“I think we shed makers,” he said. “What if we breed them continually and shed them like old skin? What if we shed them into the sand and into the water? And the Ila’s servants cook for the camp, or they did before we ran short. And the priests, the Ila’s priests, they come and go up and down the line. Maybe it’s a kind of war going on. What if the Ila would lose altogether if we took water from Pori, and everybody watered there?”

Hati simply stared at him, the two of them riding side by side. “She hasn’t given up, then.”

“I don’t think she’s given up,” he said.

“Do you think she’s planning some sort of attack on Luz?”

“I don’t know. But Luz hears us.” It was hard to remember that they were spied on, constantly. But it was true. “Luz knows, now, everything we just said. We can’t help that. I hope Luz figures how to protect us.” The last he said like a petitioner in a village court, hoping Luz was listening carefully. “She’s asked all these people to come to her tower. If she meant all of us to die, we could have done that in Oburan. Surely she has something she can do. She won’t just turn on us, because of the Ila. She wanted her. I think she still wants her. But the Ila doesn’t want to be taken.” He was afraid, as he said it. He had met two small anomalies in the way things had worked: the au’it’s desertion, and now her return, and neither might mean more than that the au’it had decided not to take an arduous journey, an ordinary simple decision.

But the Ila was going into danger at the very heart of their safety: he understood more and more that peace between the Ila and Luz was not likely, and he grew as worried about what the Ila might do as they came closer to Luz, as their journey became harder and the decisions more dangerous.

He worried about the Ila’s unanticipated action now as he worried about the failing water supply, as worried as he was about the beshti’s strength, about the people’s strength to make the climb down from the Lakht—as worried about all those things near him, perhaps, as he was about the remote calamity coming to the world. The hammerfall was still distant: the Ila’s independent action might come before they reached the cliffs, before they entered Luz’s domain, and it might be anything, even a decision deliberately to kill all of them.

And she might be mad. She might be as mad as the rest of them. She might do things that only made sense to the mad, just before they attempted the climb down with many, many people that, already, would not survive.