And Rhys had repaid his kindness by running away.

Amid the mounds, Rhys searched for a particular hand-shaped protuberance. He expected it would be something made of the same bug-cemented sand as the rest of the mounds—but no, the hand-shaped figure he found was made of dusty gray stone, seemingly carved from a solid piece. It was twice as tall as Rhys, and half the height of the nearest mound. It stuck up from the now reddish-brown sand as if it had simply been grown there. When he reached out to touch it, expecting the cool, gritty texture of stone, he found instead that it had a subtle give to it, like a live thing—a fungus or lichen.

The cairn was half-buried in the sand to the left of the obelisk, just a tumbledown of rotten stone bound with bug secretions. He climbed off the chariot and knelt at the edge of the cairn. He began removing stones to reach the guardian below. A waft of cool air met his face. It was the most delicious thing he’d felt in days. The sun was already high and hot, and even with the hood of his burnous up, the heat was oppressive. In the darkness beneath the cairn, he sensed the guardian—a wormlike insect as big around as his head, quietly resting in the cool dim. It took a few minutes to find the right combination of pheromones to affect it. When he finally felt it respond and go inert, he carefully reached his water bulb inside. He filled four more and then began replacing the stones.

He raised his head.

Women emerged from the world around him.

They seemed to come up from the sand itself, like Nasheenian women did in his dreams—half a dozen of them, wearing calf-length dhotis, breast-bindings, and heavy turbans the color of fresh blood, that wound about their heads and faces. The ends trailed out behind them like tattered flags. The clothing was the same color of the sand in this part of the desert, as if it had been dipped in blood and left to age in the sun.

The women were nearly the same color, reddish-brown, darker at the knees and elbows. But it was their height that impressed him. They were tall as giants—the tallest rose above him by a full head and shoulders.

Rhys froze. His bullets were deadtech—difficult to replace out here—and he was down to his last four. Two short of what he needed.

“What happens now?” Rhys asked, in Khairian.

The women said nothing.