A wave of rippling air struck the group and made them stagger. Vonn felt he'd been smacked in the chest. His vision flashed red and he saw he'd lost two points of Health. He hadn't been on the front line. Kotta bared his teeth and yelled down at the monster, "Belching is your attack?"

"A sonic spell," said Tazo. "Vonn, can you counter those?"

He'd learned the most basic technique for that element but couldn't fling it around. "I don't see how."

Kotta said, "It's like a frog. Or a drum. Guys, duck!"

Vonn ducked and covered his ears. A pulse of sound struck him but there was no pain this time. The rest of the group had endured it too.

Polestar called out, "Bug monster, nine o'clock!" The others didn't know the expression but his pointing spear made it obvious: the many-legged bone beast was scuttling closer.

"Retreat," said one Necromancer. The spells snapped and everyone backed off. The bony thing pursued slowly but gave up after a minute.

Ian laughed nervously. "Was that useful, anyway?"

One of the men who'd been wrangling the sound monster said, "We started to get a feel for it. That was a good place to encounter one without having to fight it. And now that we know how it fights we can be more prepared."

They headed back toward Shieldpoint. Tazo mused, "That big throat it had reminds me of the engine cylinder. Remember the thumping noises it made?"

During testing, it'd been poorly sealed and noisy, shoving air back and forth. Vonn said, "Maybe it copied the parts. So in combat, I would target the throat and poke a hole in it. Might disrupt the noise attack or even blow it up."

They parted ways from the Necromancers and from the tourists, who now had first-hand gossip. The Necromancers seemed to be in good spirits, due to having something interesting to research. Vonn hadn't directly helped them increase their influence over the local Farmers by selling their guild a crop-processing machine, but Tazo had sort of helped them anyway by providing magic to do that job. Now, they were getting drawn a little closer to cooperation with those guys. Was that a bad thing? Vonn wasn't sure, now, since there was a distinction between "only" wrangling zombies and creating them by murder. He said to Polestar, "I don't know what to make of the Necromancers."

"If they can stop this hell pit before it gets worse, I can ignore the smell. I'd keep an eye on them anyway."

#

Vonn worked at the shop, mostly catching up on the town's basic smithing needs but finding some time to begin on the milling machine.

Over dinner, Vonn sat with his parents in their home. There wasn't much space what with the candle-making vats, but as usual they made do. Tazo played with a metal mold that she'd made recently for the candle work. It was a stupidly simple concept that needed another iteration but basically made obsolete the production method their parents had been using for years.

"Distracted?" Vonn asked her.

"It takes a different perspective to find some of these ideas," she said. "Selen marched in here and in one minute she was blabbing about a better way to do things. What do you think about this magic disaster?"

Mom and Dad were listening. Vonn said, "It's horrible of course."

Dad said, "Baron Kolm needs to pay."

"Right. And the exploration team didn't even reach the core in time to get all the information I was hoping for. If there's anything good about this mess, it's that we still might learn something." He nibbled at his dark, hot bread, still steamy in his hands. "There's the Elemental type of magic that takes your own Mana and flings it outward. There's Geomancy, that takes Mana in the world and alters it. Are there types of magic that take your Mana and keep it inside you to do things, or that take the world's Mana into yourself?"

Mom suggested, "The eastern Monks supposedly train their bodies to fight with Mana."

"Ah right, the magic kung fu." Nobody understood. "Spells for hardening your fists or jumping high or something. That could be an example, if they're real. So then the fourth type of magic could be what dungeons do: take magic from the environment and from delvers, and feed on it."

Dad's ears flicked uncertainly. "Does that mean anything useful?"

"I'm not sure, yet. It seems like it'd be possible to cleanse that dungeon by changing what it's fed, though it's probably got a deep channel carved into it now like the Starry River's path. There was a holy symbol in that place when I first saw it, like the miners thought they could give it a holy theme. Are there any dungeons like that?"

Mom said, "The Healer's Deep. Supposedly it can restore almost anyone, though of course it doesn't keep anyone alive forever."

"Why 'of course'?"

Her ears flicked back. "We all have only so much time."

Vonn didn't want to dwell on that right now, with his family. "All right. Was that dungeon artificially molded, or did it start healing people on its own?"

"As far as I know, it was shaped by geomancy and prayer. Whether you can undo a thing like that, I don't know."

Tazo said, "I'd bet that the dungeon is bad at producing ordinary treasure and magicite." She turned excitedly to Vonn. "Ask Selen to check that with the Dungeoneers' records. If I'm right, then dungeons that are tuned to life or death Mana instead of a neutral kind are missing out on some process they normally do."

Future archmage, thought Vonn. "Fall is coming up. How are we going to use all this speculation to gain some more levels?"