Free Laura Kinsale by The Dream Hunter

lead them south by the direct route to Hayil, where he could lodge a complaint against his perfidious associates with the emir Abdullah ibn Rashid himself.
    Bin Dirra claimed that he knew the way through the red sands perfectly. Arden, cautious, had looked this time to Selim, silently asking his opinion of the Shammari. The boy made Bin Dirra hold out his hands and swear by the life of his son that he was telling the truth.
    Arden thought he was. He hoped he was. They filled the water bags in a range of rocky hills, where Bin Dirra shoved aside flat rocks to uncover secret basins, little pools of sweet rainwater.
    So they had turned south into the nefud. And it was like walking knee-deep through the coals of a burning furnace, red walls rising on all sides to reflect back the fire.
    For four days they had traversed the horseshoe-shaped dunes, with Bin Dirra feeling his way, making a cast up one hill and then trying another, as a hound would follow a very faint scent. To Arden, every dune and back-dune looked the same as the next.
    Heavy sand was the hell of camels. In the hollows of almost all the huge curved dunes were skeletons. There were bones of camels and bones of men. Nobody ever got buried in the nefud sands; they only got scoured by the hot wind. Last night Bin Dirra had told a delightful little tale of how the Bedu had led a company of five hundred Egyptian soldiers into the nefud, pretending to guide them toward Damascus. The next well was just a little way, they had told the Egyptians. Just a little way further! Until the soldiers had fallen down to their knees, and the Bedu had drifted away, only lingering to snare a few horses and camels as they wandered from the dead men.
    The story was not, Arden hoped, a hint. But he did not waste energy worrying over unrealized terrors. He had a compass concealed in his baggage, and the nefud was not endless. Their camels were in good condition. And they were committed now.
    He watched the water drip, and walked, lost in savage desolation and utter solitude. The long inhuman reaches of the desert, where his body found the limits of what it could endure, and his soul came near to peace.
    He had longed for it, with a longing that was terrible. And yet even here, he was looking for something that he could not find.
    All of his life, he had been looking. He did not know what for: not a horse, though there was a fine edge of pleasure in that added risk; it was not to spite his father, for that interference had merely driven him to a desert of rock and sand instead of ice. Sometimes he thought he found it in the evening, when they stopped to rest and the red sands turned violet and indigo, flooded with light like a frozen tossing sea, and he turned from that glory to where Selim cooked homely balls of flour in the bottom of the fire, and burned his fingers retrieving them from the ashes.
    Sometimes he thought he found it in the morning, when he rose and walked to the top of a sand hill, and grew drunk on the pure clear arch of the sky and the silence. Sometimes he thought he found it in a dry mouth and a thimbleful of water swallowed in the shadow of his patient camel, and sometimes in the grumbling roar of the beast herself as she complained of rising to start again, as his body complained that it was too much, too hard, he was too hot and dry and weary to go on. And yet the camel went, and so did he.
    He thought he found what he was looking for, in moments that came and vanished, that he could not hold on to. Even the endless labor of plodding in line behind Selim and the Shammari, his feet burning through the woolen socks that were all he could wear in the sands—he prayed for it to end, and he wanted it to go on forever.
    They made their devotions in the last of light, and settled to rest until moonrise. Arden lay in the blessed cooling air, staring up at the stars. Bin Dirra’s voice seemed raucous, echoing back from nowhere, asking questions that Selim answered with short