Flint and Boiling Mud

Can a collapsing sulfur terrace hold a three-man sprint long enough to plunder the throat of an erupting chimney? Suzume dug the edges of her hide boots into the vulcanized straps of her slate board, amber eyes darting across the honeycomb of bright orange fissures widening beneath her feet. She had three heartbeats to steady Kotaro's frantic hands, line up Ryoma's reckless greed, and keep all three of them from dissolving in a bubbling caldron of sulfurous mud before the tournament gate closed.

Yellow steam hissed through the perforations, scorching the hem of her split-skirt tunic.

"Hold the rhythm, drum-head!" Suzume shouted over the subterranean roar. She pointed her knapped flint bow toward a thick slab of gray basalt anchoring the eastern rim. "Stop battering the fault line! Shift your beat to a counter-tempo or the whole crust drops into the soup!"

Kotaro dropped into a low, trembling squat, his heavy pumice bangles clattering against the rims of his resonant-wood drums. "A counter-cadence? On shale that's already ringing like a cracked pot?"

"Dampen the shear wave, or start swimming!" she snapped.

Kotaro took a ragged breath and brought his twin hornfels beaters down with deliberate, muted thuds. Instead of his earlier booming strikes, he tapped a syncopated double-stroke, matching the erratic tremors vibrating through the rock.

A ripple of acoustic force hummed through the scree. The jagged fissure racing toward Suzume's front binding slowed, its forward split arresting against a line of dense basalt.

"It's holding!" Kotaro yelled, sweat cutting clean tracks through the gray ash caked on his forehead. "Barely! My knuckles are numb, Suzume!"

"Keep tapping," she said. She dropped her gaze to the churning rift ten yards downslope.

Where the sulfur crust had sheared away, a jagged vent chimney projected out of the boiling mud like a broken rib. Superheated gases roared through its hollow core, bathing the rim in violent violet heat. Embedded in the chimney's lip sat three fist-sized nodes of translucent amber stone, quivering with acoustic energy and emitting high-pitched whistles like agitated wasps.

Resonant flint cores. Formed only when high-pressure steam forced liquid silica into acoustic faults during a seismic surge. Knapped into dart tips, their natural resonance would amplify the release velocity of her sinew bow by half again.

"Ryoma!" she barked.

The cinder-skimmer was already crouched low on his slate deck, grinning like a hyena despite the smoke curling off his right heel binding. "I see them! Pretty little singers, aren't they?"

"Don't admire them, harvest them!" Suzume focused her gaze, activating her newly unlocked pathfinding sight.

Faint amber lines traced a glowing arc through the swirling steam, laying out an aerial parabola across the chimney lip. It was an insane line—the sort of angle that would flip an ordinary rider straight into forty feet of bubbling muck.

"Take the outer ridge on your heels," Suzume ordered, tracking the thermal currents with her raised bow arm. "Do not let your front rail bite until you pass the third steam jet. Snatch the cluster and kick out toward the spillway chute. Kotaro and I drop right behind you."

"Lead the line, flint-hawk!" Ryoma shouted.

He shoved off with a violent kick of his trailing boot. His slate deck clattered across the fractured scree, sparks showering from its chipped tail edge as the board bit into superheated stone.

He dropped onto the outer rim of the boiling sinkhole at a sickening slant. The heat radiating off the mud pit scorched the leather along his thighs, but Ryoma leaned his weight into the turn, trusting Suzume's vector. The amber line guided his edge across the chimney lip.

With his left hand braced against the deck for balance, Ryoma reached down with his right palm. His hardened ash-hide glove closed around the first vibrating flint nodule.

The stone broke free with a loud acoustic chime.

A sudden surge of violet vapor erupted from the vent throat, striking the tail of his board. The impact spun his deck twenty degrees off line, threatening to toss him headfirst into the gray froth below.

"Lean forward!" Suzume screamed, nocking a micro-knapped dart to her sinew string.

She didn't aim at Ryoma. She aimed three feet ahead of his nose, directly into the soft pumice lip of the terrace wall.

