“You go,” Hati said in a voice scarcely louder than the steady tramp of feet and the occasional complaint of beshti long on the trail and miserable with thirst. “Marak, come with me. Let’s not both die here. What are you going to do? Leave Tofi in charge?”

There was an appalling thought, clever as the young man was. Tofi would not forgive him. Tofi would curse him to hell. Patya would not forgive him, for settling the Ila on her husband.

The vision leapt up, the rock and the sphere, only now it was true, and imminent: it filled the sky and the ground. He was somewhere above it all, and saw it coming.

“It’s coming down,” Hati said. “It’s coming down. This is our chance. Please! Come with me!”

Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said to him, and to Hati, perhaps… perhaps to all the mad in the world at once, for all he knew. And he did not want to go, following the voices. All his life he had resisted the voices.

“Get down there,” he said to Hati. It was not yet. There was still time.

“You can’t help anyone anymore up here. Get down yourself, or I’ll stay here, too, I promise you. You’re being a fool!”

He looked back at the throng of tribes, not even with a sight of the villages yet, the villages with all they held, all the lives, their whole way of life. The line seemed to go on forever in the dusk, and Memnanan had warned him of increasing desperation and decreasing strength back there. He feared far, far worse might be happening just beyond his view: if the horde at Pori had heard the whisper in the earth of so much movement, caught scent of so many helpless and dying among the dead. What did it take from the heavens, to kill them? The vermin sufficed.

And only the tribes had thrown away their extra weight. To villagers, to the dwellers in houses, everything was precious, everything was necessary. And he could not even pass the word to the first of them, to send sanity back through the line.

“They don’t know,” he said in despair. “They’ve no experience—”

Rock hit sphere, and the ring of fire went out and a fountain of cloud went up, and that sphere was lands and water and the sky where the sun was coming over the rim of vast water…

It hit. In the vision it hit. It was still coming. But in his foresight it had come down.

And there was such a silence…

Soon, Luz said to him, one clear word. Soon.

The beshti and the plodding thousands never heard, never felt, not being mad. The au’it, still with them, making the Ila’s record, had written only what they said, in the last of the sunlight of an ordinary day.