Chapter 11 #2
“You’re some other kind of doctor now, then, I presume?”
“No, I’m a rockist, actually. I’m currently researching treatments for pyrite disease. Probably couldn’t even manage a bandage for one of you all.” She laughed a light, tinkling, slightly grating laugh that suggested she probably did that alone a lot.
“Pirate’s disease?” Mrs. Chrysler said, nonplussed.
“No, not pirate. Pyrite. Fool’s gold? Here, I’ll show you.
” Melinda eagerly beckoned them all to a chalkboard on the nearest wall, scrawled with a jumble of diagrams and formulas.
“Trolls sometimes have the mineral pyrite in their skin, you see, and when it’s exposed to air and water, the subsequent chemical reaction forms…
ferrous sulfate… sulfur dioxide… and sulfuric acid.
” With each pause she had drawn several new arrows and circles for emphasis.
Katherine noticed that Mrs. Chrysler was doing her best to remain politely attentive, but her own interest had admittedly wandered to a nearby array of certificates and diplomas.
Beside them were decorative framed woodcuts with sayings like “Rockists Take No Schist” and “School of Hard Rocks.”
“It’s corrosive, you know,” Melinda Storage was saying now, staring at the board, her back to them. “A troubling condition. But I’ve been experimenting with several salves to neutralize the acid and break the oxidation chain. I think that—”
Ruben cleared his throat. He was also scrutinizing the diplomas and woodcuts and apparently had not been listening at all. “A rockist, huh?” he said.
“Oh.” Melinda turned from the chalkboard and, registering the blank looks on her audience’s faces, put the chalk down.
Katherine was reminded of a clockmaker she’d once known, who spent much too much time on his own in the workshop and assumed everyone found timepieces as fascinating as he did… until they didn’t.
“What is that, exactly? A rockist?” Ruben asked.
The rockist nodded thoughtfully and screwed up her face as if remembering a speech she had been taught. “In simple terms,” she said, “a rockist is someone who studies the origin, age, and composition of stones and other hard materials, like crystals.” She smiled, as if expecting applause.
“So you look at rocks all day?” Ruben said after a beat.
“You could say that, sure.”
“Must be a pretty solid way to make a living then?” He nudged Mrs. Chrysler. “Eh?”
Mrs. Chrysler mustered a mirthless smile for him and apologized to the rockist with her eyes, but Melinda Storage laughed her light and slightly unnerving laugh again, in what seemed to be genuine appreciation.
“Oh, that’s a new one to me,” she said, wiping an eye. “I’ll have to write that one down.” She sighed. “So.” She pushed her unruly braids back over her shoulders, “Grrthnack said you had some questions about troll nutrition.”
“Uh, yes,” Katherine said. “Sort of.” She rooted around in her bag and produced the fist-sized lump from within. “Can you identify this for us?”
The rockist took the stone from Katherine and turned it over several times in her hands, attempting to scratch it with a fingernail.
“Hmmm, I wonder…”
They watched as she strode over to the workbench and placed the rock in a balance, then loaded a series of increasingly smaller weights against it.
Next, she plunked the specimen in a large glass cylinder with markings on the side and measured the displacement of the liquid.
Then, after extracting the rock with tongs and drying it with a cloth, she examined the lump under a hand lens, and struck it with a very tiny rock hammer—plink!
—much smaller than the one she’d held at her debut.
Lastly, she licked it.
“No doubt about it,” she finally said. “This is PDG.”
“PDG? What’s that?”
“Oh. PDG is what we call in the rockology world ‘petrified dragon guano.’ Most people call it ‘plop’ I guess.”
What does she mean, “guano”? Mr. Scruffles asked, sniffing Melinda Storage’s ankles.
It’s a fancy word for poop, Tilly replied. She was tucked in the folds of Katherine’s skirts, teetering on the edge of invisibility, the sight of the rockist’s giant rock hammer having quite unnerved her. I told you it smelled like a litterbox.
Ember cocked her ears sheepishly. I don’t think my doings ever smelled that bad, she said.
“Petrified,” Mrs. Chrysler echoed. “As in, frightened?”
“As in turned to stone, Imogene.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” the young rockist named Storage said. “I haven’t seen PDG this high-grade, though, since the specimens at my rock academy.”
Rock academy? Katherine eyed the diplomas again. “Worth much, is it?” she asked.
“A small piece of plop like this one”—she weighed it again thoughtfully in her hand a moment—“probably would get you a hundred, a hundred and fifty gold pieces in the market.”
Ruben gasped, and Mrs. Chrysler turned it into a cough, elbowing him in the ribs.
“Really? That much?” Katherine said calmly. “Why, particularly?”
“Well, PDG is twenty times cleaner-burning than charcoal, and lasts fifty times longer. It’s rare too. Very rare.”
The trio exchanged glances.
“How rare?”
“It forms only under specific circumstances,” Storage explained, leaving the bench now to gesticulate at a large map on the wall.
It seemed to show the whole continent, but instead of borders and villages and forests and mountains, it was decked out in an array of odd vibrant colors swishing all over in blobs and swirls.
“This is a map of rock formations,” she went on.
“There are different types of rocks all over, you know. Sandstones, mudstones, layers of volcanic rock and ash, river deposits.” Mrs. Chrysler’s eyes were glazing over, and the rockist astutely picked up the pace.
“But up here”—she pointed to a spot in the Stinky Mountains marked “Here Be Dragons”—“here we think a huge, ancient dragon colony was buried by a sudden landslide many thousands of years ago, and over time the massive amounts of guano that were buried underground compressed and transmogrified into what we know today as PDG.” As she spoke, Storage made squishy, squashy movements with her hands.
