The water in Flume Gamma ran black and warm. It smelled of crushed novaculite and stale stone grease.
Ren Vale waded through the knee-deep slurry. His right hand gripped an iron-shod staff that Old Corren had cut from an old quarry drill. Every step across the slick, uneven limestone bed was a calculated exercise in load-bearing preservation.
Beneath his boots, loose river gravel shifted unpredictably. Under normal conditions, an assistant clerk might slip, stumble onto a knee, curse, and scramble back to his feet with nothing worse than a bruised shin.
For Ren, an unbraced fall onto solid mountain stone would be total.
With his bones hardened to Mohs 7.0 quartz thickness and his ductile yield strength reduced to zero, the moving shock of a forty-pound impact on his kneecap wouldn’t bruise the flesh. It would shatter the kneecap into razor-sharp glass-like fragments like a dropped tea saucer.
Brother Ren walked right away to his left, wading waist-deep in the deeper drainage gutter so his broad shoulder remained within six inches of Ren’s braced left arm. The monk’s thick fingers hovered constantly beneath Ren’s elbow, never gripping—for a sudden grab could snap the brittle radius—but offering a gentle, unmoving bulwark whenever the current surged.
