SOLVED. Scene: youth with hidden teleportation skill joins desert caravan? [s]

[Richard]

As I was reading a book involving someone escaping across a middle-eastern desert, I suddenly recalled a scene that I couldn't place, even though I'm pretty sure I read it just recently and I'm pretty good about tracking my reading.

The part I recall was of an adventurous young man who plays an instrument, entertaining at an town at the edge of a desert, and hires on to a caravan heading across the desert. Halfway across, at an oasis where the locals harvest an addictive drug from a local cave, there's a mutiny, and the young man and the caravan leader are left to die. The young man uses his teleportation skill to get them to someplace safe and...

That's all I recall. I'm very perplexed.

Any help?

[Richard]

Stumbled onto it myself. This was actually in a short story, chapter number 17 in George R.R. Martin's Rogues: “The Caravan to Nowhere,” by Phyllis Eisenstein.

[Raz]

Phyllis Eisenstein has a couple of other books with the same character in them. Born to Exile and In the Red Lord's Reach, if you're interested in her work.