“A very large star,” Marak said; that was the way he interpreted it. “Where will it fall, Norit? On the Lakht?”

Sometimes Norit seemed to intervene in Luz’s answers, or failed to understand them. She turned and pointed, back, behind them. “Not on the Lakht. Out in the bitter water.”

“Then not on us,” Memnanan said with relief.

“But wherever we are, still, the wind will reach us, and when that wind blows, the sun will stop shining and the stars will vanish. The earth will ring like an anvil. When it comes, we have to be off the Lakht. If nothing else, we have to be off the Lakht, and down below it. The wind up here will be terrible.”

“Is this the truth?” Memnanan asked.

“That we have to be off the Lakht before this great star comes down?” Marak said. “I don’t know about the sun and the stars. But she’s saved our lives before.” Under the streaks of the star-fall, the desert showed cold, and the wind bit as it came. The sand blew along the surface, a light film of fine dust, and in Norit’s doom-saying, it struck him with peculiar force just then that in all this riding since starting out from Oburan, he had seen no birds, no vermin, and no trace of them. It was more than strange, and what was strange lately became ominous.

“Can we reach the edge by then?” Memnanan asked.

“If the weather holds,” Norit said. “If it turns against us, we don’t know. I can’t prevent the storms.”

Memnanan laughed at the strangeness of that I can’t prevent, as if he thought it a grim and impertinent sort of joke, but Marak was less sure, Luz would want to prevent the storms. If anyone could, Luz might be able; but she told them it was beyond her power.

Their own contingent, third in line, moved at the pace of a very large caravan, which was to say, very slowly, still, despite Norit’s warning. It was his intention to anchor the line, not to let the Keran and the Haga and the tribes with their travel-hardened beasts run a race to the detriment of all those village contingents behind. The villages, unaccustomed and containing many weak, could surely go no faster, and those afoot above all else could not match the tribes’ pace.

But now he wondered if that kindness to the hindmost was not risking all of them. “We could go some bit faster,” he said to Norit, when Memnanan had gone his way, “but that would mean those afoot will likely die. What should we do?”

Norit looked for a moment apt to burst into tears and shook her head distractedly as they rode.