The salt flats stretched northwest for eighty leagues, white and blinding under a sun that felt too sharp against the naked eye.
It wasn’t the natural glare of desert quartz or bleached bitter salt basins. The light didn’t scatter through dust motes or shimmer with sky heat haze. It struck the ground in flat, uniform bands of luminance. It cast shadows that possessed hard, unfeathered edges as crisp as snapped tin.
Lin Tao pulled the collar of his charcoal linen traveling coat higher against his throat.
His boots made a dry, rhythmic crunch against the crust of stone deposits. Beside him, Tie Shan moved with his customary lumbering steadiness. The fourteen-pound star-iron pry-bar was resting across his right upper back muscle. The giant’s left arm remained bound across his chest in a fresh hemp sling, the out-of-joint shoulder pinned and steadied beneath tight layers of boiled linen and willow-bark salve.
Lin Tao’s left eye flickered with a faint, glowing-green rhythm.
The sight overlay cast a faint aiming cross across the horizon, sampling the terrain ahead at a strict twenty-four cycles per second. Three miles out, the waving dunes ceased to exhibit organic variance. The crags of black dark rock repeated their jagged silhouettes in matching, six-hundred-pace intervals—a repeating pattern of three matching stone spurs. They were followed by two three-sided fissures, followed by three matching spurs once more.
