Quarry season opens at Wheelcrag when the frost leaves the benches, usually the second week of March, and the xorns come up with it. They are diurnal and keep to the hours when the cut faces are hot enough to loosen their flavor. A xorn stands four feet tall and weighs about five hundred pounds. It is a barrel of fused slate and crystal on three splayed legs, with three arms rising from the shoulders and three amber eyes set evenly around a toothed mouth in the crown. Malachite green and burnt copper orange band the body. It comes out of solid rock shoulders first, grips a block of ore in all three hands, and eats.
The earliest record is a rent roll from Antlerfell that lists a cartload of tin ingots as lost to "the hungry wall" and excuses the carter from the debt. A century later a surveyor's field book sketches a three-armed shape in a copper face and calls it a pest of the ore, no worse than damp. Then the rail spurs came. Iron was suddenly lying loose on every terrace, and the xorns learned its taste. The one I watched at Wheelcrag carries a polished scar across its left flank where it chewed a rail spike and the spike won, briefly. It wears the scar like a medal and looks smug about it, a diner who has found the best seam.
The quarry families live by a few plain rules. Slag is never tipped on the ore side of a terrace, because a xorn is easily offended by it. It will sulk in the rock for a week and leave the whole face hollow and sour. Kerra Dunmow, who has foremanned the Wheelcrag benches for eleven years, sets a saucer of crushed malachite on the lip of each new cut, and the xorns take it first and leave the stacked blocks alone. Households in Antlerfell keep a pot of copper filings by the door for the same reason. To track one, read the dust. A fresh feeding leaves a glittering powder fan on the ground, green for copper and gray for tin, and a fan that is still warm means the animal is within an arm's length of the rock.
I cannot say how a xorn finds ore through forty feet of limestone. The quarrymen say taste, and the amber eyes are plainly too bright to be ornament, but I never saw one open its eyes while moving through stone. Since my last visit Kerra has moved the stacking yard to the north terrace, and the xorns have followed, abandoning a face they worked for years. They are thorough, indifferent and punctual about their meals. There is one exception on the Antlerfell scree. A single old xorn there ignores ore entirely. It sits in the slag heap every noon and eats the slag, and nothing offends it at all.
- Classification
- Earth elemental, mineral feeder
- Habitat
- Quarry faces, ore veins, scree slopes
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 4 ft tall, about 500 lb
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Solid rock below the quarry floor
- Binomial
- Petrovorax tripes
- Diet
- Iron, copper, tin and silver ore
- Temperament
- Indifferent, thorough, easily offended by slag