Marak turned, staggering in the giving sand. “When?” he shouted back at Norit. “How much time, woman? Will it blow the sand over us? Are we too close to the cliffs?”

But Norit was not sane enough for that reckoning, and continued to shout about cracks in the earth and pools of fire in a voice that broke, ragged with thirst.

He turned back. He walked. They walked, almost at the tents, and when they looked back, the line of those still coming toward them went on back into the dark, in the starlight, as far as the cliffs of the Lakht, on that trail where the tribes still descended and where the villagers—the foremost of the villagers—had yet even to reach the cliffs.

The weak almost certainly could not do it. There would be falls. Fatalities.

There remained nothing—nothing at all Marak found to do for them, once he reached their own tent.

“Death comes down on us!” Norit shouted in his distant hearing, distracted, gone wandering, disturbing other hearers, and Marak moved to stop her, but Hati held his arm and tugged at him.

“Let her go. She’ll know when to go to cover, more than the rest of us, she’ll know. Luz won’t let her die. She moves everyone to work. We all have to do something when we hear that.”

“We can’t have panic. We’re going to need every hand in camp. Every clear wit.” Osan pulled at the reins, wanted his freedom, and his just reward, and Marak had not the strength left in him to unsaddle and care for him. He staggered to a stop.

Tofi took the rein from his hand without a word, and Patya took Hati’s, as Tofi called Bosginde and Mogar to tend the beshti and get them unsaddled.

“I’ll need another besha,” Marak said hoarsely, “one that hasn’t trekked to Pori and back. I’m too tired to walk, and I’ve got to talk to Aigyan. To Memnanan and Menditak.“

“Then I need one, too,” Hati said, exhausted as she was, and Marak said not a word to stop her, knowing he might need her to reason with Aigyan. The hush about the camp, the near-stifling stillness of the wind, warred with the chaos in his vision and the racket in his ears, warning, continually warning him, if he knew how to hear it, how short the time was… but only Norit had that burden, to take the message straight in and not to shut it out.

And Norit ran mad among the tents.

Sensible men around him, however… sensible men around them did sensible jobs, the only sort of thing they knew how to do. In astonishingly short order there were beshti saddled and even more precious water offered, and it took as much strength to refuse that as it needed for him to get into the saddle again.