The slot ran too narrow for them to walk side by side. Its overhanging walls undulated in waves carved by vortices of wind and sand and time as if shaped by a god whose hands shook from infirmity. They could never see more than ten yards ahead or above or behind. No sky. No water. No creatures of any kind. Just dry sandstone with darker splotches high on the walls. Perhaps they were ancient glyphs. Perhaps they were something else.

Orc followed Ogaz who followed three sets of footprints for a mile or five or twenty. Three became one when a set turned back on itself and the other went on alone. Ogaz squatted at the place where they parted and traced them with a finger. "Seeing no men walking here. Just dying brownskins."

Orc nodded and looked ahead. "Keep on."

Somewhere above the sun dragged its swollen body toward the horizon and he thanked the slot for its shade. The constant wind polished its sandstone walls into narrow ripples that stretched for miles like marks clawed across the ship's passing hull or the long contours he'd furrowed in the brothers' soil or locks of the [brigadier]'s fiery hair. He browsed the few hardy sagebrushes like an animal and with the arch of his thumb and forefinger he scraped sweat off his arms and licked it until he had nothing left to sweat and his tongue dried to a dusty foreign thing and his legs cramped and his heart hammered like he wrestled a lion though he only walked. The last urine he made was brown and fetid.

What light they had began to fade yet they pressed on. Somewhere above a man called out. Orc drew [Booky's blade] and turned his head upward. The walls pinched together there and tilted one way then another. The man's voice came again and the man came after. He plunged suddenly and his skull smacked the slot's sandstone and his clothes flapped in flight and his chest slammed the walls where they pinched and pushed his breath from his lungs in a grunt that hinted of a voice rough from shouting and harsh from hate and hard from years of forced unfeeling. He jerked suddenly and limply as the pinch caught his waist eight feet up and his waterskin on his hip burst against the unforgiving wall. Its water slid all at once into the sand.

Orc put the [blade]'s tip against the man's throat. He was already dead.

Orc began despoiling what he could reach. The waterskin was torn but a swallow remained below the tear. He gave it to Ogaz.

"Some dried meat here," he said. "Don't eat it til we find more drink."

Ogaz sucked at the tear in the waterskin. He squeezed the waterskin this way and that then let it fall. "Ogaz shares. Only sipping, only nibbling. Please just little sip, little nibble."

Orc reached his fingers around the man's skull and felt the rend there from a goring and the place where his neck had broken. His hands came away bloody. He pressed his cheek against the wall and looked upward.

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"There's blood there but I don't see how he could've fallen that way."

"Not mattering. Drink blood he's not needing."

He gently pushed Ogaz away from the man. "May as well drink seawater. Don't try it."

Ogaz sat on the sand with his back against the wall. His shirt was bloody from Orc's handprint. He thrust it in his mouth and sucked on the fabric and slid onto his side.

Orc pocketed the dried meat. He thought he heard the clash of metal on stone like the strike of the [brigadier]'s chisel against the gravemarkers in the shade of the olive trees. "Someone's fighting up there. We need to keep on."

Ogaz had his nose buried in the sand. His breath was too fast and too short. "Ogaz can't"

Orc picked him up and set him on his feet. "You'll be surprised what you can do."

The tusker slid back to the ground.

Orc thought he was finished. There was nothing to do. No water. No way out but back. They wouldn't last long enough to reach the strand and anyhow there was no water fit to drink thataway.

He set him on his feet again. "That Glad Nizam of yours is counting on you."

Ogaz nodded. A shaky sad thing. "All for Glad Nizam. All to be free."

Orc watched him wobble forward. His hands against either side of the slot. Cracked like the brothers' blighted field. Too busy dying to know he was dying. Chin down and tusks resting on his chest. If only Orc had been raised in the camps he might have such strength of purpose. He might be resting on the strand among old friends and family, waiting for some other cub to find the missing river. He looked at the dusty ground between his feet. It should be here. Right here.

Ogaz staggered around a bend in the slot ahead and out of sight.

Orc stuck the dead man with his [blade] just to be sure. "What're you doing out here?"

The dead man swung a little when he withdrew the [blade]. The floor of the slot drank up everything that came with it.

Orc breathed and swayed slightly with his breath. He tried and failed to wet the inside of his mouth. He walked forward. His gaze drifted aloft and he beheld a seamless wall of the smooth gray stone that dwarves cure for their grandest works. It blocked the slot like a dam.

It was a dam.

Down where the concrete met the sand was wet and packed and pregnant like a beach between tides. He pushed his palm into it and water squeezed out between his fingers. He fell onto his side and pressed again and licked the sand. It was salty and earthy and it coated his tongue and gritted between his teeth but he dared not spit it out, he dared not spit anything. He pressed and lapped again. He turned to tell Ogaz but Ogaz was gone.

He looked back the way they had come. Then up the sandstone walls. Then up the concrete. At the ladder of holds cut into its face. At the three toed foot drawing up and out of sight.

"Ogaz."

His echo returned from high above.

And from above he heard, "All for Glad Nizam."

Orc swallowed a little moisture and a little sand. "Even your life,” he muttered.

Again he pressed the ground and licked water it yielded. Grains of sand caught in his throat made it feel drier than ever. He looked up the ladder of holds.