Marak found to his chagrin that he had lost all count of the days, but more worrisome, he had ceased to care. Habits on which life itself depended faded from importance in the oppressive air. The au’it never spoke, in all these days. Norit had grown increasingly quiet and hard to rouse. Hati moped in the weather. Tofi looked ten years older from sunburn and dirt, while the ex-slaves recalled the white tents, and safety, and sat listless in the shade. They found a bitter spring, and the beshti, well watered, disdained it. But their water supply had become, at least marginally, a concern, and after this they determined to reserve the good water and let the beshti go in want. Tofi harbored a secret worry, and still claimed he knew the way, but Marak began to suspect otherwise.

The silence of the voices began to seem not freedom, but abandonment, stemming from the assault on Norit, as best Marak reckoned. He asked himself whether Luz would damn all the world for his crime against her, and began to think every day of dying, not that dying held any attraction for him, only that it seemed the likely outcome.

And every night as they rode the sky was streaked with falling stars, sometimes so violent in their fall they flew apart in pieces, and sometimes so near them they screamed on their way down.

He had seen very many strange things, he decided, enough strange things that he ought to be satisfied. But he was not. On the way to the tower, when they had known nothing, he and Hati had shared a passion for life. Now he and Hati looked at each other through identical visions, made love sometimes, but more often laced fingertips, only fingertips, lying near and not against one another: the heat around them was stifling, sapping all strength. Together they cared for Norit, and were concerned for her, both of them helpless to rescue her.

They traveled and put up their tent, and had grain-cake to eat. To do more asked strength they hoarded. They sat. They ate.

“The sky,” Norit said suddenly.

Brisk movement came back to her limbs, and awareness to her eyes, and she rose to her feet, staring toward the end of the tent, toward the west.

Hati’s fingers knotted into his sleeve, a demand, a claim, when Norit’s distress distracted him.

“She may kill herself,” he said, and a sense of omen dawned on him, a sudden conviction that time had slipped away from him, and the vision was imminent.

“She won’t kill herself,” Hati said. “Didn’t Luz say she wouldn’t? She’s grown too hard for that. She listens to all we do and say, even if the voices are quiet.”