“Yes, ma’am.” Trip sounded relieved. No doubt, he wanted a distraction.
“Also, our dragon scholar promises she’ll have some ideas by the end of the day as to where on that mountain to look for your papa.”
The end of the day? Maybe Blazer thought Rysha wouldn’t be able to figure out much while walking and reading. Rysha wouldn’t object to more time, but she hoped to have some likely starting points before they reached the town.
“Yes, ma’am.” Trip’s second yes, ma’am sounded a lot less enthused.
Once again, Rysha wondered if anything good would come out of finding the dragon.
“Guess we’ll find out soon,” she muttered.
• • • • •
Trip hiked at the front of their little squadron with Blazer. Leftie ambled along behind, and Kaika walked farther back with Rysha, keeping a watchful eye over her as she perused her documents while they trekked. Trip was impressed that she managed to read as she walked since the ground was uneven and full of brush and dozens of species of cactus, including ones that leaked prickly balls of thorns all over the place. They liked to stick to people’s clothes as they passed, and it was hard to pull them out without getting thorns in one’s hands. As Trip and the others had all discovered. So far, they hadn’t found a road or even a trail, so they were cutting across wild country, country full of snakes and large spiders that hissed at them as they passed.
Rysha glanced up, and their eyes met for a second, but she jerked her gaze back down, as if she were engrossed in her reading.
Trip looked away, sorrow heavy in his heart. He hadn’t spoken to her since returning to camp that morning. Both because he hadn’t known what to say and because he believed she wouldn’t want to hear from him for a long time. If ever. He grimaced, horrified at the idea of a parting that lasted forever. And horrified to know that if it did, it was his fault.
“That look like it?” Blazer pointed toward the base of the mountain towering ahead of them, to an open area that was free of vegetation.
“A town? Not really.” Trip didn’t see any buildings or smell any smoke or anything else that would have hinted of life. It looked more like they were walking up to the edge of a canyon or other depression.
Earlier in the day, his senses had come to him off and on, enough so he could feel the life around them, animals and lizards and birds, most of them bedded down to avoid the heat of the day. He hadn’t seen a single human being during their eight-mile trek. The closer they had walked to the mountain, the fewer moments he’d had where he could rely upon his powers. More often, he’d felt naked and vulnerable, and he’d caught himself jumping at scuttling noises in the dry brush around them.
“Down in that valley or whatever that is?” Blazer pulled out her compass. “We’re still heading the right direction.”
“How recent is the map?”
“Twenty years old. It was the most recent one I could get from the intel people. It’s not Iskandian, so I don’t know how reliable it is. It seems our cartographers don’t visit often.”
“Given the greeting we were given in Lagresh, I can see why.”
They walked until they came close enough to the open area to see into it. It wasn’t a valley or a canyon. As Trip stared down into a huge depression chiseled into the desert floor at the base of the mountain, he realized it was a quarry. A huge quarry with rusty red rock walls. Trip found its presence bewildering, since they hadn’t come across a road or even a path leading to it. Maybe the quarry had been dug a long time ago and abandoned.
Blazer cursed. “Is that our town?”
She pointed to a handful of stone buildings squatting at the bottom of a ramp that followed an outer wall down to the bottom of the quarry. None of the structures had roofs. A stone chimney rose up from one, large enough to belong to a smelter, but Trip doubted they would find anything down there that would help them get their fliers out of the desert. Few of the other buildings looked like they had been anything other than living quarters. One exception had a dome shape, though the top half had crumbled inward. Perhaps it had been some religious meeting area. Trip had no interest in exploring it. He felt wary toward this continent’s religions at the moment. The last thing he wanted was to stumble across another cult that worshipped Agarrenon Shivar.
For the sake of his teammates, he attempted to use his senses, searching again for human life or anything that might be useful. He got nothing from the quarry or the crumbling buildings hunkered down there. Had his eyes not been open, he wouldn’t have even known the quarry was there. More than that, he got the strange feeling that those chiseled stone cliffs didn’t want him here. As if they were watching him and would take the opportunity to crumble and fall on him if they could. A strange and silly thought, but he couldn’t shake it.
