Nayla had awakened before dawn and had walked out to the top of a low dune at the village edge to think about this thing that Idaho proposed. It had been a lime dawn with a familiar winding cloth of dust in the distance, then steel day and the baleful immensity of the Sareer. She knew then that these matters certainly had been anticipated by God. What could be hidden from God? Nothing could be hidden, not even the remote figure of Duncan Idaho groping for a pathway up to the edge of heaven.

As she watched Idaho climb, Nayla’s mind played a trick on her, tipping the wall to the horizontal. Idaho became a child crawling across a broken surface. How small he looked… and growing smaller.

An aide offered Nayla water which she drank. The water brought the wall back into its true perspective.

Siona crouched on the first ledge, leaning out to peer upward. “If you fall, I will try it,” Siona had promised Idaho. Nayla had thought it a strange promise. Why would both of them want to try the impossible?

Idaho had failed to dissuade Siona from the impossible promise.

It is fate, Nayla thought. It is God’s will.

They were the same thing.

A bit of rock fell from where Idaho clutched at it. That had happened several times. Nayla watched the falling rock. It took a long time coming down, bounding and rebounding from the wall’s face, demonstrating that the eye did not report truthfully when it said the wall was sheer.

He will succeed or he will not, Nayla thought. Whatever happens, it is God’s will.

She could feel her heart hammering, though. Idaho’s venture was like sex, she thought. It was not passively erotic, but akin to rare magic in the way it seized her. She had to keep reminding herself that Idaho was not for her.

He is for Siona. If he survives.

And if he failed, then Siona would try. Siona would succeed or she would not. Nayla wondered, though, if she might experience an orgasm should Idaho reach the top. He was so close to it now.

Idaho took several deep breaths after dislodging the rock. It was a bad moment and he took the time to recover, clinging to a three-point hold on the wall. Almost of its own accord, his free hand groped upwards once more, wriggling past the rotten place into another slender crack. Slowly, he shifted his weight on to that hand. Slowly… slowly. His left knee felt the place where a toehold could be achieved. He lifted his foot to that place, tested it. Memory told him the top was near, but he pushed the memory aside. There was only the climb and the knowledge that Leto would arrive tomorrow.

Leto and Hwi.

He could not think about that, either. But it would not go away. The top… Hwi… Leto… tomorrow.

Every thought fed his desperation, forced him into the immediate remembrance of the climbs of his childhood. The more he remembered consciously, the more his abilities were blocked. He was forced to pause, breathing deeply in the attempt to centre himself, to go back to the natural ways of his past.