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—in Pemba’s distended throat. He grabbed for it as he would grab the slick skull of a half-born child, trying to find a place to hook a fingertip—
    It slid into his palms. Black, glistening. Draped in membranous webs of mucus and blood and stinking phlegm. A jointed, chitinous thing that blinked slime-veiled eyes and snapped ragged needle teeth at Hong-la’s face.
    He should have held it. He should have grasped its ankles and swung it against the tentpole, against a nearby stone. He should have crushed its skull, the glaring yellow eyes it turned on him, and dissected the remains.
    He recoiled, tumbling backward. It kicked off from his palms, needlepoint talons pinpricking his hands—and launched itself into the air and was gone.
    What welled from the sides of Pemba’s wedged jaw now was clean blood, thick and dark from lack of air. As Hong-la rolled to his knees, holding his pus-smeared hands wide, he watched the tide stem to a trickle, then fail.
    Mercifully, Pemba was dead when the second demonspawn followed its clutchmate into the sky.

4
    Besha Ghul was quick and quiet, its long head hunkering between angular shoulders on a long, thick neck. It paced like sidling smoke on the pads of thick-clawed paws, heels or hocks moving high, like levers, as it led Edene into the shadows of the derelict hut. A smell of carrion reached her as she ducked the cracked and slanted lintel—the ghul’s supper? Or the remains of a nest left by some temporary inhabitant?
    The rich, rotten smell did not nauseate her as it once would have, though her child struggled in her belly as if in response.
    Inside the crumbled hut, her eyes adapted quickly to shadows. She stepped carefully, ducking to avoid the spindled timbers that slanted from wall to hearth like so much carelessly tossed kindling. Somebody had brought those timbers here, Edene thought, at great effort or great expense. Somebody had hauled them from whatever wet hollow grew trees—even slight, contorted trees—in this desert.
    Somebody, no matter how poor, had thought this a place worth living in.
    The walls were daubed stones piled course on course. The floor was earth only. It slanted back to a well dug in the rear corner of the hut, which they found by skirting the edges of the ruin. The walls still bore up the outer end of the roof timbers, making a passage where a ghul and a woman who crouched down upon her heels could creep through.
    Edene had no problem seeing in the dark. The well was edged in stones, a pavement set into the earth for an arm span around it. You might build your house over your water, in the desert, to protect it from heat and from wanderers—but no one would want the earth of their floor made mud every time they needed to haul up a drink. Edene crouched beside the ragged semicircle of the pit, staring down into a darkness even her eyes could not pierce.
    “Water?” she asked Besha Ghul, when it crouched beside her.
    “There is no water in this well,” it said. “It drained into the tunnels long ago. We claimed it.”
    Edene stayed where she hunkered, and stayed silent. The curve of her belly pressed the tops of her thighs, hard and yet resilient, like a drumhead. She considered the ghul, the well, the cramped angle under the collapsed roof, and the daubed stone beyond.
    “You want me to climb down.”
    The ghul blinked at Edene, round-pupiled eyes no longer lambent in this close darkness—though she could make them out, still. “It’s an easy climb.”
    She let her left palm rest on her belly, highlighting the arch of it under her stained robes. The ghul had no problem in seeing her: she watched its eyes focus. But it seemed to attach no significance to the gesture.
    “How easy?”
    Besha Ghul shrugged and showed her hooked fingers, long claws. “A scamper.”
    She touched the edge of the well. The stone was rough, lipped. She could hook fingertips behind its edge, brace her palms against the roughness. Her shoes were little more than