Spark and Pumice

Scalding fog swallowed the slope before Ryoma could brake. Steam screamed out of the split crust with the force of a battering ram, throwing up a curtain of stinging white vapor that hid whatever pit the earth had torn open. He dug his rear heel hard into the binding strap, jamming the trailing bevel of his slate board sideways into loose scree. Crushed pumice sprayed in a gray rooster-tail against the blistering vapor. The board dragged, rattled, and ground to a trembling halt two paces from the rim of a chasm that had not existed three minutes ago.

Sulfur reek hit his nose first, sharp enough to scrape tears from his eyes. His left sandal smoked. A thin thread of blue ember curled from the thick vulcanized lizard-hide wrapping his arch, carrying the sweet, greasy smell of char.

Ryoma hopped once on his right foot, casually stamping the smoldering sole against a patch of damp gray grit until the ember died.

"Acceptable for you, maybe," Ryoma muttered, rolling his ankle to test the charred leather. The hide held, stiffened by heat but intact.

The geyser roared again, venting a pressurized plume thirty yards into the sky. The concussion shook the stone beneath his feet, rattling gravel down into the throat of the fissure. The main racing line down to the carvers' huts was gone. Where the sweeping glass chute had run, a gaping trench sliced through the shelf, spitting boiling gray mud and red-hot gravel.

Taking the jump blind would mean diving straight through superheated steam. A skimmer who hit that column at fifty miles an hour would peel his skin off before his board touched ground on the other side.

Ryoma lifted the slate board by its cord, resting the tail against his thigh to check the damage. The polished belly looked rough. Where he had channeled the thermal shockwave to blast through the scavengers, spider-web cracks rippled across the dark stone.

Sixty-eight percent. One more high-friction jump on rough shale and the board would shear cleanly in two. Old Kazuma would charge him a month of scrap obsidian to reshape the core, assuming the old artisan did not break a mallet over his head first for abusing the stone.

Ryoma squinted through the haze at the lip of the rent. Along the torn edge of the basalt fracture, where subterranean magma met the rushing draft of the upper mountain, the rock had not simply shattered. It had fused under freakish pressure. Deep inside the throat of the vent, nestled between two slabs of basalt, sat a lump of translucent material the size of a man's fist. It pulsed with a dull, cherry-red glow, refracting the white steam into veins of liquid amber.

Fire-tempered volcanic glass.

A natural thermal core like that formed once in ten thousand eruptions, born when pure silica trapped superheated gas bubbles at the exact tipping point of cooling. Carvers paid fortunes for a nodule that dense. Fitted into a board's spine, it could absorb twice the thermal friction of plain slate without splitting.

The trouble was reaching it. The vent coughed on a steady cadence. Every seven heartbeats, the subterranean groan deepened, the boiling mud bubbled up, and another roaring jet of steam cleared the fissure like a dragon's breath.

Ryoma crouched at the rim, resting both hands on the cool basalt shelf just outside the burn zone. He counted under his breath.

One. The mud churned.

Two. The bass vibration crawled through his shins.

Three. A hiss of venting gas.

Four, five, six. The pressure peaked.

On seven, the geyser blasted skyward, a thundering tower of boiling mist that blocked the daylight.

The moment the roar peaked and began to taper into a hollow suck, Ryoma moved.

He stepped onto the crumbling basalt shelf, sliding the reinforced nose of his slate board into the crevice beside the glowing nodule. He did not pull with his hands; flesh would blister within three inches of that cherry-red stone. Instead, he dropped his hip and threw his full weight onto the board's tail, using the slate as a lever.

The basalt shelf groaned. The stone resisted, locked tight by cooling slag.

Three heartbeats left before the next discharge.

Ryoma set his teeth, driving his heel into the tail binding. He snapped his hips forward, putting all the kinetic leverage of his lower body through the slate. "Break loose, you stubborn lump."

With a sharp crack, the slag fractured. The fist-sized nodule tore free from its volcanic socket, tumbling onto the lip of the shelf.

Ryoma hooked the curved nose of his board under the rolling stone, flicking his wrists to scoop the glowing mass into the air. He caught it in the fold of his thick hide waist-cloth, wrapping three layers of coarse skin around it before the heat could bite through to his ribs.

A deafening whistle tore through the cavern below. The next steam pulse detonated upward, scouring the rock face where his shoulders had been a split second earlier. Ryoma scrambled back onto solid basalt on hands and knees, rolling away from the scalding rim with his bundle clutched tight against his chest.

"Sixty-eight percent integrity just bought itself an upgrade," Ryoma panted, sitting back on his haunches. The heat radiated through the hide wrap, toasting his ribs like a personal campfire.

He tapped the side of his skull, calling up the terrain diagnostic. The ember-orange interface flickered into his field of view, superimposing a glowing mesh of topographic lines over the smoking slope.

Thin orange tracer lines crept across the stone beneath him, measuring the subsurface heat flow. The primary chute was choked with rubble and scalding spray, but three hundred yards to the south, where the shelf met the jagged boundary of the High-Sulphur terraces, a narrow subterranean fissure ran cold.

No, not cold. It ran sheltered.

The reading showed an unmapped drainage conduit where ancient lava had hollowed out a sunken tube beneath the outer wall. The ceiling had caved in long ago, leaving a steep, sunken half-pipe banked with slick yellow ash and packed shale. Because it bypassed the rising magma blister entirely, the air was clear, the slope carried a downward thirty-degree pitch, and the thermal floor sat at a steady two hundred degrees—hot enough to feed friction arts without blowing out a damaged board.

The Sulphur Fissure.

A skimmer dropping through that sunken cut could bypass the entire blasted shelf and emerge directly above the lower beach, cutting three miles off the long descent around the horn.

Ryoma grinned, slinging the wrapped nodule across his back with raw cord. "Who needs the main line when the mountain builds a private chute?"

He planted his board on the slick basalt, sliding his boots into the hide straps. He tested the tail. The cracks were still there, but the balance was true. All he needed was three hundred yards of clear glide to drop over the lip of the sunken tube.

A high, shrill whistle cut the sulfur air.

Ryoma threw his head back on pure instinct.

CRACK.

An obsidian dart hit the black spire six inches from his left ear. The stone needle shattered into a cloud of razor-sharp black dust, gouging a spray of white pockmarks across the basalt face. Fragments stung his cheek, drawing a thin line of red along his jaw.

Ryoma dropped low on the board, swinging around toward the high ridge.

Thirty paces uphill, perched on an outcropping of pale yellow sulfur stone, stood a slender figure silhouetted against the boiling sky. Chalk-dusted hair whipped across her brow under the volcanic wind. In her left hand she held a short recurve bow bound in vulcanized sinew, its lower limb resting lightly against her hip. Her amber eyes fixed on him with cold, calculating precision.

Between two fingers of her right hand, another micro-knapped dart spun with lazy, lethal balance.

"That fissure is terrace clan stone, cinder-rat," Suzume called down, her voice cutting clean through the hiss of the geyser. "Take one more push toward the lip, and my next dart won't aim for the rock."