The Great Western Wastelands stretched ahead like a cracked skillet. Red shale shimmered in the heat. Jagged limestone ridges broke through the ground, and tough cedar scrub clung to the cracks. The air tasted of sulfur and salt. Fine grit worked its way into every seam and bearing.
A two-wheeled steel cart rattled over the rough ground. It had no gold trim and no winged horses. Austin had built it from channel iron, leaf springs, and honest grease.
He had made the wheels himself. He boiled hardwood sap with brimstone until it formed a tough black rubber, then layered it over pangolin hide. Deep treads gripped the flint. Sealed bearings kept out the desert dust. Beneath the cart, a solid steel axle and rebuilt leaf springs softened the worst of the bumps.
A hydraulic capstan winch sat at the front. Its bronze piston moved with a hand lever, and its drum held two hundred yards of Stellar-Steel cable. When Austin kicked the clutch into gear, the pawl dropped with a heavy clack.
He liked that sound better than any temple bell.
Austin sat on the oak bench with his boots on the footboard. He sipped jasmine tea from a chipped clay mug, his clipboard resting across his knees. His midnight-blue hard hat shaded his eyes, and red dust coated his steel-toed boots.
The small ring of debris orbiting his ankles shifted whenever he moved. The sloppy motion annoyed him, but it helped steady the cart on steep slopes. He decided to leave it alone for now.
Li Xiaoyao trotted beside him. The boy’s white robes remained spotless. A faint layer of Foundation Realm qi kept the dust away. He carried a wooden surveyor’s tripod on one shoulder and a notebook under his arm. Whenever the cart stopped, he sketched the road, marked firm ground, and recorded the distance between water stops. He still watched the cart with open wonder, but he was learning to watch the land too.
To Xiaoyao, the groaning springs were not old metal complaining about the load. They were the sacred breath of the Dao of Gearwork.
Cerberus Pug lumbered behind them. The eight-hundred-pound hound carried two huge saddlebags packed with canvas, roasted solar eggs, salted bacon, and the First Epoch server end-post. Austin had wrapped the black cube in oiled wool and strapped it down. Brass mesh covered its cooling vents.
Pug’s left head panted in the heat. His middle head watched the canyon rim. His right head slept against his shoulder, snoring like an old generator.
Austin set his tea in the cup holder and raised a brass sighting level to one eye.
“This ground is a mess,” he said. “See that fault? It shifts every year. Nobody compacted the base or planned for drainage. The town inspector would fail this on sight.”
Xiaoyao straightened. “The Patriarch sees even the suffering of the ancient wyrms beneath the earth! Master, did the World-Sundering Serpent carve those trenches with its claws?”
“No. That’s plate tectonics.” Austin tucked his grease pencil behind his ear. “The rock on one side is sliding past the rock on the other. A layer of geotextile and some crushed stone would have helped the valley above it. Pure cowboy stonework. Somebody shoved dirt around and called it a realm.”
Xiaoyao silently memorized geotextile. It sounded like a ninth-rank sealing array.
A howl cut through the canyon.
AWOOOOOO!
Dark shapes rose from the limestone ledges. Sixty jackals stepped into the sunlight. Their black fur seemed to drink in the light, and their red eyes glowed like coals.
Blood-Eyed Shadow Jackals.
Caravan guards feared the third-rank beasts for good reason. They could turn to smoke, pass through stone, and drag horses out of their traces. Ordinary blades went straight through them.
The alpha crouched on a sandstone slab thirty feet away. It was the size of a mountain lion, with a scar across its broad chest. It bared its fangs as the pack spread out around the cart.
Xiaoyao drew his flying sword. Blue light ran along its edge. “Patriarch! Mortal blades cannot touch them! Let me use the Nine-Fold Sun-Burst Sword Array!”
Austin stayed in his seat.
Green lines filled his vision as his system scanned the pack.
Austin read the screen twice. Then he looked at the empty tow bar on the front of his cart.
A slow grin spread across his face. He looked like a construction foreman who had just found sixty workers waiting outside the gate with their own gloves.
“Backup draft team,” he said. “Good ground clearance. Built-in four-wheel drive. No fuel bill.”
Xiaoyao lowered his sword a little. “Master? Backup what?”
Austin released the winch and pulled a steel spreader rig from the side crate. Sixty cable leads hung from it, each ending in a padded collar and a snap hook.
The alpha leaped.
Its body blurred into gray smoke and shot toward Austin’s throat.
Austin snapped his right arm. The Stellar-Steel cable whipped through the air and struck the smoky shape with a solid thud. Shadow form or not, the jackal still had mass.
The collar snapped shut around its neck. Austin hauled the beast out of its shadow state and slammed it onto the sandstone.
The rest of the pack charged.
Austin went to work. He swung, looped, and clipped the leads with the speed of a lineman securing cables in a storm. One collar after another snapped shut. In moments, all sixty jackals were connected to the steel whiffletree on the cart’s axle.
The alpha bit its cable.
CRACK.
Its teeth broke against the Stellar-Steel. It reared back, pawing at its bleeding mouth.
Then Cerberus Pug woke up.
The huge hound planted his front paws on the back of Austin’s bench. All three heads leaned over the dashboard. Six star-bright eyes narrowed.
A lazy puff of solar heat slipped from his middle snout.
GRRRRRRR.
The jackals looked into the jaws of an ancient three-headed hellhound and forgot why they had been hungry. All sixty dropped to their bellies with their tails tucked.
Xiaoyao stared. “Master, did you just perform a sixty-fold blood-binding ritual?”
Austin picked up his tea. “No. It’s a haulage contract. Five rows of twelve. Keep the line tension even.”
He leaned over the dashboard.
“All right, boys! Twenty miles an hour on the flat. Watch your spacing, keep the slack out, and stay off the loose rock. Mush!”
The jackals scrambled up and ran.
The cart lurched forward. Claws tore at the stone, the springs groaned, and the team surged to thirty miles an hour. A long plume of red dust rose behind them.
Austin settled against the seat and checked his pocket watch. Canyon walls whipped past. His tea barely rippled.
“Proper logistics,” he said. “No fuel, no emissions, and we just saved a week.”
Xiaoyao ran beside the cart without even breathing hard. His laughter carried over the rumble of wheels.
“The Patriarch turns the fiercest fiends of the wasteland into willing students! Even the horrors of the void pull his chariot!”
“They’re draft stock, kid. Check their paws at the next water stop.”
With sixty black tails streaming behind it, the cart raced west toward the Land-wide Border Rift.