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for moonturns to come.
    Soon the ikulas , growing bolder and urged by instinct, began to hunt ahead. Shaiara did not call them back. Israf and Ardban were wise dogs, well-seasoned, and she would not begrudge them any prey they might find. Before she, Natha, Kamar, and Ciniran had walked on for much longer than it would take for a pan of kaffeyah to come to its first boil, Ardban came loping back toward them, with a small pale shape dangling from his jaws. He dropped it atShaiara’s feet and looked up at her expectantly. She bent down and picked up the still-warm body of a sheshu. With a quick economical motion, she drew her geschak and cut off its head, tossing it to the eagerly waiting hound. Entrails, skin, and a hind leg followed, for Ardban had done well to bring the fruit of his hunt to her when his hunger must be as sharp as her own. She tucked the rest of the body into the hunter’s pouch at her belt; they still possessed the largest of the cookpots, and both salt and spices. Meager fare this, to share among so many, but she did not wish to slaughter any more of their own stock if it could be avoided. And if the sheshu made its home within the ruin of Abi’Abadshar, the Nalzindar would survive here as well.
    When the moon had crossed another handspan of the sky, they turned back toward the Iteru -courtyard . Such a vastness as this would not be explored all in one night.
    W HEN THE SKY at last lightened toward dawn, Shaiara felt safe enough to take a lamp and begin to investigate one of the tunnels; fuel they would have in sufficiency once the well-fed shotors began to dung, but she disliked the thought of building a cookfire anywhere it could be seen. The Nalzindar were not unfamiliar with caves, for there were both cliffs and caves in the Isvai—and in the worst of the Sandwinds no other shelter would do—but the idea of a strange sort of cave that men had built was a thing that Shaiara had never thought to see.
    The lantern she held in her hands gave only a little light, for she had made the flame as small as possible to conserve its little store of oil. Kamar and Natha accompanied her, for in such a strange place, no one thought it a good idea that anyone should go somewhere alone.
    The ground beneath her feet was stone, as flat and smooth as the surface of an oasis pool, just as the ground in the Iteru -courtyard had been. Every few steps Shaiara squatted down and rested her palm flat against it, still mistrustful of what her senses told her was so: though the desert windhad covered it with a thin pale dust as soft as the finest flour, beneath that the stone was as chill as dawn-water, and as smooth as a polished geschak -blade . The great virtue of the dust was that it disclosed any mark made in it; as she looked behind her, Shaiara’s fingers itched for a grass-broom to sweep away the traces of their passage, little need for it though there might be, but ahead of her, the powder held only the faint marks of such desert creatures who would naturally be drawn to water, and no sign of Man.
    Though her senses were alert—for not all of those creatures that the desert could hold were as harmless as the timid sheshu —Shaiara could not help marveling at what she saw. This was only one tiny part of Abi’Abadshar, yet she believed it must be large enough to hold all of the Isvaieni within it. The path upon which she now walked was wide enough that four shotors could be led along it side-by-side, saddled and laden, and each would not jostle the next, and the roof above her was so far away that it was lost in darkness. On either side, the walls rose up as straight as the trunk of a young palm tree, and as smooth and unmarred as the surface of a pool of water when no wind blew. The Nalzindar loved decoration and ornament as much as any of the Isvaieni, trading hides and leatherwork at the Gatherings for bright rugs and colorful woven baskets, and this starkness seemed unnatural to Shaiara. If one made a thing, why