Halfway to the canal, Adare started to lose hope. Though the ground was uneven, riddled with divots and small depressions, it offered no place a grown man might disappear. She pressed on anyway, partly out of stubbornness and partly just to see the thing through. There was no telling if there might be a thin sandbar where the current had undercut the shore. It seemed unlikely, but there was no way to rule it out without looking.

She was almost to the water when she heard the sound. At first she thought it came from the deckhands on one of the canal vessels, a few men up late drinking plum wine and singing at the moon. When the breeze dropped, however, she realized it wasn’t singing at all, but a high, thin keening, a human voice, ragged and tremulous as a harp string tightened to the breaking point. The language was unfamiliar, if it was a language at all and not simply the raw expression of grief and confusion. The voice sounded close by, but Adare couldn’t see anyone, nor any trees or bushes that might obscure a person. Shoulders tightening, she moved down the bank.

She almost walked directly into the pit. No, she realized, pausing on the rim, peering down into the shadow below, not a pit, a foundation. It was small, maybe fifteen paces across, and the large stones at the lip had mostly tumbled inward. The few that remained teetered precariously, cracked and covered with moss, hidden by the tall grass and uneven ground. Down at the bottom, a few paces below her, Oshi crouched in the corner, golden robes ripped and begrimed, palms pressed to his ears as though to drown out the sound of his own voice.

“Nira,” Adare called, looking over her shoulder for the old woman. She was searching the canal bank a little way to the south, and Adare had to call once again, more loudly, to get her attention. “He’s here!” she said, gesturing toward the yawning hole in the earth. She turned back to find Oshi staring at her. He had fallen silent, worrying his upper lip with his teeth, and begun rocking back and forth in a quick, convulsive rhythm.

“Oshi,” Adare called down to him. Nira’s warning flitted through her mind, but the man was clearly lost, helpless, maybe even injured. “Oshi, why don’t you come back to the wagons?”

His eyes darted from her, to the ragged clouds above, to his own palms, which he held before his face as though they were ancient and inexplicable artifacts. Adare took a deep breath, picked out a collapsed section of wall where she could scramble down into the pit and, awkwardly clutching the lantern, slid down into the foundation, landing off-balance, but managing to keep her feet. She turned to find Oshi glaring at her.