His scorpion pectoral returned to stone.
She re-tied her loincloth before he roused fully, found the dropped crystal, slipped it into her pocket, and returned her scorpion amulet to its rightful place. Then she retreated to the sanctuary’s snake-eye shrine. As she knelt beside it, fingers caressing its beauty, the Sanc godsbells began to toll.
Dyan stirred. He stood. In silence he straightened his robes and his loincloth and, unspeaking, unseeing, he walked away.
He was the third dead man walking she had seen.
After consuming breakfast, boiled eggs he could not taste, and too disturbed to sleep, Vortka offered his labor to the Sanc library. With three hundred Tragots gone to Et-Bano—no, Zandakar now—the library archivists were pleased to have him. They did not ask if Dyan had sent him,
