Tofi yelled at the slaves to help, and lent a hand. Together, with Hati and with Norit, all of them helping, they folded the tent and packed it. They loaded the beasts, and roused them to their feet, ready to move.

“This northern way,” Marak said to Tofi. “Do you know it?”

“There is a shorter way across the highland,” Tofi said. “My father never used it. I can try to find it.”

Try, in an unforgiving waste. But it seemed to him he knew.

And Luz knew. Luz knew exactly where they were, and where she wanted them to go.

Tofi had a worried look and clearly waited for him to say, No, no, let us go the sane and reasonable passage, but he waited in vain.

“We have guidance,” Marak said. He had never been more angry in his life, but never in his life had any man more deserved a plain answer from him than young Tofi. “The woman in the tower speaks to Norit. I don’t trust it, but she wants us to go to Oburan. At least we’re agreed in that.”

“I suppose we have water enough to make mistakes,” Tofi said faintly, and shook his head and walked off to mount up.

They set the au’it into the saddle; and helped Norit, who seemed dazed and hesitant: Luz or Norit, it would be Norit’s bones that broke, and they roused her besha up and set her securely on it.

The rest of them got up, and Tofi turned them north. Beasts that had anticipated one road and now were turned onto another bellowed their frustration to the skies, as much as to say that they remembered Pori, and fools forgot where the water was.

The complaints gradually faded. The sun sank and vanished in a brassy dusk.

“Look!” Hati said, as a star fell.

They looked aloft for falling stars, then, that sign of overthrow and change, and saw another, and a third and a fourth.

Then a fifth blazed bright, and stuttered a trail of fire across the sky. The beasts saw it in alarm, and their heads swung up.

A seventh and an eighth, as bright, traced a path from horizon to horizon.

Marak had viewed the first falling stars as a curiosity, but now he saw a ninth fall, bright and leaving a trail behind it.

A tenth, and thunder cracked among the stars, making everyone jump, and then laugh, caught in foolish fear.

Everyone had seen falling stars. They happened in the sixth and the eighth month, very many a night, but, Marak said to himself, this was the fourth month, no more than early in the fourth month, at that, and the heavens lit up in bright trails, one after another, interspersed with bright interrupted ones.

Another star fell, this one in a crack of thunder, and shattered in a cloud that blotted out the stars along its track.