One of the pack beasts had fallen, and took his burden with him, sliding all the way down to the bottom. It flailed and bawled and could not rise from its burden, and it remained a sobering example of a misstep until they could make the long descent and deal with it.

The beast when they reached it had broken bones, and had to be killed: Bosginde did that with a quick stroke and covered the blood-soaked shale with shovelfuls of dry sand, where he could scrape enough together for the purpose.

The water bags had not broken. None of the supplies was lost, except a tent’s deep-irons, which lay far up on the unstable slope, in plain sight, but Tofi ruled against sending anyone up, no matter the value.

“We can cut the beast up for meat,” the potter said. “We can take the best.”

“No,” Hati said fiercely. “Leave it all. Leave all the gear. Let us move. We may have saved those three fools, but we may lose ourselves if we stand staring!”

There was that feeling in the wind. There was disaster about the whole day, and Tofi gave the order to the slaves to apportion out the packs and get them all moving.

Even so, the first crawling vermin appeared among the rocks before they had gotten the packs redistributed.

“What is that?” Norit asked, looking around her. There was a scrabbling in the rocks, a snarl of combat. “What’s that?”

“A feast in the desert gains too many guests,” Marak said. They had followed a blood trail. With the letting of the blood from the beast’s wounds, they had the raw meat smell about them. It carried far on the desert wind: even a man could smell it. Carrying pack items that might have blood on them had risk, once the carrion-eaters gathered.

Haste, the voices said to him, no delay. No waiting.

The storm would have driven the vermin to cover, and to hunger, and the rearrangement of the land would drive some of the smallest out of their ranges. The whole path of the storm might be unsettled, and that storm track took shape in the back of Marak’s mind the way the shape of the storm had appeared in the images. He sensed desperation in the circling predators. He cursed himself for a fool not having anticipated that Foragi might have been already past reason.

One need not fear the strongest beast on the Lakht, that was the proverb. The strongest would take the carcass. But the weak were gathering, too, and they might follow the second choice. He saw the sky over them gathering with ten and twenty and thirty of the vermin.

“Hurry,” Tofi said to the slaves, as they went about the work with the packs. “You’ll be first and afoot if the vermin come on us! Move, you sons of damnation!”