Chapter 710: Beyond the Gathering Route

Chapter 710: Beyond the Gathering Route

Bai Heng looked up from the map. "And if your plaque stops answering?"

Leon had been considering the same problem. Leaving the spring meant putting distance between himself and people he was responsible for.

Eighteen stayed at the entrance base under Tian, where they had been since entry — keeping the supply camp, watching the place where the door had been, and checking the ground every hour.

Twelve stayed at the spring under Bai Heng. That was the decision that took longest, because it meant leaving an old extraction master with eleven crates of confiscated crystal in a realm where at least one expedition had already shown what it did to people it found near valuables.

"Then you don’t wait for me," Leon said. "You fall back toward Tian along our marked route. We’ve tested your link to the base this morning. Keep checking it."

Four of the twelve would guard the spring. The other eight, including Bai Heng, would gather and process its crystals. They would take only the outer growth the extraction master judged safe to cut.

Leon tapped the second marker south of the basin.

"Use this as your assembly point. If you have to withdraw, take the people first. Anything you can’t carry stays."

"Eleven crates," Bai Heng said, without quite making it an objection.

"I know how many. We can recover crates."

The old man studied him, then nodded. "Understood, Senior Brother."

Tian received the same instructions over the plaque. Bai Heng would report to her at dawn and dusk, while Leon’s group would test its connection along the northern route. If contact failed, his party would return to the last tested point before dusk on their third day away. Until then, neither camp was to count on an immediate response from him.

Vyra had both camp leaders repeat the arrangements before she closed the map.

Eighteen went north toward the storm: Leon, the four women, and thirteen Palace personnel — Wen Shu and two other scouts, four field collectors, two recorders, and four carriers.

Leon counted the departing eighteen himself before they left. Between the base, the spring, and this column, all forty-eight Palace entrants were accounted for.

His other body was already beyond the camp, walking east beneath a borrowed cloak.

The first stretch north of the spring looked much like the country around the terrace.

They crossed broken pale ground where distance remained unreliable. The scouts placed stakes every few hundred paces, and Vyra checked their sightings before allowing the carriers forward. The plaque check with the spring went through cleanly at the first marker, weaker at the second, and not at all at the third.

"Range," said Vyra. "Or terrain. Either way, it’s gone."

"Go back to the second and check again," Leon said.

The reply came through once the scout retraced her steps. Vyra marked that position, then sent their planned return time to Bai Heng. Leon watched her put the plaque away with considerably less satisfaction than he had felt carrying it that morning.

He could cross rough ground quickly. Eighteen people with gathering equipment could not. If trouble came at the spring, Bai Heng would have to follow the withdrawal plan.

By afternoon they reached long, low ridges running east to west. Each rose a little higher than the last, with shallow valleys between them where green grass grew knee-high. Leon slowed at the first patch. He had grown used to seeing plants cling to crystal and crust.

Loriel stopped at the edge of the first valley and put her hand in it.

"Roots in soil," Loriel said, parting the blades. "No crystal growth around them."

"Worth collecting?" a carrier asked.

"A little soil, if we can spare a jar." She smiled up at him. "I’d like to know what else grows here."

The carrier found one. Leon waited while she took her sample; a patch of ordinary green was pleasant to look at after so much pale stone.

Ira had fallen into step beside Leon on the second ridge, and was looking north with narrowed eyes.

"You’re somewhere else," she said quietly.

He glanced at her.

"Not all of you. But you keep looking east when there’s nothing there." She did not turn her head. "Is it — are you all right?"

"I’m fine," Leon murmured, waiting until the carrier ahead was out of earshot. "Rocks so far. A better view than this one."

"Good." A pause. "Tell me if there’s something on it besides rocks."

"You’ll be the first."

She nodded once and went back to watching north.

Four kilometers to the east, on a spine of bare rock the gathering column could never have climbed, Leon lay flat on a ledge in his second body and looked down.

He had been moving since dawn — faster alone than any column could go, across ground a party of eighteen would have needed ropes for. Out here he had nobody to keep alive but himself, and he could take whatever line the rock allowed.

He had found a pass.

Not a large one: a gap between two ridges, perhaps thirty paces wide, running north toward the storm field on a line that appeared to cut several hours off Idrett’s recorded route. The ground through it was firm. The distances agreed with themselves.

And there was something in the pass that was not rock.

A camp — or what was left of one. Stakes, a cold firepit, a torn length of blue canvas. Tracks going north, many of them, heavy and recent.

Leon lay on the ledge and looked at the tracks for a long while.

A fair-sized party. Recent, too.

Several prints still held sharp edges in the loose dust. He followed them with his gaze until they disappeared around the bend, but saw nobody moving.

He did not know who they were. He did not know where they had come from or what they wanted. The shorter route was promising. The abandoned camp meant somebody else might already be waiting at the far end.

He fixed the pass’s position in his mind, then slid back off the ledge and kept moving north.

Back on the second ridge, Leon stopped the column.

"Wen Shu."

The scout came up.

"The route in Idrett’s book. How far to the storm field from here?"

"Another day and a half at this pace," Wen Shu said. "The book takes us around the long western ridge."

"I have another route I want checked," Leon said. "About four kilometers east. There should be a pass running north between those ridges."

He indicated the direction without explaining how he knew. Wen Shu glanced at him, then unfolded her chart.

"How far should I scout it?"

"To the northern opening. Check the ground yourself. We don’t take the carriers through until you’re satisfied."

She left with another scout. Leon kept the column on the broad ridge while, farther east, his second body continued alone. When Wen Shu returned, she confirmed the pass and the tracks.

They reached its southern opening before stopping for the night. The next morning’s crossing saved them several hours of the longer western route, enough to reach the plain before making the return journey for their scheduled contact check.

Shortly after noon on the second day, the eighteen came over the last ridge and stopped.

Below them the land fell away into a vast flat plain, twenty kilometers across at the least, and most of it was gray. Hard gray crust, cracked and glinting in the pale light, stretching away to the north and east until it met the horizon.

And along the eastern edge of the plain, moving slowly west, was the storm.

A curving wall of dark air rose perhaps a kilometer above the plain, violet flashes running through it. Behind its passage, the gray crust had vanished. Patches of exposed mineral caught the light all the way to the distant workings.

Seraphine made a small sound beside him.

"There," she said, pointing. "And there. And—"

Along the edge of the stripped ground, spread out at intervals of a kilometer or so, were camps.

Leon counted six of them before he stopped. Bright tents stood behind clusters of workers. Along the nearest, a line of people was laying out extraction tools in a neat row along the edge of the exposed beds, waiting for the storm to move another step west.

At least six other groups had reached the mineral field ahead of them. Leon lowered the chart. They would have to find somewhere worth taking before the storm passed.