CHAPTER 28.1
Over the following days, the pillar of smoke and ash rising from the crater turned from black to gray and then white. No more smoke came from the face of the mountain or the entrance.
By the third day, the man, the thark and their mounts were all weakened by thirst. They kept as much to whatever shade they could find at the mountain’s base to escape the blistering heat of the day. The thoats had half full skins tied to their saddles when they fled the cavern. That was gone now. They would die without water.
“We have two choices,” the bounty man said. “We ride to our first water station or risk drinking from the Eye.”
“And after that?” Kal said, running a yellow tongue over his teeth. “You go back to Yttrium with nothing to show? I return to my bitch and her brood? We give up this mad dream?”
“I’m not ready to do that.”
The bounty man wrapped a length of cloth over his nose and mouth. He entered the cave moving low, the empty skins slung over his shoulder. Smoke still drifted from the cave mouth. It stung his nostrils and the roof of his mouth through the stretched cloth. The miasma was thicker in the interior causing his eyes to water.
He was surprised to find that his first steps into the entry chamber were into water up to his knees. Once his eyes had adjusted, he saw the chamber was filled end to end with water. It rippled out from the arched entrance that led down to the great well. He was pleased to be proven right. Without the fascii to keep the water level down with their daily consumption, the waters would continue to rise. At its current rate, it would soon fill the interior of the caves and spill out into the desert. He could picture irrigated fields where there was desert, a new city rising where the ancient had fallen.
And riches. He pictured the riches of a jeddak of old.
Crouching, he brushed away the layer of ash that lay atop the water to plunge the skins under the surface. They bubbled and gurgled as they filled while he dreamed of an empire built on thirst.
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Wading into a flooded cave for water while dreaming about building an empire is a hell of a gear shift. Betting that ambition gets him into worse trouble than the smoke did.