The wind blowing off the western salt flats tasted of sulfur, calcined bone. The dry, stone bite of evaporated salt water.
For three days following the fall of the slaver citadel of Khor-Sula, the caravan of three hundred liberated slave-miners and Low-Khorat refugees had trudged across the high plateau. Behind them, the black iron towers of the Voss family stronghold were drowned beneath sixty feet of boiling salt mud. Ahead of them lay the vast, earth-heat badlands that heralded the approach to the Great Astral Crater.
Here, forty leagues deep into the Western Rust-Dunes, the earth didn’t sleep.
Every few hundred paces, the cracked red crust of the desert broke into yawning fissures where geysers of white-hot stone steam roared into the pale sky. The steam didn’t form soft, rain-bearing clouds. It crystal-hardened instantly in the freezing desert wind, showering the red sand in fine drifts of powdery white lithium salts and quartz frost that crunched like broken glass beneath the refugees’ boots.
Ren Vale walked at the head of the column. His wool cloak pulled was tight against his throat, a leather flask of filtered desert salt water swinging from his shoulder strap.
His weathered boots were caked with red iron dust, his fingertips permanently stained with the violet-black spirit-extract of dark oak-ink. Beneath his lambskin apron, his body moved with the steady, measured endurance of an apprentice who had walked five hundred leagues across a broken empire. The eleventh exclusion penalty—Freshwater Hypersensitivity—was an unbending reality in his marrow…
