Tofi gave an uncertain laugh, and thought about it on the way down the shale.

By the time they got down it was noon, and Foragi had cut his boot on a rock, and bloodied his foot. That was not good. Tofi was out of sorts, and Marak this time agreed with him.

“We shouldn’t camp near this accident,” Tofi said. “We should bind that up, and get him on his beast, and be another hour away before we rest.”

“We’ll do that,” Marak said, well knowing the reasons. He himself got the kit and bound up the wound and dried it with powders, and scoured the boot out with sand and liniment. The au’it recorded the men’s recovery, and their treatment.

In the meanwhile they all baked in the sun, and the beasts grew ill-tempered before they set themselves under way, several of the pack beasts having sat down, then refusing to rise until they were completely unpacked and allowed to stand. Then they had to be packed up again, all to grumbling and complaint and bawling up and down the line.

They were at the edge of a stony plain, lower than the highlands of the Lakht, a region littered with fragments of shale. The persistent wind moved the sand always in the same direction, in great red ripples flecked with black, and there was no easy way across. The beasts complained. Men complained.

Tofi avowed he had no idea, beyond Pori, where they were bound, except the star Kop still would provide their easterly direction.

“East is all we have,” Marak confessed to Hati, to Norit, to the au’it, and necessarily to the men who shared his tent, two hours later, in the hellish heat of a still afternoon on the pan. “East. I don’t know what else to do, now.”

Since the debacle at noon, he had regretted leaving Pori. His haste to put them on the road seemed foolish to him now that they had found the soldiers alive, even if another night might have lost them. They had lost others. Proffa the tailor had been a fine man, worth ten of those two. But an underlying urgency gnawed at his reason. He saw it working in the soldiers. He saw it building in others. There was no more economy and no more common sense where that impulse took over. Structures built within his eyes. They shaped letters. Hurry, they said. No delay.

They burned there, overlying the world.

“I see words,” he admitted to Hati.

“How can you see words?”

“I see them,” he said. “Like the au’it. I read. We’re late for something. We have to hurry. I don’t know why that’s so. The soldiers knew it. Maybe they can read, though I’d have doubted it.”

The au’it wrote all they said, for the Ila’s record.