The iron auger did not stop at thirty-four feet with its usual dull thud.
Instead, there was a sharp, ringing crack like lake ice splitting from shore to shore, followed by a hollow boom as the heavy bit punched clean through the thin dolomite roof of a pressurized underground cavern twenty feet higher than the engineers’ plumb-lines had reckoned.
For two seconds the drill cable slackened and whipped wildly in its wooden guide-collar. Then a column of scalding white mineral steam and boiling gray mud roared straight up the borehole, blasting the tarpaulins off the lower deck of the platform and sending timber planks spinning into the mist.
Up on the western limestone buttress where the main suspension cable was anchored to a wedged iron rock-pin, the whole ridge bucked under Chaska’s boots.
She dropped to one knee as a jagged black fracture raced out from beneath the drilling derrick and split the middle travertine terraces with the sound of tearing canvas. The northeastern pine piling of the platform sheared off at its stone socket and plunged six feet into the collapsing mud.
Instantly, the forty-foot timber tower tilted steeply toward the south-west—straight over the lower nursery pools where Ysabet and Pip were wading waist-deep in warm silt to herd the half-formed reed-calves and the wing-legged burrow beast toward the side channel.
