“Omi,” Tofi began to protest, but his voice trailed off under a series of gasping cries from the lady.

“If I can see the tent, I’ll make it.”

“Take a rope,” Tofi pleaded with him, Tofi, who had lost a father and brothers to an ill-advised venture out in a storm less than this one.

He had no need of a rope: he could find Hati blind and across the width of the Lakht… he had become convinced of that. But Tofi gave him a coil of cord otherwise set aside for repair, and he gave one end to Tofi to hold.

Then he took a tight wrap of his aifad, unlaced the storm flap and escaped the pain and anguish inside the tent into a hell on earth outside.

It had begun to be daylight. The air outside was all red dust, beshti half-buried and with windburn so bad the wounds were caked and plastered with the same red as the air.

He had lied. He could not see the Ila’s tent, but he remembered where it had been when they set up camp; he ached with the need to do something more than sit waiting—and if it were Hati, he knew he would want to know; and there were debts, to the lady, to Memnanan. There were debts that asked a risk. There was, below it all, a need to know what the state of affairs was in the camp, a need to reach someone outside their tightly clenched world and reassure himself there were other living souls.

He walked out from the lee of the tent, staggering in the gusts—there was the hard part, maintaining his orientation when he was blown half off his feet and blinded by dust, but the wind itself was a direction marker, and he walked, with the wind battering his left shoulder.

He counted two intervening tents, the Ila’s servants or her guards had crowded up their tents between: he had not marked who was in the tents, but he had remembered they were there.

He made his way past two groups of beshti in no better and no worse condition than their own, sandy, wind-scoured ghosts in the red murk that passed for daylight.

Now the way was straight out of that wind-shadow across a narrow gap of blowing sand, and to the Ila’s tent, with two others pitched up against it.

He was blind for a moment, then found the ropes, and followed the side of the main tent around to the sheltered east end, where the storm flap was laced tight. The wind gusted: canvas shook to a wind so hard and sand-edged it abraded his exposed hands. He saw fraying on a taut edge of the canvas itself, and bones—bones, scoured white, that had blown up against the tent wall, along with minute scraps of cloth tattered to rags, buried in sand.

“Memnanan!” he called out. “Captain!”