---
"Press forward and kill," Shale said, one syllable, and his heavies took that single step no farther than the end of a hammer's face. It meant the men opposite them could not reclaim the piece of conviction she'd just bought with discipline.
Wolf became a rumor at the rear of the wedge. He didn't need claws for this work. He needed small treasons: stoppers that bit instead of sealing, the barely tilted board that dumps a water skin's beauty into the sand, a lizard hole where a smart foot thinks it can rest. Every time a bearer reached, the desert remembered whose mouth it wanted to be. Every time a captain looked back for a promised jar, the jar wasn't there. The wedge's nose grew thirst long before its throat was dry.
"Reserves move forward," Yavri said. "Third rank to second. Second to first." She did it like a loom, warp and weft, and the cloth held. It was as good a living wall as any desert had seen in a year of wars.
