He could not leave this vision untested. He got up and began walking down the slant of the sand that rose up against the sandstone, down a well-trodden path that led him down to the level of those orderly white tents. Hati followed, and Norit and the au’it trailed them both, all the way to the edge of the encampment, where a green-banked pool stood. Beshti wandered at liberty at some distance around the pool, halterless, seeming to belong to no one. Children ran and played, and splashed in the water.

The children stopped and stared. In their gift-robes, they looked like everyone else in sight, but the au’it with them did not. When they walked by and into the rows of tents, people stopped their work and stared.

The people were like the people of any village. There was a potter at work, a weaver. There were all these ordinary activities.

“Where are you from?” Marak asked a potter, and with a clay-caked hand the potter indicated himself and several adults around him.

“From La Oshai,” the potter said with an anxious glance at the au’it. It was a village in the northwest. “My wife is from Elgi.” That was on the western edge of the Lakht. “We met here. Where are you from?”

“Kais Tain,” Marak said. He walked farther, with Hati and Norit, and the au’it trailing them. He asked names. He asked origins. The whole place was a mingling, and as far as he could tell it went on and on.

“The hammer will fall,” one weaver said suddenly, after naming his village. “This is the only safe place. This is the only place.”

“Are you happy here?” Norit asked, and the man’s overly anxious smile faded.

“I wish my wife would come. I wish I could go out there and tell her.”

“Can’t you?” Marak asked.

“I don’t know the way,” the man said.

It was the only unhappiness they had met face-to-face; and it was too painful, and brought back what Luz had said, that everyone who was not here would be under attack, and no one could save them.

Marak turned and walked away, out under the heat of the sun, and walked back to the pool and up toward the ridge, Hati and Norit and the au’it in his tracks.

He had become a void, a sheet of sand on which nothing at all was written.

The unfortunate man down among the tents, a weaver, had no idea of directions. Perhaps he had followed a vision to get here. He had none to take him home to his wife.