Frontier Chef: My Cooking Skills Are Broken-Chapter 34: Rock on a String

The Harkenians stared at him and not a single one of them looked convinced.

"Water," a guard repeated. "With that thing."

"It’s called a Dowser’s Pendulum and yes, with this thing, which cost me more than your helmet."

Ezra held it up so the crowd could see and a few of them leaned back instead of forward.

"It’s a rock on a string," someone said from the back.

"Here, just give me a second."

Ezra walked on, following the stone rattling against the chain.

The rest of the Harkenians followed after him.

He was literally the carrot on the stick, while he too was following the carrot.

The pull dragged him across the commons, past the dry fountain with the firewood stacked in the cracked basin, past the south gate’s well where the last bucket sat at the bottom of a rope that hadn’t been wet in days.

The pull kept going east, toward the inner wall where the steam vents hissed through cracks in the volcanic rock.

Each step made it stronger and the chain was nearly horizontal now, straining against his grip hard enough that he had to adjust his footing.

He stopped where the pull was at its worst:

A stretch of volcanic road between the south gate and the eastern corridor, nothing special about it except for three steam vents clustered within arm’s reach of each other.

All of them were hissing louder than the others along the wall.

"Here." He pointed at the ground. "Right here. Well, under this."

The crowd had followed him all the way. Most of them were skeptical and all of them were thirsty enough to entertain his bullshit.

A man crouched and pressed his palm flat on the road. He stayed there for a while, longer than felt casual, and when he stood up he wiped his hand on his leg.

"The steam’s wetter here than anywhere else in the settlement. Always has been. We figured it was just the vents being close to the volcanic bed."

"It’s not just the vents," Ezra said. "Also, who are you?"

"A fossil digger, but that’s not the point. Even if you’re right," the digger said, and he paused long enough that Ezra could tell he wasn’t ready to commit to that, "this is solid volcanic rock underneath us. We’d need twenty men on picks working in shifts for a week to break through, and that’s if it’s only a few meters down."

Ezra counted his fingers. The bite from the girl was already starting to sew itself together. "So we get twenty men. I’ll help, too."

The digger looked at the guard, and the guard looked at his feet.

"Most of our men are deeper in the frontier. Monster activity’s been pushing toward the outer settlements for months and the commander sent everyone who could hold a weapon to reinforce the perimeter camps."

The digger gestured at the commons around them. "This is what’s left. Old folks, merchants, a handful of guards on rotation, and the fossil crew."

’So we’re fucked.’

Two old women pushed through the crowd and Ezra recognized one from the same morning, the one he’d fed.

’These must be the old ladies Leyla mentioned.’

Short, sun-beaten, with hands that had been working longer than Harken had walls, they sized him up and down before following the stone dangling on the chain.

"You found the Sunken Vein," the even shorter one said.

The crowd went quiet enough that Ezra could hear the steam hissing.

"My grandmother told me this. Her grandmother told her." The old woman spoke with caution, as though her words being heard by the sand would be a death sentence.

"Before the sand, this was all green. Rainforest, horizon to horizon. Rain that didn’t stop for entire seasons. Pontia’s beast traveled across the land and left a ravine in its wake."

"When the rains came, the ravine filled to the brim. An entire river, born from one creature’s passing," the other grandma chimed.

The first grandma nodded. "The desert buried everything. Sand and stone and centuries. But the water never left. It just went deeper than anyone could reach."

"That’s a bedtime story," the guard said.

The fossil digger made a noise of agreement, so did a few of the other Harkenians. As old as this crowd was, fairy tales were still fairy tales.

"Bedtime stories don’t make pendulums pull sideways," Ezra said. "And your fossil digger just told you the steam here has always been wetter. That’s not a coincidence, and you know it."

The digger crouched again. He held both palms this time, fingers spread on the volcanic stone.

"If the old river is actually down there, we’re talking about more water than Harken could use in ten lifetimes."

He looked up and the creases on his forehead multiplied by three. "But I meant what I said. We don’t have the men and we don’t have the tools. Volcanic rock doesn’t care about bedtime stories or pendulums. It breaks when you hit it hard enough, long enough, with enough bodies." The fossil digger stood up and brushed his palms and gestured to the crowd and himself. "We are not that."

Everyone looked at Ezra now. They stared without blinking, hopeless or resigned Ezra couldn’t quite make it out. But all eyes were on him now.

An arrow pointing at water with no way to access it was just as useless as the shirt that still held on for dear life against his chest.

Ezra sat down on a rock and watched the pendulum still clinking against the chain.

The Harkenians kept staring still. The grandmas were patiently waiting, while the guards were already walking away back on their patrols.

’The Ossalaka carved their settlement out of a rock formation with bone tools and paws. Their homes are made out of rocks too, precise enough that the curves matched the shape of the furballs.

Besides the Patriarch, which thinking back I still don’t know how it fits through a hole being as fat as it is.’

"What’s he thinking," a woman whispered.

"Who knows." The fossil digger shrugged. "Probably nothing. Look at him, his head is breaking."

The Patriarch’s royal guards had dragged a slab of Dunecrest Bull through tunnels that shouldn’t have fit it, and they’d done it without breaking stride.

Ezra stood up too quick, and a few Harkenians flinched.

’They fucking dig. That’s what they do.’

But Ezra couldn’t walk into the desert and bark orders at a tribe that worshipped his hands. He didn’t speak Jackalyn beyond "ossa" and even that was generous.

The only person in Harken who could actually talk to the Ossalaka was a Ruby-tier hunter who was currently planning a briefing about a nine-star wyvern, and had the audacity to fuck with him about made-up customs at that.

’I need to talk to Neve.’

He looked at the crowd.

"I’ll figure out the men," Ezra said, and his stomach grumbled. "In the meantime, who’s hungry?"