Zalas rubbed at his chin in contemplation, before looking to Anoth curiously.  “I find it strange that you know so much about Naltite nobility.  How did you know that this girl is from the family of a city magistrate?”

“I organized the noble houses of the Naltites.  Why shouldn’t I know about them?” Anoth countered.  “It is my business to know the power structures of Zaidna as much as it is to know them in Yalet.”

“But family lines fade through the generations, especially among the lesser nobles.  Isn’t that why we didn’t continue foolish traditions like tattooing our foreheads with family crests like the Naltites?  Surely your time is not worth learning and remembering the family crests of even lowly city magistrates.  One might think you have a peculiar interest in Naltite nobility.”  Zalas’s tone remained delicate and jovial, but Anoth was not fooled.

“My interests are none of your concern.”  Anoth opened his mouth to chasten Zalas further, but noticed small flashes of white erupt out of the corner of his eye.  He turned to look and saw a small troop of engstaxis running toward them from the mountainside.  Even from a distance, he could see their translucent white skin blistering in the sunlight.  A handful of guards chased after them, presumably preparing to add lashes to their sunburns for their insubordination.  It appeared that Davim had not completely rectified the matter after all.

Zalas moved directly into Anoth’s line of sight, blocking his view of the engstaxis with narrowed eyes and a wide smile.  “Why does it matter what crest a Naltite whore wears on her forehead?  Any Naltite woman would look once upon those—” Zalas gestured at the trio of blue circles tattooed upon Anoth’s forehead.  “—and flee in fear and disgust.  So why discriminate?”

Anoth remained silent.

“Or perhaps,” Zalas mused, “you discriminate because—”

“Something is happening,” Anoth muttered, sidestepping Zalas to regain sight of the engstaxis.  Their spindly legs were quick, and the pudgy guards in the distance were having difficulty grabbing a hold of more than one at a time.  There was something odd about the engstaxis’ appearance, which became more evident as they closed within a hundred yards.

Davim stumbled forward to get a better look at the herd of slaves approaching.  “What—what do they have strapped on their backs?”  He squinted, but then his eyes opened wide in horror.  “Black powder.  Those are explosives!  Don’t let them near the barracks!”  He motioned to several of the guards in the encampment, who rushed to intercept the impending assault.

“At least they are running away from the mountain,” Anoth commented grimly.  The engstaxis began shrieking and veering to the side, still moving doggedly toward the encampment.  This was no pinpoint tactical assault.  Those blasted engstaxis intended to kill everyone in the camp, including themselves.  Anoth finally stepped forward.  He would handle this himself.

By this time, Davim had worked himself up into a full froth of panic.  “Kill them!  Kill them before they reach the camp!  Do whatever you have to do, just make sure they don’t reach the barracks!”

Anoth came to an abrupt halt.  One of the intercepting guards was raising his hands, working a pattern.  Anoth quickly shifted focus.  In an instant, he could see all the blackened specks of primal matter that hung the air, including the quivering, tightly bound pattern that became visible in the guard’s hands.  It was fire!  “You fool!  Not fire!  Cease that pattern immediately!”

The guard turned, confused.  He staggered, the unreleased ball of flames scorching his palms, causing him to yelp.  He pulled his hands toward his body in a desperate attempt to obliterate the pattern, but it was already out of control.  The fire leapt from him, breaking free from the condensed pattern into a wide swath of flame.

Most of the engstaxis stopped in their tracks, barely avoiding the wave of fire, but it bathed the foremost slave among them in a flash of orange.  As the sack on his back smoldered and the black powder within it started to ignite, the stricken engstaxi looked to Anoth with knowing eyes.  Then closing them for the last time, he smiled.

The other engstaxis recovered from their shock and rushed toward their lit compatriot, diving to catch sparks upon their own backs.

Anoth shielded his face with his arm as the other engstaxis began to burn.  With an earth-shattering crack, the first engstaxi burst, sending his body parts and the other engstaxis backwards toward the mountain.  Almost in sequence, more of them exploded, creating a chain reaction until several of the last engstaxis were propelled by the combined force of the explosions, hurtling back into the mountainside.  Even with the first explosion at several dozen yards away, Zalas, Davim, and the slave girl were knocked onto their backs, while several of the pursuing guards were incinerated in the blink of an eye.  Anoth remained standing, but the hairs on his face were singed.

Anoth lowered his arm, only to witness the final explosion erupt from within the inselberg with ferocious force, blasting a gaping hole in the rock face.  This was exactly what Anoth had been trying to avoid by keeping the engstaxis separated.  Even under the strictest supervision, the pale-skinned bastards had managed to stash small quantities of alchemized chemicals and explosives in the mountain’s crevices without detection.  One of their flaming bodies had hit the surface of the mountain, exploded, and set off a chain reaction among one or more of the hidden supply caches closest to the surface.

