Technically, it wasn’t Ryoko’s fault. She hadn’t asked anyone to accompany her to Altok whenever she went to visit her parents. In fact, if anyone had been interested in assigning blame, which they were not, it was Weir’s fault.

Among the many things that Ryoko found deeply charming about Ora, one was that she always had on her a fork-shaped stick and a little chunk of flint. She only used these to eat prickly pears.

What Tengu and Ora, and the Sand Crawlers, had noted as a big patch of wild hemp with a stand of date palms, dotted with prickly pears, Weir immediately recognised as an abandoned farm. The best explanation she had for this was that the oldest date palms were in regular rows. It was mostly just a feeling.

Weir was right.

This ruin was unlike the ruins that had become the Sand Crawlers’ base and Lookout. It was either older or had been of a much less sturdy construction. Only bits and pieces and the remains of five or six foundations could be found under all the hemp.

Ryoko, Ora, Tengu, Weir, Beetle, Owl, and four of the other Sand Crawlers had been passing by to have a look at the escalating situation where Wasolan bordered on the wastes.

As the war between Wasolan and Kzara continued, slave catchers had been slowly spreading into the southwest of the wastes, as more slaves around the borders of Wasolan were making a break for freedom. So far, there wasn’t much in the way of raiders and bandits moving in, since the good pickings were much further west. But it was a situation that Haven and the Sand Crawlers wanted to keep an eye on.

So really, it wasn’t Ryoko’s fault in the slightest. Admittedly they were headed to the blacklands after looking around, which did involve visiting Ryoko’s parents. But still, not her fault.

Given that the group hadn’t been on a schedule, it wasn’t a problem to spend a couple of hours digging through the hemp examining ruins. But no one other than Weir had much interest in the old farm at the time.

As telegraph lines were being laid out to Lookout and the Sand Crawlers, Weir and some of the other interested sorts came back to the old farm with camels and carts to cut back most of the hemp.

Some of the farmers had been trying to grow hemp around Haven, for cloth and paper, but hadn’t been having much luck. There wasn’t enough space inside the walls for a nice big field. There wasn’t much interest in clearing out all the loose sand that the wind pushed against the walls.

What had once been a massive surplus of clothes and other equipment looted from raiders, bandits, and slave catchers had long since run out. Haven traded some food, some rubber, and copies of some of their books with Altok and Yarkot for cotton and hemp fabric, but Weir wasn’t the only one who would have liked to be able to grow it locally.

With a view to replanting a lot of it in a likely spot not far northeast of Haven, near the woodland where the water table wasn’t too deep and the soil wasn’t too thin, the farmers pulled all the hemp out of the ruin over the course of about two weeks.

They also collected a good bucketful of dates to plant in and around Haven, even if a couple of them joked that they wouldn’t live long enough to actually get to eat the dates.

While we’re piling blame onto Weir, she did suggest that someone should rebuild part of the farm, if only to collect the dates. Ryoko wasn’t the only person who supported the idea, or the only person who thought it would be a good strategic outpost for keeping an eye on the southwest of the wastes.

She was the only person who was thinking it would make it more convenient to visit her parents, but people thinking it would make expeditions into the blacklands more convenient was close enough.

A small apartment building had been finished in the old farm that would become Outpost by the time the telegraph line reached Lookout. It could comfortably house eight people, and uncomfortably house about twenty. If you really crammed them in there, you could probably have fit about sixty people sleeping on floors and furniture, but they wouldn’t have been happy about it.

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Unlike Lookout, the old farm wasn’t inhabited most of the time. Expeditions and scouts headed west might stay the night from time to time. Occasionally people from Haven or the Sand Crawlers would stay a night or two as a little holiday. But as Lookout’s tower grew, the old farm stayed right where it was.

The little apartment building had been there nearly four months when an expedition came past to discover slave hunters keeping out of the rain, enjoying themselves in the common room. Haven couldn’t be having that.

