“Every man drink a sip, and eat a bite, and turn out to pitch tents as fast as they come in before the wind hits. Free and slave, the Ila’s men, the tribes, all of us. We’ll be doing it as long as we have time, all night and into the morning—in the calm or in whatever rolls in on us.” He still could see nothing but the ring of fire, over and over again. He had held Luz at bay this long. He had ridden to Pori and back. Now Osan’s strength was spent, and Osan would not kneel for him, so blind and half deaf to the world, he walked and walked, and tried to maintain his awareness of the world under feet gone all but numb.

He thought that Tofi and Patya had mounted up again, and he thought the au’it had lost her grip on her besha’s rein and it had gone ahead of them toward the tents, but that was all right. The beshti all knew where their own herd was, and where their own tents were pitched.

Thirst had his mouth and throat all but incapable of swallowing: the air was dry as dust, and over the course of their walking, this close to safety, he offered Hati a sip of the water he personally carried, but, prudent, she had her own, and drank a sip. For himself, he drank the skin dry, the last bit, telling himself somehow there would be more, and somehow Luz would see them supplied, after all they had passed, but he was not through with his work. He had to wring more out of a body already exhausted, which needed water now, and no matter the thirst to come. He would not be through until every living survivor was down the cliffs and under canvas.

“The waters will rise up,” Norit’s voice cried behind him, thin and high, a voice divorced from reality. “The bitter waters will rise up like a wall and that wall will go out to overflow the edges of the world! It’s coming down! It’s already falling!”

Marak wished her quiet. He saw these things in his own mind when she said them. He had no idea what he was seeing until Norit named them, but she pulled the images into terrible clarity.

“The earth will crack! The bitter water pour in on the forge, and the heat of it will go up like a furnace, like water cast onto hot iron!”

It was the fountain he saw. He had thought it was cloud in the sky.

“The hammer will fall!” Norit shouted at the heavens, at those behind them, at anyone near her who would listen. “The earth will ring like an anvil! The wind will come, stronger than any wind before!”