“I’ll see you there,” Hati agreed, and called out to the two women and laid on the quirt. She was gone over the roll of the next hill, vanishing in the dust they left.

“I warned you,” Norit said in a brittle voice. The tribesman had gotten her upright.

“That you did,” Marak allowed. He had no wish to take up a quarrel with Luz. He doubted even Luz had known the danger there was at Pori, or Norit could have warned them in far clearer words. The truth was that Luz had not known, had had no idea until now about the mob there. But: East, east, east! the voices urged, as if they had always been right.

He said, he hoped sanely so, and calmly: “Well, we can’t water at Pori; that’s clear. Norit was right: we can’t camp and rest. We need to get all this mass of people as far east as we can. If we’re out of water, we’re out. We’ll do what we can.”

East. Surrender to Luz settled him into a familiar track. He knew the way down the cliffs to the east of Pori, and he knew that the gathering of vermin had just doomed a good number of the caravan to a struggle they might not have the strength to make without rest and water.

But if the continual footfall on the earth of the last caravan in the world drew attention from Pori, if the smell of them wafted on the chance wind, if the vermin still following the column met those feeding on Pori’s ruin… if any one of those three things happened, the unthinkable became a certainty.

He led. They veered just slightly off the track they had taken getting to Pori, and for the better part of an hour they moved over trackless sand.

Then as they crossed a shallow pan they saw, as Marak had hoped, a distant haze of dust below the line of a far ridge. That hazy disturbance in the sameness of the Lakht marked the caravan’s passage, and it had, indeed, turned eastward.

Hati had reached them safely. Aigyan had heard the warning.

The sun stood at noon, and the caravan pressed eastward, not camping, not resting.

Marak kept his pace, not pushing his own party. The beshti under them were tired, worn down by days of travel and now coming within sight of water and hazard at distant Pori—only to turn away.