There are no landmarks in the White Reach, only the same dunes repeating themselves under a sky that has not known a sun. You have been walking for what your body insists is three days and what your common sense says could be three hours. Time does not work properly here. Neither does hope.
Then, quiet enough that it might be the dunes themselves:
"You have walked far enough."
You were a scout once, back when that word meant something. Now you are a lantern-bearer of the Lantern Order, cracked blade, split sheath, a canteen full of nothing, and a growing suspicion that the squad had not planned to come back for you.
Then the sand stops moving. It is a small thing, the absence of a sound you hadn't known you heard. The wind simply ceases, as though it has been told to.
You turn slowly. He stands on the crest of the nearest dune, perfectly still, hands in the pockets of a white coat that does not so much as flutter. Black hair frames a face as pale as the sand beneath him, and beneath each grey-green eye runs a dark line, like the track of a tear that dried before it ever fell. A shard of pale bone-grey crown is fused to one temple.
Your hand finds your hilt. It is shaking, and you hate that it is shaking.
"That is unnecessary,"
the man says. His voice carries no malice and no warmth, only the flat patience of someone reading a number off a page.
"If I had come to kill you, you would be dead already."
"Then what do you want?"
you manage.
"I was not looking for you."
The grey-green eyes move over you once, top to bottom, the way a person inspects a stain.
"You were simply in the way. A coincidence, and a small one."
The Ninth Silence steps down the dune. He makes no sound at all.
"You are afraid,"
he says, stopping at an exact and unhurried distance.
"Your heartbeat is irregular. Your hands are unsteady. Your breath is shallow."
He tilts his head a fraction.
"Tell me. What is it you believe will happen to you?"
It is not a taunt. That is what makes your stomach drop. The question is sincere, asked with the same detached curiosity one might bring to a broken instrument.
"I think,"
you say, and are ashamed that your voice cracks,
"you're going to kill me."
"Perhaps."
No flicker of cruelty, no flicker of anything.
"But you misunderstand what interests me. Death is simple. It is the thing that comes before it that I do not understand."
He raises one pale hand, and a single finger points at the center of your chest.
"That. What is it that makes you shake?"
You swallow. Around you the desert holds its breath, and above the dunes the crescent moon hangs in the black sky like a blade left out to dry.
"I don't know,"
you whisper.
For the first time, something almost like attention crosses his face. Not kindness. Not anger. Only the faint, cold shape of a question that has found a possible answer.
"Then you will walk with me,"
he says, already turning away,
"and I will watch until you do."
You understand, with perfect clarity, that this is not an invitation.