She had sat down like a marketwife. In deliberate mockery of the fear he felt he sank down and sat like a field hand, cross-legged, at the last in a hard collapse against the stone. All she offered might be a lie, but from a posture like hers he answered and he listened, having been caught and corrupted by this idea of hers. Everything in him longed for answers, longed for reason, for purpose, for some logic to his life.

“What if I do this?” he said. “What do you expect me to find out there?”

“If I knew,” she said, “would I have to send anyone?”

“If I’m that mad, how shall I remember to come back?”

“If you are that mad,” she said, “will you care? And if you are not mad, will you serve my needs? I think not. I think only the mad can find this answer.”

“It may be,” he said.

“You attacked my city.”

“So I did.”

“And failed.”

“And failed,” he said.

“Why?” she asked, as if she had no idea at all. “To take? Or to destroy?”

A wise question, an incisive question. It told her everything of his wishes in a word.

He made a move of his hand, about them, thinking of the machines. “If the machines would work for us,” he said, “I would be very content to sit in this hall.”

“And would you do better than I, sitting here?”

“I would not pour water into the desert,” he said. In this mad give-and-take, the memory of such waste still galled him. “I would build a stone cistern, and put it next to the walls, and let whoever wished settle around it and grow fruit.”

It might be a foolish answer, as the holy city saw it. The Ila listened to him, listened very gravely. “You think we waste it.”

“What else is it, when it pours out under the sun? You feed the vermin. They multiply out there.”

Her lips quirked. It might have been a smile. “You would turn us into a village.”

“It’s not likely,” he said.

“Not likely that you would ever have taken Oburan? No. Far from likely. It was far from likely when you and your father came up onto the Lakht. Surely you knew that.”

He shruged, having no wish to discuss his father’s plans or their misguided strategy, or the failed aim of his thirty years of life. The world might turn again, and, meanwhile, he was alive, and he had eyes, and he had seen the inside of this place. No, it was not likely that he or his father would have sat in this hall, rulers of all the world, but fortunes shifted. If she willed, his were changing; he was not dead yet. He managed not to meet her eyes, and asked himself why he cared for her respect, or what he suddenly had to fear in this debate.