A watchtower stood over a well the Legion had drilled through bedrock decades before. To the west was the Red Sand Sea. To the east was high scrub, Cygnus Point invisible in the distance. Near the watchtower a supply officer checked our wagons against a manifest. Sertorius shook my hand once, briefly.
"Eight days, by the survey," he said. "Maybe nine. My cartographers walked the first two days themselves. The rest is based on what they saw with a glass from a high ridge line. Past that you're on your own." He held my eye a moment longer than the sentence needed. "It's the best the Empire can give you. It's better than nothing."
He put the map in my hand himself, rolled into an oiled tube stamped with a mark, then turned back towards his men. The Legate was back at Cygnus Point somewhere, and Tullus with him. He had washed his hands of it, and our conversation was finished.
It was a strange feeling preparing to cross the Red Sand Sea from the other direction. I had walked out of Heliqar with my whole city lined up along the road to see me go, boys saluting from a low wall and my mother's eyes on me until she made herself look away. Since then I had spent every day being watched. Most often by Ruvuk's men, and sometimes by Ruvuk himself. Cygnus Point had not bothered to see us off.
We had four tuspaks, none older than three years, requisitioned from a herd at Cygnus Point that had never crossed the Sea and didn't yet carry the exhaustion our own beasts had in their eyes by the end of the outbound crossing. We had three wagons instead of six with skid plates that had never touched sand and wheel rims some Legion engineer had already thought to widen before we asked him to. It was better equipment than I had built myself. It is unsettling to be handed a solved problem you had planned on fighting.
The map unsettled me more. I unrolled it that first night under the awning out of old habit, looking for the place where I would start correcting it, and there was nowhere to start. Every distance on it was given with precision I couldn't verify. My own cairn line I could read like my own handwriting, because I had walked every mile of it at least twice. This was confident but unvetted. Bastien found me still looking at it an hour later.
"Time for me to read you," he said. "You don't trust a number you didn't write."
"I've never crossed this way. Neither has anyone from Heliqar." I rolled up the map. "There's no cairn out here if this map is wrong. Nothing we put in the ground ourselves to fall back on. I don't like owing my life to someone else's survey."
"You've been owing your life to worse than a survey for months," Bastien said, and went to check the harnesses.
The rhythm came back by the second day. Wake before the sun found the dunes, walk until the heat meant losing more water than we could afford to lose, shelter through the worst of the heat in whatever shade the wagons threw, and walk again once the light went gold. Stop when full dark.
On the crossing to Spartova I had spent every opportunity to work on the lexicon and the poem. There was no lexicon now, and no poem left to break. The stones still rode in my pocket, and some evenings I closed my hands around each of them, just to make sure they were still there. They had stopped being a puzzle and simply become things I owned.
Which meant that for the first time since I met the Qulomban woman, I had six empty hours in the shade of a wagon with nothing that needed solving.
The grief wasn't what I expected. I kept reaching for some structure to put around what had happened. By the third afternoon I caught myself actually drafting a ledger in my head, assigning Olen a line and the Assembly another. I had built a whole philosophy on the belief that grief, like anything else, could be accounted for if a man was disciplined enough. I reminded myself again that I was wrong and I let the ledger go unfinished.
Bastien did not ask what I was doing under the wagon those first few afternoons, staring at nothing with my jaw tight. He had his own hours to fill. He filled them the same way he had the first time, working a strap that did not need working, glancing toward the horizon in the direction of his daughter. Neither of us tried to solve the other's problem. That, I think, was the first real kindness either of us had managed to offer since the Dawn Gate.
The trouble with the map started the fifth day. It was quiet. An absence rather than an event.
The survey marked a formation at what should have been the end of the morning's push. It was supposed to be a low table of exposed rock, wide enough to shelter the wagons and the tuspaks before the sun became unbearable. We navigated to it by dead reckoning off the map's coordinates. The hour it should have resolved out of the heat shimmer, there was nothing there.
