The Citadel of Khor-Sula didn’t stand upon the desert. It had grown out of the wounded earth like an iron cancer.
Two leagues past the northern rim of the Singing Basin, the bleached white chalk-stone plains gave way suddenly to a jagged, broken wasteland of dark hematite crags, stone-hard shale, and rusted red sandstone. Looming against the pale, bleached horizon was the stronghold of the slaver syndicates. A sprawling, tiered castle built entirely from dark, fiery melted rock waste-stone, rough-hewn dark rock blocks. Then it heavily rusted through plates of scrap iron salvaged from a hundred swallowed caravans. Thick plumes of oily black soot and rotten-egg yellow smoke billowed from half a dozen smelting stacks, draping the red cliffs in an acrid, choking haze that smelled of scorched copper and rotting salt water.
Above the castle walls rose three huge sound surveillance horns. Massive, bell-mouthed brass funnels forty arm-lengths long, mounted upon timber swivel-turrets. Powered by rhythmic air-powered steam bellows that exhaled greasy white vapor with every stroke, the horns swept continuously across the rust-red dunes. He listened for the ground-shaking footsteps of escaping slave parties, rogue sand-wyrms, or secret trading skiffs attempting to bypass the toll-roads.
Ren crouched behind a fractured ridge of ironstone. He lowered his quartz sand-goggles to study the citadel’s defenses with cold, careful scrutiny.
