A misty aura encircles the moon. The moonlight on the salt flat results in an eerie tableau of a flat, desolate plain glowing white like alabaster. The horses of the pursuing army kick up a nearly invisible dust filled with sparkling salt crystals that reflect the moonlight as they drift in sluggish clouds.

We have reached the sand dunes and are now riding on a trail winding among them. Sandstone hills lined by horizontal stripes of ocher and brown stand on the other side of the dunes. The hills have been worn smooth by rains that must have stopped eons ago, or were perhaps smoothed by the flow of an enormous river.

“I don't know how we're going to get out of this one,” I confide to Liana, who sits beside me on the bed of the wagon.

“The wrath of God,” the girl replies, and her pale skin gives off an otherworldly glow that matches the salt flat in the moonlight. Her dress and hair are still damp from her dive into the pool of Shiloam.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

She shrugs her shoulders. “You're the one who knows the scriptures, not me.”

My confidence is bolstered by the fact that she has an answer. I want to say that we've beaten the odds up to this point, but I know nothing is a matter of chance. “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” That's a line from Hamlet, not the Psalms of Wholeness, which I remember courtesy of Ms. Berenstein's English 12 class.

The wagon passes a fork leading off to a smaller trail.

“There!” Liana shouts and points.

“Hey!” I shout to the muscled man with the bull horns. Looking at him seated behind the horses, I see that his back is covered with red scars from wounds that are still fresh. “Stop here.”

The horned man brings the wagon to a stop. I hop off and help Liana down, while the scarred driver looks at us curiously, wonder what is going on.

“We passed a fork back there,” I tell him, gesturing with my snout. “I say we get off here and let the wagon go forward. With Lord Riyel's help, the soldiers will pursue the wagon, giving us time.”

With a shrug, he hops down from the driver's seat and slaps the rump of the lead horse. The wagon surges forward, empty, rolling along the trail until it disappears behind a bend in the dunes.

We return to the fork in the pass and follow the side trail. Soon the sandy soil of the dunes gives way to hard sandstone as we wind through a canyon. We're in a riverbed, but the stone is dry, and the striped walls tower above us on either side. Everything is worn smooth by the flow of water; I can see it in the soft curves of the canyon walls, but the gorge is dry.

For nearly an hour we hike, and we begin to hear the soldiers behind us. We have a head start, but we're on foot, while the pursuing army is on horseback. The narrow trail through the stone leads to an open area the size of two basketball courts. There is a wall in front of us, and the trail appears to have reached a dead end. We look to the sides, but there is no exit. We've managed to hike into a box canyon.

We look at each other, and nobody needs to state the obvious: we're trapped.

“Up.” I gesture with my snout upward.

The bull man tries to climb, but the stone is smooth, and he slips back down.

“Here, let me carry Liana up, and I'll return for you.” I drop down so that Liana can climb onto my back, and she wraps her arms around my neck. The rain begins to fall, and I can hear the horseshoes whacking the sandstone path. I climb upward, which is harder now that it's raining, and slink up the water-sculpted walls until she is standing on the flat stones above the canyon.

I turn with a spine that is amazingly flexible, forming a 'U' with my body as I descend the stone wall head-first. The rain builds in force, splattering against the sandstone. The tan patches of stone turn dark as they become wet. The giant bull-man grabs my neck and I begin to climb, but it's a struggle. Horse's hooves draw closer, and the muscular man wrapped around my neck lets go, as is to drop to the ground and fight, but I catch him with my tail between his legs before he can fall.

“I'll fight them,” he says, “buy you time.”

“No,” I tell him. “The fight is out of our hands.”

Now I feel like I'm at the gym, straining with every handhold, and working the leg press as I push myself upward. The albino girl is small and thin, but this brute is not only big, but packed with solid muscle. It doesn't help that the rain has grown in intensity, and the stone is slick. The lead element of the army is now in the canyon, and can nearly reach us with their spears.

I slip as one foot gives way, and the horned man and I drop suddenly, swinging as we fall. The precipitous slip and fall has caused a thrown spear to miss and whack the stone where I was just a moment before. The canyon is filling with troops, some of whom dismount so they can get a better shot at us. My tail whips out and catches a stunted tree sprouting from a crevice in the rock. The rain is coming down in buckets, so the soldiers looking up can hardly see with the rain pelting their eyes. A hail of spears soars through the air as I haul myself up to the withered vestige of a tree.

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“Climb over me!” I shout to the horned man.

“What?” he shouts back. He can't hear me over the roar of the rain pouring down and striking the stone like a stream of bullets from a Gatling gun.

“Climb over me!”

He complies, and seizes the tip of my snout with his broad hands, the spot where the sword cut me, which is still sensitive, but he needs it to get a purchase. Spears are whacking the rock beside me, hardly audible above the noise of the rain striking the sandstone like bullets. One spear catches me low in the side, just above the thigh, and lodges in place.