There was a brief silence, but as Davim and Zalas moved to stand, a low rumble, like a death rattle, emerged from the mountain, swallowing up the distant screams of the slaves.  Starting slowly, but quickly accelerating, a massive layer of stone began to slough off the western face of the inselberg.

Anoth watched in passive fury as the entire ridge broke into pieces and crumbled the wooden platforms below like houses made from sugar wafers.  He was too far from the mountain to be endangered by the landslide, but the cloud of dust that rolled forth in its wake was enough to sting Anoth’s eyes and coat him in a layer of earth.  He had been so careful in devising their excavation methods, manually peeling away the stone in layers to ensure the Orb’s preservation; could one stupid mistake ruin centuries of work?

When the mountain was finally still, and the earth beneath his feet had settled, Anoth surveyed the devastation, walking slowly toward the rubble.  A vast assortment of arms and legs, either burned or smashed into a pulp of flesh and splintered bone, jutted out of the debris that had filled the large craters the exploding engstaxis had left.  The few surviving slaves had already begun to tackle the great pile of crushed rock, and with bare, bleeding hands they threw aside boulders and shards of crumbling sandstone in an attempt to free their friends.  They were wasting their time, of course.  If those buried were not dead yet, they would suffocate soon enough.  Most of the remaining guards staggered about in a stupor, helpless and unwilling to regain control of the slaves.

Out in the desert surrounding the ruined inselberg, something was beginning to creep.  Anoth could sense the tumultuous black aura, and knew exactly what it was.  It was the gathering of hadirs, attracted by the chaos of the mountain’s fracture.  While most of the hadirs had gone with Tovam to the raids, the ones that remained were assembling in the sand and heat, waiting patiently for their opportunity to feed.

Zalas and Davim joined Anoth at his side.  “Awful, awful,” Davim whispered repeatedly.  Both he and Zalas were pale and stared unblinkingly up at Mount Thayl.  Or what was left of it.

“This is what your carelessness has done!” Anoth snarled.  Davim shivered, while Zalas sidled away from him, presumably to avoid Anoth’s wrath.  “I want every grain of sand in this rubble heap searched for the Orb.  I don’t care how high your house of ormé is; if anything has become of my master, you will serve as the hadirs’ dessert!”  Anoth did not wait to see Davim’s reaction.  Instead, he turned and stormed toward the ruined mountain.

As he reached the newly exposed rock face, all of the remaining slaves looked to him in fear before returning to their frantic digging.  All of them except one.  Atop a pile of broken stone, he spotted a single, heavily wounded engstaxi, who, instead of digging, was hammering at something with a jagged rock.  Upon seeing Anoth looking at him, he glared with ruby-colored eyes, half-ruined by the sun, and hammered all the harder.  Anoth’s blood boiled, and he climbed up the rubble in long strides until he reached the broken but defiant creature.  Anoth laid a swift blow to his belly with his boot.  The engstaxi crumpled, but slowly lifted his rock and brought it back down with as much force as he could muster.

Incensed, Anoth struck blow after brutal blow to the engstaxi’s already frail, shattered body, but the engstaxi continued to strike at the rubble with the rock until he finally succumbed to the assault.  As the rock dropped from the engstaxi’s hand, Anoth looked down to see what he had been hammering at so desperately.  There, half wedged in the rubble, was a grubby round stone, about the size of Anoth’s fist.  Beneath an outer layer of hardened earth, which was cracked by the engstaxi’s attempt to destroy it, Anoth could see a brilliant blue-green flash of labradorite peeking through.

Anoth’s mind was paralyzed by incomprehension.  “No,” he muttered, and dug his fingers into the rubble to pry out the stone.  He was numbly aware of Zalas and Davim’s approach from behind.  They called up to him, but their voices were like whispers compared to the chaos swirling in his head.

At last, the stone came free.  “Master Verahi,” he whispered, before greeting the Orb with a reverent kiss.  He laughed, turning to look down on the gathering crowd around him.  He held up the Orb in triumph for all to see, the exposed labradorite shining like a star in his hand.

Zalas and Davim, along with the unwounded guards, instantly sank to their knees in worship of the stone, while the slaves hung their heads in sorrow.  From the ruined camp, up to the remains of Mount Thayl, the bodies of the wounded writhed as the hadirs emerged from where they’d been hidden.  Wordlessly, the hadirs descended upon the dying, commencing their ravenous feast.