Thunder crashed over them, the wind roared, and in the overthrow of the heavens and the battering of the wind, Marak held Hati to him for warmth. They tried to gather Norit into their embrace, but like the au’it, Norit stayed apart, somewhere near the big tent pole, waiting, waiting. She began to sing to herself in the dark, a tuneless song like the wind, drowned intermittently by the thunder and the crack of the canvas.

Lightning flashes showed through the seams of the tent. A terrible crash of thunder hit their ears.

A pattering followed, as if pebbles were falling on the tent.

But in the rain of pebbles battering against the canvas over their heads, Marak realized the singing beside had stopped a moment ago.

He gathered himself up and felt toward the tent pole where Norit had sat.

“Norit?” he asked the dark, and the roaring and the thunder gave him no answer.

Were it Hati, he would have thought she had simply gone off to the corner of the tent on intimate business. But a moment ago Norit had been singing, and now she was not where she had been. That warned him something might be amiss.

Then he felt a sudden gust, and he knew for certain. The tent flap blew and moved in the dark, its cords loosed, admitting a dark less absolute than the dark inside, and a fitful flicker that picked out a horizon.

He went out it, flinching as pebbles struck him… not woundingly hard, but hard enough, and when he put a hand to his bare skin he felt his skin slick and gritted with sand that immediately stuck to it. In the lightning flashes he saw small shining objects lying about him, like jewels in the lightning. He saw others bounce as they hit, and felt the sting of others, an impact on his skull.

“Norit!” he shouted into the wind and the falling stones, angry, willing finally to leave her to Luz.

But he heard her voice on the wind, sobbing or laughing, or perhaps both.

“It comes,” Norit cried. Lightning showed her dancing along the ridge.

On that dim, lightning-lit sight he ran out through the pelting from the heavens, knowing that only fools and suicides wandered away from tents in storms. He reached her, he seized her in his arms and precisely reversed that trail, aiming straight for the tent door, in a sudden, blind dearth of lightning.

“This way!” Hati shouted from ahead of him.

He went toward that voice and as he made the doorway, fierce, familiar hands seized on him and on Norit. Lightning showed him Hati’s face, a series of three flashes.

“Fool!” Hati shouted at him over the roar of the wind. “Get in! Get in!”

Even in that time pebbles had bruised his back and his head, and with Norit in his arms, they burst through the windblown door and into the numbing stillness and blackness inside.