Mainspring by Jay Lake

correct gear ratios onto the smallest of the blank wheels.
    â€œI’m sorry,” Hethor whispered to the candleman who crouched next to him on hands and knees. “I’m not hungry.”
    â€œNever hungry in this heart of stone,” the candleman said matter-of-factly. “Not no one. Still, a man’s got to eat if he’s going to live.”
    Hethor supposed the candleman had a point. He pulled himself up into a squat, back and joints protesting from time spent on cold stone and chunky wax, then scuttled after the man who had come to fetch him.
    A number of the prisoners were seated in a circle. They were surrounded by a veritable rampart of candle wax.
The top of the lumpy, flowing wall was lit by still more candles. Hethor had no sense of the size of the room, other than of a great space, for the flickering flames made the darkness around them all the more impenetrable.
    He would have preferred less light and more vision.
    His guide brought Hethor into the circle, patted a place on a little seat of wax worn by years of buttocks, then crawled to his own place.
    â€œWelcome,” said another candleman. It might have been the same one who had greeted Hethor the night before. He seemed to be the spokesman.
    If it had been the night before, Hethor realized with a shiver. His sense of time told him it was morning. The clattering of the Earth was almost loud here, a metronome overriding the confusion of the darkness, but there was no way to check the passage of sidereal midnight, no validation at all.
    No master clock save the one he carried within.
    â€œThank you,” Hethor said belatedly, recovering from his train of thought. “I’m—”
    â€œNo,” the candleman said firmly as he raised a hand. “We have but one rule here in the pit. Slow, go slow. Your least bit of news is a treasure to be gleaned and passed about from man to man. Do not scatter lightly now what you will prize later.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œIn the pit of the candlemen, no one sees.”
    They all intoned, “No one sees.”
    â€œI hear,” said Hethor with a flash of understanding. He did hear, after all, the music of the Earth below all the levels of life. That strange gift he had always had, commonplace to him but seemingly peculiar as some rumored power of a sorcerer from the Southern Earth the few times he had tried to explain it.
    He understood their darkness in a basic, primitive way. “What of you, then?”
    â€œWe are waiting here,” said the spokesman.
    Hethor considered that answer. He inhaled deeply,
smelling wax and sweating stone and distant slops and unwashed candlemen. He listened to his breathing and theirs, the hiss of hundreds of candle flames and the unaccountably loud sounds of the Earth. He looked around the glimmering darkness.
    Panic clawed his throat. It recalled the sensation of drowning in a river. He’d nearly done so one summer when he was nine, tangled in the rotting branches of an old log in the current, willing to mortgage his soul for one more breath of air.
    â€œPlease …” Hethor choked out the word, fighting his desire to scream and bolt from the prison even if he had to claw through stone to do it. Surely they all felt that in this place. These men were buried, dead as the Brass Christ in his tomb, with no angel to roll back the stone.
    Someone pressed a bowl into his hand. It was cool to the touch, and a little rough. He could barely see it even in the candlelight, but with his other hand Hethor found a pile of boiled eggs. He took one and passed the bowl along.
    Soon there was a sound of peeling and chomping as the candlemen ate. Still there were no words.
    Another bowl came, almost the same as the first, this one filled with a soppy mess of which Hethor took a fingered scoop. Rolled oats with a trace of honey, he decided from the smell. He passed that bowl, then licked his fingers clean.
    When the third bowl came, he