The fire had been burning all morning. Farun reported the heat inside the tunnel was unbearable. Amero looked to his chief digger.
“What do you say, Mieda?”
“Water.”
Amero held up his hands. “Take the water now! Two at a time, go!”
He and Mieda were the first to enter. Still holding soaked bark to their faces and waddling under the weight of full buckets, they entered the smoky passage. The heat was overwhelming. Sweat coursed down Amero’s face as they neared the fire. In addition to the pine boughs, the diggers had stacked oak wood against the wall. The hardwood had burned down to a glowing drift of coals.
Mieda dropped his mask and picked up his bucket in both hands. He flung the water high, so it would run down the rock face. Amero did the same, then both men retreated, coughing hard. As soon as they were out, the next pair ran in, and the next, until forty pails had been dumped on the fire.
Amero, Mieda, and the diggers stood around the mouth of the tunnel, wrapped in steam and smoke. A gentle breeze helped clear the mist away.
“Now, we’ll see.” Amero started for the opening. Farun held out a long-handled stone mallet. Amero smiled and rested the heavy tool on his shoulder.
The others trooped in behind Amero. The carved stone floor sloped downward, so the farther they went the more standing water they encountered. By the time they reached the black stone wall, water, ashes, and rock dust had combined to make a soupy black mud. Some of the men slipped and fell. A few others snickered. Amero let the mallet hit the floor, and the resulting clunk silenced the crowd at his back.
“Give it a whack,” said Farun.
“It ought to be your honor,” Amero said, offering the handle to Mieda.
The dark-skinned man pressed the mallet back into Amero’s hands. “Honor’s yours,” he said. He gestured to Farun and the others. “My life, their lives, are owed to you. You hit.”
Amero swung the hammer high and brought it down smartly on the obstinate wall. The hammer head was granite, and many granite tools had been broken on the black stone before, but this time the obstruction shattered. Grit flew, and hand-sized flakes fell to the muddy floor. The diggers roared with satisfaction.
Outside, the waiting villagers heard the cry of success and echoed it. Men ran out of the tunnel calling for baskets to haul away the debris. More mallets were brought, and soon the cliff side rang with the blows of stone on stone.
Amero and Mieda stood outside and watched a continuous line of diggers emerge bearing baskets full of broken rock. These were emptied on a large pile of leavings that rose by the side of the lake. As more black stone was thrown on top of the sandstone debris, tiny avalanches cascaded down the pile into the lake.
“We’ll have to find a better place to dump that,” Amero mused. “We don’t want the lake tainted with rock dust.”
A young woman emerged from the tunnel with a basket on her back. Amero quickly lost interest in the rock pile when he recognized Halshi, eldest child of Valka, one of the first plainsmen to settle by the lake with his family. Halshi had jet-black hair, smooth, tanned skin, and a ready smile. Amero had hinted to Valka he was interested in becoming Halshi’s mate, but with one thing and another, this task and that, nothing was ever settled between them. Still, Amero always found himself watching her whenever she was around.
Halshi added her burden to the pile. She’d started for another load when Amero called to her.
“How goes it?” he asked. “Are they breaking through?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, hitching her basket on her hip. “The rock’s flying apart now. You did a good job, Mieda.”
The chief digger acknowledged the compliment with a nod. Amero found himself wishing he’d earned Halshi’s praise.
A scattering of red glints in the rock pile caught his eye. Amero squinted to see them better. It wasn’t a trick of the light. As he drew nearer, he saw the debris was flecked with hundreds of small red beads.
“What’s this?”
He knelt and picked a larger nodule out of the pile. Roughly globular, the bead was shiny and hard, like Duranix’s scales, though a different color.
“That stuff?” said Halshi, looking down at him. “I don’t know, but the pit’s full of it.” She returned to the tunnel.
Amero found himself intrigued by the strange red beads. He dug through the coarse slag with his hands and found most of the black stone was dotted with them. Even odder were the larger slabs of rock that had red beads oozing out of them.
A shadow fell across Amero. Mieda had come to see. “Ever seen this stuff before?” Amero held up a handful of red beads.
Mieda examined the pellets closely, holding them up to the light, even putting one between his teeth and biting on it. At last, he replied, “It’s copper.”
“What’s copper?”
“It’s strong. It’s — ” Mieda groped for a word the plainsman would recognize. “The dragon, his hide is like this.” He made two fists and banged them together. “Strong. Hard. This is copper.”
“Metal? It comes from rocks?” asked Amero, amazed.
“I’ve lived long, been many places, seen it before. I never saw it made. It makes tools and pretty things, if you have enough of it.”
Amero was lost in thought. “There were no beads in the black stone before the fire,” he muttered to himself. “Somehow the fire sweated the copper out of the rock.”
His mind was racing. For years he’d sought to make use of Duranix’s cast-off scales, but aside from bending or sharpening them, he’d found no way of changing their shape. All his experiments with fire had failed to melt a single bronze scale. If a substance with scale-like hardness could be extracted from the earth around them, couldn’t it be worked into more useful forms, into any form they wanted?
He set a gang of children to work sifting through the tunnel slag. All the red pellets were to be collected and saved.
By sunset the tunnel had been extended five paces deeper into the mountain. They’d planned to go twenty paces in each tunnel. That would guarantee cool, safe storage for a long time. The villagers were tired but happy with their success.
Amero was too excited to sleep. He had a basket full of copper beads and a head full of ideas. Other tunnels could be extended through the black stone blockage using Mieda’s heating method. If each one yielded similar amounts of copper, Amero would have enough raw material to begin experimenting with it. He wished Duranix were here to advise him. The dragon found the human predilection for toolmaking amusing, and he was a fount of useful ideas.
Thinking of the dragon raised a new question: Where was Duranix? His flight to and from the east should have taken only one day. The sun was now setting on the dragon’s second day away.
Amero realized Duranix might have been diverted by any number of things. Who could know what would interest a dragon? Still, he found himself staring at the eastern range, a frown on his face, as the setting sun turned the sky at his back crimson. He kept hoping for a glimpse of the dragon flying home, but the darkening sky remained empty
Chapter 10
A strange and ominous calm hung over the banks of the Thon-Thalas. Cold river water, collected in the mountains to the west, chilled the warm summer air, creating patches of mist slowly flowing along with the current. Half of Karada’s band, almost two hundred-fifty men and women of fighting age, crouched in the bushes a pace or two from the water’s edge. Further up the hill, the rest of the plainsmen waited on horseback, their position screened by a hedge of freshly cut saplings.
Now and then a horse snorted or tried to eat the tender leaves of the camouflage just in front of them.
