If he was dying, he had led Hati and Norit here, and they needed him awake, not lying here half-witted. Their absence was a grievance and a worry, and when he thought of them, that worry increased and the headache became less.

“Hati,” he said aloud, and tried to move.

Voices spoke to him, or around him. He felt small, vexing pains. He grew ill with the smells, and he grew angrier and angrier at his helplessness. If he fought, he could open his eyes. If he fought, he could think. If he fought, he could remember why he was here and where Hati had gone.

The voices went away. There was utter quiet for a time. It was hard to maintain the struggle. It slipped away from him, just slipped away.

And with no sense of connection to that dark place, he simply waked up, in a brown, smooth-walled room.

He lay under a light cover, on a bed that stank of lye or some such thing, under a glowing sun that lit the whole room, and he had not a stitch on.

He sat up, on cloth fine and smooth as any he had ever felt, and as clean to look at, though it stank. He was clean, he was shaven, his hair was washed and reeked of alcohol and lye. The sunburn on his hands and the new blisters on his feet had diminished to a little peeling skin, and that told him, given the way he healed, that it had been more than a few hours he had lain here, and that the dark dream might be no dream at all.

He swung his legs off the bed.

Sand-colored clothing lay on a shining metal chair at the foot of the bed. It made him remember Ian and the guidance that had brought him here.

“Ian!” he shouted out, damning him for his betrayal. “Ian!”

He expected no response. He doubted Ian would want to be near him at the moment.

But if the clothes were here, they were surely for him, who had none, and they were cleaner than the rest, smelling at least of nothing worse than herbs.

He put on the breeches and shirt and belt, sat down to put on the boots… in every particular like the boots he had come in, but new, as if they had been re-created down to the last stitch.

He hesitated at the gauzy robe, robes indicating tribe and tribe indicating allegiance; but he was not accustomed to go about in half undress, either; and when he picked it up, he saw how a shoulder stitch of strong twill bound the layers into a garment that could be shrugged on with its folds in place.