But vision came, a vision of sky and dark, and it came, and it came, a ring of darkness behind the ring of fire.

Marak! the voices cried all at once.

He pulled the storm flap shut, worked with swollen fingers to lace it tight.

It was coming, it was coming, he said to himself, seeing the ring of fire and the ring of darkness again and again and again. Inside, Tofi told Mogar and Bosginde to pull the storm lines tight and hold on, back at the weather side of the tent, back where they had put their baggage: storm rigging-lines connected to the webbing above the canvas were anchored inside the tent, around the weight of the baggage. If anything held, those lines would hold, pressing the tent down harder the more the wind blew to lift it up.

They took their places inside, in the dark, with no lamp burning.

They braced. They sat ready. Marak joined those holding the lines. Hati did. Memnanan’s wife and aunts and mother held one another, and Norit with Lelie and the au’it as well he thought had moved near them.

Thunder came first—and the ground shuddered with that thunder, a rhythmic beating like that many footsteps: beshti from end to end of the camp bellowed alarm.

Wind hit like a fist, hit, and began to pull at the ropes, trying to lift the tent. The ropes began to vibrate, and hummed with the assault, and Marak gripped the rope, robbed of breath, as if the very strength of the air had been swept away around them. Ears congested; night-blind eyes seemed to swell in their sockets, and Marak shut his eyes tight, squinted down, to keep them from bursting, and pulled on the rope, and felt its vibration going through his arms, through his bones, and up from the sand under them. He might have shouted. Others might have. He was deaf, and his ears were bursting.

Debris hit the tent, a heart-stopping impact that hung and beat against them, threatening to destroy them. A wave of cold came. Still the wind beat at them, indistinguishable from earthquake. Marak bit his lip and hung on, and held on, feeling the line shake under the stress. Hearing had all but gone, but the vibration in his bones had a voice, the wind’s voice. Distanced by the congestion in his ears, it had voices wherever it found a chink, an inlet, and it wailed, it howled, it roared. Marak, his voices raged at him, but they were small against that voice. The visions showed him ruin and the ring of fire and the ring of darkness—and this was it, he thought, this surely must be the worst.