So they sped up though they walked, and shucked their packs and scrambled at the same pace they ever had. The everyday uncanny of the monk’s trails took them at increasing speeds. They passed pillars of rock in the middle of trees, and rounded them to emerge in dry plateau. The woods were threadbaring; it was as if they trod through an old and thinning tapestry.

"Through… here I think," Qurabin would say, and their compass needles yawed haywire as they crossed leagues. They went faster than horses.

Qurabin’s efforts, Cutter understood, were apostate. Qurabin was wrenching things from the Moment’s domain of lost and hidden things. Every day Qurabin sounded lessened.

"You want to disappear." Cutter spoke it in a tiny voice. The monk was displaced, renegade, renounced by history and home. You want to disappear. Every lost route you uncover, you lose something-something’s hidden from you. You’ve had enough. And this is how you’ll do it. To make it mean something. Their journey was Qurabin’s protracted suicide.

"You know what the monk’s doing," Cutter said to Judah. "We better hope Qurabin don’t be all hidden or lost before we get where we’re going."

"It’s close," said Judah. He smiled then, a look of such joy that Cutter could not help but smile back.

The land was deep in grasses. Kettled glacial till, sloughs and dustbeds intermitted the low slopes. There had been so many weeks of journey. They saw mesquite copses and ruins. With the wind, the wild crops moved like sea. The monk grew weaker, more hidden, but cajoled and led them past water, past animal herds, python-sized centipedes wrapped around trees.

One day they saw things leave a trail of pollen and dust and shake the grasses like whales in shallows. Borinatch, strider, the ungulate plains nomads. A family clan, young at the front, the queen behind. The striders stood much taller than a man. They careered by with their tottering gallop, their legs unbending and swinging like crutches.

One of the sows turned a friendly bestial face and saw them, waved as she thundered past. Borinatch hands worked in strange ways. It looked as if her limb appeared and disappeared.

The travellers had become a tough crew. Their muscles were bunched; they were expert shots. Pomeroy’s cuts had stained inside, so he wore splendid dark scars. Elsie fastened a bandana about her wild hair. The men’s beards were long, their shag tied back with leather: only Drogon defied this, shaving dry every few days. They husbanded their dwindling bullets, carried fire-hard spears. They looked, Cutter thought, like adventurers, the continent’s merce-nary freebooters.

We ain’t though. There’s a damn reason for all our travels.

"It must be nearly Sinn, ain’t it?" he said. "Or is it already? I’ve lost track." They tried to work through the weeks on their fingers.