All around the pit, in whatever settlement they had brought her to, Sentinels started crying out. She heard them dashing here and there in apparent panic, and heard a few growls and snarls as the creatures collided. A shadow fell over her pit and quickly passed, and Nomi recognized the willowy waving of a creature's long limbs.

“Hello!” she called. She was suddenly afraid that if they left, she would remain down here unfed and unwatered for an unknown length of time. They were looking after her now, but though they thought her pregnant she did not seem special to them. The pit proved that. The pit, and that stinking bloody mass in the far corner that she had doggedly refused to examine. “Hey, ugly pissers! Where's my food? Where's my fucking water?”

Sordon's words came back to her, his unwanted descriptions of wars the Sentinels had fought against one another. Perhaps this was another such battle, starting because she had arrived with something else unborn for them to worship.

Nomi paced the small pit, five steps one way, five the other. She heard Sentinels calling again in the distance, and the silence above and around her suggested they had just left.

“Hello!” she shouted again. “Food! Water!”

“They can't hear you,” Sordon Perlenni said. She could not yet see him but she knew that he was close, perhaps sitting a few steps away from the pit and listening to her growing panic.

“What's happening?” Nomi asked.

Sordon started chuckling, then laughing, but there was nothing of humor there at all. He sounded mad. He tried to talk but his laughter increased, and it eventually turned into loud, extended sobbing.

“Sordon!” Nomi called. She jumped and held on to the timber grating, trying to pull herself up. But her arms were still weakened from the climb. “What is it? Why have they gone?”

“The God,” he said at last, stuttering the words between sobs. “The Fallen God. Someone is going for it.”

“It's close?” she asked, feeling a thrill of fear.

“Not so far away,” he said. “Is it your Ramus?”

“Ramus died. He—”

“I'm here to let you out,” he said. “Listen to me, Nomi. If he's close—”

“I can't trust you,” she said. “You left me hanging there on that rack. Used me to calm your own sick guilt.”

His head appeared above the edge of the pit for the first time, and in his old man's eyes Nomi saw such terror that she slumped to her knees, trying to draw as far away from him as possible.