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Clovis snorted. “Ignore them. They’re idiots.” She wiped her mouth and looked around at the small group with him. “This is all of you?”

Arpix nodded. He led them on, over a low rise and down into the depression where they had made camp in the reconstructed shell of a building whose masonry had lain half-covered by the dust. The canith wouldn’t be looking at that, of course: they would be staring at the head, neck, and shoulder of the great queen, all slightly tilted such that it gave the impression the huge statue might be about to plunge back beneath the surface.

The stone head was a good ten feet tall when measured from the bottom of the slightly pointed chin to the top of the over-wide forehead.

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” Evar growled.

“What?” Arpix was often far from sure he wasn’t putting his own interpretation on random snarling.

“A poem from antiquity,” Evar said. “There was a city here once, I think.”

“Yes. There are old tunnels riddling the plateau. Most of them collapsed. If not for the things we found down there we would have died shortly after arriving.”

“Where’s the weapon?” Clovis proved herself to be single-minded.

“I don’t know.” Arpix raised a hand to forestall any more threats. “It’s somewhere below us, I assume. Buried with the city it protected. It might be as small as a pebble or larger than a city square. I have no idea. We discovered its existence in the same sort of way that you did—standing inside the zone, looking out at angry skeer, and thanking whatever gods were watching over us.” He turned away from Clovis to address Evar, who was larger yet somehow less intimidating than his sister. “How did you get here? Do you know what happened to Livira and the others?”

Arpix had no experience of reading emotion on the face of canith but he felt sure that Evar’s sudden stillness and the way he looked down at his hands, bringing them together to wrestle slowly with each other, was not a good sign. A coldness gripped him. “Evar?”

The others had caught Livira’s name. Meelan, who had been sitting on a nearby rock, stood up quickly and stared as if trying to squeeze the meaning out of their conversation. Salamonda’s hand found Jella’s and together they came to stand beside Arpix.

Evar met Arpix’s gaze reluctantly. “I met Livira in the Exchange. Her friend, Malar, was injured and we came through my portal, to my time... now... to heal him—”

“She’s here?” A flicker of hope. Arpix couldn’t help but look around, knowing himself to be a fool even as he did so.

“We went back to look for you. She insisted. We were all ghosts—you understand? We could see but not touch. She and Malar got bound up inside assistants.”

“Inside?” Arpix tried to imagine it.

“Inside.” A growl and a nod. “I understood then that they had been trapped in the assistants that raised all of us.” He waved an arm at his siblings, both of whom rumbled in their throats. A noise that sounded like mourning. “I came back to the now. But I was too slow. Both assistants had been destroyed.”

A short keening noise that was almost a howl escaped Clovis. “The Soldier died hard. Many fell before him.”

“Destroyed?” Arpix understood the word; he just hadn’t thought it was possible. “An assistant?”

“By skeer warriors. Lots of them.”

“So where are Livira and Malar?” Arpix needed Livira to be somewhere. She couldn’t have come to her end like that. Not broken by skeer. His voice had softened past the point at which he could get the raw edges of the canith words through his sore throat. But Evar seemed to understand anyway.

“I don’t know.”

Meelan grabbed Arpix’s arm. “What’s he saying? It’s bad, isn’t it? I don’t believe him.” Anger tried to hide another emotion and his voice shook with denial.

“How long ago?” Arpix asked Evar.

“Days. Days... I tried to save her. I ran... I was too slow.” And Evar, showing more and sharper teeth than Arpix had imagined he possessed, slowly tore his hand across his chest, leaving three deep, bleeding furrows.

Arpix turned away from the canith warrior, having no answer for Evar’s pain or his own. “Assistants,” he managed, reaching for Meelan’s shoulder. “Livira and the soldier, their spirits got trapped inside assistants...”

“No!” Meelan shook his head slowly, studying the ground. He looked up sharply, eyes bright. “That was her? The assistants that saved us from the fire? That was her and Malar?”

Salamonda and Jella, understanding the emotions but not both sides of the conversation, closed in without questions, and for a long moment they stood, bound in a circle of each other’s arms, voiceless in their grief.

—

For the next two days, Evar watched over Kerrol and treated his wounded shoulder with help from Salamonda. Clovis proved less nurturing than her brother and instead insisted that she be shown the abandoned workings cut into the plateau.

Arpix had explained that when they had first arrived they had survived only because of the limited equipment they were able to scavenge from the tunnels. Their first saviour had been rope. Not from some inhabitant of the buried city—rope would never survive that long, even in a desert—but from some more recent habitation, when perhaps some other travellers had discovered that skeer left the area alone and had stayed for a while. The rope enabled them to reach the well’s water. Lengths of timber and a rusting hoe head had been other important finds.