Raith winced as the poultice began immediately bubbling, but he steeled himself to avoid flinching.  “I think your treatment might sting more than your knife could have,” he said.  “What is a marabout like you doing with a knife, anyway?  I thought your kind swore off violence.”

Shaking her head, Shandal wiped her hands on a dry burlap rag.  “The old ways don’t carry much water anymore, so to speak.  We don’t have the Land Walls to defend us anymore.  And it’s more than just the scorpions and the serpents who strike and spit venom here in the sands.

“Surely a Virgin Priestess has never killed a man,” said Raith.

His question went unanswered.

A simple adobe hut stood at the foot of a dramatic escarpment, about twenty paces from the mud-brick well and overlooking the salt flat.  Each month since the fall of Ukur, Shandal had prayed for the waters to be restored, and each month her pleas fell on the ears of dead gods.  But she had her well and she had her peace, alone except for the goats she raised for milk and the flightless kuuzaj bird upon which she roamed the sands.

Alone, that was, until this visitor.

"I take it you have a name," she asked him.

The man still bore the marks of dehydration, fatigue, and a few wounds better hidden than the one on his forehead, but his breathing had stabilized, and he had left, for the foreseeable future, the door of the shadow.  But the spark of wit had returned to his eyes, and he smirked wearily.  "I have used a thousand names, give or take.  The ones who know me best, though, call me Raith."

Shandal leaned her head to the side, her purple-red hennaed dreadlocks rattling as she took in his amorphous character.  "Let me guess, then," she said.  "You're a thief, perhaps?  A wandering scoundrel?"

Through as much of a grin as he could muster, Raith replied.  "I'd like to think that I'm a survivor of whatever I get myself into, regardless of what I'm pretending to be that day."  The bold proclamation nearly overtaxed him, and he fell to coughing.  Though he seemed to think he could fool his own body into forgetting its wounds, Nature was a tougher mark.

Shandal crushed together some dried leaves and a handful of hard-shelled seeds, mixing in water to form a poultice for Raith's wounds.  "And I am Shandal," she said.

"Let me guess," asked Raith.  "You're the wise healer who has gone slightly mad from years of isolation?"

"No," she replied.  "No, only months.  It hasn't been that long since--"

"--since the fall of Ukur," said Raith, completing her sentence.

Shandal instinctively reached for her dagger.  These new instincts-- the ones that kept her looking over her shoulders, the ones that kept her reaching for the blade at every sound riding on the wind-- had only recently been planted at the base of her mind.  Before the fall of the Great City, she had been one of the hundred virgin acolytes of the High Priestess of the River; after the fall, many things had changed.  She braided her hair tightly to keep the sand out of it.  Her once smooth and pale face had tanned and begun to freckle and wrinkle in the sun and the harsh wind.  Now she clipped her nails short and her temper shorter, tossed aside her flowing white temple robes for workable leather clothes, and suffered neither vanity in herself nor foolishness in others.  As she brought the blade to bear against her guest, familiar words in a now-ancient melody came forth from his mouth:

b'ruthu bel b'shaz al-beis
bel shazzu beis aqu aqu

"The lord of the people lives in the water... you... you are an Ukuri?" Shandal asked, stunned.

"Perhaps not by birth," he said, "but certainly by persuasion, at least up until Lord Shavastiloth's armies torched the city.  Now I'm not sure what I believe."  As Shandal let down her guard, he added, "Even if I weren't, I'd be pretty motivated to say most anything in this state to keep you from slicing me up with that knife."

Shandal set the knife aside.  "Alright," she said, taking in and then letting out a deep breath.  "That shouldn't be enough to make me trust you, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt."  She rinsed her hands in water and then spread the poultice onto them in generous amounts.  "Now I want you to trust me in return," she said.

"With what?" asked Raith.

"With the knowledge that this is going to hurt quite a bit."  With that, she pressed her sticky hands onto his wounds.

A bucket of water fell from Shandal's hand and soaked immediately into the thirsty and sunbaked sands near the lonely well.  She squinted to confirm what might simply be illusion across the shimmering salt-flat, and upon reaffirming her initial impulse, jogged the hundred yards between her and the very real figure of a man crawling along the dead white ground.

She knew better than to immediately trust the crippled man and instinctively drew her flint dagger as she swung the leather water skin into her other hand.  Life in the Endless Sands had taught her a caution that was warranted far more often than it was not.  But she was a healer by faith, one of the acolytes scattered after the fall of great Ukur, and the water was just as important an offer as the knife.

As she approached, the man pulled his gaunt and blood-encrusted face up into view.  An old wound crossed high on his forehead and notched his temple, and his brown eyes were wild with dehydration.  "Be still," said Shandal.  "I want to aid you, but if you leap at me I will have no choice but to bring my blade to bear."

He closed his eyes and nodded in assent, his lips too parched to make sound.

Shandal unslung the water skin from her shoulder and lowered it to his mouth.  His lips accepted the life-giving water passively at first, but after the first few sips, he raised his hand toward her wrist, desperate for every drop.  At this, Shandal brandished her knife.  "Slowly," she said.  "Slowly."  He nodded again, and again was speechless.  She allowed him to take a few more sips from the skin, then withdrew it.  "Too much water will hurt you as much as not enough.  Let's get you into the shade."

The pair began the journey back to the well.