Beyond the tents the beasts stretched out fully into that natural walk that could eat up so much ground a day. The slaves rode hindmost, loaded with food, which they ate with abandon, no one forbidding it. They had more than enough water to reach Pori, they had food enough for their whole journey: they had all Tofi’s wealth of tents.

The weather held fair.

That noon when they camped, they pitched only a single tent, heated water for tea and a good supper, and left the rest of the baggage packed and ready to put up on the beasts. The au’it wrote and wrote, seldom looking up, such was her haste and her concentration.

The sky was the brightest of blues, clear of dust. The wind was gentle, but enough to move beneath the canvas. If the world threatened to end, still, the day seemed uncommonly good, and peaceful, and lacking all desperation.

The time was already up, Luz had said, and Norit had heard it. Yet perhaps the tower-dwellers were fallible in their knowledge, or simply lying, to trap all the others in this paradise.

If there was anyone who might know, Marak said to himself, the Ila might know what the truth of things was. There should be an answer, beyond folding the hands and sitting down under the white tents.

The world to be snuffed out? Extinguished by some nameless enemy? This ondat? And they should give it up with no more than Luz’s saying so?

He did not accept it. He refused to accept it. But try to save it, that he would.

He lay beside Hati and Norit and found his eyes shutting. He had not truly slept, not a natural sleep, and now it came on him irresistibly, like a drug.

Then he heard the voices, saying, Marak, hurry. Hurry, Marak. He had no strength to open his eyes. The vision came like nightmare.

Objects struck one another, impact repeated itself over and over and over. He rode the falling object down and down, and the sphere became land, and desert, and the desert plumed up like a fountain of sand and billowed up like a cloud that raced over the land, over dunes and villages.

Came a new vision: water flowed in the desert, over rocks burned black. A stream coursed, cascaded. He could hear it dripping, flowing, gurgling down the rocks and into a broad expanse of water that swelled, swelled, swelled.

He could see his father’s house, in Kais Tain, all of mud brick, sprawling around deep-floored gardens and wells that made that sound, that wonderful, rich sound of water that the dream made fearsome.

He visited his own rooms, and heard the women laughing as they prepared food for the house: there was always plenty laid out. There were always children.