She brightened now, in academic self-satisfaction.
“And that’s the only place?” Katherine asked. “Where PDG like this forms? There are other dragon colonies, surely…”
“Yes, but there would have to be the right environmental conditions,” the young woman said.
“Compression and all that takes time. The only known place right now is the mountains. I have a hypothesis, though”—her eyes lit up and she reached for a small, demo-sized, hand-wound press on a nearby shelf, fiddling with it in an illustrating sort of way—“that fresh dragon guano could be turned to PDG much, much faster by simulating the right conditions: high heat, intense pressure, a vacuum… Mining wouldn’t be necessary at all. ”
“That would be quite revolutionary, wouldn’t it?” Katherine asked.
“Oh definitely.”
“Well, I’d keep that to myself for now, dear,” Mrs. Chrysler advised, pushing the contraption away with a finger. “We’re on the trail of the owner of that particular chunk of stone poop, and they probably wouldn’t like your idea at all.”
The rockist’s face fell. “I suppose… that’s probably true.”
“Tell me, dear,” Katherine said, “is there a reason someone might keep mining PDG a secret?”
Storage thought a moment. “I guess,” she finally said.
“I mean…” She gave her press a refreshed sidelong glance and relocated it in a cupboard, which she promptly closed.
“All the PDG on the market today comes out of the Stinky Mountains. A mountain troll conglomerate controls the mineral rights to it, I believe—the extraction, the trade.”
“Like a cartel,” Mrs. Chrysler said, nudging Katherine meaningfully.
“I suppose.”
“And they wouldn’t like it if someone else started pushing in on their turf.”
“I suppose not.”
“Even we didn’t mess around with cartels, Katty,” Mrs. Chrysler said. “A person would have to be pretty brash and reckless to go taking business out from under them.”
“Same kind of person brash enough to scam a bunch of nuns?”
“Yes, probably the same exact kind.” Mrs. Chrysler turned to Melinda Storage. “These Stinky Mountain trolls you mentioned—on which side of the mountains do they operate, do you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“This side? Or… the far side?”
“Both sides, I think?”
“Interesting.” Mrs. Chrysler regarded Katherine askance, undoubtedly recalling that incident from their youth that Katherine herself preferred not to remember, involving Miss Dodge, Chauncey, and a now-one-armed Stinky Mountains troll.
They had avoided the far side of the mountains ever since. Trolls tended to have long memories.
The rockist was turning the lump over in her hand now and looking up at them critically. “I’m curious how you came upon this specimen, but now I don’t think I’ll ask you.”
Mrs. Chrysler reclaimed the lump and patted the rockist’s hand. “That’s probably for the best, dear.”
Melinda Storage regarded her with a cocked head and probing, inquisitive eyes. “But, you did say you were curious about troll nutrition… A troll wasn’t… eating this, were they? That’s not right, you know. It is poop.”
“Well, we know that now,” Mrs. Chrysler said carelessly.
“And we will definitely tell them to stop,” added Ruben, getting caught up in the spirit of things. Melinda’s eyes popped wide.
“It’s a good thing we spoke with you,” Katherine agreed hastily. The rockist, still looking a bit concerned, nevertheless smiled weakly at the affirmation of helpfulness.
“I can give you a list of the most nutritious rocks and crystals,” she offered, eagerly pulling out a drawer and handing each of them a pamphlet from within. “This describes a well-balanced troll diet.”
“That’s very kind of you, dear,” said Mrs. Chrysler, leafing through the pamphlet in a believable show of interest. Katherine was reminded of her friend’s complimentary appraisals of young Pip’s drawings.
“Any other questions, then?”
“I think that’ll do for now,” Katherine said, tucking both the PDG and the pamphlet into her bag and checking that the cats were still close by. “Thank you again for your help.”
“So, all this time,” Ruben said when they were back out on the street, “the… place has been mining rare, expensive dragon poop right under everyone’s noses?”
“Yes, Ruben, but let’s keep that under our hats,” Katherine said.
The day had begun in earnest by now, and steady streams of people and pony-drawn carts were ambling up and down the street.
Heaps of freshly baked bread were being trundled to street stalls, and passing wagons were piled high with gourds and corn.
No one seemed to notice Katherine and her party, but still she cast her eyes about warily, now that she knew she had a valuable chunk of stone dragon crap in her bag.
“For over forty years probably,” Ruben went on, waving his hands irritably, and with no change in volume, “and absolutely no one knowing!”
“Yes, Ruben,” Katherine said, hands palm-down to shush him.
“Well, that’s just… just—gah!” Mouser licked his ear and derailed his search for the perfect adjective.
“We’ll have to tell the nuns now, won’t we?
” he continued more quietly, and shrank back into his cowl like an agitated turtle.
“This is even worse than it was before. Oh, she’ll never put in a good word for me now. ”
Katherine had to agree that things were looking rather gloomy for Ruben, but, she considered, things might be even gloomier for the Splint family if a certain mountain troll cartel caught wind of what they had been doing.
“You’re awfully quiet, Imogene,” she said after a time, watching her friend gaze unseeingly across the street.
“Yes, Katty, I was just thinking… that I could really use a cup of tea.” She broke her blank-stared reverie, and an impish grin crept over her face as she turned.
“And I know just where I want it from too… if the place is still there.” Katherine nodded knowingly.
“You want to recreate the past a bit, Ruben?” Mrs. Chrysler asked mischievously.
Ruben gulped.