Chapter 6: What the Ashspice Showed Him

The Rashen scouts did not speak to them directly for the first hour. They communicated in a series of hand signals that Cael could not parse — not the formal Rashen trade-gestures he'd seen illustrated in the Durath cultural briefing packet, which now seemed to belong to someone else's life, but something older and more compact, a language of three fingers versus two, of palm facing out versus in, of the precise angle at which a chin inclined toward the horizon. They moved through the dark with the particular confidence of people for whom darkness was simply another kind of light.

Cael moved between them and watched everything.

His nose had stopped bleeding but left a crust along his upper lip that he could taste when he breathed through his mouth, which was often, because the air in his nostrils still had something wrong with it — a faint metallic sweetness that he understood, at some level that had nothing to do with logic, was the Ashspice still evaporating off his skin. He had fallen into perhaps forty kilograms of the raw crystalline substance. He had no memory of the fall itself. He had memory of everything that followed, which was worse.