The night march across the floor of Saltglass was cold, silent, and swift.
Soon as the crimson afterglow faded from the western peaks. Then, the desert radiated its stored heat into the cloudless sky. The heat plummeted from blistered fire warmth to near-freezing chill within two hours. Kezra buttoned her canvas coat to her chin, pulled her wool mittens from her pockets. Then she kept her stride steady behind Fellis’s rhythmic pulling.
Beneath their boots, the salt crust had hardened into a crisp, ringing stone floor. The handcart’s iron tires gave off a steady, metal hum as they rolled across the stone ridges. That left two thin, dark parallel tracks in the pale bitter salt frost.
Every hundred strides, Kezra’s thumb pushed a boxwood bead along her cord.
Nine hundred paces. One thousand paces. Eleven hundred paces.
She didn’t need to consult her notebook to know that the thread connecting them to Kilnstep was stretching out into a long, nonstop line. She felt it in the soles of her feet, in the ache of her calf muscles, in the familiar weight of the survey case slapping against her left hip. A map was not an abstract drawing made by a scholar in a distant capital. It was a physical distance paid for with the grease of a traveler’s boots.
