“So far.” The Ila’s voice was weak, but edged. “I gave you your freedom. I gave everyone in the world their freedom, such as we had, so long as it lasted. Now there’s one way, one blood, and one tribe in the world, and we’ve joined it.” She drew breath, and her eyes held the old fire. “So let the ondat worry about that.”

“So you have secrets,” Norit said. “You change your makers at will. You’re trying to change them now, but so far, it’s not working, is it? We’ll understand how you do that. Sooner or later, we’ll know.”

“Luz.”

“Yes?” the answer came.

The Ila smiled… smiled with chilling serenity. “We’ll see. Granted we have an immediate problem… still, we’ll talk.”

“We are pragmatists,” Luz said from Norit’s lips. “You can’t feed this mass of people, or shelter them. We can. You think you can change my makers, given a hundred years, or two hundred, or three. Try.”

“’I assure you, I’ll try.”

“We should go,” Marak said to his wives, and took them each by an arm and walked.

He had seen enough to satisfy himself the Ila was alive and that she had become one of the mad. But she was not content to be that—she never would be content. She meant to change the order of the world, and now meant to do it from inside their ranks.

Luz then would change it back, and so it would go, by degrees as tiny as the makers themselves. Now there were two gods on the earth, and neither one was, or would be, perhaps for all time to come, completely in power over the other.

There might be gods in the heavens, too, the ondat, watching to see how it all came out: he believed his vision of the tower in the stars.

But the ondat could scarcely observe a war of makers, carried on in the veins of two determined women.

Himself, he had done with gods, and had no desire to contend with makers. He put an arm about his wives, one on either hand, and went out through the curtain, taking one combatant out of speaking range, at least for now. It might be a while before the Ila heard the voices he heard, if she ever did.

He gave Memnanan a passing courtesy, and went out into the morning. An au’it followed them, and took up her duty.

They packed up and they rode, a long, weary line of riders.

They went in a kind of twilight, the air cold, the sun thickly shrouded in slate gray cloud.

But the light was enough, finally, to show them a strange, up-thrust shape on the horizon.

It was the tower on its hill, on the rim of the land they,could see.

“We’re almost there,” Marak said, and pointed it out to his wives, who already knew.