Chapter 704: Before the Dust Settles

Chapter 704: Before the Dust Settles

They came up through the stone in four places at once.

The creatures had low, heavy bodies the size of large dogs, overlapping gray back plates, and shovel-shaped heads above powerful digging limbs. The first came up beneath the amber team’s abandoned cut, surfacing through loose stone with a grinding scrape, and swung its head toward the nearest carrier.

The Palace personnel moved at Leon’s warning, lifting tools and retreating toward solid ground. A handler beside the red crust was rising from one knee when the rock beneath his planted foot gave way. He fell sideways as a burrower surfaced beside him.

Seraphine reached it before it could turn on him.

Lightning carried her across thirty paces. Light followed cleanly through her blade as she changed direction, without the hesitation she had worked to eliminate during her Core preparations. Her sword passed between the creature’s first two plates before it had fully cleared the ground.

She was already turning toward the next one.

"Shalegnaws!" Bai Heng shouted from behind the amber team. "Ore eaters. We’re standing in their feeding ground!"

"How many?" Leon called.

"Packs of ten to twenty, usually! Foundation-stage, all of them, except—"

The ground in the middle of the shelf heaved, and the thing that came up out of it was twice the size of the others and plated in something that caught the light violet.

Bai Heng backed another step. "That one’s the leader."

The rest of the pack surfaced around the scattered teams, and for about ten seconds the shelf was dangerous.

Wen Shu was near the violet with a lantern and a short blade and three of them surfacing in a ring around her. She backed against the largest slab and raised her blade, denying them a clear approach from behind. Ira arrived at the nearest burrower’s flank, drove her lance through its back plate, and swept the haft into the second creature as she pulled free.

The third looked at Ira and went back into the ground.

"Coward," said Ira, with approval.

Vyra had not moved from the recorders’ position and did not need to. Four burrowers were coming up the shelf’s eastern side toward the carriers stacking slabs, and she laid a single line of Crownfire across the stone in front of them — narrow, low, steady, and precisely placed. The first burrower tried to cross it and changed its mind with considerable speed. The other three did not try.

"East side’s closed," Vyra said. "They’ll dig round. I’m watching where."

One recorder caught his partner by the shoulder before he could run after a dropped case. Together they backed toward the carriers, who had set their loads down and drawn short blades. A scout took the exposed corner of the group. They needed only to hold it while the women cleared the approaches.

Leon saw Wen Shu reach for a fallen handler’s pack and waved her back.

"Leave the equipment. Get him behind you."

She changed direction at once. The pack slid into a widening cut a moment later, but its owner was already on his feet. Leon would rather replace a set of straps than carry someone up the slope.

Loriel knelt beside the injured handler at the red crust. His lower leg lay at an angle that made Leon wince even from across the shelf. As she reached for him, another burrower surfaced to her left. She turned, touched two fingers beneath its jaw, and released a precise pulse. The creature collapsed beside the cut, leaving her free to examine the knee.

"Knee," she said to the handler. "It’s out, not broken. This will hurt."

The handler gripped her sleeve. His shout as she reset the joint carried across the shelf.

The leader turned toward Leon beside the source. Its pressure was Golden Core, and its violet plating dragged a shower of loose chips from the edge of the opening as it hauled itself clear. It charged low, shovel-head aimed at his knees.

Leon checked the space behind it. Nobody was in the line of his response, so he let it come halfway across the open ground.

He folded the space immediately above its next foothold. The beast’s forelimbs dropped farther than it expected while its hindquarters carried forward. Its armored belly struck the stone, leaving its head exposed as it scrabbled for purchase.

Leon walked up to it and put a compressed lance of ice through the seam behind its head.

It stopped moving.

Leon let the fold close and checked the other teams. Seraphine had cut down two more beasts, and Ira finished a third near Wen Shu’s slab. Vyra burned down a burrower that lunged toward the carriers, then extended her flame along the eastern burrows as the last attackers retreated underground. Tools lay scattered around the abandoned cuts, but the gathering teams were together behind cover.

The whole thing had taken perhaps forty seconds.

On the far side of the amber band, Bai Heng had his assay lens halfway to his eye and had apparently forgotten to finish lifting it.

"Nobody’s dead," Loriel reported, a few minutes later. "The handler’s knee is back in and he’ll walk on it by tonight. Two scrapes and a cut hand from a chisel. That’s all."

"And the pack?" Leon asked Seraphine.

"Eleven dead, including the leader," Seraphine said. "Four went underground. They’re moving away; I’ll keep watch."

Bai Heng had come across the shelf and was crouched beside the big one’s carcass with a look of unashamed greed.

"Look at the plating, Senior Brother." Bai Heng tapped an exposed edge with his chisel. "Shalegnaws incorporate minerals from their food. This one has layers of lightning-bearing material all through its shell. The smaller plates should be useful too, though we’ll have to assay them separately."

"Take them," Leon said.

Bai Heng inspected the carcass once more. "Twenty minutes for the plates, with two people helping."

Leon checked the terrace. Vyra was already at his shoulder.

"An hour and forty minutes," she said, "if the rate holds. It hasn’t changed."

"Do it," Leon told Bai Heng. "Then return to the amber. Leave the deeper cuts alone."

They worked the last stretch hard, and they worked it well.

Bai Heng’s team took the amber in the end — slabs of it, dense and heavy and strange, stacked beside the violet and the wrapped red. The carriers stripped the burrowers’ plating with a practiced efficiency that suggested they had done this with other beasts. Wen Shu held the upper edge and called the terrace’s position every ten minutes in a voice that got steadily calmer as the day went on.

With forty minutes left before the shelf would be covered, the terrace’s shadow reached the retreat marker Vyra had placed beside the slope. The route itself was still clear. Leon called the end of collection.

"Everything that’s cut comes with us. Everything that isn’t, stays."

Nobody argued. Half the violet band was still in the stone, and the deepest amber, and a patch of red crust that Bai Heng looked at the way a man looks at a meal he has to leave.

Leon could have cracked the remaining beds out in a few minutes. He did not, because he did not know what breaking the stone around an active source would do to the source — and the source was what he actually wanted.

If it replenishes, we’ll want more than one visit.

They went up the slope in order, carrying their loaded cases. Tian counted thirty returning, and the communication check answered cleanly at the top.

While the first cases were being logged, Leon looked back. The terrace was sliding across the ground where he had stood beside the source. Later, the last exposed strip disappeared beneath it.

Bai Heng was the one who did the first count, at the reception rope, with Tian’s recorder beside him.

He went through it twice. Then he sat back on his heels, took off the cracked lens, and looked at Leon.

"This is more than we’d hoped for from the first excursion," Bai Heng said. "More useful material than I brought enough assay slips to label. I’ll have to borrow some."

Then he held up one of the amber samples from beside a channel, and turned it in the light.

There was a faint line in it — fine, pale green, running through the amber like a hair.

"There’s something else mixed into this sample," Bai Heng said. "Only beside the channel. I didn’t find it in the other cut." He lifted it toward the light again. "If it washed in from elsewhere, that source may be worth finding too."