Osan, his companion of prior lies and deceptions about his madness, was bone and dust now. The shoulder on which he used to lean was gone. There was no more help from that quarter. There was this beast, which would live or die with him. So with all these men. He need not go anywhere to explain himself this night. No more. No more lies. He was what he was, and the soldiers, their last tie to the city, had left them. Only the caravan master could dispute his word, and Obidhen, set under his orders, called him lord.

They were well equipped, like the best of caravans. There were no walkers to slow them. There were no wagons. Out away from the wells as a fast, well-equipped caravan could travel, there was less chance of bandits. It was water that drew predators.

Marak, the voices said, past the roaring in his ears. Marak. This way.

East where the sun rose. East where the world slid. East, east, east, and an end of questions, for men and women in universal agreement, a handful of souls all set desperately toward the identical, desperate, crazed obsession.

So his jagged reasoning went as they traveled on into the night, when every man was isolate and when the dark cooled the land to shadow and starlight.

At times he slept in the saddle. At times he waked to look at the stars and realize that nothing known lay in front of him.

In the enduring dark this new Osan called up emotions in him that he thought the drugs and the march had killed. Osan made his hands remember love and his body remember freedom,, and those two things stirred other feelings.

Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said. His body fell into a rhythm it had known from before he could remember, a rhythm he had learned in his father’s arms, when that had been the safe place, the shaded place, the secure place.

Now that of all things was the deadliest place, the most painful place for memory to go.

There was only Osan.

Freedom was all he had ever asked of his father.

A cave of suns beckoned him, blinding bright: he squinted his eyes even in the dark, and it made no more sense than it ever had.

A tower rose up against the stars, a black shape, a vacancy of light. Marak, the voices said.