The heat beneath Joric Thane’s wagon awning was thick enough to taste of boiled canvas, animal fat grease, and old cedar sawdust.
By two in the afternoon, the rest of the camp had pulled back into whatever patches of shade could be found beneath the high wagon beds. Inside the canvas tilt, Kezra Venn sat on an overturned salt keg, her elbows propped on the folding frame stand table. Meanwhile, Fellis Dain and Yseld Arken leaned close on either side.
Between them lay the quarry register Joric had hauled out from an iron chest beneath his wagon seat. It was a huge, folio-sized volume bound in grease-darkened rawhide, its corners capped with tarnished brass plates. Its spine stitched with was heavy shoemaker’s sinew. The front cover bore the faded, stamped royal seal of the Saltglass Mineral Concession, dated thirty-five years earlier.
Kezra turned the thick, animal fat-stained leaves with gentle, deliberate care. The pages smelled of coal dust, lamp-wax, and long-dead mice. Most of the early entries recorded mundane extraction tallies. Four hundred tons of white alabaster shipped to the country capital in the third month. Six wagonloads of selenite crystals. Fifty cords of green spruce timber purchased from the northern lumberers to shore the main haulage drift.
