“My brother,” Khatijah said.

“Ah,” Nyx said.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry, Khatijah.”

“Khat,” she said.

“Khat.”

“Yours?”

“Woman, actually. Sixteen-year-old signed on for two years of service. Deserted after a month. I was twenty.”

“How’d you get her?”

“Didn’t. Never brought her in.”

Khatijah looked genuinely shocked. “You brought in all your notes, though. All the bel dames talk about it. The woman too stupid to give up a note.”

“I gave up that one.”

“What happened?”

“She was infected. Some shit from the Chenjans. Forty people died, mostly her kin.”

“Oh.”

“That’s why I always brought in my notes, after.”

“They don’t teach anybody that.”

“The note was never registered to me. I had some people change it.”

“You ran black work from the beginning, didn’t you?”

“I never pretended to be a good woman, Khat.”

Together, they walked back to Eshe’s body. Isabet was kneeling over him, weeping.

Nyx took Isabet by her good arm and yanked her up. She didn’t mean it to be kind. Isabet cried out in pain.

“You listen here, kitten,” Nyx said. “I don’t have patience for weakness. You cry over him tonight. I need you focused for whatever the fuck this desert flings at us next, including more of your Ras Tiegan handmaidens. Understand?”

Isabet shook her head. No, of course she didn’t understand. Nearly eight weeks in camp and her Nasheenian was still fucked.

“Tell her, Ahmed.”

He did.

“How do you want to handle the body?” Ahmed asked.

“Need to cut off the head,” Nyx said. She had nothing to burn him with out here, and if they left the head intact, he was at risk for coming back as some lumbering beetle.

“You want me to do it?” Ahmed asked.

She gazed off toward the horizon. “I’d prefer that, yes,” she said. Because I have become a weak old woman, she thought, but she could feel something coming loose inside her. She was losing some vital piece of herself. It was all about to unravel, and she feared that prepping Eshe’s body would be the catalyst.

“Won’t that call that… sand?” Kage said.

“Fuck,” Nyx said.

Safiyah appeared, quite suddenly, from the structures ahead of them.

Nyx had her scattergun out and her finger on the trigger before she realized who it was.

“Took your time,” Nyx said.

Safiyah raised up something she held behind her. It was a woman’s head. “Found their pyromancing magician,” she said. “That’s a conjuring trick I haven’t seen in a very long time.”

“Magician?” Nyx said. “A magician can do that?”

“Not just any magician,” Safiyah said. She tossed the head into the forest of white. Nyx realized the head was bloodless. “That’s a woman with some very old skill, something you don’t even see in Nasheen anymore.”

“And they can just blow people up like that?”