Norit reached them, her besha wild-eyed and still trembling from fright. But they were made whole, the three of them together again, and safe for the moment. Their madness had become linked, one to the other, and where one was, the others would come, and where Luz was, they would know Luz’s intentions, all three of them: there had been no chance they would lose her while she was free to ride, Marak was sure of that now.

“Everyone’s gone mad,” Tofi lamented, standing on the ground beside him. “We can be robbed if we stand still!”

“Far worse than that can happen,” Marak said, conscious of the lead-colored heavens over their heads and the crowd seething back into the camp on the edge of outright panic, a narrow margin be tween the urge it took to move this number of people and the fear it might set off an utter panic. “Stay mounted,” he said to Hati and Norit. “All the rest of you, mount up. Let no one cross here. Use the quirts. Make stragglers go around us and the baggage!”

Luz was satisfied, exhausted. The voices and the visions dimmed in his head and ceased to drive him.

In the gray sky above them a shooting star streaked beneath the clouds, sputtering fire as it fell. Tofi’s men cried out and pointed, and priests, in the chaos of the crowd, pointed aloft and raised their hands in prayer.

“The priests may come into our camp,” Marak said. “They’re useful. But for the rest, don’t pity anyone. We know the way. Our resources are for us and the Ila to stay alive. Without us all the rest will die.” He felt a chill as he made that pronouncement, facing the scene in front of him, the ruin of a city ringed with tents as far as the eye could see. He made an exception for the priests. With all his heart he hoped his mother and his sister were safe, but he knew his mother could ride, and knew they were safer with the Haga, come what might: the Ila’s close company had dangers of a kind he had to be free to deal with.

Most of all they would be happier not seeing him as he was, prey to madness and harried at times beyond love for anyone.

For the rest, there was one, only one alive who could hold this mass of people together, and she, red-robed, their lifelong enemy, amid that tangle of canvas and ropes and panicked crowds.

If no one else in the city escaped, she must come down, soon, very soon, because if this mass became a mob, it was no more rational than any other mobbing in the desert, no mind, no wit, only desperation and self-seeking, devouring its own to satisfy the panic hunger, and they would have to take to the road and get ahead of it or die.