Maker of Fire

Emily, West Ridge above the Vanishing River

Cadrees spotted the place I described immediately and landed in the little clearing in front of the vein on the bench. We got down this time and I walked them to the alcove. Cadrees stuck his head in, "this is bigger than I thought it would be."

"Yes, this will work if we need a spot to shelter in. The only problem is all these rocks on the ground. It would be hard to find a place to sit."

He was referring to all the magnetite that had fallen from my blasting. "Let me do some housecleaning." He pulled out a quartz crystal he wore around his neck and got that funny half-lidded look that magic users have when they do major magic. Then all the loose rocks floated up and floated out into the clearing where they neatly piled themselves in a half-circle shape, making a wall. It was amazing to watch. I'm sure my jaw dropped all the way to the valley floor because Hessakos had a good laugh after seeing my reaction.

Hessakos exhaled and relaxed: "I'm not completely recovered yet from two nights ago. That took more work than I expected. Alright, let's go back to Tourmaline Mountain. By the way, Emily, what's that name mean?"

I sketched a typical tourmaline: a long striated prism with flat terminations and a rounded-triangular cross-section. I annotated it with a note that the colors could be black, blue, dark green, light green, pink, or green on one end shading to pink on the other.

"That pink and green version is what I would call two-color crystal," he remarked looking at the tablet. "You draw well, Emily. I assume then that Tourmaline Mountain has two-color crystals?"

I nodded yes and then wrote: "And quartz crystals too."

"What's a quartz crystal? Hey, don't give me that shocked expression. What is it?"

I drew a six-sided quartz crystal with a pyramidal cap.

"I know that one too," he said. "We call that just crystal. There's a large crystal in the well of every shrine. Smaller ones get used for magical tools or to make charm gems."

That confused me since charm gems are flat. I wrote: "Charm gems are flat and don't look like quartz because quartz is not flat. Why is that?"

"The artificers of Giltak cut the crystal into thin wafers for charm gems. Depending on intended use, the hexagonal cross-section may be replaced with a round one."

That's sounded weird to me. Quartz has non-existent cleavage planes. That would make cutting flat wafers or disks from a quartz crystal difficult and maybe even impossible given this civilization's lack of technology. Even in the 21st century, cutting disks of quartz that way required a wet saw with a blade whose cutting surface was made of crushed diamonds.

"That's an interesting face, Emily," Hessakos laughed. "I'm looking forward to when you can talk so I can find out what all your faces mean. Now then, can I give you a lift back into the saddle?"

I waved him off and started writing and sketching instead: "Tell Cadrees to look for these on the north and west sides of the mountain." I drew what a vein might look like as a vertical dike, as a sill, and as a footwall on one side of the gully eroded down by a stream. It was oversimplified but there just wasn't time to explain how ore deposits worked. I was sure that we were looking for pegmatites, those vein structures where crystals have time to grow.

Hessakos studied my simplified drawings. "Cadrees, I'm looking at drawings Emily made. I'm mindcasting it now. See it?"

"I see it. What do you want me to do if I do spot something like these?"

"Find a place to land," I wrote. Hessakos repeated it out loud for Cadrees.

We got back into the air and spent some time looking, landing, and inspecting features. Cadrees had much better eyes than me or Hessakos, so he was the one who found the greater number of possible locations. It was past midday when Cadrees landed on the eleventh possible location. This one was just below the treeline on the north side of the mountain in a little col between the main peak and a secondary peak.

I walked between the col and the secondary peak and found schist, of all things. I was hoping to find a pegmatite. Then I had a thought and ran back to the col, which confused poor Hessakos.

"Emily? Emily, what are doing?" He chased after me. I was about a third of the way between the main peak and the col when I found what I thought I would find: pegmatitic crystal growth. I had found a skarn, the hydrothermally-altered minerals between the metamorphic schist and the tonalite exposed on the east and south sides of the mountain. Tonalite is a lovely salt-and-pepper igneous rock often mistaken for granite by people who never bothered to learn any geology.

The treeline stopped at the transition between the schist and the skarn mineralization, which wasn't surprising since changes in vegetation are often controlled by the underlying geology. I started walking the contact, which took me west into the trees and downward. The trees had covered many small protrusions of skarn rock so they weren't visible looking at the mountain from a distance. I ran from outcrop to outcrop, with Hessakos on my heels, trying to get me to stop and answer him but I was too excited to slow down.

My first find was book mica. The second was cassiterite. That got me more excited because cassiterite is the main ore mineral of tin. This was looking better by the minute since tin and bismuth sometimes occur together. I found some quartz crystals and then I saw bismuth; not bismuthinite, but elemental bismuth in a little pocket with quartz. It was the sort of mineral you could only see in a museum in my former life: stacks of planar triangular faces of pinkish-silver metal on a bed of little quartz crystals.

"What is that?" Hessakos dropped to one knee to get a better look. I wrote: "It's what we're looking for. Can you get the tools?" He closed his eyes briefly: "Cadrees is coming. It's better if we stick together." While we waited, I looked at other nearby outcroppings and found bismuthinite intergrown with elemental bismuth.

As soon as Cadrees arrived, I grabbed a hammer and pointed chisel and started working on liberating some of the bismuthinite to take back with us. I decided after a minute or two that bronze did not make good tools for rocks. The point on the chisel was mushed beyond saving in no time at all.

"You want some of this, Emily?" Hessakos was studying what I was doing. "Here, let me try something." He took out a quartz crystal that he was wearing as a pendant under his tunic and then got that half-lidded look again. Pieces of bismuthinite started falling out of the outcrop.

