It was an old wooden building. The door was closed by a padlock the size of a ham. Wooden shutters had been pulled shut over the windows and bolted from the inside. A gentleman would’ve been stymied, but Jack knew that the weakest part of any building was usually the roof-so as soon as he found a wood-pile stacked against the wall, he climbed up it and got up on top, and found clay tiles under his boots. These were thick and heavy, made to withstand hail-storms and tree-branches, but Jack with the strength of panic stomped until a few of them cracked. Fist-sized rocks were pelting down around him now. He stopped one that was trying to roll off, and used it as a hammer. Finally he created a hole through the tiles, threw in the torch, squeezed through feet-first between the wooden laths on which the tiles were mounted, and dropped through, landing on a table. He snatched up the torch lest it set fire to the place, and found himself looking at a portrait of Martin Luther.

His hunters-several dozen by now, he guessed-had surrounded the building and begun pounding, in an exploratory way, on its doors and shutters. The booms in the dark gave Jack a general idea of the building’s size and shape. It had several rooms, and was therefore probably not a church, but not a mere cottage either. No one had tried to pursue him through the hole in the roof and he was certain no one would-they’d burn it. It was inevitable. He could even hear axes thudding into trees out in the forest-more fuel.

This particular room was a rude chapel; the thing he’d landed on, the altar. Next to the Luther portrait was an old and not very good rendition of a woman proffering a chalice with a communion wafer levitating above it, suspended by some ongoing miraculous intervention. It made Jack (who’d had enough, for one night, of accepting mystery drinks from eerie females) shudder. But from having spent too much time lately around miners, he recognized the woman as St. Barbara, patron of men who dug holes in the ground, albeit with all of her Catholic insignia filed off. The rest of the room was striped by plank benches. Jack hopped from one to the next to the back, then went sideways and found a kind of sitting-room with a couple of chairs and one of the towering black iron stoves favored by Germans. Turning on his heel and going the other way, he found a very heavy scale dangling from the ceiling; weights for it, the size of cheese-wheels; a cabinet; and, what he most wanted to see, a stairway going down.

It was getting smoky in there, and not just from his torch. Jack mauled the cabinet open and grabbed a handful of kienspans. He’d lost his hat while running through the woods and so he stole one of the miners’: a conical thing of extremely thick felt that would soften impacts of head against stone. Then he was down the stairs, and none too soon as the old wooden building was burning like gunpowder. They’d make a big fire of it, throwing on whole trees: a fire that could be seen by the burghers of Bockboden, sending those Hexen-hunters a powerful message by which they’d be completely baffled.

The stairway went down for perhaps two dozen steps and then levelled off into a tunnel that went at least as far as Jack’s torch (which had consumed most of its fuel) could throw light. He lit a kienspan, which burnt a little brighter, but he still could not see the end of the tunnel, which was good, and to be expected. He began running along in a kind of crouch, not wanting to smash his head on the ceiling timbers, and after a minute, passed by a hand-haspel crammed into a niche in the tunnel wall, its ropes descending into a shaft. A minute later he passed by another, then another, and finally he stopped and decided he should just go down one of those shafts. He’d been down here long enough to stop being so proud of his own cleverness, and he’d begun to worry. The Hexen knew the territory better than he. They couldn’t not know that the building was a mine entrance, and they must have anticipated that he’d find the tunnel. Perhaps the mine had other entrances, and they’d soon be coming down with torches and dogs and God knows what, as when they hunted burrowing vermin with their sausage-shaped dogs.

One of the hand-haspel’s buckets was at the top, the other down below. Jack climbed into the one that was up, and hugged the opposite rope, and by letting it slide through his arms was able to descend smoothly for a short distance: until he relaxed, and the rope slid too fast, and he hugged it tight out of panic, so it burnt him and made him let go, causing the same cycle to repeat, except worse. The only thing that interrupted this round was when, at the halfway mark, the lower bucket came up and caught him under the chin and caused him to let go entirely-which was fine, as he would have been stuck at that point anyway. He dropped, then, with only the empty, ascending bucket as counterweight, and what saved him was that the impact of his chin against same had set it swinging briskly back and forth, its rim biting into the rough wall of the shaft faster and faster as it rose higher and higher, throwing sparks and dislodging fusillades of jagged rock in Jack’s direction with every impact, but also slowing his fall with a corresponding series of violent jerks. Jack kept his head down and his kienspan up in case this shaft terminated in water, a possibility he should have considered earlier.

Actually it terminated in rock-the bucket landed unevenly and ejected Jack. Loose bits of stone continued to clatter down from above for a little while and hurt his legs, which was welcome as proof he hadn’t been paralyzed. The kienspan still burnt; Jack held it in a death-grip and watched the blue flame pour out of it and turn yellow as it moved sideways along the shaft, contrary to the normal habit of flames, which was to tend upwards. Jack kicked the bucket out of the way and did some moving about, and found that there was a rapidly building draft, approaching a breeze, moving toward him along the tunnel. But when he backed up to the other side of the shaft opening in the ceiling, the air was moving the opposite direction. Two flows of air converged at this point and moved up the shaft, starting now to make a certain wailing noise that Jack could not fail to liken to damned souls or whatever. Now he understood why the Hexen had gone to work felling trees up above: they knew that with a sufficiently enormous fire they could suck all of the air out of the mine.

He had to find a way out, which did not seem all that likely now, as he’d made the (in retrospect) mistake of going down to a lower level. But he chose the direction from which there came the strongest flow of air, and began to move as quickly as he could. The faster he ran into the wind, the more brightly his kienspan burnt. But it burnt less brightly as time went on. He tried lighting a fresh one, but it, too, burnt feebly unless he waved it in the air, and then the light flared up and shone between the heavy bars of the wooden cage that kept the rocks from crushing him on all sides, and cast rapidly moving shadows, sometimes looking like angry faces of mangled giants, or huge ostrich-skeleton-monsters with scimitar teeth: all of which went together neatly with the deafening chorus of moans and wails made by all of the passageways as the breath was sucked out of them.

Around this time Jack also noted that he was on his hands and knees skidding the dully glowing kienspan along the floor. From time to time he’d see the low portal of one of those side-tunnels go by him to the left or right. Going by one of these he felt a strong cool breeze, and the kienspan flared up; but when he went past it, the air became dead and the kienspan went out entirely. He was breathing very fast, but it did him no good. With what strength he still had, he backtracked through absolute darkness until he felt the wind from that side-tunnel on his face. Then he lay down flat on the rock for a while and simply breathed.