“He’s gone madder than I was,” Marak said. “Now I’m the sane one, and he’s trying to kill the lot of us. Stop him if you see him. At best, persuade the rest not to follow him.”

But in all their wandering back in line they had not yet come to Kais Tain, and they had come a long way back. They rested the beshti beside the column, letting them sit a while as the dark gathered about them. Some village bands, passing them, sent to know who they were, and they told them, and advised them about Tain and the danger to all of them.

Meanwhile the dust stayed up and the wind kept blowing, a stiff wind at the caravan’s back… far better than a facing wind. The sand piled up against the beshti’s feet as they stood by the wayside, and vermin prowled about, prompting an occasional stamp and threat.

In that rest they shared a little of their provisions, that water and that food which every tribesman carried against emergency, and to increase the food and water store of their group.

It was soon dark, a sand-choked night in which Marak saw it was folly for the villages to keep going: the weak lagged, and if not for the beshti’s following, other beshti might well stray off the track and lose themselves in the dunes. If he were at the fore of it, secure in the heart of the tribes, he might not himself realize the struggle back here, the fragile contact between straggling village groups, with village-bred beshti, many of them not the swiftest, not conditioned for long treks, rather beasts of local burden, soft as their local handlers.

As the Keran and the Haga had not realized it. As Hati had not. He tried to make Norit hear him, through Luz, but that never succeeded. Luz seemed to look through his eyes only seldom, and with difficulty, and if she spoke, it was less loud and less real than the wind rushing past him. The villages dared not stop, and the vermin got in among the beshti, quarreling over the latrine sites and the cook sites, which became a seething mass of small, unwholesome bodies.

How long they traveled then they had no idea. There were no stars to measure time, no light at all in the heavens. The earth shuddered briefly, and people on the march cried out soft, weary alarm.

Something mid-sized and furtive slipped up on them, encountered them, and shied away, vermin that feared the beshti. After that several others likewise shied back from the beshti, and lost themselves in the dusty dark.

Antag and his brothers were brave men, and not stupid ones. They must long since have known what had taken him longer to admit.