They had rushed out into the wilderness like novices, they had found their lost, and now they suffered for it.

Tofi came over to find them in that condition. Men were lying in fits and others lying tranquilly staring at the ceiling. “What’s this?” Tofi cried, and then began to back out from under the shade of the tent, as if he feared for his life. They all might be in that condition, in both tents, all but the sane.

Marak roused himself so far as to lift his head. “Resting,” Marak said. “Only resting. Is it time to move?”

Marak! The voices screamed at him, shook him, raged at him with lights. Hurry, hurry, hurry!

“It’s time,” Tofi said fearfully, doubtless longing for Pori, and safety, and sane men.

Marak, pulled Hati up, saw the vacancy in her eyes, and shook her. “Wake,” he said. “Wake. Sleep in the saddle.”

No father, no mother, no sister, no wife, no lover could divert them. Lifelong, one purpose, one need. East. East. East, where the sun begins.

Norit, too, he pulled to her feet. The au’it and Tofi woke the others, and they began to pull the stakes and collapse the tents.

Malin and the soldiers, it turned out, had gone, simply walked ahead of them when the madness had taken hold, and no one had noticed until they all mounted up, and there were two beasts too many. So all their haste to leave Pori was wasted, and no one much cared about three fools madder than the rest of them.

But Marak cared. The land descended, beyond the dunes, in more dry, broken shale, black rock that heated enough in the afternoon to blister a human foot, and the beasts hated the footing… the heat hurt even through their pads, and their long, thin legs had trouble dealing with a skid.

More, there began to be blood on the shale, and off toward the shadowing east, an ominous gathering of vermin dotted the sky.

They were following three fools. What could they expect?

Yet haste! haste! haste! the voices railed, and the tower built itself, and fire ran across the horizon.

“They’re leaving blood,” Hati said, on the slide above him. “This is not safe.”

“What is safe?” Tofi asked with an anxious laugh, from below them. They were on the steep part of the shale, now, and every step the beasts made cracked into a thousand sliding fragments. “What has been safe?”

He no more than said it than there came a loud slippage and dark rush of dust and shale past them, and beasts bawled and shied in a cascade of fragments.