Hadrian Dustwhistle's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

By dusk Hadrian crept to the broken arch and looked out. The riders were back. They had not bothered to hunt him further — they had simply stopped. On the flat ground between his ruin and the dunes ahead, they had pitched a tight ring of tents around a fire, mules picketed, a low fence of scrap wood thrown up on the open side. A blockade. They meant to wait him out. Behind that camp lay the only road he had — the dunes, gold and soft and endless, ridge folding into ridge like a sea that had stopped moving. Once he was inside them, no rider could track him. He just had to cross half a mile of flat, lit ground to get there. He watched the fire all night from the cracked window of the old ruin, counting heads and listening to their laughter carry. Four men. One always awake. The carved walls at his back hid him well, but the walls did not move, and he had to. Near the third hour past midnight a wind kicked up and dragged a long curtain of dust across the flats. Hadrian wrapped the mule's hooves in rag, shouldered the water, and went. He walked, not ran. He kept the dust between him and the fire and the mule's head low. A shout went up once — a guess, not a sighting — and a rider mounted and circled wide, but the wind had already swallowed his tracks. By the time the dust thinned, Hadrian was over the first dune and down its far side, knee-deep in cold sand, alone. He had slipped the noose. He was also, finally, past the last hard ground. Ahead lay only dunes, and his water, and the scorpion on the map.