A few hours of freedom and Awa’s head throbbed and her butt ached. The poison master reminded her of compelling fiends in the border-void who could unravel the best minds. Yet the headache was her own fault. She could never help thinking a knotted thing apart. This was her genius and also torment. Most Sprites played first thought against second and third thoughts and, no matter the clash and confusion, held the polyrhythm for truth. Awa never stopped at a clash of three or five or seven or … How else to survive Smokeland or a transgressor hut? She hadn’t forgotten herself after all.

Fannie hesitated, wary of sludge surging across the Empire Road. The poison master caressed her neck and ears and melded his body to hers as she scrambled into brush away from deluge. Monster and all, he was a true horseman. Awa pressed her face into his icy cape and clung to his waist, praying he wouldn’t get thrown.

“Just water,” he murmured, coaxing Fannie back to the road. “Water will save us. Water is life.” He whispered about the wonders of wetness and the miracle of muscle and bone. Was he a lapsed Elder like the traitors who helped Zamanzi raid her enclave? Or a Babalawo, a father of mysteries from the floating cities gone witchdoctor rogue? “You know water,” he said, calming even the screeching crows. “You are water.”

“We’re all water,” Awa mumbled, “still—” Too much water ripped and roared toward the narrows and the only bridge outside Holy City for leagues and leagues, a triple-arch stone structure on disputed land that nobody tended to. “We could be trapped in this valley between a flood and a deadly sandstorm.”

“I know.” The poison master didn’t seem like a suicide. This flood must be more destruction coming faster than he had expected.

Awa couldn’t really fathom what he had expected.

“Rogue impulses.” He talked to her thoughts. Hopefully he wouldn’t make that a habit.

Fannie stumbled on through refuse battering the road. Rather than worry about drowning, Awa lost herself in the polyrhythm of blood beats. The horse’s heart was a bass djembe drum, half the pace of the man’s. The crows’ treble hearts went too fast for counting. Awa’s heart played among these beats. Sprite discipline rescued her again. Still alive, why fear death and spoil your moments? They managed to reach the narrows before an exhausted mount dumped them in brush or the flood swept the road away. Awa smelled Holy City deluge gaining on them, a burnt blood and raw sewage odor. Cathedral trees bellowed as the ground quaked and tore up their roots. Across the river, the distant foothills of the Eidhou mountain range beckoned.