“I don’t think we’re going to find a spare boiler or steam engine down there, ma’am,” Leftie pointed out, coming up behind them.
Blazer cursed again. “It’s not even going to be worth going down there, is it? Ravenwood?”
“Right here, ma’am.” Rysha closed her book as she jogged up, the rubbings from the outpost also clutched in her hand. “Oh, is that a Referatu Meeting Dome?” she blurted, eyes widening as she looked at the humble collection of buildings. She gripped Blazer’s shoulder. “If it is, that is so amazing!”
“Uh,” Blazer said, eyeing the hand on her shoulder. “Why?”
“Referatu?” Kaika asked. “Like Sardelle’s people? Witch people?”
Trip felt as bewildered as Blazer looked, in part because he hadn’t known the Referatu had ever existed on this continent, but also because he would have imagined the town of a magical people being more impressive than this. Of course, if those stone buildings had been abandoned centuries ago, he could see why their magical luminosity had faded.
“Yes, they’ve been around for millennia,” Rysha said. “They were one of two early organizations that formed in Iskandia dedicated to studying and teaching magic, and those domes were popular architectural elements for them more than three thousand years ago, possibly as much as four thousand years ago. Even though we saw Iskandian influence in that outpost, I hadn’t expected to find sign of early Referatu inhabitation here, deep within Rakgorath. We can go look, right?” Rysha quivered like a hunting dog ready to take to the field. “There’s no danger?”
Blazer opened her mouth, but Rysha pulled away from her before she could speak. She jogged down the ramp, waving her rifle over her head.
“I’ll go check,” she called back.
“Did she just call that pile of rocks an architectural element?” Duck asked.
“It’s a dome-shaped pile of rocks,” Kaika said.
“There’s no roof. Everything’s collapsed. It’s barely circle-shaped.”
“You have to use your imagination.”
Blazer sighed. “Come on, Trip. Let’s go check that chimney down there. I can’t imagine there being anything useful left after four thousand years, but maybe we’ll get lucky and some archaeologist’s steam carriage will have broken down here when they came to study the ruins.”
“Based on the month we’ve had so far,” Kaika said, “this group doesn’t have that kind of luck.”
Since Trip couldn’t inspect the ruins with his magical senses, he trailed after Blazer. He would have to look around the old-fashioned way. If not for the order and the fact that Rysha might need assistance, he wouldn’t have gone down on his own. Everything about the quarry repulsed him, from the crumbling ruins to the cliffs themselves.
Jaxi? He touched the soulblades’ hilts. Azarwrath?
They did not respond.
Trip wondered if they were aware of the world around them now or if they were trapped in some strange limbo world. He hoped from the way the power crystals had turned off and on that there was nothing magically or structurally wrong with them and that they would return to normal once the team left this place. And he prayed the same was true for the soulblades, that they
were simply unable to use their magic right now but would be normal again when removed from the dead zone.
Trip maneuvered to walk next to Kaika as the team descended the wide ramp. “Is your sword chatting with you at all, ma’am?”
“Chatting? Eryndral and I don’t chat.”
“But does it seem dead to you or can you sense it now and then?” Trip thought of the way Dorfindral had worked the night before, warning Rysha that he was… making trouble.
“I can sense it right now, complaining that you’re cozying up to my side.”
“Cozying, ma’am?” Trip shifted farther away from her, but he didn’t think he’d been that close.
“He would prefer you find your own ramp and your own pit to walk into.” She smirked at him, though it didn’t seem that genuine of a gesture.
The sword must have been reminding her that he bore that distasteful dragon blood. Interesting that it wasn’t affected by the dead zone.
“Your sword is magical, even if it’s designed to destroy those with dragon blood,” he mused.
“Yes, I believe we’ve been over that.”
