“Save us from the Ila, is all,” Tofi said under his breath. “Don’t let her cut my head off, and I’ll be grateful.”

Tofi went to his business. Hati rode up beside him, and slowly the Ila’s column wedged a straight course through the confusion toward them.

“Form up,” Marak called out when he judged it time.

Tofi moved, shouting to his men, who already knew their places in the line of march.

The Ila approached, at Memnanan’s side, and Marak waved a signal, sweeping to the south and never even stopping for courtesies. Marak fell in smoothly with the head of that column, he and Hati and Norit.

The Ila was behind them, in the heart of their protection, not leading. An au’it, their own au’it, fell in with them and rode with them, her book on her knee, writing as she rode.

“Ride with me,” Marak said to Memnanan. “Is your household with you?”

“Within the column. They’ll come to your tent when we camp,” Memnanan said. “I’ve told them. You have my lasting gratitude. And your relatives?”

“With the Haga,” he said. “I hope they’re there.” For the first time he thought of that second question. “My father?”

“Released,” Memnanan said, and Marak suffered curiously mixed feelings about that.

“It was that or kill him,” Memnanan said. “I’ll not have him near the Ila.”

“I well understand,” Marak said. A certain part of his heart wished he had seen Tain. A certain part of him longed to linger back and wait for Kais Tain to pass: See, Father, he could say. I’ve done something useful with my life. I’ve saved all of you.

And another part wanted to say, I’ve survived. I’m still alive. So has my mother, so has my sister, damn you for a devil.

He did neither. They filed out along the road, past that trampled ground near the ridge, past the wreckage of the carts, where not a book remained, only a vermin-covered body. The junior priests might not have lingered to bury their chief priest, or, do them credit, perhaps they had, and misjudged the tenacity of the vermin. In either case, even if they had carried him back to the city for burial, the vermin would get the body, with more or less work.

On that thought, Marak rode aside from the column and looked back at the city.

A pall of smoky haze hovered above the hill that had been Oburan, and over the Beykaskh that had been the heart of it. It was the last of sunset. The glass dome and the glass-rimmed walls caught no light now. Their fire and their life was extinguished. The vast camp had gone down, collapsed, beshti rounded up, pressed back to the work of carrying riders and baggage.