“Well, some, maybe. They are a godsless people. Worshipping sand and wind and all manner of nonsense.”

Rhys had certainly met nomads further south who worshipped gods of wind and sand, but his captors had not been among them. There were many who still followed the one God, even out here in all this blackness.

He thought of Elahyiah, and the children. Did she still live? Did she think of him, or was she so relieved to get away that she did not spare him a thought? He closed his eyes, and remembered the happy years of their marriage, before the bel dames came. Everything had been destroyed after that. It was foolish to think he could put anything back together. Wasn’t it? Who was he now, without Elahyiah? Without Mehry and Nasrin and Rahim? Was he a man at all?

After so many weeks of travel, one became used to shifting vistas, hard-packed beds, and picking mites and midges from the bedding.

When the bugs became especially virulent, Hanife shared his repellent, and Rhys slathered himself in it every night, but in the morning—inevitable as the blue dawn—cysts had formed in the warm, dry flesh between his toes. He spent many of his waking hours coaxing them out and stowing them in a pouch so he could burn them each night. The scents released when they burned tended to act as an additional repellent. Hanife thought him mad to cut them out, but Rhys knew it always hurt worse if you let the little ticks and midges grow and split open on their own in a rush of blood and pus.

He got so used to traveling that it was not until the third day after Hanife told him they were nearing the end of the desert that he finally noted the thin black line on the horizon.

Rhys peered out past the group of desert men scouting ahead of them and said, “My God, what is that?”

“The end of the world,” Hanife said.

“My God,” Rhys said.

“Indeed,” Hanife said. “Now you are stuck with me, my friend. Now we are true partners.”

24.

Eshe threw three bandoliers of water bulbs onto the ground at the center of camp. He was wheezing. Blood oozed from three long slashes across his chest. Whatever thing they had battled out there while Kage shot at Ahmed and the assassins had lashed out with six sharp claws and then retreated into the darkness, yowling. He still trembled with the memory of that scream. It had sounded human.

Kage carried a second bandolier. She put it down next to his. He saw there were six or seven individual canisters missing from the bandolier, and wondered where she’d hid them. How many others had she smuggled away before he got over there to her and the assassins?

“So how many days is that?” he asked.