“I would rather see this all go another way,” she said.

The prayer ended. Around them, women began rolling up their prayer rugs. People returned to the streets.

“Get out of Mushtallah,” the woman said.

She watched the woman step abruptly backward into the wall of the tavern, but instead of smacking hard into the wall, the woman simply passed through it, through the veil of some glamour that likely led below, into one of the magicians’ tunnels—the Abd-al-Karim—that linked key cities from the old world.

“I will leave Mushtallah in my own time,” she murmured into her tea, and turned her gaze once more to the sky.

The Families, too, had their own shortcuts to the other side of the world. She had only to choose her moment.

Above, the alien ship hung still and silent in the night.

23.

It did not take Rhys a week to become conversant in Yazdani. It took two.

By then, he had learned that Hanife was one of three brothers come down from Yazdani, a country far beyond the desert wall. Rhys had never heard of it—had never heard of anything beyond Khairi—not the desert wall, and not Yazdan.

“Of course not,” Hanife said. “Until we crossed the Wall and made peace… well, stopped making war with these damned unbelievers, we thought all their stories about a world beyond the Wall on our side was a myth. Ships never make it out of harbor up there. And going overland, well, that requires coming to this godsfucked place. You can understand.”

“How far are we from there?” Rhys asked one night as they camped under a black, cloudless sky. The only stars he saw were far to the south, ringing the horizon behind him. The further north they went, the blacker the sky. He wondered if he would see anything at all but the moons and the billowing purple curtains of light if they went any further.

Hanife was feeding some kind of dust into the fire. It popped and crackled, burning high and hot for hours. He and the driver and the charioteers slept near the fire, but the desert men slept beyond them, in the cool darkness. They drew a circle around themselves, and clustered at the center of it. One man remained on watch all night. It was a different man each night, but never in shifts—though it seemed the nights themselves had grown longer.

“From where, Yazdan? Oh, we aren’t even past the Wall yet. Don’t you know where that is? Ever seen it?”

Rhys shook his head. He had heard there was a wall, but he had seen many walls in his time.

“How many people go beyond the wall?”

“Not enough,” Hanife said. “Or maybe too many.”

“Is there a market for slaves there?”

“Slaves?” Hanife looked appalled. “That word. The gods frown on that type of thing. The Yazdani don’t take slaves.”

“Don’t you enslave the nomads?”