The first of the flying and the crawling vermin arrived and began worrying at the carcass with them only a stone’s throw away. Another few sent down a shower of shale fragments, coming down the slide.

The quick and the desperate came first. They were not the strongest, only the earliest, the most opportunistic, harbinger of what else would come. They growled and tore into the carcass and the scent of blood and then entrails grew in the air.

“Hurry!” Hati said.

“A’ip!” Tofi yelled. “Ya! a’ip!” The beast the slaves were loading stood trembling, and without complaint, when she gave a jerk on its lead.

More of the flying vermin had landed.

And a glance off across the land showed a furtive, eye-deceiving movement as if the land itself had come to life.

Marak saw Norit into the saddle, delayed to assist Tofi’s women while Tofi railed on his slaves. Osan had gotten up onto his feet.

He did not delay then to make Osan kneel again. He seized the rein, jumped, and seized the saddle, hauling himself up by brute strength until he put a foot in the mounting loop, a move he had doubted he could do. Osan was moving before he could land in the saddle and tuck his leading foot into place. Tofi scrambled up, and the slaves mounted in desperate haste, the pack beasts tethered in line and each trying to move at once.

Osan quickened his pace, flicking his ears in distress, laying them back at what he smelled. The beasts knew what the nomads of the Lakht knew, what Hati had foretold. Marak himself had never seen a mobbing… few in the Lakht had seen it and lived.

The beasts picked up their pace, treading heedlessly, crushing small vermin that chanced underfoot, creatures hardly more than a hand’s length. The mobbing started on that scale, other creatures turning toward the smell of death near at hand, already beginning to gorge and being bitten and clawed by other creatures nearby.

In an instant what had begun as a flattened multipede became a fist-sized ball of struggling eaters that grew larger by the moment.

All that hunger, Marak thought, only a day or so out from the rich oasis of Pori. And the storm had churned it to madness of a different kind, a natural frenzy.

The beshti hit a traveling run, a difficult pace for the unhabituated, and next to a flat-out bolt, which might fling the weak riders from the saddle. Marak held Osan back, and crossed him in front of Tofi’s men, who were about to break ahead.

“Don’t wear them down,” he said sharply. Hati pulled in front with the same advice, and they slowed the impulse toward outright flight. At a moderate pace they reached sand that no longer moved.

Then they counted themselves truly escaped, and fortunate.

They did not overtake Malin and the ex-soldiers.