“Luz,” he said aloud, to the presence behind Norit’s glazed steadiness. “Can you bring water to us at the bottom of the climb? We need your help. Too many of these people will die. Can you send Ian? Can you lead us to water closer to the cliffs?”

He begged for help. He bargained with their fate. Pride was nowhere in his reckoning. He prayed to a second goddess-on-earth for a miracle their Ila could not provide, and all the while the skin between his shoulders was uneasy, as if they had not shaken all the vermin off their track. He felt calamity organizing around them, and the people for whom he held all responsibility were in greater and greater disarray.

Marak, Marak, Marak, was all his own voices said in reply. He saw the sphere and the rock and the rings, twice repeated. That was the help Luz gave. She had done better. She had reached him before, and now found nothing to say to him but that: go, go blindly, giving him no reasons.

He suspected the fault lay in himself, that he was most-times deaf, and unreceptive…

Like his father. Like Tain, deaf to things he needed most in the world to hear.

But unlike Tain, he broke his silence. “Norit,” he said, pleaded. “Does Luz say anything about water? Does she offer us any help?”

“There’s nothing,” Norit said, sitting in the embrace of the tribesman who had saved her. “Nothing I can do.”

Norit never yet asked how her daughter fared after that fall. Luz had never asked. Luz involved herself not at all in the welfare of individuals, cared nothing for the workings of Norit’s heart. Later Norit would shed tears, but Luz did not let her shed them now.

“It’s coming,” Norit said further. “It’s on its way. We have two days. Just two days. You won’t reach the tower in two days.”

That was the plain truth, and it offered them no water, no help. It occurred to him to ask Luz if there was any point in trying, but it occurred to him, too, that he had no interest in hearing the answer one way or the other: it would not change what he would do. He could not sit down in paradise. He could not sit down in hell, either. He was going to try to reach the tower… he was going to try to get all his people down off the Lakht and into the lowlands before the hammer fell. He was going to get them as far toward safety as he could get them. They had him for a leader: that was what they bargained for.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before we went to Pori?” He did ask that question.