The ground beneath the southern canal dyke heaved with the wild churning of underground jaws.
Three massive, segmented burrower beasts were tearing through the ground base beneath the stone foundation, their razor-sharp jaws chewing through compacted clay and shattered granite at forty cubic yards per minute.
Above them, forty feet of stone embankment was groaning. Hairline fractures were already opening in the mortar joints. The polished blue heat-proof glass coping tiles on the crest began to gap and shift as the supporting soil was evacuated into the hollows below.
“The wall is settling,” Master Duncan Stone-Splitter roared, shoving a timber prop beneath an overhanging cut stone block. “The voids are opening under our boots! If those monsters chew another ten paces of dirt, the entire south face will slide into the ditch!”
Giles Croft stood on the track shoulder with his wooden ruler, sighting along the sagging coping line.
“Differential foundation settlement is already three inches,” Giles noted, his voice flat, precise, and fully untroubled by the thundering quakes beneath his feet. “Standard subsurface cavity failure. If we try manual digging, the leftover overburden will collapse and bury the work crews. We need high-pressure void-fill steadying.”
Master Caleb Thorne-Wood and Borin Bronze-Lung were already hauling the mobile grouting rig into position.
It was a heavy, four-wheeled iron chassis carrying a level Archimedean screw pump, machined from cast iron and enclosed in an eight-inch bronze barrel.
The pump was geared directly to the power take-off shaft of the nearby waterwheel water chute through an endless hemp drive-rope, capable of delivering forty horsepower of nonstop clockwork thrust.
Connected to the pump’s discharge snout was a three-inch flexible copper pipe, ending in a ten-foot steel injection lance fitted with a hardened cone-shaped boring head.
Sister Teresa and twelve laborers swarmed around the nonstop mixing hopper above the pump.
They dumped bag after bag of powdered unslaked burning lime powder, ground granulated blast-fire melted rock waste, and fine fiery sand into the hopper, churning the mix with heavy wooden paddles as cold canal water was piped in from the race.
Inside the mixing chamber, the chemical reaction reached instant, terrifying fury.
The water hissed and screamed as it touched the fresh burning lime powder.
Within thirty seconds, the slurry was bubbling at over two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. A blazing bright, scalding broth of liquid calcium hydroxide and high-pressure melted rock waste cement, thicker than wet mortar and hot enough to peel flesh from bone.
“Grout is hardened,” Teresa shouted, her wimple dusted with grey powder, her eyes shining with fierce excitement. “Eighty bushels of lime and forty sacks of melted rock waste! The holy cement is boiling!”
“Couple the injection lance,” Giles commanded.
Captain Kenneth Drake and four armored veterans seized the ten-foot steel pipe by its padded timber handles.
They drove the pointed lance directly into the mouth of the central burrow hole, sinking the steel tube six feet deep into the churning mud.
At the other end of the tunnel, forty feet underground, the massive jaws of the lead burrower paused.
The beast’s milky blind eyes twitched in the dark, sensing the intrusion of the iron pipe into its nest.
“Engage the drive clutch, Caleb,” Giles ordered. “Maintain injection pressure at eighty pounds of pressure.”
Caleb threw the iron lever.
The heavy drive-rope snapped taut. The Archimedean screw inside the bronze barrel began to spin with a deep, grinding roar: CHUG-CHUG.
The screw seized the boiling burning lime powder-and-melted rock waste slurry from the hopper. That forced it through the three-inch copper channel under eighty pounds of nonstop water-pressure head.
The steel lance in Kenneth’s hands shuddered wildly.
Deep beneath the earth, twenty barrels of boiling, scalding liquid rock erupted from the punched holes in lance head directly into the confined tunnels of the burrowers.
The reaction below ground was total.
The burrow tunnels were soaked with cold marsh groundwater and acidic slime secreted by the monsters’ glands.
When the white-hot, high-pressure bitter-salt burning lime powder slurry struck that confined, waterlogged space, an explosive heat-powered flash occurred.
The groundwater instantly flashed into high-pressure steam.
The steam had nowhere to escape. Confined within the tight dirt tubes, the boiling vapor swelled by sixteen hundred times. That forced the thick, scalding cement deep into every fissure, void, and crawlspace.
THUUUUMP.
A muffled, underground blast shook the levee.
Plumes of boiling white steam hissed upward through the cracks in the mud, smelling of wet lime plaster and burned up hard shell.
Then came the screams.
From deep within the earth rose a chorus of horrific, muffled shrieks. The agonized screeching of underground monsters being wrapped alive in boiling, liquid stone.
The three fifteen-foot burrowers thrashed wildly in the dark.
Their serrated jaws chewed at the encroaching flood. But the boiling burning lime powder instantly scorched their sensitive mouthparts and burned their breathing spiracles into blackened ash.
As the beasts thrashed, the high-pressure grout wrapped around them.
The high-pressure melted rock waste cement, reacting with the wet lime plaster and the stone-rich marsh water, underwent a sped up exothermic cure.
The thick, milky slurry didn’t stay liquid.
Under eighty pounds of pressure, it forced its way into the joints of the monsters’ hard shell plates, packing their breathing vents and solidifying around their thrashing limbs like cooling iron.
Within three minutes, the muffled shrieks began to choke and fade.
The underground thrashing slowed, shuddered, and ceased.
Kenneth Drake held the lance steady, the sweat pouring down his scarred face. He felt the intense heat streaming through the steel pipe into his heavy leather gloves.
