Table of Contents

In between tiny, nibbling bites of the offered barley and dates, my strange companion provided something of an explanation for the circumstances in which we found ourselves. Her name was Fenin, and she was a maiden selected from birth with the dubious honor of being offered up as a meal to the great worm of the desert. To that end, she had been taken from her home and placed here, loosely tied to this rock, just that morning. For the preceding seventeen years of her life, she had been kept apart from others in a small house in the center of town, permitted to leave only with three escorts. “Svilsara is the greatest city upon the earth,” she insisted, though from her description, it only took an hour to complete her daily, supervised circuit of its inner wall. In that small house, she was provided with everything she could want: the finest of clothes and delicacies, a room full of books, and next year’s sacrifice as a companion. Why she looked as though she had been starved for a year and was dressed only in a threadbare, dust-stained robe, without even straw sandals to protect her feet from the sunburnt rock, she did not say.

Table of Contents

The desert was called Shunkare in the tongue of the merchants—one I did not yet know, and was unlikely to learn, traveling alone except for my horse—and it was made of dust, fine as silk and permeable as water. Save for the few days of the year when the rains came, the air burned to breathe and carried dust into the lungs, slaying the unwise and unmasked slowly and painfully while it painted the sky in streaks of violet with each rising and setting of the sun. As I set out from the oasis, I could see for miles: endless drifts of fine sand, carved by flooding and dried in place, like a frozen white sea.