They used their food sparingly, and Samarkar took time in the evening before sleep to supplement their water with what she called out of the air, seemingly from nothing. They were coming into the heat of summer, when caravans avoided crossing the desert at all. Temur had a sense that they all feared the crossing. The days were passed in trudging forward, discussing their worries in low tones. The nights were passed staring awake on watches or sleeping hard, as they did in shifts. Even Hrahima must sleep sometime, and Temur was not an experienced walker, though he was slowly adapting.
But as they came up to the range of low hills where they planned to spend the night—preferably by the shores of a seep oasis, if they could find one of the ones the map suggested should be there—Temur’s measured step faltered. Because he saw green ahead, yes, a patch of grass and huddled trees, and from behind them he caught the glint and the scent of water.
But in the grass by that water stood something impossible: a liver-bay mare, head down, cropping the grass in the shade of a bush burdened with unripe pomegranates.
“I’m imagining things,” he said.
He would have rubbed his eyes to clear them, but Samarkar touched his wrist and said, “If you are, I’m imagining them too. That’s Bansh.”
She started forward, about to break into a jog despite the lingering ache in her thigh, but Brother Hsiung threw his arm in front of her. She checked sharply. When she glanced up at him, he shook his head.
She blinked and nodded. “If Bansh is here, it’s because someone rode her here. And that person is waiting for us.”
“And possibly does not have our best intentions at heart.” Hrahima crouched, bringing her face close to the earth, and sniffed. She stepped a little sideways, a movement that should have seemed crablike but was instead powerful, and sniffed again. “Nothing,” she said, standing. “The wind blows over the hills, from the east. The curve of the bluff could be holding the scent in a pocket of dead air, I suppose. But I can smell the mare.”
Temur drew his knife. “Carefully, then.”
As a group, they advanced, Brother Hsiung and Temur to the front—Temur holding his knife, Hsiung barehanded. Hrahima ranged out to the side, and Samarkar followed them, every sense straining.
But no matter how they searched, they found nothing. Nothing except Bansh, curried to a shine like afternoon sunlight, her tack hung neatly on the branches of a nearby pomegranate tree.
“Somebody brought you your horse,” Hrahima said, at last, tail lashing. “And I cannot smell on her—or her furniture—who.”
Temur had already come up to her and was rubbing her velvet nose, feeding her chips of dried fruit that he’d been intending to eat himself. Overhead, a drifting vulture circled.
A gift of the Eternal Sky, before we leave his lands entirely?
“Well,” Temur said. “I guess we work with it.”
* * *
In the morning, they topped the bluffs and looked out over the salt pan of a dead ancient sea. Temur wondered how he had thought the cracked lands behind them a desert, when all to the horizon this one stretched off-white, featureless, infinite.
Beside him, the others too stood and stared.
Bansh now carried most of their gear. What had been heavy packs for four humans and a Cho-tse was a moderate load for the mare. Temur was worried about water—how much, realistically, could Samarkar create?—but if all went well, they should be out of the desert in a hand of days and a little more. The mare could live on very limited food for that long, if Samarkar could keep her watered.
If all went well.
It was a faster route than rejoining the Celadon Highway, and Temur thought they’d have less chance of meeting up with assassins or Qori Buqa’s men. The attempt in Stone Steading left no doubt the killers were seeking Temur in particular. And of course, the blood ghosts could not cross the salt flats. They hoped.
The glare was eye-splintering, and salt dust rose up from their footsteps to coat their faces and mouths. After the first half day, they sheltered under canvas from late morning until evening, and walked by moon and starlight through the night. The hard-baked salt reflected even the sparsest starlight, giving them light to walk by. At least the pale hot sun crossed the sky in the proper direction. These were Uthman skies and not Rahazeen.
* * *
Every evening when she awoke and dragged herself from her hard bed, Samarkar found Temur leaning close to the bay mare, singing into her ears and stroking her mane. Well away from him, the barrel-bodied monk, stripped to his trews, was practicing the forms of his martial art in the still warmth and waning light.
The first thing Samarkar did was create water. With practice, she’d gained dexterity. Now she looked back at her fumbling first attempts with a kind of awe for how far she’d come in a few moons.