Of all the writhing, gliding, squirming, clacking, chittering things Ahmed had seen out here, cicadas weren’t one of them. “No. They mutants?”

Nyx set three of the water bladders in front of the trader. “Ask him if he has sen,” she said.

Ahmed shook his head.

“They come out every twenty years or so,” the trader said. “This is the season. I saw them when I was a kid. Big fuckers. Eat a caravan whole. Big teeth.”

“Cicadas don’t have teeth,” Ahmed said.

“Sen,” Nyx said.

“Do you have any sen?” Ahmed asked.

The trader shook his head. “Not sure what that is.”

“How much for this, then?” Ahmed asked. And then, to Nyx, “Is this all? There’s no sen.”

The trader preferred bugs, but they didn’t have any, so Ahmed served as middleman while they haggled in Nasheenian currency.

Once they were agreed, Ahmed loaded up their goods.

“What was he saying?” Nyx asked as they walked out.

He told her.

“Why’d you argue?”

Ahmed snorted. “I wasn’t arguing. I was educating.”

“Let me tell you. Best way to get yourself staked out on the sand and left for dead is to ignore the locals. You don’t know this place.”

“Teeth!” the trader called after them, making claws with his hands.

“Peace be,” Ahmed muttered.

“Let’s get breakfast and find a guide,” Nyx said. “I heard there’s a tea house where folks hire themselves out to caravans seeking to cross the Wall.”

“Can we afford a guide?”

“Of course not. But we can afford to feed and clothe somebody, now that the magician is dead. Here, the tea house is this way.”

Ahmed followed her through the riotous mass of colorful people. He wondered where all the people had come from. Weeks and weeks across this desert, and they hadn’t seen more than a handful of figures, most of them moving away from them.

“You don’t speak Khairian. How did you find out so much around here?”

“You don’t have to speak a language to pick up on things. People talk without speaking all the time. You should know that. You worked intel.”

“Did you pick up on why there are so many people out here?”

“It’s a trade city, intelligence boy.”

“Did you see a lot of people out there?”

“Not any people who wanted to be found,” Nyx said. “You forget we’re in somebody else’s country. They’ve got their ways of avoiding outsiders, don’t they?”

He thought of the raven-filled settlement, and the strange prayer niches. They could have come within three hundred paces of that settlement and not seen it. It took stumbling right into it to find it.

“Hurry up,” Nyx said. “It’s just here.”