“If there’s no water down below, before we reach the tower—” The worries obstructed clear reason, his thoughts going back and back again to the cardinal points. “She’s got to do something, is all. I can’t. I can’t get the villages to move faster than they will. And if we don’t camp close enough to the rocks at the bottom, the wind will kill us, and if all the sand falls off the cliffs, it may bury us. What’s the answer for us? How far is safe?”

“We’ve done all we can,” Hati said. “We’ll go down, is all. We’ll do what we can, by what we see.”

Norit, who might know, who might hear Luz’s answer, only rocked and sang to herself.

There was nowhere any peace. He could look to the edges of the camp and see the furtive action of a few creepers, harmless things, but their disturbance could trigger others—all that mass at Pori, which stayed near the water, preying on itself, the stronger on the weaker. They had not walked into it. The chance that they might have walked in with the villages behind them still haunted him. But he tried to do what Hati said: he tried not to think.

A wind blew, sulfurous and unpleasant. It might have stormed for days during their passage, and instead the weather had favored them, their one piece of blind luck. Not even Luz could have arranged that. He thought that calamities were piling up on him, but if he looked, he saw a few signs of luck still with him, a few signs that the odds could be shoved into better advantage. If a man paid attention. If he did think of all the possibilities.

He kissed his wife, rested his head against her, shut his eyes a moment.

“Up,” Hati said after a dark space, giving him a little shake, and he realized she had held him, bracing his weight for however long he had slept, steady and sure. “We’re moving,” she said, and they were: the Keran were rolling up their mats. The Ila’s servants had struck her shelter.

A little sleep seemed for a moment worse than none. It was hard to move. He gathered his scattered wits, helped Hati up, waked Norit, but not Lelie—her he picked up, and heaved her, still sleeping, to his shoulder, to hand her up to Norit once Norit was mounted.

Hati rolled up their mats and went and tied them on, and led the beshti back.

Marak saw Tofi help Patya up. The aifad cheated him of the sight of Patya’s face, but Tofi looked happy, and the language of their hands, not quick to part, was a reassurance. They looked only at each other.