By midday, the purple shadow beneath the limestone shelf had shrunk to a narrow strip barely three feet wide.
The four of them sat huddled together with their backs pressed flat against the chalky rock, their knees drawn tightly up to their chests to keep their boots out of the blinding line of sunlight that crept across the gravel. The heat beating down upon the exposed limestone floor was intense enough that Fellis couldn’t rest his bare palm against the stone for more than three seconds without feeling his skin begin to blister.
Around them, the air was utterly dead and motionless, thick with the bitter-salt stink of ancient dried salt water and sulfur that drifted up from the deeper cracks in the salt pan. Even the pack mule had stopped twitching its ears. He stood with its head lowered into the darkest corner of the cut, its breath rattling softly in its dry throat.
Fellis Dain pulled the handcart’s small pine tool chest toward his feet. The box had warped in the fierce dry heat, its dovetail joints groaning and its iron hasp sticking until he tapped it sharply with the brass handle knob of Davren’s work knife. Inside, wrapped in greasy sheepskin rags to protect them from road grit, lay Kezra’s four-foot eight-sided iron sounding rods, the four steel survey corner pins, the heavy stone-chisel, and the spare iron linchpins for the cart wheels.
