Ian, meanwhile, walked steadily before them. The open sand was a tablet slowly erased, revised every time the wind blew, but the walkway through the plain of glass showed the passage of feet both coming and going: Marak did not miss it, and he had not, as they entered that pathway and added their prints to the rest, the fact there had been a traffic going around the depression of glass, and beyond the dune.

He doubted that Hati had missed that fact, either, but he said nothing, only stored it up as an indication there might be more than one destination hereabouts, perhaps another one beyond the hill that obscured their vision of all the land beyond, and perhaps more to this place than the tower. The prints he saw went around the scattered glass, and up on the other side, and out of sight, as the land either stretched on in a broad flat or fell away in a depression. There was no place round about higher than the base of the tower.

At this range it filled all their vision, and those footprints went confidently toward a bare wall at its base, where a subtle jointing showed where a door might be.

So there were mundane accommodations like doorways, Marak said to himself. Ian did not walk through walls, or expect it of them.

That seam cracked before they reached it, and let out a warm bright light, welcoming rather than threatening: as a door, like the Ila’s doors, a large square dropped back and slid to one side, rapidly, and with no hand to move it.

Inside, a series of lighted globes marched along the ceiling of a long, long hall.

It was the cave of suns. Marak recognized it, and his heart skipped a beat. They were within the vision. Hati and Norit must realize it.

Ian walked ahead of them, booted feet echoing sharply on a floor like glass, under blinding suns that now assumed a mortal scale, floating globes of brilliant, fireless light.

“This is the place,” Norit whispered as she walked. Her voice trembled. “This is what I always see.”

Marak pressed her hand, and Hati’s, and the au’it hovered close by. He trembled. He was ashamed to acknowledge it to himself and twice ashamed to have Hati and Norit know it, but he trembled. He was here, within his lifelong vision, and he could not but think of all the hours of misery, all the days and nights he had fled his father’s house, trying not to be discovered in his madness; of nights on the Lakht, on campaign, trying to conceal from the men he led that he heard voices and saw this place, over and over and over again.

All these things… all the years, all the losses of self and pride… came to this hallway, and proved, not madness, but prophecy. And for what, he asked himself angrily. For what?