“Stand clear of the sky-slit, courier!” Geth Marr roared.
The quarry foreman drove the eight-foot iron wooden props prop straight through the breach like an ancient siege ram. The cone-shaped pick point, forged from case-hardened rail steel, struck the hunter directly in the center of the chest bone with five hundred foot-pounds of driving force behind the blow.
The impact produced a sound like a heavy timber splitting under crushing pressure. The double was propelled backward into the dripping black void of the tailing water chute, its polished courier boots losing all traction on the wet, slime-coated limestone rubble. Its chest caved inward beneath the hardened pick point, the waxy manifestation tissue fracturing along the rib lines in sharp, webbed cracks.
Yet even as its spine slammed against the rear wall of the water chute twenty arm-lengths back, its uninjured left hand shot forward.
Its fingers closed around the eight-sided bar of the prop with the instant, unbending clamp of Hookhold.
The eighty-pound steel bar arrested its forward drive in mid-air. The metal shuddered, shaking with a high, singing hum that traveled back along the shaft into Geth Marr’s shoulders, nearly tearing the foreman’s calloused palms from the grip.
“Jarek! Harl! On the prop!” Geth bellowed, his boots skidding across the white pine floorboards as the double began to pull the steel bar back into the dark. “Don’t let the shadow lever the stone!”
