Dusk fell over the Saltglass quarries like a sheet of blue slate dropped across the basin floor.
With the sunset came the night wind. Not the dry, baking blast of the afternoon, but a thin, freezing downdraft spilling off the high Blackglass crags to the north, carrying stinging eddies of crushed bitter salt dust that settled into every fold of wool and every seam of leather.
Down on the lower terrace, Joric Thane’s wagon drivers were already shifting their baggage wagons into a tight circle, lashing canvas skirts around the wheel-hubs to keep the dust from drifting into the grease-boxes.
“We can’t sleep down there,” Fellis Dain said. He looked over the rim from the upper terrace where their expedition camp was pitched. He was holding the corner of their shared sleeping tarp. It shook out the gray powder that had piled up during the afternoon drills. “The wind is funneling straight through the old quarry cut. By midnight, anyone lying on the lower ground will be coughing bitter salt mud until their lungs bleed.”
Kezra Venn walked the upper gravel terrace, Davren’s second-best work knife in her right hand and a mason’s straight-line coiled in her pocket.
The upper terrace sat twenty feet above the dust funnel, sheltered from the northern draft by an overhanging brow of vesicular dark rock. It was dry, clean, and safe from night eddies. The only problem was the slope. The gravel bench leaned toward a rocky dry wash at an awkward twelve-degree pitch…
