The Horse Without a Mane

Kalim steals by threes: three ways out, three chances, never fewer. When he cuts a barrel loose from a night caravan leaving Sazgar, he expects water. He finds salt.

Seventeen of the town's wells are drying. Lowered into the dark on a rope beneath the King's Shaft, Kalim finds not a tunnel but a ledger: a debt paid one name a generation, kept by an old register-keeper, a tired king, and a genie who cannot cross a circle of cord.

A 120-page desert noir of measurement and thirst, in etched copperplate line and lantern light, where water is counted like money.