The three covered wagons rolled across the blinding white flats, leaving narrow ruts in the crust.
Behind them, the howling brine-storm began to die down. The greenish haze of salt dust thinned into a pale, heat-baked sky.
Above the wagon roofs, the translucent film of jade vapor shimmered one last time. Then it dissolved into harmless fragrance, having carried the caravan safely past General Dravus’s frontier pickets.
“The wind has turned cold,” Sera Thorne called out from the lead wagon.
She drew rein on the front pair of oxen. Her grey eyes swept the horizon, spear resting across her knees.
Ahead lay a vast depression in the earth. Dead-Brine Crater stretched for two miles across the chalky plain, its jagged limestone rim rising like broken teeth.
Inside the crater, thin trails of gray smoke drifted from shallow caves.
Three hundred figures huddled in the shadows of the salt stone. They wore tattered linen rags that barely covered their ribs. Across every forehead burned the blackened scar of an imperial branding iron.
