Come to us, the inner voices said now, more and more insistent. Come to us. Listen to us. At such times the whole world swung, repeatedly, violently as if the demons within his eyes attempted to swing the whole body left or right. It was hard to resist the tug when it came. The mad commonly twitched and jerked in the depth of their affliction.

Some houses might not have given up their mad sons. Some houses, even whole villages, might be wholly given over to the taint, and secretive about their shame.

Other houses, other villages, might have killed the afflicted quietly, so as not to have any madmen left to turn over to the Ila. The caravan of the damned had stopped at villages where no one confessed.

The wife of Tarsa wailed and prayed in the grip of her visions. “Look!” she would cry. “The city! The holy tower is here!” and at other times, “Gods bless the Ila,” as if the soldiers would have pity if she praised the tyrant.

“The devil is in the east!” the tanner shrieked, and that set off the old man, who asked after his wife, and cried that he had fathered devils who betrayed him.

Sweat trickled down Marak’s face and down his neck and under his arms, drying on his ribs. A man’s body betrayed him in the heat. It readily gave up its water. In sorrow, it gave up even more.

Somewhere above the sky had been a land rich in life, where all men were born.

Somewhere up there above the burning blue had been a paradise of water, a pool that never stopped flowing.

That place might have been in the heavens, as the priests said, but the heavens during this march hinted nothing of paradise, only a cold light of stars by night and the burning eye of the sun by day.

They said, the priests did, that when the First Descended had come down onto the Lakht, the Ila, undying and eternal, had divided men from beasts, and beasts from vermin: afterward the world and its order was ruled by the god, the single god, and administered by the Ila and her priests.

Marak, like his father, like most of the west, had rejected that belief. There was no help in the heavens, no reliance on priests on earth, or on the god’s viceroy. But having fought that authority and having come to this, there was nothing to do with his life on earth except, perhaps, to end it, pouring out the life he owned like water, until the desert drank it dry, until the vermin of the sky swarmed thick. A man died in the day and nothing was left of him by sundown but the bones.