From Bagdade, they crossed the land of the Nekhem and picked up a tailwind, which brought them in two hours to Raki, Raghae of old, once again on Oikoumenē territory. Raki was an isolated city on an island of peace heavily fortified on all its borders. There, Oresias learned from a military field inspector that no news had been heard from Alexandreia, and that their air transport escorts—an aerial tanker and an old cargo plane that would be abandoned—were ready to accompany them from that point.

They now began their incursion into truly dangerous territory. Fifteen hundred years before, the Persians and the Oikoumenē in Europe had been swept to the west and then driven to the seas—the Priddeneian Sea and the Middle Sea—by the Alanoi and Hunnoi, working their nomadic peoples and subject Teutonic tribes into a vast mobile nation of warriors. An empire had been set up from the shores of Galleia and Kimbria to the great walls of Chin, the greatest the world had ever known—and the most fragile. In fifty years, that empire had vanished like a dream of blood and smoke, and the Skythians and Nordic Rhus had moved into the void. The Alanoi and Avars had finally held their ground east of the Kaspian, and the Hunnoi north and east of them. For a thousand years, these territories had been in flux, but had kept their basic shapes, until the arrival of the Aigaian Turkmenoi, pirates and ravagers of Hellas.

The Turkmenoi had carved their own niche, transferring their piratic tendencies to the Kaspian, and it was over that slender mountainous territory between the Altaic republics that the beecraft now flew. The Turkmenoi recognized no one as their betters or their masters. They isolated themselves and tried to hold back the incursions of the outside world. There would be no mercy for gullcraft should they be forced down; but it was unlikely the Turkmenoi could muster such weapons.

Rhita looked at the hundreds of miles of broad naked mountains passing below, and felt lonelier than ever before. She realized the variability of human thought and human history, the contradictions of cultures, as unmappable as these rocky passes and pinnacles, and it seemed that humans would never share a single truth. That meant either there was no single truth, or humans would kill themselves trying to find it…. Either way, thinking about it depressed her.

Her exhilaration of a few hours before had faded into dark unease. She was tired; sleep on the beecraft was not refreshing, accompanied as it was by the unending roar of the jets. Her stomach was touchy again; she did not feel it was safe to eat any more, yet she was hungry. She complained about nothing, but the flight was dragging on and on…