The Palace in the Moonlight
Novelette 8,083 words Recommended by 2 award/anthology sources
"Dabir and I shrouded the Syrian in his saddle blanket and spent a few hours digging a hole for him in that lonely land. He had been the last of our companions. Bandits and desertion and, finally, illness, had whittled our numbers down from the score of warriors and porters with whom we had begun our journey so that only we two were left."
Content warnings 1
death
Quasar links out; the story lives on Lightspeed, where the author gets the click.