Eshe watched her kick about in the loam like a lost dog. From a distance, the land here had looked like an oasis, but up close the tangled fingers of the structures that towered over them were spiny, lichen-covered ridges made of some bone or mineral. Bits of detritus had gotten caught up in the tops of them. He saw sage, desert grasses, and even the mangled body of some parrot or raven that must have died on impact. The air smelled of death here, though Eshe saw no other dead creature. It took him some time to realize the smell came from the loamy soil surrounding the lichen-trees.

Eskander wandered about the maze of lichen-trees in slow circles, raising and lowering her hands.

“Poor excuse for a magician,” Ahmed muttered beside him. “I can feel her tapping into swarms like she’s asking directions, but most of it’s just jumbled and confused.”

Kage walked up to join them. She, too, gazed at the magician.

“Are we lost?” she asked.

“It appears so,” Ahmed said.

“Fatima put her in charge,” Eshe said. “What did you expect? Shortest path?”

Isabet chimed in, in Ras Tiegan. “This is a waste of time. You should shift and scout.”

Eshe sighed and moved past her, toward Eskander. “You don’t want to see how much food I’d have to eat to come back after a shift out here,” he said.

“You did it in Ras Tieg all the time.”

“There were a lot of things I did in Ras Tieg,” he said. “Not all of them are a good idea here. Or did you not get that yet?”

He glanced behind them. Khatijah was the problem. They had spent far too long waiting for her to recover, and her walk was much slower now. Painful. Ahmed said he did what he could for the pain, and Eshe knew that whatever drugs the bug in her head pumped out helped, but she and Nyx were supposed to be their strongest members. Now, with the missing hunk in her leg, and persistent limp, she wandered around like a shambling corpse. And then there was Isabet, of course, and her stump of an arm.

“What are you looking for?” Ahmed called down at Eskander.

She jerked her head up. “Eh?”

“What bug are you trying to call?”

“Oh, it’s a tricky one. Tricky, tricky,” she muttered. “A kind of sand worm. The larva sometimes has memory of its parent. Should be able to tell us where to go.”

Kage said, “That does not sound—”

Ahmed cursed softly. “She’s madder than a Tirhani martyr.”