Jack Cloudie. Stephen Hunt

channels clear of sand. Commercial concerns had gone bankrupt all across the province. With one solitary consolation. The grieving over the loss of their mothers had briefly brought Omar and Shadisa even closer. By then, they were of an age where their presence together would be remarked upon, and the beach had become unsafe as a rendezvous; too much danger of being spied upon by a passing townsperson looking to supplement a barren larder by collecting the last tide’s seaweed.

      Reluctantly, Omar had abandoned the familiar fan of their palm tree’s leaves, trading it for an ancient ruin in the desert. There was a place ten minutes’ walk from the town, a failed oasis and its collapsed wellspring. There had been a construction there once, as old as time, now with only seven pillars left to make its presence in the world. Shadisa had called them the ‘Pillars of Nuh’ after an old children’s tale, a little bowl of sand offering the shade of its cracked marble columns to rest in. You couldn’t always find it, as the drifting sands sometimes covered it over, before reversing its passage a few weeks later and revealing the dried up watercourse again. When you were inside it, nobody could find you, not unless they stumbled over the top of the basin by accident.

      Omar had missed the sound of the sea lapping against the beach and the cry of the gulls, but along with his advancing years, there were other consolations to capture his attention. Like the way Shadisa would flick and curl her golden hair across her soft smooth skin as she gazed up at the clouds, or bump him playfully when he made her laugh with some boast or sly observation. His mimicry of the cooks, gardeners and water engineers working at the great house had been particularly useful in that regard. She would roll about laughing, her teeth flashing as white as the mysterious arched bones they occasionally found jutting out of the dunes, allowing him to pull her close and taste her lips with his. He hadn’t even needed to arm-wrestle Shadisa to claim his prize.

      But in all lives there comes a time when the laughter must end, and for him that had been one evening after they’d been staring up at a sunset together, the hot ancient peace of the desert interrupted by a woman’s wails. He and Shadisa had crawled to the top of the dried-out wellspring to see someone fleeing across the sands, a young woman wearing an ivory scooped-neck abaya, her body weighted down with dozens of leather water bottles. Shadisa recognized her first, whispering her name to Omar. One of the staff at the great house, a raven-haired beauty called Gamila. She had been promised in marriage to a water trader, a man of such exceptional ugliness that it was said none of his other three wives could bear him children. Despite his advanced age, or perhaps because of it, Gamila had been promised to the merchant as a cure for his other wives’ infertility – hardly an attractive fate for one so young and vivacious. And here she was, sprinting across the dunes in the cool of the evening, enough water sloshing about her person to follow the caravan road all the way to the next coastal town.

      He had hardly needed to hear the distant shouts of a pursuit to know that she wasn’t travelling with her family’s blessing. Shadisa had made to jump up and signal to Gamila to hide with them under the watercourse’s crags, but Omar has pulled her back. If they were discovered out together, Shadisa wouldn’t have needed Gamila’s presence to condemn her in sharing the errant daughter’s fate. Shadisa had struggled and kicked, but the days when she’d been a physical match for Omar were long gone. With his fingers clamped over Shadisa’s mouth, Gamila sprinted past, following the crescent-shaped mound of a sand dune without spotting the dried-up oasis. Then she was gone, the shouts of the chase growing louder, men’s voices hooting and calling to each other, before passing and fading under the darkening sky.

      How Shadisa had cursed and damned him for stopping them going to the girl’s aid. He was a fool and a coward and a timid fraud. She couldn’t believe he could be so selfish. Shadisa simply didn’t see how he’d been protecting her all along, saving her from her own thoughtless, reckless actions. Shadisa’s father’s temper would have been volcanic if she had been discovered out in the dunes with a male slave, aiding a girl in dishonouring her family’s name. Gamila had called her own fate down upon her; every slave knew there was only one crime worse than running from your master, and that was getting caught in the attempt. Shadisa didn’t deserve to join the careless house girl in her punishment, and frankly, although he had never voiced it, neither did Omar.

