“He’s running hard,” Antag judged at a moment they found a clear set of tracks, and Marak agreed: there was the movement of a man bent more on distance than on cleverness.

“He taught me every trick,” Marak said grimly. “And he’s not panicked. He has a lot of them left.”

He tried not to plan what he would do, or what he would say when he found Tain. He planned only to kill him before there were any words to haunt his sleep. His mother’s blood was on his hands and before he was done, his father’s would be. He promised himself that, and grew as crazed as he had been when it was the voices. Luz wanted him back. Luz tried, but he refused, continually refused, and bent the sanity he did have in one direction, into the sandy haze and toward his father.

They passed the last of the tribes and along beside the village camps. There Tain’s track moved inward, ran beside the tents, past one camp and a second.

Then as they might have guessed, that trail went into the midst of a village camp, and straight through its center and into the next.

Here was where Tain might change beshti, and steal one or two, but as yet they found no trace of that: besides that, the trail grew confused, Osan taking the scents of dozens of his kind, growing distracted: they would have to pick up the trail outside again, and that would cost time.

Sleeping men stirred beneath the tents, lifted heads from their arms. Or they were not quite sleeping, since the last intrusion.

“A man rode through,” Marak said to the villagers. “Where did he go?”

Several pointed the same way, back through the length of the camp, not to the side.

“Which villages will shelter him?” Antag asked, as they followed that track.

“The western,” Marak said. It made him think of home, of the walls of Kais Tain, irretrievable. Of neighboring villages, red walls and known wells, and boyhood friends, and pranks, and the shade of village gardens.

Marak, Luz said, trying to recover him. He had shown weakness and she found it. Marak, Marak, Marak, listen to me.

He refused.

He tried not to think about the villages, those times, those lessons, the years he had loved and respected this man as the god of his life. In his boyhood the sun had come up every morning over Tain’s shoulder, and all the world had been right… or would be if he could be quick enough, hard enough, strong enough, to win Tain’s approval.

In those years the western lords had all been Tain’s allies, and there had been no hint of the quarrels that would break the abjori apart. They had all fought against the Ila’s rule, which was eternal, remote from care of them and their needs. They had fought, and their cause was right.