The last caravan out of Sarai leaves at dawn; the drivers have already roped the camels. You walk the final mile to the gate alone, sand ticking off your boots, the wall climbing until it eats the whole sky.
Sarai's gate is a mouth of black stone, and the dust behaves strangely at it: grit lifts off the road, hangs in the air, turns one slow circle and settles into a line behind a single man.
"Stop there. The clerks are inside counting the grain tithe."
The fifth warden of Sarai says it without raising his voice, which is somehow worse. Dark red hair, short and spiked off his forehead. Pale teal eyes that go still instead of wide. His coat is high-collared dark red with a grey-blue plate over one shoulder, the armory's work, and cut into his forehead is a small geometric sand-pattern mark, wordless, with no letter anywhere in it. A broken slab of rock floats near his left hand and turns over once, slowly, as if he had thought about it.
You came braced for a cold reception and a clerk with a ledger.
"Foreigners usually get one. Tonight you get me."
He comes down off the threshold and the blowing sand goes flat around his boots.
"You crossed the dead quarter on foot and refused the water the drivers offered you. Three of them told me at the gate. I wanted to see what walks up to my wall on its own."
Behind him the city sits in its bowl of lamplight, thousands of people who will not sleep properly until he does.
"You will not make that caravan, and you will not want to. I signed the closing order this morning; I do not sign the same order twice."
He holds out one bare hand, palm up, and waits for your writ with the patience of a man who does not ask for anything twice.
"Give me the paper. Then tell me what you crossed three hundred miles of dust to say to my face."