Outpost, a temporary name that stuck, was closer to Haven than either Lookout or the Sand Crawlers’ base. It was only a day and a half of brisk walking to get there, or just shy of two days at a normal pace.

Within a week, the apartment building had grown another storey. Within two weeks, a bunkhouse and storage shed had joined it near the small patch of regrowing hemp. A telegraph line was on its way.

Within a month, another little apartment building had sprung up, along with a well, a battery, two turbines, and a telegraph station. In part, the construction was so much faster in Outpost than Lookout because of what seemed like an imminent threat. Mostly, the difference was that the buildings in Outpost were predominantly wooden.

By the time people started accusing each other of ibildicide, Outpost was permanently inhabited by thirteen people and usually housed twenty. Expeditions continued to pass by on the way to Altok and the blacklands, but the people who had moved in were much more active than the inhabitants of Lookout.

A large workshop for processing hemp had been established, for one thing.

Most important was that the residents of Outpost made frequent forays into the wastes to hunt down slave catchers. Thus far in our short history of Haven, this sort of campaign had only had the desired effect: pushing dangers further from Haven and the wastes.

In this case, it went worse.

And it still technically wasn’t Ryoko’s fault.

The forays from Outpost grew in size, and grew in ambition. Ryoko wasn’t the only person who wanted to leave the wastes and work on pushing the slavers and raiders out of the lands between Wasolan and Altok. She was, admittedly, one of the big drivers of the change.

Not only would it make expeditions to the blacklands and Kzara more convenient, it would help bring more caravans back to Haven. As the danger around Journey grew, caravans had been getting less frequent again.

Despite it seeming obvious to quite a few people that bringing caravans and travellers had been the entire point of Tengu clearing out the wastes the way she had, Tengu wasn’t very interested in doing the same in the independent region around Journey and Altok.

It’s possible that if Tengu had explained herself better, things would have gone differently. But all she really said on the matter is that it seemed too dangerous, and wasn’t really her business.

The obvious counterpoints were that Haven’s population was very close to reaching five hundred, and there were a lot more people who knew how to fight than when Tengu had been clearing the wastes by herself. Tengu only insisted that people were giving her too much credit.

Wasolan was unlike the Lord’s House and Ovek in a particularly important way. Wasolan used slaves in their armies. Ovek understandably saw that as a bad idea, and if anyone could be bothered asking someone from the Lord’s House, they would have started ranting about giving the honour of combat to the impure. It amounted to the same thing.

As the war continued, Wasolan relied more and more on slavers raiding caravans and towns to the far south to keep its numbers up, and on raiders and slavers raiding Kzaran caravans headed east to weaken Kzara’s economy and make money selling slaves to Ovek and the Lord’s House.

Unfriendly relations with Altok were of the least concern.

Forays out of the wastes to target raiders and slavers around Journey created a problem for Wasolan. And a problem that seemed much more manageable than the caravans and traders that headed further west our of Kzara, well out of Wasolan’s territory.

If Tengu, or someone else with a better understanding of the situation, had explained this to Ryoko, or any of the other slaves freed from Wasolan or Sand Crawlers looking for a good fight, who darted in and out of the wastes to break up slaver and raider gangs, they might have given the subject more thought.

As it was, the first sign of trouble was fifty soldiers from Wasolan appearing over the horizon near Outpost in the early morning. The telegraph operator sent word to Haven, of course. But Haven was at least a day away, compared to fifty soldiers who were about an hour away.

If Lookout had found themselves in this situation, they could have retreated into the heavy, stone watchtower and fired arrows and thrown rocks and finally gotten to use their ballistae.

Outpost was made of wood, and they didn’t have any ballistae. It was just supposed to be little bands of slave catchers out here, not serious trouble. Wasolan was supposed to stay out of the wastes.

One of the benefits of Outpost being made mostly from wood, of course, was that if abandoned, it could be rebuilt within a month. Sooner, if the effort was made.

Abandoning Outpost would have meant those brash sorts who had been raiding raiders for the last few months to abandon their pride. And that wasn’t going to happen.