By the evening the storm blew past, so that the stars began to appear in the heavens, the brightest first, then a wealth of them, like jewels scattered through the heavens. It was never so clear as after a blow.

The twenty-one dead meant that number would not be eating and drinking. That meant they were not short of water or food. Amid other pieces of good news, the boy Tofi thought he knew the way to Pori village, and recited the stars that guided them, Kop and Luta, which were clear and cold above them. He had been there. He thought he could go back accurately, and they would have no shortage of food or water, or canvas, which was well: Hati avowed Pori was within the range of the Keran, but she had never been there.

But of skilled hands… there was a marked shortage.

“Give the order,” Marak said to the boy, and Tofi said, “Break camp.” Tofi said it louder, for the slaves. “Get up! Strike the tents!”

It was no small labor, when the deep-irons were driven. They had to be dug out; and it was brutal work. In the absence of the freedmen and the other, more senior slaves, near their freedom, all of them, men and women, dug with whatever they could, all of them anxious to be on their way out of this ill-omened place. The slaves who had eaten and drunk so well were obedient, now, and by no means weak from hunger. One might hope those two had grown wiser and learned from all their mistakes, but Marak doubted it. Once the wind blew, and men began thinking that other men were going to take more than their share, the impulses that governed were not always wise. In the case of the slaves who, alone of the work party, had gotten back to their tent alive, they had thought they were dead anyway. So they grabbed and consumed in panic, vying with each other for the last scrap and thought nothing about the next day.

They learned now or both of them were dead, in Marak’s reckoning. The boy could think of mercy, once he realized the slaves had likely had nothing to do with his father’s death, and were guilty of nothing but surviving. But the Lakht was merciless even to the skilled, like Obidhen, let alone to fools who drank their water up for fear of dying, and there were few second chances.

The dead they had laid out decently, covering them under with the sand they dug out from around their supplies. They spent no extra labor at it, however. It was a burial only for the boy’s comfort, and the boy knew as a matter of course that vermin of the sand, like the vermin of the air, were clever and persistent. The company simply said the names of the lost a last time, and were done with ceremony.