His job was to save lives and get them on their way. But he had done that. Norit would see the rest to safety. She was their guide. Anything he could do, Hati could do.

Was he holier and more righteous than the Ila in her shelter?

And then he looked at Hati, asleep beside him, and knew in his heart that Hati would stay with him, no matter what. It was never just one life that he would risk, taking that hazardous post for himself: he would kill Hati by that decision.

And if Norit was not enough, if they lost Hati, too, what application of common sense were all these people going to get in their leadership?

None from the Ila, nothing that did not favor her own comfort, her own survival above all. The people deserved some leader who cared about them? And did that attribute make him holy? Or better?

He ceased to have answers. He thought that he should go down. He thought that he should stay alive as long as he could, and do the most that he could, because he had no way of knowing what might happen after they reached the bottom, or where he might find a use.

But if he went down, what man could he ask to stay? Or should he ask any man who might live to risk his life?

He was looking at the ex-slaves, at Mogar and Bosginde, men who least of all had relatives depending on them, but they had each other, and could he ask those two men to risk their lives, even when no village would value those two lives? He knew what good men they had come to be, and how, in any other time, if there were time left in the world, those two would turn up masters of their own caravans… but there was no time left for good men to do anything but scramble with the rest and stay alive. If all the good perished, it left only the rest to have their way. And was that good?

He was still thinking that when Tofi came to him and squatted down to talk, and he realized Tofi and Patya had been sitting off to themselves, and that now Patya was hovering suspiciously in the background. Marak shaded his eyes to look up at the young man.

“Omi,” Tofi began. “We may all die.”

“I don’t certainly intend to.”

“I don’t either,” Tofi said sensibly, while Patya, hovered behind him in unaccustomed silence. “Your sister, omi, she doesn’t intend to, either. But—we don’t know about tomorrow. A star could fall on us.”