The canvas tilt above Kezra Venn’s head smelled of boiled linseed oil, bitter-salt white chalk-stone dust. The sour wool of two damp blankets that had not dried through the cold desert night.
She tried to lift her chin from the folded hemp pack. Then, the muscles along the back of her neck pulled like over-tightened bowstrings. A thick, wet air pressure filled the left half of her skull. A persistent, unmoving stuffiness that felt as if someone had driven a wooden bung wrapped in wet fleece straight into her ear canal. She reached up with a clumsy right hand to wipe the salt grit from her eyelashes, and her knuckles trembled against her cheekbone. She shivered with the rhythmic, uncontrollable twitch that always followed an exchange of high mass.
Outside the tailboard of Joric Thane’s ambulance wagon, the caravan camp was already moving.
Kezra didn’t hear the wagons at first. She felt them through the ash timbers of the cart bed and the iron leaf-springs beneath her hip. A slow, rolling shaking came up through the wheels. Three beats of iron tire on solid stone, a hollow shudder as a heavy freight axle crossed an open seam. Then the steady grinding drag of gravel under four hundred stone of Saltglass freight. It was the rhythm of loaded salt wagons rolling across the newly arrived limestone bench. Sixty-four paces of solid quarry rock that yesterday morning had been sitting three hundred paces away on the upper terrace. Now bridged the thirty-two-pace…