Gravity acts on the spear as the muscular man steps on my snout, putting his sandaled foot right on the spot where it got split by a sword. The butt end of the spear is falling, acting like a pry bar to scoop out a chunk of muscle, until it meets resistance, then starts to slide sideways until the blade pops out and the pressure is relieved as the spear falls into the mass of troops packing the canyon. I try to pull myself up, but now find that I am under a waterfall caused by the torrents of rain spilling over the rim of the canyon and cascading down into gorge.

My feet pedal furiously. My grip is always tenacious, but the flow of falling water is so strong that I'm struggling to get a purchase. Another spear pierces the side of my tail and strikes stone, then clatters as it falls, driven as much by the running currents tumbling down into the canyon as by gravity.

The box canyon is packed with troops who have surged into the canyon in their eagerness to get me. The horses become agitated, and pace about as they are able to, but they are jammed in tight. “You shouldn't underestimate the intelligence of horses,” I tell the cavalry as I clamber into a small niche in the sandstone, a low gap in the rocks that seems to have been designed to hold the long, flat body of a man-sized lizard. “There are no accidents,” I tell myself, and I hear a roar building in the direction of the sand dunes.

From my vantage point high above the soldiers packed into the canyon I can see what they can't see, a river of mud raging through the sandstone arroyo, growing in size and fury as it courses. The torrential rain adds to the volume of the muddy river as it slams the sides of the canyon, spilling upward and churning. The roar of the surging flood grows so loud that the soldiers hear it above the downpour. Horses rear up with their hooves pummeling each other. They wheel about, butting into each other as their mounts try to decide what to do. Multiple commands are shouted, but become lost in confusion, and the din of the pouring rain and the dark brown rapids smashing a path through the narrow canyon.

The wall of muddy water strikes the first soldiers. The dark torrent already carries tumbling horses and soldiers, the stragglers that it has swept up in its inexorable race to the box canyon. Some troops who planned to race back out of the canyon have turned around, but there is nowhere to go. The canyon fills with muddy water, and the once-proud army is now flotsam and jetsam, floating in the turbulent flood, or falling beneath the waves. The water churns and circles, making the bodies of horses and men smash against the canyon walls. Soldiers who have lost their mounts claw at the smooth walls, but are swept up and dashed against each other and the submerged stone floor.

For a half hour the dark water rises, foaming as it tosses and rages in chaotic currents, nearly reaching the crevice where I have taken refuge. In time the rainfall slows until it stops abruptly. As if someone has pulled the stopper on the drain, the water surges back outward, carrying the bobbing corpses of men and horses, sweeping them out of the canyon like refuse. The water retreats, flowing until it reaches the sand, which hungrily soaks up the muddy river, but the dead bodies remain atop the sand.

The moonlit canyon is strangely silent. I climb out of the crevice to the withered tree, and then clamber up to the lip of the canyon, where I see Liana and the horned man climbing down from a bare tree nestled among the rocks. From up here we can see all the way back to the walled city, to the open paupers' grave outside the gates, to the salt flat, and the bodies of the army strewn over the dunes.

With the horned man and the albino girl at my side I sing the psalm.

The wrath of God is slow to build,

but unleashed in sudden violence

in the downpour

in the raging waters coursing through the narrow valleys

laden with mud.

The turbulent rapids sweep the wicked before them

to vomit them onto the dry desert.

“If you had read the scriptures you would have avoided your fate.” I shake my head. I turn to the muscular man beside me. “What's your name?”

The corners of his mouth dip downward. “Taur.”

“The bull man,” Liana says, because his name is short for “Taurus.”

“I shouldn't use that name.” He sits on a flat rock and Liana sits beside him.

“Why not?” Liana puts a hand on his arm.

“It's evil.” He runs his hand over the scar on his bald head and touches the horns as if to confirm that they're still there.

“God the Healer made all the animals, all humans, all the plants that grow on the earth.” I gesture with my stubby hand, knowing how feeble it looks, but I'm indicating the panorama stretched out before us. “A bull is not any more evil than a gecko or a rose. The dark gods can't create anything, so they try to hijack creation, try to warp it.”

Taur looks up at me, and I feel like he's starting to get a hold of something.

I gingerly lay a hand on his shoulder, aware of the fact that he's been burned, and because of me, too. “According to the scriptures, we're all figures made of clay, and one mud vessel is no better or worse than another. It's what we contain inside us that counts.”

I turn and take in the sights of the world laid out before me, and look in the direction we were headed. I see a city ahead in a harbor filled with sailing ships, and beyond that a seemingly limitless blue sea.

“Ankla,” Liana says as if reading my mind. “That's next on our journey.”

“It's almost sunup,” I tell the two, “so we'll rest here for the day. At nightfall, we're headed to Ankla.”