Bad Air

Overview

Bad air is the quiet killer of the underground. It makes no sound and gives no warning a careless worker will heed, and a crew can walk into it upright and be carried out of it, or left. Wherever a people lives or works below the surface, keeping the air good is the first labour of the place.

Cause

Air below ground goes bad in three ways. Foul airs seep out of rock and old workings and gather where no draught reaches: heavy damps that lie along a floor or fill a sump, lighter ones that collect in roof hollows, and a kind that burns. Air in a closed chamber is used up by the breath of those in it and by every lamp and fire. And heat builds in the lowest levels faster than a draught can carry it off. In living-root country a chamber whose root has died loses its air with its bracing (see Living Root).

Who It Strikes

It takes miners, vent crews, salvagers, and whole households when a draught fails.Kobolds feel trapped air through skin and stone before anyone else, and their small bodies are first to fail in it, so a Kobold who turns back is worth listening to. Dwarves bear the deep's pressure as steadiness, which can make them slow to feel its air going wrong. The Wrought do not breathe and walk through it unharmed, one reason their predecessor frames were first set to work in vent shafts.

Signs and Course

The first sign is in the lamp. A flame that burns low, shrinks blue, or will not stay lit warns of a heavy damp; one that flares tall and pale warns of the kind that burns. In the body, bad air begins as a dull headache, a quickening breath that brings no ease, and a heaviness in the limbs. Then comes the dangerous stage: a calm, careless sleepiness in which the sufferer stops caring to leave. A worker who sits down to rest in it seldom rises. In thick air the fall comes within a few breaths. Brought into good air in time, most come round within the hour, sick and pounding-headed for a day.

Contagion

Bad air does not pass from one person to another; it passes to everyone in the same chamber. The danger is the rescuer who runs in after the fallen.

Treatment and Its Limits

The only cure is good air, quickly. Crews haul the fallen out by rope rather than follow them in, and lay them in a moving draught. Against the air itself Scatter Cloud breaks a foul pocket apart, though cast badly it only moves the danger onto someone else, and Open Way can blast a choked vent or jammed exit. Gale Magic costs most in still air, which is where bad air lies, and Breath Steady cannot cure poisoned breath. A healer of Vital Magic can restart halted breathing, at a cost to the healer's own reserves, if the patient is already out of the pocket.

Mortality

Thick bad air kills nearly all it catches, and the kind that burns can take a whole crew in one blast. Thin air seldom kills those who leave it soon. Some who lay long before rescue keep a lasting dullness, a poor memory, or a tremor, and miners' talk names such a worker as one the deep "breathed on".

Lore and Belief

Dwarves say a dead pocket holds its breath, waiting for someone to share it, and many crews believe the foul airs are the old dead under stone exhaling. Kobold warning marks for shafts that breathe poorly are taken for superstition by outsiders until they lose someone.

Ruin-delvers who break into a sealed Dwarven working for its old treasure carry a candle ahead of them on a pole, and every hold has buried a band that found a vault of gold and lay down beside it to rest.

In the Medieval Era

In the Stonewake Deeps air comes first: vent runs, trap-doors, and pressure gates are walked on fixed rounds, much of it by Kobold crews, and lamps are kept small because every flame is counted against the air. At the mine-edges of the Ironspine, bad air is among the ways Dwarves most often die before their time, and the Kobolds who notice it first are not always believed. It waits in the underlayers of the Broken Marches, and in the Roothollows a chamber whose root dies goes slowly stale. Most cases end before any healer arrives.

Where It Appears

• The Stonewake Deeps
• The Ironspine
• The Broken Marches
• The Roothollows
• The Lay of the Land
• Kobolds
• Gale Magic (Breath Steady, Scatter Cloud)
• Zephyr Prime
• the Writers' Guide chapter Stone and the Deep
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Basins and the Marches
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Bridge Peoples
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Schools of Magic