“She’s taking grout,” Kenneth gasped, his eyes wide. “Five hundred gallons... Eight hundred gallons... The pressure is holding!”
“Continue pumping until the pressure relief valve blows,” Giles instructed calmly, checking his pocket pressure gauge. “We must fill every tiny blood vessel fissure in the ground base to prevent high-pressure piping under the foundation.”
The screw pump groaned, laboring against increasing back-pressure.
CHUG... CHUG... CHUG.
Finally, with a loud POP, the spring-loaded brass relief valve on the pipe hub tripped, venting a jet of white steam into the air.
“Refusal achieved,” Giles announced. “Disengage the clutch.”
Caleb threw the lever out of gear.
Kenneth and his men hauled the steel lance out of the ground.
Where a gaping, collapsing hole had threatened to drag the canal dyke into the earth, there was now only a solid, smoking plug of pale grey stone, flush with the surface and already as hard as set plaster.
Duncan Stone-Splitter knelt by the hole, laying his bare hand upon the cooling surface.
The stone was warm, rock-hard, and fully unbending.
Beneath that three-foot plug, forty yards of underground tunnels had been transformed into solid, stone-hard limestone tubes, permanently wrapping the fourteen giant burrowers in a solid tomb of artificial stone.
Duncan looked up at Giles, his mouth hanging open in utter disbelief.
“They wanted a hole,” Duncan whispered, his voice trembling with awe. “And you gave them forty tons of living rock. They’re frozen in there forever, aren’t they?”
“They’re chemically integrated into the foundation ground base,” Giles said, adjusting his glasses. “The hard shell back shells will act as stringy pulling reinforcement within the stone-hard limestone matrix. The bearing capacity of that sector has just increased from eight hundred pounds per square foot to over six thousand. It’s an exceptional foundation consolidation.”
Kenneth Drake slowly wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. That let out a dry, incredulous chuckle.
“Only you, Lord Giles,” Kenneth said, shaking his head. “Only you would turn an invading army of swamp monsters into load-bearing iron rods.”
* * *
By late afternoon, the settlement had returned to the business of laying rails.
The crushed ballast was re-tamped, the cracked ties were replaced. The strap-iron line was spiked down across the newly stone-hard embankment without a fraction of an inch of settlement.
The sun sank into the western crags. Then, Rook Red-Mane walked out onto the track shoulder, with two of Torvald’s desert scouts.
In Rook’s hands was a heavy canvas bundle, tied with sinew and soaked in dark, oily blood.
He dropped the bundle onto the timber narrow high walkway before Giles, Duncan, and Kenneth.
The canvas fell open.
Inside lay a cut monster claw, three feet long, crowned with five curved, serrated talons of rainbow-bright, oily black hard shell as thick as a man’s thigh.
The talons were not hollow.
They were solid, dense. Then they ribbed with glowing green runic channels that cried a slow, poisonous ichor onto the spruce boards.
“Found at the edge of the Sunken Sump,” Rook whispered. His amber eyes were wide with grim dread. “One of the Broodmother’s vanguard titans. An armored goliath eighteen feet tall.”
Kenneth Drake drew his broadsword and struck the curved claw with all his strength.
CLANG.
The hardened steel blade rebounded with a shower of white sparks. That left barely a dull grey scratch on the black hard shell.
Kenneth stared at his sword, his jaw tightening.
“My broadsword didn’t even bite the enamel,” Kenneth said, his voice dropping low. “And Rook’s scouts hit it with three heavy steel crossbow bolts at forty paces. The iron points shattered on its forehead plate like dry twigs.”
Rook looked at Giles, his red hair whipping in the cold wind.
“Traditional arrows can’t pierce the Broodmother’s armor, Lord Master builder,” Rook said, his voice trembling. “When she marches from the deep marsh, our walls won’t hold her. She will walk through our gates like a boar through spiderwebs.”
Giles crouched beside the cut claw, pulling his folding rule and his brass measuring tongs from his vest.
He measured the thickness of the hard shell plate, tapping the dense, curved surface with his pencil.
“Eighty tiny fractions of an inch of curved, multi-layered organic composite,” Giles murmured, his eyes narrowing with deep analytical fascination. “Pulling yield strength about four hundred tons of pressure, with an energy-absorbing stringy matrix. A standard broadhead arrow at two hundred feet per second simply doesn’t possess the striking force thickness needed to initiate shear failure.”
He stood up, dusting his knees, his face utterly devoid of fear.
“If traditional arrows can’t pierce it,” Giles said calmly, “then we stop using traditional arrows.”
Borin Bronze-Lung picked up the heavy black claw, weighing the massive hard shell talon in his thick, leather-gloved hands.
“A needle of star-iron,” Borin whispered, his dwarven eyes gleaming with fierce inspiration. “A bolt of dense mountain wolframite, forged thin as a finger and fired faster than a lightning stroke! By the ancestors, Lord Giles, I have eighty pounds of raw heavy dark metal billets sitting in the Under-Pass warehouse!”
Giles pulled his pocket watch from his waistcoat, checking the hour against the setting sun.
“Eighty pounds of wolframite is enough for thirty sub-caliber penetrators,” Giles said. “Borin, fire up the high-heat forge. Kenneth, bring the projectiles drafting boards. We have an armor-piercing sabot penetrator to engineer before the moon rises.”