Miner's Lung

Overview

Miner's lung is the cough of the deep trades. A miner who has cut stone for twenty years climbs a stair like an old man, and everyone in the hold knows why. Nobody dies of it suddenly. The chest simply fails, a little each year, until a winter fever finishes it. With it go the other marks of the trade, which hold folk count as one wear: the smith's ruined ears, the forge-eye, and the burns.

Cause

The dust of cut stone and ore, breathed every working day, settles in the lungs and scars them, and scarred lung cannot take in air. Smelting smoke and the smoke of charcoal-burning do the same more slowly. The other wear has plainer causes: hammering takes the hearing, and the glare and sparks of the forge cloud and scar the eyes.

Who It Strikes

It strikes those who work in the dust: miners, quarrymen, stone-cutters, and the crews who clear and brace the workings. Dwarves bear it better than other peoples, being dense and durable and keeping a little of their old draw of steadiness from stone, but an old Dwarven miner coughs too. Kobold crews, who keep the vent runs and narrow ways, work in some of the worst dust in the holds. The Wrought do not breathe and take none of it, which is one reason so much of the dustiest work falls to them.

Signs and Course

It comes on over years. First there is a dry cough in the mornings and a shortness of breath on stairs. Then the cough brings up grey or black phlegm, and the worker stops at every landing. In the late stage the chest is barrel-tight, the lips go blue with any effort, and the worker can no longer go below. A cold that others shake off becomes lung fever in a miner's chest, and that is how most of them die.

Smiths go deaf slowly, the high sounds first. Forge-eye is a burning, watering eye after a day at the fire; over years the sight clouds.

Contagion

It does not pass between people.

Treatment and Its Limits

Nothing undoes scarred lung. A Vital healer can keep failing breath going for a night with Breath Recall, but it cannot repair destroyed lungs, and healing magic spent on a chest that goes back into the dust is spent for nothing. Breath Steady eases the panic of the breathless and steadies the breath for a while.

What helps is keeping the dust out: cutting wet, a damp cloth over mouth and nose, moving air through the workings, and taking the old cougher off the face and onto lighter work. Steam and honey ease the cough.

Mortality

It seldom kills before middle life, but it takes many years off a miner's life, and most who have it die of a chest fever in the end. Dwarves often work longer before it stops them.

Lore and Belief

Dwarves say the stone is taking back what was cut from it, and call a deep cough "the mountain in the chest". Many miners believe the dust is clean and only bad air is dangerous, so they fear the dead pocket and ignore the dust. Smiths take deafness as a mark of mastery.

Hold songs honour the old miner who coughed his way back down into a collapsed working to lead the trapped crew out by memory, because no one younger knew the old seam.

In the Medieval Era

It is common wherever stone and ore are worked, most of all in the mine-edges of the Ironspine and the working and forge levels of the Stonewake Deeps. The holds of the Ironspine Holds and the Stonewake Compact count air as somebody's work, and the vent rounds of the Kobold crews that clear bad air clear dust too. A hold keeps its broken-chested old miners at the lift-houses, the stores, and the archives, out of the dust.

Where It Appears

This ailment grows out of the mine and forge life of:

• The Ironspine (land and hazards)
• The Stonewake Deeps (land and hazards, ordinary life)
• Kobolds