Collier Bet Marchant led on the second day. Of the twenty-seven who went into the stope, six came out. The pit villages read no names aloud for them and keep no anniversary, which is the plainest difference between the Blackdown men and the city; Marchant herself gave the Bank Council the bare count in a single sentence three years later and has added nothing to it since.

There are two accounts of what lay beyond the break, and they have stood side by side for fifteen years without either party contradicting the other in public. The Colliers, after three years of silence, said through Marchant that the ground was poor and the fall no more than a fall. The Black Lantern brethren say nothing at all in writing. They spent eleven days underground, walled the stope up over the dead, and have left one of their brothers stationed at Blackdown from that day to this, the single permanent posting their Sarrum house keeps anywhere. Their reason for keeping no description is that a description invites a visit. Men on the New Lode level do not linger by the walled face, and talk of the stope in the town's public houses comes in so many shapes that the pits treat all of it with contempt.

The stope changed the county's law in a way four larger disasters had not. Before a year was out it had become the rule across the Sarrum country that no pit may break into unplanned ground unless a brother of the Black Lantern stands by, at the owner's charge, because the insurers would not cover a working opened otherwise. The officer goes through the break first, though nothing requires it. The owners grumble at the fee every year and have never once asked for it to be lifted, and the rule has bred its own quiet evasion, since a road an owner would rather not explain is easily stopped and entered in the workings book as bad air.