They stopped him just short of the distance inside which he might move and not be stopped. The guards brought chains and put them on his hands. He bore that meekly, too: the chains were a weapon, brass chains, solid and capable of shielding a fist, of looping a throat, of cracking a skull. Then they put a spear backwards through the ring attached, and two men held it, but that was not enough. The spear, too, was a weapon within his reach.

With those precautions they moved him to the very foot of the Ila’s seat.

A great calm came on him, even a sense of leisure in which he could satisfy his curiosity before he used his last chance. He looked up at the Ila, the tyrant, the ruler of all the world, as if he owned her.

“Marak Trin,” the captain said, and the au’it wrote.

Then the traitor voices started in his skull, dinning: Marak Trin. Marak Trin. Marak Trin, a foolish, mindless echo, hindering him from clear thought.

In the desert, on the wide plains of the Lakht, in constant company with the mad, aware of the rest, the voices had grown louder and more insistent. He fought them down. He looked up at the red robes, the blood red robes, up to the Ila’s face, and found it very aptly time to die, before the voices were all he heard. But he had never seen the like of her.

White, white skin, and gloved hands, and booted feet. On the Lakht, they valued white skin, skin the sun had not touched. They whitened the skins of brides and grooms with creams. They valued slender bodies that clearly had never lifted burdens or carried water, or scratched a living from the desert.

All these marks of beauty the Ila had. She wore a close cap of red silk, and inner robes of silk shaded like flame. She exuded wealth, and power, and, some said, holiness.

Yet she seemed frail, in size and strength so like his young sister, he was dismayed.

“Are you truly mad?” she asked him directly, as his sister might have asked, a question, an entangling snare of question that caught his mind and his heart. He had killed enemies. He had never killed a girl.

But he had never failed an intended target, either. He would; he would not; and in desperation he leapt at the steps. He dragged his guards with him. He hauled at the chains and had three men stumbling at his feet. He seized the spear and lifted his hands, aiming it at that slight figure.

A thunderbolt struck him, sizzled through bone and nerve and flung him back in a sliding course down the steps. The guards smothered him with their bodies, wrenched at the chains, and hit him, but that impact of bone on flesh was nothing, nothing to the thunderbolt.