“Luz takes her,” Marak said, with a distracted glance at Norit. Her face was white and still, terrified. “She can’t stop it. She’s a woman from Tarsa; she’s never been outside her village. She isn’t doing this.”

“This is a dangerous woman,” the Ila said considerately, the hand half-lifted. “This is an extremely dangerous woman.”

“I’m your hope of salvation,” Norit said sharply. “You’ve lost. Your enemies have found you. We bargained with them for your lives. We’ve worked here thirty years to save something of what you built, first, because we couldn’t come closer to you inside your guards and your protection, and second, because we didn’t think you would hear us, and third, because we wouldn’t lose the rest, trying to save you. When we knew we had Marak Trin among the mad, we tried to take the Lakht and gain your attention, but he couldn’t reach his father, and his father couldn’t reach you.”

“With Tain’s army?” The Ila laughed as a man might laugh at a very grim joke, on his father, on his entire house and all their effort, and it stung. “From the beginning, that wasn’t likely.”

“But you reached him,” Norit said, while Marak remained paralyzed by this step-by-step disclosure of the facts of his life, a simple process of logic and history. “Knowing what we had made him, but not that we had made him, you chose him for your messenger. Entirely reasonable. There was no one better, no one more likely. And having sent a messenger, I assume you intended something more than to wish us well.“

Luz dared to challenge the Ila, to question her. The guards, the whole chamber poised and braced for retaliation.

“Because,” the Ila said, as if it were no consequence, and with a turn of her wrist, as if she deflected a blow. “Because we wished to send him, cousin. Because through him you challenged us. Because he is less mad than the rest, and because I saw if any of that herd would come back across the Lakht, he was the likeliest. And if there were madmen appearing across the land, it was as clear a sign of something arrived as was likely to come. Yes, I sent him. I sent him to find an answer to the madness, and to explain it, and he has, beyond any doubt.”

“But they’re no longer mad, those I keep. They are safe. They will be safe in what will come. You know the nature of their voices. You know the source of their visions. I don’t need to explain. More than that, you feared, Ila Jao, you feared we were the ondat. We are not.”

“But in their service.”

“Not in their service, only having made peace with them. You know what they fear and why they fear it and why they will reshape the world.”