They did not camp at noon, either. They kept going with minor rests, taking a little of the dried fruit for their meal, and a little water, enduring the heat of the sun, and even the beasts did not complain. The distance between them and the disturbance still seemed perilously scant, the beasts still were skittish, and they rode until they had put the whole afternoon behind them.

Then they settled down for a shortened rest, with no tents pitched, lying on their mats until the stars came out.

In the distance a hunter howled, and most all the still bodies in the camp roused and turned and looked toward that horizon.

So did the beasts, lifting their heads in perfect unison.

Marak saw nothing but a flat, endless, wind-scoured land.

He let his head back and trusted the beasts to raise a fuss if danger came close. The voices urged him, pleaded with him, Hurry, hurry, hurry! even now, and rest came hard.

Fear was on the wind tonight. The tower built itself, and the cave of suns was in it, and he heard voices multiplying.

Then he gained the strangest notion that he should get up, and take his beast and keep traveling.

Certain of the sleeping madmen sat up, too. Hati had gotten to her feet, and then Norit, who plunged her head into her hands and shook her head, refusing the vision, perhaps, or perhaps only weary beyond words.

The beasts themselves, not being mad, could not sustain such a pace. But after all the fright and terror of the day, still, the mad rose up, not listening, locked in that intensity of purpose that drove men to walk to their deaths.

Malin and the soldiers had been the first.

“No,” Marak said. He went to them, seized one arm and the other, and shook at them. “Wake up. Don’t follow it afoot like Malin and Kassan. You saw what happened with the beast. You know what happened to those that walked out. In a few hours we will go. But not straggling off by twos and threes like fools! Listen to me!”

Two heard him. The orchardman began to walk, and the potter followed.

He caught the orchardman and hit him hard with his, fist, pitching the man down. He overtook the potter, a slighter man, and hit him, the same. The man went down unconscious, and that was the end of his walking off in the night.

The orchardman sat nursing a bloody lip and muttering to himself, but sane enough with the pain of a chipped tooth to know he had been a fool.

Marak went back with a sore hand and sat down to suck at a cut knuckle.

“Let them go,” Hati said.

“Why should you care?” Norit asked. “Why should any of us care?”

The erosion was reaching the rest of them, a slippage of what kept their company together, a bleeding of reason and sanity.