Universe · mythic, sunlit, wondrous

The Salt Road

A caravan road across a bright and endless desert, where the winds are caught, bottled, and sold.

The Salt Road runs a thousand days across the Bright Waste, from the salt-cities of the west to the green rumor of the east, and along it move the caravans — camels and carts and the singing of drivers — and along it, too, move the winds. For in this country the winds are things: the dawn wind and the grief wind and the wind that smells of a place you have not seen in years, each with its own weight and price, and there are those who catch them in tall blue bottles and sell them at the waystations to travellers who have need of a particular air.

It is a country of story-logic, where a bargain is binding, a name has weight, and the third of anything is the one that matters. The magic is bright and rule-bound and a little sly; the tales along the Salt Road are fables, and fables have morals, though rarely the ones you expect.

Ground rules

Folkloric, not epic. No dark lords or world-ending wars — bargains, cleverness, wishes with hooks in them, and the small justice of a tale well told. Wonder, adventure, and a moral you can hold in one hand.
The winds obey rules. Each wind does one true thing; a bottled wind, once sold, cannot be recalled; the wrong wind in the wrong hands is the engine of many a story.
Bright, not grim. Danger and mischief and hard lessons — never gore, never despair. The Salt Road punishes the greedy with a wink, not a wound.

Texture

Salt-white glare and blue bottles. Camel bells and the smell of cardamom. Waystations of striped cloth. The winds themselves — dawn-cool, grief-heavy, homesick-sweet — corked and shelved and sold.

Recurring forces

The winds — living weathers, bottled and traded; the realm’s magic and its currency.
The bargain — binding, literal, and never quite what either party meant.

Seeds

A wind-seller who sells the wrong wind to the wrong buyer. (grew into The Girl Who Sold the Wind)
A broker who buys every wind to keep the sky still, and the seller who breaks a binding bargain to keep the road a road. (grew into The Wind She Would Not Keep)
Three travellers, three bottles, and only one true wind among them.
A waystation where the winds themselves come to trade, one night a year.

Books in this universe

Characters

Basri Yel The Salt Road's most famous wind-catcher — ninety-nine winds bottled, and a legend built on the one he didn't catch
Emir Duqal The Still Emir — a grieving collector who buys winds to silence them, and commissions the hundredth catch
Hadi Sarraf A wind-broker of the still city; the buyer of every wind
Naima A girl crossing the waste to buy her grandfather one last wind
Noor The Emir's "ear" — a foundling raised in the House of Still Air, sent to verify the hundredth catch
Rafiq The water-boy Zari cheated out of his caravan ticket — and could not shake
Zari A young wind-seller of the Salt Road