By the fifth hour of daylight, the sky above the Rust-Dunes had ceased to be blue. It was a searing vault of bleached zinc that pressed down upon the red dunes like a heated laundry press.
The heat had climbed past one hundred and fifteen degrees. Heat shimmers warped the horizon into liquid pools of false silver. That turned distant sandstone buttes into melting castles. The red iron sand was hot enough to soften the pine tar in the cart wheels. It filled the stale air with the sharp, bitter stench of boiling resin.
Ren pulled the tow-harness with his shoulders hunched, his woolen tunic soaked through with greasy, salt-rimed sweat. Every breath felt like inhaling oven air. His mouth was coated in a dry, bitter-salt chalk that tasted of sulfur and dead stone.
Beside him, two of the younger refugee weavers had collapsed into the shade of the baggage barrow. Their skin flushed was dark crimson, their eyes rolled back in their sockets.
“They’re cooking from the marrow out,” Nomad Ren said, halting at the crest of a low transverse dune. The nomad adjusted his cracked leather face-veil, fully calm by the fire wind. “If you don’t find them shade and salt before noon, you can save yourself the labor of digging graves. The dry air will mummify them where they lie.”
