15
Zoe smelled the camp before she saw it, a stench of too many people, cooking fires and the faint metallic scent left after an electrical storm, the residue of spent magic. Hashim had carried her for several hours, Callen on his back, never slowing, never stopping until they reached the end of the tangle of paths through the rocky chasm and emerged at the edge of a valley.
A river ran down from the mountains into a vast lake with a church submerged in the middle, perhaps drowned on Earthside and pushed through here by lack of belief. There were fields of some kind of crop with blue flowers in vast terraces up the slope, workers moving in channels between them.
Around the lake, the camp was divided into clear sections, more like military barracks than the ramshackle place Zoe had imagi
