The afternoon sun had burned the morning haze off the Saltglass road. That left the vast, pale floor of the bitter salt basin exposed under a sky the color of bleached slate.
Kezra Venn knelt in the coarse, chalky gravel three paces outside the northwest corner of the sixty-four-pace road bench.
Beside her, kneeling on the hard caliche, Fellis Dain was clearing away a pile of loose limestone chock-stones that had been heaped against the base of an overhanging rock shoulder. Paxa Sel stood four paces back, her arms folded across her medical apron. Meanwhile, Yseld Arken held her hooked climbing staff balanced on her hip. Her gray eyes swept the distant southern ridge where Hest Vale’s scouts had been sighted two days earlier.
“Here it’s,” Fellis muttered. His fingers scraped the last layer of white silt from a crevice in the bedrock.
Kezra leaned forward, angling her right ear down to catch his words over the steady, dry whistle of the wind.
Driven four inches deep into an upright fracture in the blue limestone bench stood her backup sounding rod. A five-foot shaft of forged low-carbon iron, capped with a hardened steel point and tipped with an eight-sided ash handle bound in brass wire. She had planted it there on Day 43 during the final deep-strata check, using it to sound the thirty-two-pace depth of the solid road prism before the exchange. It was an old tool, made during her second week of training under Maud’s watchful eye, filed…
