“Prop a river?” Chaska repeated, though her eyes were already measuring the six-foot clearance beneath the sagging water-belly and the pile of flood-borne driftwood jammed against the cavern wall ten yards back. “With what—drift-logs and quarry stones?”
“The otters don’t hold the water up with timber,” Kiv said, pointing up at the intact root-web behind them. “The magnetic silt and the living roots do the lifting. The prospectors only stripped a twenty-foot pocket down the middle. If we wedge three or four timber A-frames under the torn root-skirt and pack magnetic mud back against the lodestone arch, the current will spread its weight back onto the side roots instead of tearing the hole wider.”
“Then let’s move before the next root snaps,” Ashaun said, slinging Fesk’s bow behind her back so her right hand was free to haul wood.
Sister Osha took two steps toward the driftwood pile with her lantern—and stopped dead beside the tumbled heap of stone where the prospectors had pried a boulder loose to reach the root-socket.
Sticking out of the black silt at the base of the rock was the broken iron tang and split ash handle of an old geologist’s prying bar.
It had not been dropped by yesterday’s saw-crew; dark cave-crust covered half the shaft, and the recent prospectors’ boots had merely kicked the mud off its upper end. Stamped deep into the flat iron collar below the wooden grip was a small emblem: an open book crossed by a plumb line, followed…
