A Salt-Kept is a dried body crusted white: skin drawn tight and brown under a rime of salt crystals, lips shrunk back from the teeth, eyes gone to white pebbles. Its clothes, where any remain, are stiff and cracked and of no fashion anyone knows. It walks slowly and stiffly, and each step is a crunch, like a foot on frozen snow. Salt sheds from it as it goes, leaving a pale trail on the darker ground. The air near it is so dry that it hurts to breathe.

They lie out on the pans and along the stepped shorelines of the vanished salt-people, which still stand far above any water. By day they are buried in the crust or lie like driftwood on the old beaches; by night they rise. No one has counted them.

They walk the old shorelines, as if waiting for the sea, and seem to look for water. A Salt-Kept that finds a camp comes for its water skins and its people: it seizes the living and holds them, and what it holds dries. They are not fast, but they do not stop, and they do not tire.

Their touch draws the moisture out of a body, as the air on the old sea floor drains it from the lungs. A traveller held by one for long is left as dry as the Kept. They are hard to harm: blows crack the salt and little else. Water poured over one softens and slows it, which is a cruel trade in the Glassbelt. Like other remnants, they grow stronger the longer they are left.

They give nothing that anyone will take; even salvagers leave their goods where they lie. They are a danger to anyone who camps on the pans at night. Those who must cross go by day, keep to known routes, camp off the old seabed, and bury their water.

Desert folk tell of a ruler of the salt-people who asked Mereth to keep him for ever and was kept, unable to move, while his people dwindled around him. Many say the Salt-Kept are his people, kept as he asked for himself, and that he lies somewhere out on the pans still, watching them walk. Others say they are his courtiers, looking for him, and some crossers think the crunch of Mereth’s footsteps heard on the pans is only theirs. No one knows whether any of it is so.

Treasure-seekers go out on the pans for the salt-people’s grave-goods, and the crossers tell of a band that took a crown from a Salt-Kept and was followed across the pans for three days by a line of the dead, walking in its tracks.