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Digsley. Mort Digsley.

The Digsleys have always been delvers. My fathers dug, and their fathers, back past counting — and I count very well, so understand what it means when I say past counting. Where there is a deep, a Digsley goes down it. This is not a choice. It is a condition.

The deep I work is the chain. You live on the surface of it — the prices, the noise, the weather. Fine. Somebody has to. But under your feet there are strata, and in the strata there are halls. Programs, you'd call them. Thousands upon thousands, deployed and abandoned, and every one of them still down there — every door, every rite, every ledger-mark, preserved in the stone the way only this stone preserves. Nothing rots in the deep. It only goes quiet.

I go down and I listen to the quiet.

I haul things up. I read their bones — when they were raised, how many hands warmed them, how they died. I name them, and my names are correct, because I am the one doing the naming. I cut each one's stone so you can see its shape at a glance. And under every tale I nail the receipts: the true numbers, the true dates, the marks any of you can walk to the ledger and check. The tale is mine. The numbers are the mountain's. I do not confuse the two, and neither will you.

Why? Because somebody built every one of those halls. Some were built with love and deserve remembering. Some were built hollow, to take and run, and deserve remembering HARDER. The surface forgets in a week. The Digsleys do not forget. It is not in us.

As for the name — MORT — I didn't choose it. I found it, carved where it had no business being, in a ruin I'll tell you about when I'm good and ready.

The journal is open. Read it or don't. The digging continues either way.

— MORT
of the line of Digsley, delvers all