“Where is the hot spring?” Ysabet asked, looking at the Stone Shepherd’s stiff, frost-cracked horn-knuckles and the way it kept rolling its left shoulder against the cold wind.
“Two miles up the west box-canyon,” the shepherd said wistfully, pointing one horn-thumb toward a plume of pale white vapor rising behind a saw-toothed ridge. “Good yellow sulfur mud, hot enough to boil an egg at the back and just right for soaking an old neck at the lip. Used to go every October before the big blizzard of ‘thirty-four dropped a boulder across the lower sheep-wall and gave my statues a straight slide toward the ravine.”
Pip turned immediately to Ysabet and tapped her boot twice with its front foot, its amber eyes bright.
Before Ysabet could speak, Ashaun stepped forward, her boots crunching hard on the frozen shale. “Wait a minute,” the older woman said flatly. “Precentor Edris is less than two days ahead of us with the central bell clapper and a digging crew. Every hour we sit in this basin playing nursemaid to three dozen walking gravestones is an hour he uses to bolt his resonance frame into the bedrock. Spending a whole day here so a pass-spirit can take a mud-bath is extravagant nonsense.”
