“To the outside,” officers shouted as they filled each cart. Memnanan sent an officer down with precise instructions, while Marak and his companions sat on mats in the shade of the awning and rested, truly rested in the bawling confusion. Norit slept longest, curled up in a knot. Hati waked and sat sharpening a knife. Neither of them had use in what proceeded. Marak himself let his head down and catnapped in what should have been the heat of the day, but was in fact cool and pleasant.

Important men and women arrived at the tent, and Marak lifted his head, overhearing that rumors were suddenly rife in the camp, regarding caravans leaving. “Caravans may indeed leave,” Memnanan told them. “And if I were you I’d see to my herds, and have the beasts watered before the Mercy grows crowded.”

Priests’ white robes were now brown-edged with soil from the spring, dusty and stained by the moldering dye of the books; but on they worked, better men than they looked, in Marak’s estimation.

The aui’it labored with them so far as loading the last carts, and two of them in their red robes went with the carts, down the sole straight road that led from the Mercy through the camp, and if rumor was not now running the circuit of the camps, nothing less than a star-fall in their midst would rouse curiosity.

Servants hung about in the doorway of the Ila’s tent with worried looks on their faces. They had sent all their treasure out, at the Ila’s order, under a sky leaden and disheartening. The guards themselves looked desperate, expecting further calamity, and looked about them as the ground shook, as if they now realized that cataclysm had reached the heart of their lives.

Traffic around the fountain increased to a point of panic, slaves of the caravans restoring their supplies, servants of households taking up water in jars, jostling with common folk and villagers: if one house was watering, then all would. Beshti moved in and out, with their handlers, snarling and grumbling.

The beshti Memnanan had ordered arrived to water, too. Marak was glad to see Osan among them: and the rest that appeared were fine animals, decked out in gear that shone with brass and fine dyes.

Memnanan’s men came to report the carts outside the city and disposed under guard of the priests. It was time to move.

Norit slept like the dead, for all the rest she had not had, and they had not disturbed her. But now Marak shook gently at her shoulder, and met for a moment the gentle face, the sensible one. She had a frightened look, in her interludes of sanity, as Marak could only imagine. Norit’s plunges into madness were deep and dark, and left her haunted by things she half remembered, half understood.