The dry bed of the River Skell was a canyon of cracked white salt sixty paces wide.
Where water had once cascaded down from the northern highlands toward the agricultural valleys of Val-Khorat, there was now only a trench of stone-hard stone crust that crunched beneath the wagon wheels like sugar under an iron pestle.
Along the center of the salt channel, a phantom highway ran.
Ren Vale stood on the southern bank, his hand resting on the wooden gunwale of the cart. He watched the ghost play out for the fourth time in twenty minutes.
Down in the salt trench, six huge freight wagons pulled by teams of six horned draft oxen trundled forward in total silence. The wagon drivers wore coarse, raw, unwhitened linen tunics tied with raw leather thongs and heavy bronze torcs around their necks. The traditional attire of the Merchant Guilds of the Third Century, three hundred years before the founding of the modern High court.
The wagons moved at a steady trot for exactly four hundred paces.
Then, exactly as the lead wagon’s front left wheel crossed an ancient milestone carved with the numeral XII, the lead ox threw an iron shoe. The animal stumbled. The heavy wagon slewed forty degrees across the salt. The wagon driver hauled wildly on the leather reins. He shouted a silent oath into the milky air.
