“This was five hundred thirty-eight years ago,” Luz said, “when she created the pool and sent out this new breed of men, under priests she instructed. This was five hundred thirty-eight years ago when the First Descended took this world and hid from their enemies.”

There was a new thread. “What enemies?” he asked.

“Enemies her predecessors made. She found a desert and transformed it. She sent out the makers and by them she fitted her creation to survive. She set up the priests to teach a history she wrote. As far as the priests’ god exists, she is that god, and the devil of your belief is her enemy. Both are false. But we’re not here to argue philosophy. We’re here to save as much as we can save, before her enemy destroys this creation of hers. You are a resource to us, a threat to them, and we’ve won a reprieve: we’ve won this world, we’ve won the chance to save you, if you’ll only listen. That’s why we’ve called you here … to save your lives.”

It was too much to swallow at one taking. All around him, within his arms, was the evidence of intentions not as benign as the promise. And all his knowledge a lie? He refused to fall down and worship their truth, either.

“What do you think of us, Marak Trin Tain? Do you want to listen?”

“I’ll listen,” he said. “You keep your damned hands off us. And bring Hati here!”

The sunlight grew on the walls, and whitened, and the vision was done. He found Norit’s trembling had spread to his own limbs. Nothing he knew was true? Where did lies start and stop?

The door whisked open. He expected a monster. He saw instead a perfectly ordinary woman, in house clothes, without a robe, like a prostitute. She had no definite age. With robes, she might have been a baker, a potter, a weaver. But she was very, very pale. Only the Ila had such skin.

The Ila, and, he guessed, Luz.

“Marak,” Luz said in her own voice, and with an accent neither westerly nor easterly, only mildly strange. “Norit.” This with a nod to his companion, who clung trembling to his arms.

“So what do you want?” Marak asked. He held Norit close, and then on a second thought, put her apart from him. He had drawn the Ila’s lightning. He might draw this woman’s: he expected it, because he was not in a mood to bow down, with Hati unaccounted for. “One thief calls the other a liar. What does it mean to the man who’s lost his silver?”