“Do you see it?” he asked Luz in a whisper, and then, thinking that someone else, perhaps Hati, was close to him. “Do you see a village in the night sky?”

“I see something white,” Hati said, and a hand rested on his shoulder, comforting him. “It could be a village. But its towers go off in every direction.”

“Like the tower,” Norit said, from behind her. “It’s a tower in the sky.”

Luz warned them: the ondat were here. Somehow the ondat had established a village that had no ground under it, and Luz showed them this sight to amaze them.

“What does it mean?” he asked Luz in that absence of other questions. “What are they? Where are they?”

Up, that strange sense of direction told him, as it had at other times told him east. This time it was up, up, up, when he knew there could be nothing up there but the sky and the stars.

Perhaps the ondat had breached their treaty and taken over.

Perhaps after all they would destroy Luz and her tower, and with Luz, their refuge, and all of them would die.

Perhaps their real safety, now that the hammer had fallen, was not the tower, but to scatter into the low desert, and hide in caves, hoping to live in whatever circumstances they could.

“What do you want us to do?” he asked Luz in a whisper, as he always had to speak to Luz aloud to be heard.

He only felt a direction, and that direction was what it had been. East. East.

East.

He felt someone rest a hand on his shoulder. Tofi was there. The tent above him seemed far less fine. Daylight came only from an open flap. There were no lamps lit.

“We’re in danger of drowning,” Tofi said. “We’re going to move the camp.”

“East,” he said. The vision of the tower in the stars broke apart, became irretrievable, something beyond imagination.

“East,” Tofi said, and that satisfied him. Satisfied Luz.

It dawned on him the plain tent above him was his own, and that Hati and Norit were on his other side, with Lelie, and that there were, unaccountably, more points of contact than the three of them. Four, one in this tent, largely unaware, asleep. Five, the last at a little remove from him.

That one was aware, and in pain. It was the Ila.

“We’re going to have to pack the tents wet,” Hati said to him, businesslike. “We have to move. There’s water just flowing through, washing out some of the tents. It’s become the one thing we’re not short of.”

“I probably could ride.”

“Probably you could,” Hati said. “But you’re not going to.”

He shut his eyes.

Eventually they moved him onto a litter, and wrapped him in two blankets and a piece of canvas, and carried him out into the light.