They worked the basalt by hand for two days, and the stone began at last to give back small change.
Silas taught them to read the hammer's tap — a true note for solid depth, a hollow note where the slab thinned over the chamber beyond. They cut a groove along the lower edge where the cold thread escaped, deepening it by finger-widths, wedging and levering. Saya kept rendered fat by the shaft for blistered palms, and took her own turn with the chisel.
On the second afternoon the groove was a slot a man could lay his forearm in, and the thread had thickened to a steady spill that filled a cup in the time of a short prayer. It was not enough for fifty souls, but it could be tasted. Tomi, allowed the first full cup by Chief Taklish's decree, drank in grave sips, like a chief at council.
"It tastes of stones," he announced. "Good stones."
Silas laughed — and even as he laughed, he heard it. Below, Joseph and two young men were levering at the freed lower corner with a length of ironwood, and the stone, which had groaned politely for two days, spoke in a different voice: a grinding, sliding thunder that came up through the soles of every boot above.
"Out!" Silas roared. "Out of the shaft — move!"
The ladder shook. Earth rained in a brown curtain. One young man came up clawing and coughing, the second with Silas hauling at his belt, but Joseph, deepest and nearest the slab, did not come. A support timber snapped like a rifle shot, and half the eastern wall folded inward. Dust boiled up and swallowed the opening. Beneath the choked hollow, muffled and weakening, Joseph called once for help and did not call again.
Saya was at the hollow before the dust thinned, digging with her bare hands. "Joseph! Answer me, you stubborn fool of a cousin!"
A groan answered, thin through three feet of fallen earth.
Silas laid a plank across the mouth and set men either side with baskets. "Dig as I call it," he said. "One more slide buries him past finding."
It was Saya who found the way, wriggling into the narrow side-crevice where the earth had fallen least. Silas seized her ankle a moment.
"If that moves, you do not come back either," he said.
"Then hold the rope and pray with your hands busy," she said, and kicked free, and was gone into the dark with a lantern shielded in her shawl.
Below, she found Joseph pinned to his knees, one leg under a fallen timber, his face grey, his breath in short grunts, the spill running cold across his hands where he had kept his fingers in it, as if holding the spring itself in place. The slab had slid a hand's breadth and wedged, and over his bowed back it hung like a roof in the instant before it falls.
"He is here!" her voice came up, steadied by will. "The stone holds by nothing. I cannot lift the beam alone."
Silas stripped off coat and boots, greased his shoulders at her fire-pot, and went down headfirst into darkness that took him as a fist takes a finger. Earth pressed his ribs. Lantern light showed Saya's face upturned and unafraid, and Joseph's eyes open upon him.
"Well-digger," Joseph managed. "Seems I found your thin place."
"Hush, and breathe shallow," Silas said. He set his back under the timber where Saya directed, planted his feet in mud that sucked and held, and lifted as he had not lifted since his army years, when a wagon went over on the San Pedro and Clara, new-married, talked him calm while he bore its weight off a driver's chest. The beam rose an inch. Another. Saya dragged at Joseph's arms, and Joseph, with a cry he bit in half, pulled his leg free and crawled bleeding toward thin grey light.
The slab groaned. Silas felt the mountain shift its mind, and shoved Saya toward the crevice after Joseph. "Go! It is coming — go!"
She went, but at the mouth she turned and thrust her hand back. It was her hand Silas found and held as the world behind him folded down in roaring darkness, and her strength and Joseph's together drew him out into the blaze of afternoon, where he lay coughing up dust and laughing — because both her hands were still fast around his wrist, as if she had decided he was not a thing to be let go of.
Chief Taklish stood over them, his face wet in a time of no rain, one hand on Silas's shoulder and one on Joseph's head.
"You went into the earth for my blood," he said to Silas, "and my blood went into the earth for you. Let no man in this camp call you a stranger again. The word is finished."
Joseph, his leg bound tight with Saya's own shawl, gripped Silas's forearm in a warrior's clasp. "Brother," he said, simply, and the word went round the watching camp like water passed hand to hand.
Chapter 18: A Paper Claim