“She is the Ila’s au’it,” Marak said. “She has orders to go where I go.“

“Whose orders?”

“The Ila’s.”

“The Ila’s orders have no weight here,” Ian said.

“They have with me.” They had stopped on the exposed hill, where the wind battered them and the heavier sand stung bare skin, Ian’s scent came to them on that wind, too, a curious scent, like sun-heated cloth, like living plants. “We’re all mad here except the young master, the two slaves, and the au’it. We see visions and hear voices. Do you?”

Ian gazed at him a long, long moment, seeming to measure him twice and three times and perhaps not to like the sum he arrived at. He was a strange sort of man, strange in his smell, tanned, with wisps of pale hair blowing out from under the headcloth, and with narrow, close-lidded eyes. Marak had never seen such sun-bleached hair, and never seen green eyes, green like stagnant water. The cloth of the sand-colored robes was fine as that in the Ila’s court, cloth of gauze of many lengths and layers, so that they blew and whipped in the wind, individually as light as the dust itself.

Wealth, such cloth said. Power, that wealth said.

And that the Ila’s orders did not reach here did not persuade him to trust this Ian, no matter how the voices dinned into his ears and no matter how the feelings in his heart said this was, after all his trials, the place. The Ila ruled everything. In Kais Tain they might have said that the Ila’s rule did not extend there, but they did not disrespect an au’it.

“Come,” Ian said then, shrugging off the matter of the au’it, ignoring her presence, and led them farther, over the low dune. After that they walked along Ian’s back trail—he left tracks like a man—on for some little distance toward a sandstone ridge, and along that for a considerable distance south.

Go with Ian, the voices said. Believe him. This is the place. This at last is the right place.

The desire and the voices grew, overwhelming better sense, and heat, and thirst. But limbs grew weary in walking. Feet ached, and rubbed raw in boots. The au’it lagged, carrying her heavy book, and Norit stumbled.

Still Ian walked at the same pace.

“If we were to trek all afternoon to get where we’re going, we might have saddled the beasts,” Marak said, vexed, helping Norit.

Ian turned and confronted him for another lengthy stare, a test of wills, perhaps.

Or perhaps Ian heard voices of his own. It occurred to Marak at that moment that such might be the case.

“Not far, now,” Ian said, and led them, at a slower pace, up another rise.