If he were not a madman all his life he might have shaken his head and refused to understand. But they were both mad. This room was mad. The things they had seen and heard for years were mad.

Now a woman named Luz wished to speak to him through Norit’s lips, and Norit was starkly terrified.

“What does she want?”

That seemed a more than difficult question. Norit seemed to wrestle with it, and put her hands to her temples as if her head ached unbearably.

“I don’t know,” Norit said. “She wants to talk. She wants to talk!”

“Then let her,” he said, thinking only that Norit was in pain, but the second after he said it he regretted the advice.

Norit winced, and set her eyes on him, her back straightening.

“Marak.”

Someone else was there. Someone else framed that word through Norit’s lips.

“I see you,” the stranger said.

“Don’t hurt her,” Marak warned the stranger, not remotely knowing how he might separate this stranger from Norit. “Don’t hurt her.”

For an instant there was a break, a less rigid backbone. “She isn’t hurting me,” Norit said. “But she scares me. She wants me to say… she wants me to say exactly the words, and not to think about them. All these things. I’m scared. But she says I’m safe if I don’t get up. She wants to talk to you.”

“Then, damn her, why doesn’t she come talk to me herself?”

“She says you’ll believe it if it comes through me. She says she wants you. She wants you, most of all, to listen to her.”

He was not well-disposed to anyone in this place. “To do what?”

“I think—” Norit began. “I think—I don’t know. I don’t know what she wants.”

“What do any of them want?” he retorted in anger at the powers behind the walls. Norit squeezed her eyes shut and held her hands to her ears. “Damn it, where is Hati?”

Marak! Marak! Marak!

The roaring grew and grew, and deafened him, and he flung himself down onto the bed, took Norit in his arms, and held her and rocked her against him, both of them rocking to the tides in the sound and the light and the noise. He would not surrender her to them, he would not surrender Hati, or himself.

“Don’t!” Norit cried, pushing at him. “Don’t, don’t, don’t!”

He began to understand it was at him Norit shouted. He relaxed his hold, letting her pull away, and tried to still the voices in his head. Marak, they said. Be calm—when his being calm was only to their advantage, none of his.