The time passed more easily than Regbi expected it to. Khadan proved to be good company, just as content to sit in silence as to regale her with tales of his travels. And he could speak for hours on end. By the way the words flowed from his mouth, she guessed that he hadn’t had much company in a while. Months worth of pent-up stories kept her from ever succumbing to boredom.

“How long have you been away for?” Regbi asked him through a cloud of tobacco smoke. She would become her grandmother if she wasn’t careful. Or maybe even Teb-Tengri himself; she lay on her belly with her feet dangling over her head, one hand supporting her head, the other his bone pipe. She stretched forward to pass it to him and returned to her lounging; she decided there must be some trick to it if Teb-Tengri insisted upon it.

“A year or two I think.” Khadan inhaled a lungful of spicy-sweet smoke and let it billow out his nose like a smokestack. “Maybe longer. I have a habit of losing track of time.”

“That long!” she exclaimed. Khadan’s eyebrow quirked; she was supposed to be calm. He would probably add another day to her sentence if she weren’t careful. As interesting as their conversations had been, she was growing tired of their lazing. She was eager for something new, but she knew better than to voice her complaints. Instead she said, “When do you plan on going back? Won’t people be concerned that you’ve been away for so long?”

“I suppose I’ll go back as soon as I feel drawn to,” he said with a languid toss of his head. “There’s no real hurry. Not when it comes to a spiritual journey. My shamans understand that and they’ll wait for me as long as I require.”

“Why leave in the first place?”

“To learn. This is my first time outside of the desert. Outside of my own home, really, since I’ve sat as Teb-Tengri for such a long time now.”

Regbi couldn’t resist interrupting him to say, “But you look so young. At least young enough to make something like that sound strange, if you’ll excuse me for saying so.”

“I’ve been Teb-Tengri since I was twelve; I’m thirty now. I think.” He began ticking off his fingers, balancing the pipe in between his teeth. “In any case, I should be soon or have been for a little while already.”

“They made a twelve year old their spiritual leader?” It was becoming a difficult thing not to lose her cool. At twelve Regbi had been battling other children with her crutch and stealing extra portions of daily soup. She had been little more than a wild beast motivated by greed and raging hormones and here sprawled this indolent creature who had been made chieftain of all the desert shamans at the same age.

“Age has nothing to do with it.” He offered the pipe, but she refused it. Khadan shrugged and helped himself to another drag. “Nor experience, nor even wisdom. It’s all about the correct state of being.”

“Which you have?”

He nodded but didn’t elaborate. “You can probably imagine that it’s kept me busy, being who I am. It hardly gives me any time to travel like a normal person might. I know what I know of things by what people tell me, but at a certain point that doesn’t suffice. I have people come to me from all over seeking advice; I decided I would be able to counsel them better if I experienced things for myself. So off I went.” He made a marching motion with two of his fingers, walking them across the rug towards Regbi. She snorted and reached for the pipe. The tips of her fingers brushed it before Khadan pulled it back and placed it in his own mouth.

“It seems to me you would have been better off staying at home,” she said.

“You think so?”

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“Things are probably nicer in your desert. People too.”

“I’ve met nice people outside of it. Bad ones too, but you find them anywhere. What concerns me most are the cities. Do you know about them?”

If it weren’t for the earnest expression on his face, Regbi might have laughed. It was such a childlike question, akin to asking why the sky was blue or how babies were made. Everyone knew what an city was, even the people that were lucky enough to live outside of them. Everyone except Teb-Tengri, it seemed, whose ignorance in certain matters hadn’t ceased to surprise her: he had never learned how to read, let alone write; he couldn’t remember his exact age or the day he was born; and he had shocked her to the core when he mentioned once in passing that he had never owned a pair of trousers or ridden in anything with wheels, other than a camel-drawn cart of course. He was a great novelty in that way. It made him more human somehow.

“I was born in one,” Regbi said. She snatched the pipe from him and took a long drag, expelling the smoke from her lungs in a prolonged sigh.

“Were you? Strange. I always pictured you coming from a little village somewhere. A nice one with trees and water, animals too.” He seemed almost sad that it wasn’t the case.

“Born in one, grew up in one. You could say I’m an expert on them.”

“I’m very glad I decided to keep you then; those places are unnatural. They’re no place for a little shaman. What you need is nature,” Khadan said, as if he could simply prescribe it to her like a cough syrup.

“Have you ever been inside one before?”

“No. They have a bad energy about them. Every time I draw close my head starts to ache. They reek of steel and putrid smoke and other smells I can’t even describe. I know I have no business inside of them—not me, nor anyone else for that matter.”

“Most people don’t have a choice,” Regbi said. She felt strangely defensive about it. She wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as if she had any love for them herself. The opposite really. She had passed a miserable childhood inside of one and the beginnings of an even worse adulthood, but somehow Khadan’s words managed to get under her skin.

“So I’ve heard,” he said with a commiserating nod. “They’re moved there from their proper Places and herded together like cattle. But even cattle have their own grazing lands, clean air and fresh water. It seems to me that people should have at least that much too.”

“There aren’t any cities out where you are?” It seemed impossible that there weren’t.

“Not in the high desert. Roads can’t get to us,” he said with a predatory gleam in his eyes. “And the ones that they’ve tried to build in the lowlands never last for long.”

Regbi thought to the spirits he kept and shuddered. She wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of them.

“You’re not concerned that they’ll find you?”

He merely smiled, as if the question were so absurd that it wasn’t worth answering. Keep your secrets then, Regbi thought to herself. She didn’t need Teb-Tengri’s magical insight to know that there was one dancing behind his smile.

“You should consider coming back with me once you’ve taken in your spirit,” Khadan said. “Whether or not you still want to be my student, it’s a good place to be a shaman. The best that I’ve found.”

Regbi the Desert Shaman; she would need to come up with a more exotic name if she were to take him up on his offer.

“Maybe…but there’s still the matter of the spirit.”

But the shaman shook his head. “Not yet.”

“When?”

“When you’re ready. You still look a bit stiff from where I’m sitting.”

Regbi felt as boneless as a noodle and looked it too; if she were any more relaxed she might melt through the pillows. Not for the first time did she suspect there was something more than tobacco in the desert shaman’s pipe. An herb maybe, or some hint of magic. It tugged at her drooping lids and sang to her from the pillows. They were as plump as a game hen to her sleep- hungry eyes. She rested her cheek against them and closed her eyes. They were so heavy she could feel a pressure building in their center. She was dragged to their depths, drowning in a sea of black.