“Of course. Surely you were there? All dead, just north of Tejal. All but you. The gods were kind to spare you. I have taken on the blood debt you owed for whatever hoo-hoo you killed out there in the desert. I understand. These things happen. But as long as I own the blood debt, I’d suggest you not run off anywhere. It’ll take you four years to work it off. That’s not so bad a time, then?”

“What?”

“Your blood debt was worth far more than five thousand notes. Twenty thousand, at least.”

“Twenty thousand?” Rhys could not imagine such a sum. “You’re indenturing me, then?”

“Indenture, yes. I had forgotten that clever word. It’s the southern ones who use it, mostly. Here it is simply called working off your blood debt. Which begins now. It’s another few weeks until we get back to the hold, so I suggest you begin learning Yazdani now. My staff is at your disposal. I will caution you though. If it turns out you have lied to me… If you are not as clever as you pretend, well… Many men die in the desert. You understand.”

“I understand,” Rhys said. “But what about—”

Hanife shook his head, and started talking to him in Yazdani.

Rhys crawled into the back of the vehicle, and drank his water. When he was done, they gave him two more, as if water were not the most precious resource in the world. Compared to traveling with the austere desert women, his new companions were chatty and gregarious, especially Hanife.

Among Rhys’s many concerns was Hanife’s epithet. He had said something about… gods. Rich men could be good allies, but rich men without a shared morality—infidels—were dangerous. He needed to tread even more carefully here. The desert women he could understand. They reminded him of bel dames, of Nasheenians, and he knew how to regard them. But these people, these Yazdanis, were something else entirely. Something unknown. He was reminded of a story about a beggar accepting water from a beautiful woman at a well, and how after offering water, she had offered her charms. The devout man in the story had refused her, but they were both eaten by djinn. She for harlotry, and he for accepting soiled water from a known harlot.

But as the driver passed him yet another water pod and the world began to feel cooler, and not so disjointed, he remembered that it was actually a Ras Tiegan story.

What was the Chenjan one? Why could he not remember? Or were they so much the same that he confused them?

He drank.

20.

Eskander had them turned around again.