The Caravan Across the Salt Desert

The Salt did not look like a thing that could kill you. That was the first lie it told.

For three days the caravan of Kader the glass-merchant had walked out onto it, forty camels and nineteen souls strung in a line across a plain so white and so flat that the sky seemed to rest directly on the ground, and for three days it had been almost beautiful — the crust glittering like crushed diamond from horizon to horizon, the air ringing with a silence so total that a man could hear his own blood. They were crossing the Pale because the mountain road to Ashkavan was shut, bandits in the high passes all that season, and a merchant with a hundred crates of colored glass and silver wire does not wait six months for a war to end. The Pale was the only way left. And the only person alive who knew the buried well-line that crossed it was the woman walking at the head of the line, alone, the way she always walked: apart.

Her name was Yara, and the caravan did not trust her.