      And a wantonly cruel punishment it proved to be. After Gamila had been dragged back to town, the old merchant quickly decided to break off their betrothal in favour of one of Gamila’s younger sisters. Her family then paid for a master womb mage – an expert in the honour-sanctions demanded by wealthy families – to travel to the town from the distant capital. The spurned suitor rejected the lighter punishment of giving Gamila two extra arms and sentencing her to a life of hard labour as a baggage carrier. Instead, the womb mage had buried her in the sand up to her waist on the outskirts of town and inflicted a changeling virus on Gamila, twisting and mutating her form into a cactus-like taproot. What had been her arms and head warped into fleshy green pads, the outline of her face barely visible as lumpy veins of spines. No eyes to see, no mouth to scream; Omar had often prayed there wasn’t enough sentience inside her barrel-like trunk to feel the cuts of travellers’ knives as they sliced wedges out of her body and sucked on the rubbery green flesh for her water. The desert wastes nothing, the travellers would mouth, before discarding the sucked-out flesh in the dust and continuing on their way.

      But more than Gamila’s body had changed that day. Ever since then, Shadisa’s attitude towards Omar had cooled. No more walks. No more time together in the old oasis or on the beach. She barely smiled when he approached, and made every excuse to be out of his presence as quickly as possible. Perhaps she was frightened of receiving a similar punishment from her father; perhaps she had seen the price of flouting society’s rules and judged the potential cost of continuing to see Omar too high? Surely she still can’t blame me for what happened to Gamila? It was hardly my fault. You would think that given the time we’ve spent apart, on reflection, she could now see that it is only my quick thinking that saved her. Show me a little gratitude at least. The town’s hunters wouldn’t have just given up looking for Gamila. They would have kept on searching until they found her alongside us, and there wouldn’t now be one body twisted to serve as a taproot outside the town, but three. No, Shadisa’s scared, that has to be it. She’s seen what happens to those who defy their family and she’s fearful. Shadisa just had to be brought to see the greatness burning within her suitor, the infinite potential, then she’d realize that he wouldn’t always be fetching and carrying on a water farm.

      ‘Hey there,’ ordered Alim, flicking a pebble of limestone rock at Omar, ‘stop mooning over girls too fine for you and open the locks to the next tank. If the fish don’t purge soon, you’ll have a tank of spoiled water and a school of sick salt-fish.’

      Omar nodded and made his way to the lock wheels. The last slave who’d killed a batch of salt-fish had been made to eat the sickening black things for a week and almost died of salt poisoning. Yes, the arbitrary punishments, just another perk of being a slave in Cassarabia. Alim helped the young slave in his task, walking down the line of water tanks, twisting the rusting wheels that opened the lock doors, the sloshing water sweeping the fish away to the next stage of the filtering process. The fish were biologicks, of course: the product of womb mage sorcery. Only the House of Barir and the other houses that worshipped the Sect of Ackron, all members of the guild of water farmers, understood exactly how to create and nurture the salt-fish. Adding special vials of hormones to the water supply through their complex life cycle to keep them thrashing and thriving.

      Ackron was the fifty-third sect of the Holy Cent, informally known as the trader’s face, and those who embraced the sect often prospered as traders and merchants. That was the theory, at least. The rusting wheels on the water farm’s tanks spoke of a different reality, though. When the plague had spread through the northern provinces of Cassarabia, it had killed over two-thirds of the House of Barir’s people, leaving their coastal water farms undermanned and in the care of the house’s slaves and vagabonds-for-hire like Alim. The bones of the house’s faded glory were laid out in the sand dunes alongside the farm, a handful of metal arches that had been constructed to hold a water pipeline which had never been completed; pipes for fresh drinking water that should have reached all the way to Cassarabia’s capital, bypassing the water traders and the caravans.

      It was through the broken