Her bow thrummed. The obsidian dart drove into the stone, trailing a thin braided tendon cord.

Ryoma caught the cord with his knuckles without breaking momentum. The tension snapped taut, arresting his tail-spin and wrenching his board back onto the calculated arc. He swept his fingers across the chimney rim, ripping the remaining two flint nodes from the stone matrix just as the chimney crumbled into the boiling sludge.

"Toss them!" Suzume yelled.

Ryoma slung the cluster through the air. Suzume caught the hot, singing nodules in her utility pouch, the radiant friction warming the hide through her palm.

A triumphant tremor ran through her fingers. With munitions like these, no terrace guard could pin her down from the high perches.

"Now drop!" she shouted to Kotaro.

The drummer snatched his resonant-wood drums to his chest, kicked his wide basalt-runner deck forward, and dropped into the chute. Suzume leaned hard into her own board, her slate rails biting into the crumbling shale.

Behind them, the entire terrace shelf collapsed. A thunderous roar of boiling gray mud and scalding steam filled the air as two hundred yards of stone sank into the subterranean reservoir.

They rocketed out of the dust cloud, their boards skidding across the hard, sun-baked basalt flats at the base of the High-Sulphur terraces.

Ryoma slid to a halt twenty yards ahead, his charred heel binding finally giving up with a loud snap of vulcanized cord. He kicked his foot free and looked down at his smoking boot sole with an easy laugh. "A clean ride! Only lost half my heel-strap."

"You lost the line by two inches," Suzume said, braking beside him with a crisp spray of dry basalt grit. "If my dart hadn't anchored your nose, we'd be fishing your charred belt out of the sulfur kettle."

"A detail," Ryoma said, winking as he wiped a smudge of soot from his cheek. "We got the stones, didn't we?"

Kotaro dragged his board to a halt, panting heavily as he checked his drums for fractures. "My forearms feel like boiled sinew. If we do that again today, I'm charging admission."

"Save your breath," Suzume murmured, lowering her bow.

Before them rose the arched gateway of the Sulphur Basin tournament grounds. Carved from massive pillars of polished black obsidian, the gate stood flanked by banners of ochre hide bearing the sigil of the upper terrace lords.

Blocking the entrance was a barricade of polished basalt shields.

Standing at the center of the perimeter was Torano. The terrace champion stood draped in a mantle of golden sulfur silk, his immaculate, mirror-sheened obsidian board resting against his armored knee. Four burly ridge guards in hornfels breastplates stood behind him, stone-tipped halberds leveled at the trio.

"Look what crawled out of the sinkholes," Torano called out, his aristocratic voice dripping with disdain. "Scavenger rats tracking ash across the tournament approach."

Ryoma hoisted his scarred slate board onto his shoulder and stepped forward. "We're here to register for the Obsidian Cup, Torano. You called for three-skimmer crews. We have three. Step aside and let us through the gate."

Torano raised a manicured hand, a cold smirk touching his thin lips. "A crew requires standing, baselander. And more importantly, it requires an untainted record. Word has reached the arbiters that the upper chutes were vandalized."

Suzume felt a cold spark ignite behind her ribs. "Vandalized?"

"Someone drove caltrops into the public lines," Torano said smoothly, tapping the rim of his mirror board. "A crude attempt to disrupt legitimate riders. By the authority of the High-Sulphur stewards, your team is barred from entry pending formal disqualification."

Suzume reached into her belt and drew out the heavy, barbed spike of hornfels caltrop she had recovered on the slope. She stepped shoulder-to-shoulder with Ryoma, letting the midday sun catch the crisp, unmistakable hallmark carved into the barb's base.

"Is that so?" Suzume asked, her voice quiet and deadpan. "Then perhaps the arbiters would like to inspect the seal on the chiseled hornfels you left in our chute."

Torano's smirk froze, his amber eyes locking onto the barb in her palm.

Ryoma stepped up beside her, flashing a reckless, razor-sharp grin that promised violence. "Call the arbiters, champion. Let's see whose name gets carved off the roster first."