“I can’t sense or communicate with my magical swords—haven’t been able to reliably since right after we crashed. The closer we’ve come to this mountain, the worse it’s gotten.”
“Oh? Hm.” Kaika tapped her fingers on Eryndral’s hilt and surveyed the quarry.
They were more than halfway down the ramp, and the walls towered over their heads. Trip wondered how the miners had gotten their ore out in a pre-steam-age society. Or their ingots, if they had smelted the ore here. On carts pulled by donkeys? Were donkeys native to this continent? He imagined that big, scaled lion eating a donkey for a snack.
“Wait,” he muttered as a thought occurred to him. “Are quarries actually used for mining ore? The ones I’m aware of in Iskandia are for pulling out granite, construction aggregate, gravel, and other building materials, not precious ore or gemstones. Though I think those are sometimes found as a byproduct.”
“What are you blathering about, Captain?” Blazer looked over her shoulder at him.
Rysha, skipping down the ramp like a kid on her way to meet friends at a playground, had reached the ruins and probably didn’t hear their comments.
“I’d assumed, from the chimney and from the name of the place on the map, that this place existed to smelt ore, but…” Trip waved toward the stone walls. “This isn’t a typical mining setup. Not for ore.”
“If witches were doing it, maybe they could just wave their hands and extract huge chunks of the earth,” Kaika said.
Trip grunted an acknowledgment, but he now suspected this place had been used for some of the stone in the outpost. Such as that fancy stone railing that had wound down the levels and levels of that staircase. It could have even been the source for the clay used to create all those tiles. The quarry walls did have a reddish tint.
But if all they had been after were rocks, why was it in the middle of this magic dead zone? Had that existed thousands of years ago? Would the Referatu have chosen to build a quarry in the middle of a place where they couldn’t access their power? That seemed an odd choice, especially given the way those towering stone walls were disturbing him. He couldn’t imagine spending a prolonged period of time down here.
When they reached the bottom of the ramp, the others headed toward the remnants of the town, Blazer walking straight toward the structure with the chimney. A woman of single-minded purpose. Rysha had better investigate the dome quickly. Trip doubted Blazer would be willing to stay long unless she found something that could help them with the fliers.
Instead of heading for the town, Trip walked to the rock wall rising up behind it. Certain sections of it seemed to repel him even more than others.
Though a headache started behind his eyes and his skin crawled, Trip made himself walk straight toward one of the sources of his discomfort, a portion of rock visibly different from the rest. Instead of being solid sedimentary stone, such as they had passed on the way down the ramp, the rock here was striated. Rusty red bands stretched horizontally, layered through lighter types of stone that he couldn’t name.
“Is this iron?” he mused, eyeing the red rock.
Though he’d read about various types of ores and alloys, and used them in engineering applications, he’d never been out to a quarry or a mine and seen the raw material extracted.
He touched his hand to the stone, thinking of the reputed magical dampening quality of iron, that mages often couldn’t sense things through boxes made of the stuff. In the old days, if they’d been captured, they might have been locked up in cells lined with iron.
Trip spotted Rysha crouching outside of the dome, running her hand along something. Though he was reluctant to call her over or even speak to her after the night before, he wanted her opinion on this. Maybe she knew more than he about quarries and why the Referatu might have been mining iron. Or iron in addition to whatever rock material they had drawn out of here.
“Rysha?” he called. “Can you come here for a minute?”
An agonized expression stamped her face when she looked away from the dome. He thought it had more to do with the idea of leaving her find than anything to do with him. But her eyes widened as she looked behind him.
“Is that a banded iron formation?” she asked.
“Possibly?”
Rysha jogged over and touched the red bands. “This is great. Did you know there are numerous hypotheses discussing how banded iron formations were created? They’re quite the anomaly in nature, and they only occur in Teroic rocks that range in age from 1.8 to 2.5 billion years old. My mother would love to see this place. There should be some magnificent fossils around, as this would have all been under the ocean once. This should be magnetite.” She pointed to a layer of rock above one of the rusty red bands. “Or maybe chert? Do you want to hear some of the hypotheses of how these bands formed?”
