Norit looked at him, frightened, as all her waking hours were a chaos of fear and Luz’s presence. For a moment it was Norit, wholly Norit who gazed at him. Then the fear dimmed, and it was Luz. “Do what you came to do,” Luz said sharply, and that was all she would say, leaving him angry and worried both.

He delayed talking to Hati. He knew it would be an argument.

Haste, the voices said. Don’t stop. Don’t rest.

The sky remained the same dirty yellow toward the night, until the sun went down in a red sky the like of which none of them had seen; and that night the stars were hidden by cloud. Now and again in the far distance a trail of fire came through, and once a great boom resounded across the pans.

Day came with a different shade, gray murk above their heads, streaked with dirty yellow high, high aloft.

They had ceased to point at wonders. Tofi looked up gape-mouthed at this one, and so did Hati. The au’it began to write, and seemed to lose heart, and folded her book under this leaden sky.

Norit had nothing to say.

“We should keep moving,” Tofi said. “The mirage has failed us. But I know we’re not that far.”

The yellow dust of the western pans was on the move. Sometimes, being newly fallen, dust ran along the ground, a light film of it, streaks across the red sand of the Lakht.

But by midmorning a dark haze was on the northern horizon, and by noon a low black pall obscured the face of the Qarain’s red rock.

“Fire,” Hati said. “Smoke.”

It was the city itself they were seeing. They saw nothing like the tall graceful towers. The city lacked its towers and was surrounded by a field of dull gray and red-brown their eyes had taken for sand.

Tents stood on the outskirts of the holy city… many, many tents spread all about it.

But there was no city. All the fine dwellings, all the wealth, all the power of Oburan had come to this. The holy city was a hill of ruins.

Chapter Fourteen

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The extent of the calamity of the heavens has yet to be known, but Oburan has opened its gates to the desperate: everyone who comes to the Ilias Mercy may come in.
—The Book of Oburan

They did not rest. the beasts remembered water or smelled it in the air, and even after so long a trek they stretched out in that smooth halfrun the self-saving creatures rarely sustained, flagging occasionally but still moving at a walk, until they caught their breaths. Then one of the riding beasts would take it in his head to run, and off they would go again toward that distant ruin, maintaining the pace so long as their wind lasted, pack beasts jogging along behind.