“You weren’t listening. Now you are. Get below the cliffs. Get behind rock. Get the stakes down. I don’t know what may happen. I’m trying to know where the hammer will come down. It’s not good for where it falls. It’s not good for the other side of the world either, and that’s what we have to worry about. The earth will crack at both places and melt the rocks in its forge.”

Luz made the visions. Norit said them as best she knew how, out of things she had seen: what more could she do? Sometimes they were things no one alive had ever seen, and Norit tried to describe them, out of a village wife’s meager experience.

“The prophet,” the tribesmen said to each other in muted tones, and meant Norit. The tribes regarded no priests, but the Keran had learned that this one spoke for the power that led them, and they were in awe at this strange conversation, this matter-of-fact consultation of their oracle.

And there was no comfort in anything Norit could say.

They traveled toward that haze of dust that marked the passage of the caravan across the land at the same steady pace.

And uneasy as he was about the land behind them, Marak became aware, in that sight, that he knew where Hati was. He knew it as well as he knew Norit’s location beside him, as steady, as reliable as the pole stars in the general fall of the heavens. She was there in the heart of the column. The constellations might be shaken, but he could not get lost in the world that contained the other parts of himself.

The caravan had no need of another dreamer, another guide as mad as Norit.

It needed a plain, headblind madman to say only: I’ve been there before. I can lead you. I know a way down. Don’t hesitate, don’t camp.

It needed Tain’s son, too: it needed him to say: Don’t have pity on the dying. Don’t hesitate. When the line goes, go.

He rode toward the column, and on the edge of joining it, on the very moment of crossing toward safety in among the plodding beshti, he realized their party had been one member short on the retreat. He was so used to the au’it following him and Hati and Norit that he had failed to notice that this time she had not followed them out from the caravan.

Surely she had not come out with them.

“No au’it followed us,” he said to the Keran, half a question. “You saw no au’it tracking us at any time.”

“No, omi.”

At least they had not lost her. He thought they had not.

He rode in among the Ila’s servants, and near the Ila, and up to Hati’s side.

“I advised Aigyan,” Hati said first. “He knows all the situation. He’s going to keep the line moving. We’re going over the rim.”