The captured slaver officer sat bound to the bronze runner of the overturned skiff, his arms lashed behind him with three turns of braided camel-gut cord.
His name was Sub-Bailiff Tarek. A thick-necked, sun-blackened man in his late thirties with a crooked, twice-broken nose, a gold ring in his left ear. A tattoo of a three-toothed iron sieve branded across his throat. His lacquered leather breastplate was split at the shoulder where Nomad Ren’s flint blade had cut his weapon harness. His dark eyes burned with sullen, murderous fury.
Ren stood three paces away, his scuffed cobbler’s boots planted in the red sand. In his right hand, he held his carved mammoth-bone awl, its silver-wired tip gleaming in the morning glare.
Beside him, Mira sat on a wooden water crate beneath the shadow of an overturned leather sail. She had laid her boxwood embroidery hoop across her knees, her left hand steadily guiding an iron needle through a square of grey linen, darning a small tear in the fabric. Her right arm rested in her lap, catching the desert light in deep, cool ribbons of amethyst. That solid, many-sided limb of smoky quartz.
“You’re dead men,” Tarek spat, coughing a fleck of red iron dust onto the sand. “Every one of you. Caravan-Master Voss controls forty skiffs and two steam-crawlers at Khor-Sula. When our patrol doesn’t report to the guard post by sunset, he’ll roll the iron siege-drills across these dunes and grind your little handcarts into firewood.”
