The high-pressure gas jet from Borehole One took three hours to exhaust its main pocket.
When the howling died away into a faint, rotten-egg hiss, Giles Croft stood over the collar with a wet litmus slip. The paper turned a sharp, violent crimson. Acidic vapor, soaked with volatile sulfur compounds and white-hot steam from deep earth-heat venting.
“Corbin,” Giles said, waving the fumes aside. “Cap Borehole One with a cast-iron blind pipe rim and a three-inch bleed valve.
Run the vent pipe into the lime scrubbing pit. We’re not turning this terrace into an open-air acid bath.”
Foreman Corbin Cross nodded, wiping oily grit from his leather gauntlet. “Aye, Lord Giles.
But the men won’t touch the drill stem. Word’s gone down to the lower tent city that we poked the Third Eye of the Underworld. Two hundred miners from the old guild leagues are down on their knees by the soup wagon, praying for the mountain not to swallow their boots.”
Giles took a breath of cold mountain air and shook his head.
“They have spent too many years listening to wandering minstrels and not enough time reading basic stratigraphy. It was a pocket of trapped hydrogen sulfide over high-pressure steam.
