The sun didn’t rise over Saltglass so much as it ignited the eastern horizon like a fire draft.
Within thirty minutes of the first crimson arc clearing the jagged fiery ridge, the heat across the bitter salt floor climbed twenty degrees. The vast white basin, which had seemed like a quiet, frozen lake of pale animal fat during the pre-dawn hours, transformed into an unbearable glare that burned the eyes even through slitted willow-bark snow goggles. Every dark stone boulder scattered across the plain began to radiate heat like a fresh-baked brick drawn from the heart of Maud Venn’s clay pot kilns. It sent waves of shimmering air rippling upward until the distant hills appeared to dissolve in a sea of liquid silver.
Paxa Sel raised her right hand and caught the front ash yoke of the handcart. “Halt here,” she ordered. Her voice carried the clear, gravelly snap of a field medic who had treated heat stroke and salt blindness across three separate frontier campaigns. “Into the cut.”
Twenty paces to the north of the wheel ruts, a dry winter watercourse had carved a narrow limestone notch three feet deep into the terrace floor. An overhanging shelf of chalky limestone projected four feet out from the eastern lip. He cast a strip of cool purple shadow across the pale gravel.
