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.

“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.