Now they spoke in low tones to a small caravan. The man at the front was young, the same color as the women, and tall as they were, with the same weathered skin and eroded features. It was as if the wind had worn away their very faces. Generally, these desert people had wide, flat noses like Ras Tiegans, and flat foreheads, teardrop-shaped mouths, and very narrow, almond-shaped eyes that reminded him of an alien he had seen once from New Kinaan. In his many days—weeks?—traveling with these women, he had also discovered that they prayed almost constantly. When they camped each night, the first on watch would take up the prayer, so there was always someone in the group muttering the litany. Most of it made little sense to him. He recognized traces of the prayer language. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend it was the true language of prayer—perhaps the way it first sounded in his youth, before he understood it—something he felt he should know intimately but couldn’t quite make out.

The man they spoke to wore a long red dhoti and leather baldric bristling with weapons. Behind him were two chariots that appeared to be harnessed to a dozen massive green beetles, their jeweled carapaces sparkling in the sun. The beetles’ humped backs were waist high, their mandibles tall as Rhys’s knee—the perfect height for cutting off a man’s leg. The chariots were manned by soldiers in expensive black organic slicks and frilled turbans that gave them another hand of height. These men were paler than the others, but only just. He supposed they could easily have been the richer strata of this society, kept paler and smooth behind filters, like the First Families of Nasheen, but he doubted it. They didn’t seem native to the desert.

The chariots flanked a more… unconventional craft. It was a little like an open-air bakkie hung with prayer wheels, only instead of tires, the frame was buoyed by what must have been several million ants, each as large as Rhys’s thumb. They had to have a nest within the vehicle’s primary cistern. Perhaps it bred its own replacements? Ants and bees were especially easy to tailor for conducting specific tasks. They lived and died according to the instructions they received from complex chemical compounds. Rhys supposed it wasn’t much of a stretch to replace a bakkie’s expensive semi-organic tire structure with a more durable, cheaper alternative that wouldn’t get buried in the sand. Still, the sheer skill it must have taken a magician to create these kinds of insects—strong and pliable enough to reliably carry a vehicle and its inhabitants across shifting sand—was extraordinary. He wanted to meet the magician who’d done it.