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Feels like you've been walking for <span class="mu-i">days</span> which is always the trick around here. The landscape changes by subtle degrees. It's all sand and endless shimmering horizons and you don't notice the hypnotic lull. Then you cross a dune and bypass a rocky cliff that sticks out like a broken tooth and then - well - then you suddenly enter a place of almost shade and green things. Mushy sand from some wetness in the deep earth. Bricks, long stained by the wind, but orange clay still almost faintly homely. This place is impossible to see at distance, hidden by some quirk of sand dunes and the undulations of the landscape. You practically fell right into it.
It's not an oasis, not by a long shot, so the few of you that hoped for more water can groan and complain and pretend it helps.
Still - the sand somewhat sticks to your boots here. It's possible someone dug a well, because there must be some underground flow or such-like. And where there were once wells there were once people. Might still be some.
No tracks from wagons here, and you're sort of off the beaten path. <span class="mu-i">Ideally</span> the supply train would be staggered out behind you with villages you'd had already passed and haggled with. Once the quartermaster assistants arrive, the villagers would have had time to prepare the supplies that the Commander and his outriders had already haggled for. It's a system that has worked on countless other operations, it keeps you lean and moving and precludes endless slow-downs from overload on the road.
But it does have this one peculiar problem that precludes its usage by most standardized military formations. It's the thought that lurks now in the back of your minds.
If the Commander and his outriders have passed through a village ahead of the supply train, and you, on foot and marching along to some distant goal, pass by later once again <span class="mu-i">and then</span> eventually some underworked supply clerk finally rolls up with four mules and an empty wagon . . .
. . . well.
From a certain point of perspective, that would mean someone got a good headcount of your entire outfit, knew the proper fighters were on ahead a-ways and could keep a watch for any returning. It's a system that lends itself far too readily to ambushes.
Which is why one only ever does it in places were that sort of thing doesn't <span class="mu-i">happen</span>.
And --
You can't muse much more because the hounds go ballistic at some distant scent. But they don't bound to the chase. They bare their hackles and teeth and the growls are low and rumbling.
It's not people - that's a different signal (two short barks means intruders). But they're <span class="mu-i">unhappy</span>.
And that distant sun-baked bit of random clay architecture in the middle of absolute nowhere is to blame.
Might be you should take a look? It'd be a good place to leave a message, if some of the supply people have passed by this way or gotten in trouble.
Might be you should turn <span class="mu-s">right around</span> and get out of here. Just something in the air.