She turned her bright eyes toward him as if all the previous night’s distress had been forgotten. Trip doubted that was so, but seeing her so interested in something made him smile.
“I’d love to hear about it on the flight back home,” he said, “but for now, I’m trying to figure out if this is what the Referatu, or whoever lived here way back when, were mining for. And why. It completely and utterly repulses me.”
“Repulses?” She laid her hand lovingly on the rock wall, as if she couldn’t fathom it.
“Not the science part, but the rock or ore is grating against my senses. Like the very walls themselves hate me and hate anything magical. Maybe they’re related to your sword.” Trip waved toward Dorfindral’s scabbard.
It was a joke, but Rysha gazed thoughtfully down at the hilt. “That’s interesting.”
“Not very. It’s giving me a headache.”
“I had assumed that the chapaharii swords were made in the traditional manner for that era, iron sand heated together with coal, and that the magic or magic-loathing element was added afterward. Perhaps it was even a part of the smithing process, with a mage working hand in hand with the blacksmith. I hadn’t considered that there might be some source of special ore that was used. And if this ore is special, and that’s why they were mining it, what made it special?” Rysha stroked the rock as she gazed upward, toward the top of the quarry. “The ore here could be more of a geological oddity than the rare but not unheard of banded-iron formations. Or do all banded-iron formations have these anti-magic qualities? I guess we don’t have any evidence yet that the iron is oozing an anti-magic quality. Just your headache. But could this quarry, or perhaps all the rock in this general area, be the reason for the magical dead zone?”
She was talking so rapidly, so engrossed in her speculations, with Trip listening intently, that neither of them noticed Blazer striding toward them until she barked orders.
“I don’t know what you two are doing over there petting the rocks, but have you forgotten that I want those fliers powered up somehow so they can
get out of the desert? And that you, Lieutenant, are supposed to be finding me a dragon lair?”
“We’re having an epiphany over here, ma’am,” Rysha said, rubbing her jaw as she gazed left and right along the rock wall.
“Lieutenants don’t get to have epiphanies. They get to follow orders.”
Trip bristled and stood at her shoulder, glaring at Blazer while Rysha contemplated the rock. “I’m the one who called her over here, ma’am. This is about—”
“Captains don’t get to have epiphanies, either. There are some scraps in the smelter building over here. Very old, very rusty scraps. I doubt anything will be useful, but come take a look. I’m sure your engineering experience is greater than mine.”
Trip wanted to stay where he was and talk Referatu history and chapaharii weapons—the possible origin of chapaharii weapons?—with Rysha, but Blazer’s glare was implacable. A singular focus, indeed.
Well, maybe something in the smelter would shed more light on this mystery for him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Trip passed the dome where Leftie and Duck were discussing the palatability of the lizards scampering among the rocks, and walked into the second-largest structure in the village. He expected to trip over rocks as soon as he entered, but the few that had crumbled over the centuries had done so near the walls. Whatever had once provided the roof for the structure had disappeared. Some biodegradable material, perhaps. Or something valuable enough to loot.
There wasn’t much remaining inside, with only the chimney suggesting this had been a smelter. Whatever anvil and smithing tools had once occupied the structure were long gone. Trip spotted a couple of rusty bolts attached to the ragged remains of an aggregate floor in the back. A few more scraps of iron dusted the ground, but Trip didn’t think the metal had originally come from the quarry. He was no expert at dating historic materials, but the scraps didn’t seem as old as the bolts or the ruins themselves. Nor did they repel him the way the ore in the quarry walls did.
He slipped a few of the scraps into his pocket, thinking he could use his magic to morph them into useful parts for his toy once his abilities returned to him. There wasn’t nearly enough iron to be useful in building a steam engine or whatever Blazer fancied they would create to tug the fliers out of the desert.