‘Isn’t anything left to say, is there?’ Gentle said. ‘We should turn in. Looks like we have a long hard time of it ahead of us.’

28.

The night was cold, the ground was hard and Pilgrim’s back and weak leg ached from the ride through the mountains to the high desert, but he slept long and deeply. When Poppy shook him awake, he was disappointed but not surprised to discover that Gentle was gone and one of the maras was missing.

He told Poppy and Fragrant about his conversation with Gentle, said he thought that the matter had been settled.

‘Clearly not,’ Fragrant said, with an unforgiving look.

‘Perhaps he decided there was nothing in this venture for him, and cut and ran,’ Pilgrim said. He was disappointed by his friend’s selfishness, and angry with himself for having been too trusting.

‘Or perhaps he decided to sell everything he knows to Foeless Landwalker,’ Fragrant said.

‘That’s also possible,’ Pilgrim admitted.

‘We shouldn’t have brought him with us,’ Fragrant said. ‘But we did, and now we have to assume the worst. We need to get to where we are going as quickly as we can, and hope that you can talk your way into Foeless Landwalker’s confidences before Gentle can.’

They ate the last of the flatbreads Gentle had made the night before, folding them over stripes of fish paste, and packed up and headed out in the cold dawn light while the rest of the camp was still waking. The road climbed through stark desert. Stones and sand and gravel. Cactus, thorn bushes, stretches of parched grass. Ridges of giant boulders. Long shadows shrinking as the sun rose, the air growing warmer. Pilgrim hoped to see a figure waiting for them up ahead. Sitting beside a tethered mara, standing up as they approached. Gentle’s snowy pelt and pinkish gaze. A perfunctory excuse about scouting ahead, given with a slow smile that challenged them to disbelieve it. But they saw no one else on the road, and an acid uncertainty began to simmer in Pilgrim’s stomach.

A distant haze of dust resolved into the site of an excavation of ogre ruins. A cluster of burrows close to the road, a banner strung between two of them declaring that the Sweetwater Collective was digging up the past to make a better future. A line of windmill generators, huge blades turning slowly and steadily in the hot wind. Further off, beyond the conical mounds of spoil heaps, a steam shovel was working at one corner of a huge pit, the tinny clank of its chain echoing small and clear in the profound stillness of the desert.