He had never taken the chance to talk directly to another of the afflicted on the one fact of their lives they all knew.

“They call my name,” he said to that closed, taut face. “Do they call yours?”

Her eyes opened, searched his. None of the mad was willing to speak about their affliction. It was all but rude to breach that silence.

“Yes,” she said. “They called my child-name and now they call my woman-name.”

“The same,” he confessed, which he had only admitted to his father. “Day and night.”

“If we walk east forever, what will we meet? The bitter water?”

“If we walk that far.” No one lived near the bitter water. No bird flew. The water-edge there was a land of white crusts and death. The toughest men in the world lived at the edge of the bitter plain and hammered out salt and breathed it and tasted it until they died. Everywhere in the world, men somehow found a way to live. Those men were free, at least. They traded with the Ila. They did not obey her.

The lines of fire built within his eyes. They made a form, rising up and up.

“Do you see a tower?” he asked the an’i Keran.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you see it now?”

“Yes,” she said. Two mad visions touched one another. Two were the same. He suspected they all were, and that every man heard his own name.

“I called it a spire,” she said, “before I saw the holy city. Could it be the Beykaskh?”

“Not the Beykaskh,” he said. He was as sure of that as he was sure the direction was east. “No tower that I know, so tall and thin. A spire. A rock spire?”

“So,” she said.

“I wonder what the others call it.” He stared at the sun through the coarse canvas, felt the heat of the wind touch the sweat on his throat and arms like a lover’s breath. “Ask the others what they see. Let the au’it write it for the Ila’s curiosity. And tell me what you learn. Gather all the visions.”

The au’it stirred on the mat nearby. She was uncannily alert to her duty, but he had no further orders for her.

“Hati will ask the others. You write it. But rest now. Sleep.”

The woman eased back to her rest.

In the evening when they waked, Hati took the au’it and went about from one man to the other, asking the same question.