“More likely we’ll die if we sit on our rumps. We’re going to try not to. Tell her that. Tell her she needs to listen to advice.” Tell her she was not in charge of decisions? Tell her she would not give orders to the tribes? That was too much to expect of Memnanan. If he tried to make that point, he would lose this man, and everything. “Tell her we can’t rest long. Not a moment more than we have to.”

“I will.”

“What did the au’it tell her, in her report? Good, or bad?”

“I don’t know,” Memnanan said.

“Is that the same au’it with us now?”

Memnanan’s eyes traveled in that direction, and back. “I have no idea.”

“If the Ila orders anything that prevents us getting down off the rim,” Marak said, “for her life, don’t let her. Don’t do anything to prevent us. It’s corning. That’s all I know now. It’s coming.”

“I said: she’s in favor of the descent,” Memnanan said. “As soon as possible.” He added, in a low voice, with as much desperation as a man might feel: “I trust you for my household, Marak Trin.”

Memnanan’s wife, his mother. His unborn child.

“I’ll have a good man walk beside your wife when we make the climb down,” Marak said, reassured that Memnanan had asked the favor, not quite admitting it. “To steady the besha.”

The au’it had moved up beside them. She wrote as she had written all the conversations before, all of which the Ila now knew—at least those the au’it might think most important.

It was their au’it, he decided, in one glance, and then in the next, had his doubts return.

He knew their own au’it’s face, her mannerisms. And how often in the past had it been some different woman, when the aui’it frequently wore the veil, against the unkind sun and the drying wind? Their own au’it might still be reporting. The Ila, riding with the aui’it, ahead of them, might be making her own plans, outside Memnanan’s knowledge.

The Ila had no need to ask him questions, if that was the case. In the au’it’s report she proved to herself whether he would lie to her, or to his companions, and when he posed himself that question he grew calmer: he never had lied, so far as he recalled. If she was sane, she would know he had never worked against her.

Perhaps the Ila even trusted him, as far as she trusted anyone, even Memnanan. That was an unlooked-for conclusion.

But whatever the Ila thought, whatever she schemed, whatever she intended toward him, if her intentions agreed with his, getting this mass of people down off the Lakht before the hammer came down, he decided not to confuse the issue any further with questions.

Or reports.