He strode toward the abandoned chariot. His hands began to shake as he untangled the caterpillar’s lead from its hitch. He leapt into the cart and pushed out into the desert, beyond the circle of the caravan. He kicked at the supplies in the chariot, and noted that he did not have much water. He needed to go back the way they had come and tell someone what had happened. He needed to get back to Tejal, to find Elahyiah and his children. But the wind had started up, smearing the caravan’s tracks across the desert, blowing more smoke. He was bitterly cold. Above him, the sky was alive with purple fire.

He turned back once. The caravan was some ways distant. No one was following him. He heard screaming, then Khairian singing. The trembling got worse. He was tired of killing for lost causes. He closed his eyes, and tried to still his racing heart with the memory of why he had come to this Godforsaken place.

The night the bel dame assassins came for him and his family in Tirhan, they had taken his hands, nearly drowned his wife, and killed his daughters. They found Souri’s body that night, but not his elder daughter, Laleh. He had searched for her body, and had the well dredged, and put in a report with the Tirhani order police. Elahyiah told him he was obsessed about a ghost, and after two years he let it rest. He had tried to rebuild his life, his family, even though he had failed to protect them that night, when the bel dames burned the world down around them.

So many failures. He no longer wondered what God would say to him at his death. He no longer anticipated paradise. He was a deserter and a coward. And a killer. What was one more body now that he had failed at everything else?

He was already damned. But he could not fail his family again.

Rhys huddled in his burnous against the chill and prayed for a warm dawn. A new day. A clean beginning.

But as the caravan burned behind him, he admitted to himself that there was no starting over.

Just running. Endless, mindless running across the desert, into a future much bleaker than the past.

11.

Inaya knelt at the foot of Saint Mhari, murmuring a prayer of safekeeping she had intoned since her childhood, long before she understood the words. It was an hour after midnight mass, when only the most desperate and downtrodden still walked the dim passages and knelt in the narrow prayer niches of the church, seeking solace from lesser saints whose concerns, they hoped, were easier to bear than God’s, and so could afford to pay them more attention. It was her mother who first took her here to these lesser spaces; the small, secret spaces.