Brannoch Sump keeps its salt dry by holding its sea uphill. The water stands a hundred feet above the plain behind a black basalt wall, and the plain, white and flat for three thousand miles, receives only what spills over. Everyone who lives below the wall arranges the day around that spill, and one trade exists only because of it.
Vigdis Haldorsen is a crust-mender. She wakes on the gray petrified-kelp stilts of Orrin Slake before the amber moon rises, eats boiled salt-fish and a fistful of brine shrimp, and climbs down with a clay pot of hot brine paste and a flat iron trowel. Salt crust dries into hexagons, and each crack, left alone, lets the emerald channels undercut the pans and eat the footing of the causeway. She walks three miles to Ivarsund Cut along the pink crystal edges, never across the white middle. The middle is a lid over brine, not a floor, and every child on the plain learns to read the color before learning to read anything else. At a seam she kneels, packs the paste, presses it flat with the trowel, and shuffles to the next hexagon. A good mender closes about two hundred in a morning.
At midday the second moon, small and milk white, stands overhead and throws a hard cold light that makes the cracks easy to see. Vigdis eats dried kelp on the crystal rim and does not talk. Sound carries badly over salt, and the plain is quiet enough that the wet tick of settling crust can be heard from a hundred yards. By afternoon she turns back toward Aldrevik Landing, where the causeway meets the first firm pan, scraping her trowel clean against a stilt. Asked whether the wall frightens her, she says she has patched under it since she was nine and it has been on time every evening.
On the stilts the pots go on to boil. Steam rises in thin gray ropes, lamps come up in the windows, and out at the horizon the amber moon slides behind the basalt lip until the spilling sea glows gold along its whole length. The sheet falls without a splash that reaches the town. Vigdis hangs the trowel on its peg and counts the lit windows from habit, as she has every evening of her life. This observer measured the wall only from the causeway and cannot confirm whether the lip was cut, built or grown. Nobody in Orrin Slake offers an opinion either. What nobody has explained is the water itself: the sea pours over that edge every evening, the channels never rise and the pans never flood. Where does it go?
- Classification
- Tidal salt world, two moons
- Habitat
- Salt plains under a raised sea
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- Pale Reach spans about 3,000 miles
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- The Pale Reach
- Binomial
- Orbis maremurus
- Diet
- Brine shrimp, kelp, boiled salt-fish
- Temperament
- Dry, patient, quietly stubborn