At the exact instant of commitment, as the two parcels locked into their new map points, the sound return wave surged upward from the thirty-two-pace base plane.
Over one hundred and thirty-one thousand cubic paces of living limestone, released from decades of earth-shaking sideways tearing force, discharged their clockwork recoil through the nearest grounded earth-measuring guide-rod.
The blast wave surged up the iron-shod ash sounding rod Kezra Venn held in her right hand.
She had bent her knees and unclenched her teeth as drilled. Because of that, eighty percent of the main moving shock traveled down her skeleton and discharged into the native gravel beneath her boots. It blasted a six-foot ring of crushed white limestone dust outward like a puff of cannon smoke.
But the sound return hum—the high-energy bass shaking of sixty-four paces of displaced dolomitic rock—deflected across the neck bones at the base of her skull.
It struck the left side of her head like a muffled blacksmith’s hammer wrapped in wool.
THUNG.
A lance of blinding, white-hot pressure stabbed deep behind her left eardrum, sharp and violent as an iron needle-point arrow driven through the bone of her temple. The world tilted forty-five degrees in half a heartbeat. A sudden, sickening wave of dehydration dizziness slammed through her inner ear. That turned the pale morning sky into a spinning vortex of blue and silver.