Wind does what wind does in the Sea. Inselbergs show one year, and by the next the dunes have buried them. Possibly the cartographer had simply misjudged the distance, and the height was just a guess. Sertorius had told me this himself. The part of me that wanted to survive hoped he was wrong.
There is a version of that morning where we stop the moment the formation fails to appear and make camp in whatever shade the wagons throw. The next claim of water lay a full day beyond the phantom shelter.
I did not choose that version. I looked at the map and then at the sun. I decided the phantom shelter had to be real because we depended on it. I told the column to keep walking. It was the same mistake Olen once warned me against making with a theory about basalt intrusions. That time it had worked. This time it did not, and I have turned it over since, trying to work out how much of my confidence that morning was genuine judgment and how much was just exhaustion.
We walked two hours past the point where we should have made shelter, into the flat white part of the day when even the tuspaks stop making noise, because noise costs water they would rather keep. Nobody complained. Nobody had complained in five days. Men who have spent months in Spartova keep their mouths shut when the heat starts winning.
It was the young Quartermaster, the one who kept the caravan's ledgers and its water rations, who went down first. He'd been hiding the early stages from everyone. He went down all at once, mid-stride, without the staggering warning I had expected from watching tuspaks. Bastien had him in the shade of the lead wagon before I had finished turning around. His skin was dry when it should have been slick. His eyes had gone somewhere else.
We were still working on him when one of the men called out and pointed. A quarter mile off, low enough that none of us had lifted our heads to look, sat a table of rock exactly where the survey had marked one. It had just worn down to half the height the cartographers must have measured, however many years ago that survey was made. We carried him into its shade instead of the wagon's. It made no difference that I could see.
We stripped him to the skin and packed what water we could spare against his wrists and throat. A man in that state cannot process what he swallows so we put nothing in his mouth. We stacked every awning we had two deep for shade. Bastien fanned him until his own arm gave out, and another took. I held his head in my lap. Nothing reached him. Only after we got back to Heliqar and reviewed the records did I find out he'd been going short on his own water so the count would come out even for everyone else. He died a little after the worst of the heat had already broken, which meant the outcome was determined before we became aware of the problem.
We buried him in the sand at the foot of that rock. All we had were three stones to put over him. Standing there with sand still under my fingernails, I realized that though it would soon be swallowed by the sand, it was also the only man-made marker of any kind on this entire route. The Legion's cartographers had given us distances and elevations across nine days of blank parchment, all of it in a confident hand, but nowhere on their map was there a single stone intentionally stacked.
Bastien did not speak for a long while afterward. When he finally did, walking beside the wagon in the blue hour before full dark, he told me he'd already paced off the gap between where the map had put the rock and where we'd actually found it. "The map was not wrong by much," he said. "A mile, maybe less."
"It did not need to be wrong by much," I said.
The Sea did not care whether any of us lived. It had taken the Quartermaster with the same flat indifference it would have shown a King or an empty wagon, and it would take me the same way the instant I gave it the opportunity.
On the ninth day, in the hour before the heat rose, Bastien stopped the lead wagon. He stood looking east with one hand shading his eyes. I came up beside him and followed his gaze, and there, low and faint enough to mistake for cloud, were the two mountains that had held Heliqar between them.
Nobody cheered. Bastien only let out a breath, and said, "Two more days."
What surprised me, looking at those mountains, was that the fear I had carried across the Sea changed shape instead of lifting. I had spent the whole crossing afraid of heat and thirst, afraid of a body that simply gives out mid-stride. I was no longer afraid of dying on the sand. I was afraid of the gate itself: my mother's face when I told her about Olen, and my father's face when he understood there was no treaty. Both of them would learn, for the first time, what their son had done in a fortress on the far side of a desert they had never crossed. The Sea had only ever wanted to kill me, cleanly and without opinion. Home was going to want to know who I now was. And even I didn't know the answer.
I looked at the mountains a while longer, then told the column to walk.