The sun was three fingers above the black saw-toothed crest of the western ridges. Just then, the shout went up from the southern quarry track.
It wasn’t a panicky cry, but the sharp, practiced bellow of an experienced wagon driver whose rig had run into trouble. Kezra was sitting near the expedition’s handcart. She watched Fellis test the tension on a spare length of braided flax line, when Yseld Arken stepped up behind her.
The former Cairn Host guide didn’t shout. She reached out with the iron metal ring of her climbing staff and tapped Kezra’s right collarbone twice—firm, precise, clear.
“Trouble on the rim track,” Yseld said into Kezra’s good ear. “Joric’s heavy medicine wagon. The left rear tire found a soft pocket.”
Kezra was on her feet before the sentence finished. Her knees gave a single, brief tremor—the lingering body tax of yesterday’s Reach exchange—but she ignored it. She grabbed her work knife and walked briskly toward the southern slope.
Fifty yards south of the reopened road bench. There, the old quarry track curved around the lip of the displaced deep gap, Joric Thane’s four-mule medicine wagon sat canted at an alarming twenty-degree angle.
The left rear wheel had punched through the glistening white salt crust into an underground pocket of bitter salt ash. Fine, talcum-dry fiery silt that had settled into a hollow during the winter flash floods. The heavy iron tire had sunk straight to the boxwood hub, burying the brake shoe and dragging the wagon’s…
