“I can’t think!” Norit said in a faint voice. “I see things and I can’t think about them, and I hear words and they don’t make sense. She hates me; she says she doesn’t, but I know she does!”

“Let her be!” he said to whoever possessed Norit. “Talk to me, and let her be!”

“Norit is far easier.” Of a sudden Norit’s head drooped, and her whole body sank into his arms, so that for a moment he feared Norit was dead… but Norit lay in his embrace, aware, and breathing as if she had run for her life.

“Luz wants you to listen,” Norit whispered against him, teeth chattering. “Luz wants you to listen and not to fight her.”

“Hush,” he said. “Hush. I’ll try.” He did try. He shut his eyes and tried to make sense of the whisper in his skull.

“She thinks things,” Norit said, at the limit of her expression, trembling. “She wants things. My ears buzz. She’s angry because you won’t listen to her.”

“I’m trying! Let her give us Hati back. Let her make sense and come into this room and talk to us face-to-face. It was she I saw in the metal hall, wasn’t it? She’s flesh and blood like the rest of us. Why won’t she come here to talk?”

“Will she be safe, she asks.”

“I swear she’ll be safe. Just let her leave you alone.” He wiped a strand of hair from Norit’s cheek. “Luz! Do you hear me?”

Somewhere a door opened. Theirs closed. He looked up from over Norit’s head.

“We’re locked in,” Norit said in a faint voice.

“We’ve been locked in,” he said. “This whole damned place locks us in.” He thought of Hati, who never but in the Beykaskh itself had experienced a roof. He thought of Hati shut in a little room, with no way out.

“She says…” Norit whispered. “She says… I should say exactly these words, and you have to listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“We have to go back. You promised the Ila to go back, and we have to. We have to tell the Ila… we have to tell the Ila…”

Suddenly the walls of the room went black, and the vision of the stars spread itself all across them. Norit cried out. Marak held to her; and suffered a vision of stars lit with lightning.

The tower rode that blue-glowing fire to the ground, and reached out arms and dug into the earth, substantial as a mountain, on a plain of glass.

And they still sat on a pale, foreign bed, clinging to one another.

“The beginning,” a voice said from above them. “Your beginning. The First Descended.”

Marak leapt up, but all around him was the desert, limned square, on the walls, a moving image with neither wind nor smell, and square-cornered.