"Great imitation of a fish, Emily," he teased me over my wide-eyed and open-mouthed expression. I was gobsmacked watching him take apart an outcrop in seconds. I ran over to the book mica and pointed at it.

"You want that too?" He walked over and liberated two huge books of mica while I grinned over the thought of furnace windows and a way to cover the slit in my horn eye protectors.

I then walked over to the elemental bismuth. My greed for beautiful minerals was getting the better of me. I could have looked at that rock all day.

"This will need to be the last one, Emily, or I'll run out of stamina," he got on his knees and sat back on his heels. Then the rock around the bismuth started spalling off all around the specimen, trimming all the rock away from around the quartz pocket. Soon, it was the only thing left on that part of the outcrop. He made a horizontal cut below to detach it. I was already picking up the bismuthinite and mica and stuffing them in a canvas sack.

The hard part was packing up the bismuth in the quartz pocket so it wouldn't be destroyed in transit. Hessakos solved that problem by repacking his pemmican into another sack so we could use the wooden box it came in for the mineral specimen. It was then that the wind started to pick up noticeably.

"That's not good," Hessakos looked up at the sky as he finished stowing the sacks in the saddlebags. He strapped the pemmican box down immediately behind the seat of the saddle. "Up you go," he picked me up and deposited me on Cadrees and got on himself. He did up my straps faster than I could do them myself and then we flew up through the trees to get airborne.

"We've made a bad mistake, folks," Hessakos remarked as we all looked at the leading edge of a storm almost upon us. "We'll run into that no matter where we try to go on the other side of the lava plains. It's going northeast and we need to go east or south to get to any town on the Salt River. It's a good thing we scouted out shelter, Emily, because we need to use it. Cadrees, get us back to where we were this morning."

I was really surprised at how fast the weather had changed and then I corrected my thinking. From the empty rumble of my stomach, I realized it was much later than I thought. I had lost track of time while focusing on the outcrops we had found and so had Hessakos. It started to snow on us while we flew.

It only took a few minutes for Cadrees to land back at the bottom of the magnetite vein. At this lower altitude, it was rain that was falling. When we got into the alcove under the vein, Hessakos cast a charm to dry off me and Cadrees followed by a charm of warmth. He then pulled a leather and canvas bucket out of the baggage Cadrees carried. He took his crystal and concentrated. The bucket slowly filled up with water.

"I would like some of that water when it's full," Cadrees said. "It's for you but I'm afraid it's short rations for you." He patted the eagle on the neck. "I did see some mountain sheep in the valley but they're probably in the trees by now with this rain."

"Missing one evening of dinner will not kill me," the eagle replied.

He dragged the bucket over to Cadrees. "I have sweet tea for you and me, Emily." He produced two leather skins of cold tea from the saddlebags and put one in front of me. I couldn't even lift it.

"Blarg! I'm an idiot!" He smacked himself on the side of the face. He then dug back into the saddlebags and produced a small beaker made of horn. He filled it up from his bag of tea and handed it to me, "Do you want it hot?" I nodded and it was instantly hot. Having magic sure was nice. I was feeling a bit envious.

He spread our sheepskin flying cloaks on the ground to sit on and laid down on his back. "We're stuck here for the night. It's not the wet that's the problem. It's the wind. Getting caught in a wind shear or a downdraft could break Cadrees' wings. We'll have to wait for more stable air once the storm has passed over. This looks like the beginning of the harvest to cold season weather pattern, which is about right since the harvest season will be starting soon. There will be snow in the morning where we found our rocks. If we hadn't come here today, you would have to wait until planting season to locate what Mueb wanted you to find."

That would have been difficult to deal with. The thought of spending the entire harvest and cold seasons wondering if a god had really visited me in a dream was chilling. The fact that a god did visit me in a dream was not exactly a cause for celebration. I did not like the feeling that I was just a puppet dancing on some deities' strings, especially given my secular leanings in my previous life.

"Wow, that's a face that could sour milk," Hessakos sat up. "What's wrong?"

"Thinking about gods meddling in my life, that's all," I wrote on the wrist tablet.

"Yeah, I can see where that could be a burden rather than an advantage," he nodded. "It's not been an easy year for you, has it?

"Not more or less difficult," I wrote. "Just a different kind of difficult."

"It's hard living in the wilderness," he nodded. "I did it for two years after I ran away from home. Dang, Emily, that's a great face you're making. I wish there were a way to capture all your expressions."

Curse my brain, I immediately pondered how hard it would be to make a camera.

"I know that look, Emily. You're thinking of something outrageous again. Do you have a way to capture expressions?" He looked expectant and curious.

I sighed and wrote, ruefully, "there is a way to capture images on silver." I knew I could make a primitive daguerreotype with a camera obscura, with silver-plated copper sheet or silver fused onto glass, then converted to silver halide, and developed by exposure to mercury fumes. It was dangerous as anything because mercury vapors are neither kind nor gentle to living beings, but the process would probably work just fine.

"And you never thought to use it?"

Hessakos got a lifted eyebrow from me for that question. I wrote: "Living here in my valley, I had no practical use for it. I made things that made my life easier or more comfortable. Making a camera would do neither."

"Wait! What's a camera?"

"A device to capture an image and I believe Cadrees wants some more water."

After he fetched the water in for Cadrees, we ate dried fruit and pemmican for dinner while I explained how I would make daguerreotype images until it was dark. Then we slept in our sheepskin cloaks.

---