“These men we can do without,” Tofi said in a low voice as they rode. “The woman we can do without, most of all. They’re the troublemakers. There always are, in a caravan, and these are ours.”
“There always are,” Marak agreed. “Without their bad example, someone else would have to be the fool. Would they not?”
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.
“I see people walking,” one of the others said, Kosul the potter, who sat nearby, and that, it struck him, was exactly what Norit had said. “They want us all.”
“The people there in the tower want us,” Norit said in this council of equals they had made in their tent. “I don’t know why.”
Heads generally nodded agreement.
And who had said there were people in the tower? But now they all believed it, and everyone agreed. Whether or not the soldiers could read, he had no idea. They had chosen the shade of the other tent, preferring the company of Maol and Tofi and the slaves, who detested them… most of all preferring Malin, who would not come near Hati, and there were only two tents in which to shelter.
Marak’s skin crawled. He wanted to rise up and deny all relationship with the rest of them.
And yet he increasingly formed a notion in his head not only of a threat sweeping down on them from every quarter of the earth, but of a refuge toward which they walked, one at the very heart of all the mystery they pursued, one they must reach soon, or die.
He shivered, and Norit caught the shiver, and so did Hati, then no few of the others.
All at once, for no reason whatsoever, he—all of them, perhaps—saw a hall of suns; and figures moving shadowlike among them. Structures traced fire across his vision.
He shouted. He clenched his hands and saw a door before him, and that door moved with no hand touching it, like the Ila’s doors, but what was behind that door he could not answer and did not want to know.
A man cried out near him, and fell down in a fit. “I see spirits!” he cried. “The god! The god! Ila save us and intercede! I see the god!”
Fever rushed over Marak’s skin, making his heart beat hard and his ears roar with sound.
Marak, a single voice said, wishing his attention, and he tried to give it, but the images came pouring through. From the other tent, at greater remove, there were shrieks and shouts.
Tower and cave and star, and each opened, and divulged a heart of structures and shapes and forms and light, all jumbled together. Walls were built of light and fire. Structures had tastes. Sounds had texture like rough sand.
He shouted. He leapt up and found something to lean on, the smooth strength of a tent pole, proving where he was. He rested his head against it, and stayed there long, long, not daring move until the visions stopped.
The fever had come back, as if he had taken a wound; and when his vision cleared he saw Norit had clenched her arms across her stomach and Hati had her hands braced before her mouth, gazing at nothing at all.
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?”