They passed the villages more rapidly now, the caravan’s motion carrying them past as they rode toward the rear: Kais Goros, Kais Tagin, and Undar went by: the westernmost villages were not the hindmost in the line.

They passed Kais Karas and Kais Madisar, and the wind was, if anything, fiercer, coming in gusts that reddened the air with sand. They had come into a place where a deep wash rolled down to a dry alkali bed and where there was little room on the column’s right hand. By then, shadows had begun to gather, the sun dying in murk.

But on that rock Marak saw the bright scratches in the slope where a rider had gone down, and another where he had climbed up again and onto the far side, and so toward the low stony ridges.

“No knowing whether it’s Tain himself,” Antag said, and Marak said to himself that it was true. He would wager if he looked to the other side of the camp he would see other tracks, and that Tain had sent a man out to divert pursuit and himself taken another route.

“He’s gone straight through the camp,” he guessed suddenly, and rode through the traveling column, dodging between riding beasts and pack train.

It was the same story there, tracks on the far side of the line, perhaps another diversion. More, it was the village of Mortan, and two men he asked for by name in this village of the western Lakht were both missing.

They rode on. Another and another village they searched, and heard nothing, and found nothing. The next village had seen men riding through, and had no idea who they were, except they thought they were bandits.

Tain might have abandoned diversions, ridden straight back to Kais Tain, wherever it fell in the order of march.

But in his doubt the voices, hitherto silent in this business, began to echo in his head, Luz’s summons, Luz’s urging: Marak, Marak, come back. This is too far.

They passed new graves, walking staffs marking the place where someone of the villages, likely the old, had simply given out during the last rest. Vermin had already dug up the dead, and fought and snarled over the pits, not a good sight. But there was no longer any hint along the trampled side of the tents that a band had gone this way or that. There might by now be ten or so men weaving in and out of the camps to confuse pursuit, men going off across the sand to lay false trails and coming back again.

Marak! the voices insisted, out of patience with his desertion, and he knew, as surely by now Antag and his men knew, that they had lost Tain’s track.