Norit went out of the tent and stood in the burning heat. Eventually he went, swept her up in his arms, and carried her inside. When he set her on her feet she abruptly sat down and stared out unblinkingly at the daylight.

“Luz,” he said, kneeling and shaking Norit. “Luz, you’re killing her. We love her and you’re killing her.”

There was no seeming awareness. Norit simply stared.

He gave up, took his hand away, then on a second thought laid hands on Norit and made her lie down. She stayed as he disposed her, and he went back to his mat, next to Hati.

The au’it slept. Tofi and the freed slaves slept. A rising wind stirred the broad canvas of their shelter, and everyone but Norit roused to see the sight. They had seen nothing else living for days, not even the flight of a bird. The land seemed dead around them.

Then the canvas stirred slightly and lifted like a breath of hope.

Then the southwest wind began to blow, but it was the breath of a furnace, as unkind as the silence. They packed up and moved on, the beasts complaining, and by evening the wind was a west wind, in their faces, picking up sand as it came. In the pans, uneasy dust flowed in small streams along the harder surface of the sand.

They crested a broad, gradual ridge as evening fell, and before them, as far as they could see, the otherwise flat, stone-littered plain of the Lakht beyond showed strange new wounds, pale sand circles in the old, weathered sand, two nearest that overlapped each other.

Had some desperate band of travelers, as lost as they, attempted wells all over the plain?

“What creature made that?” Hati asked Tofi. “Have you ever seen the like?”

“No,” Tofi said, sounding for a moment like the boy he was. “Never in my life.”

Their downward path took them alongside one such pale spot, a shallow new depression in the sand, with dark red, unweathered sand thrown out around it. The beasts lowered their heads and nosed the area, odd behavior in itself, and pawed at it, but they found nothing buried there.

They pushed on across the plain, not liking the vicinity. They put it far behind them by next noon, when they pitched a belated camp.

The earth shook itself, like a beast shaking his skin; and they who had been stretching rope, and the two freedmen, who had been pounding a tent peg, stopped their work.

They all stood still, except Norit, who had sat down at the start of their work, and who sat like a stone. The peg, half-driven, pulled loose.

“What was that?” Tofi asked.

“The earth will shake,” Norit said, breaking days of silence. “The earth will crack like a pot and spill out fire.”