“Walk faster, walk faster,” the guards taunted them lazily, sitting supreme over the column. The lank, curve-necked beasts that carried them plodded at an unchangeable rate. They were patient creatures, splay-footed, towering above most predators of the Lakht, enduring the long trek between wells with scant food and no water. A long, long line of them stretched behind, bringing the tents, the other appurtenances of their journey.

“Oburan!” the fools still cried. “The tower, the tower!”

“Run to it! Run!” the junior guards encouraged their prisoners. “You’ll be there before the night, drinking and eating before us.”

It was a lie, and some knew better, and warned the rest. The wife of a down-country farmer, walking among them, set up a wail when the word went out that the vision was only the shadow of a city, and that an end was a day and more away.

“It can’t be!” she cried. “It's there! I see it! Don't the rest of you see it?”

But the rest had given up both hope and fear of an end to this journey, and walked in the rising sun at the same pace as they had walked all this journey.

Marak was different than the rest. He bore across his heart the tattoo of the abjori, the fighters from rocks and hills. His garments, the long shirt, the trousers, the aifad wrapped about his head against the hellish glare, were all the dye and the weave of Kais Tain, of his own mother’s hand. Those patterns alone would have damned him in the days of the war. The tattoos on the backs of his fingers, six, were the number of the Ila's guards he had personally sent down to the shadows. The Ila’s men knew it, and watched with special care for any look of rebellion. He had a reputation in the lowlands and on the Lakht itself, a fighter as elusive as the mirage and as fast-moving as the sunrise wind.

He had ridden with his father to this very plain, and for three years had seen the walls of the holy city as a prize for the taking. He and his father had laid their grandiose plans to end the Ila’s reign: they had fought. They had had their victories.

Now he stumbled in the ruin of boots made for riding.

His life was thirty summers on this earth and not likely to be longer. His own father had delivered him up to the Ila’s men.

“I see the city!” the woman cried to the rest. She was a wife, an honorable woman, among the last to join the march. “Can’t you see it? See it rise up and up? We're at the end of this!”