He still was shaken, dizzied by the feeling of falling with the star. The things Luz said involved a simple act, but the reason behind it defied understanding, and his suspicion, old as his understanding of the world, said not to trust this.
“The world’s going to end, Marak Trin. But this place will survive.” Luz walked to the door. “It’s this simple: you can stay here, or you can go back and rescue all you can.”
“To what good?”
“To all the good there is,” Luz said. “Or will ever be. If you choose to go, if the danger becomes too great, you can turn back. We won’t refuse you. Understand: you come very late. I’m not sure you’ll get there at all, or that you’ll get back with anything more than yourselves—if you’re very lucky. The ondathave waited thirty passes of this world around its star. I expected the attack to begin twenty days ago.”
“Have we weapons?”
“No weapons. No fighting. Only a safe place. When people run for their lives, a few more may run here. Pori might make it here, by accident. For the rest… they’ll die. And as for the Ila, oh, I assure you your Ila understands what we are. That’s why she’s sent you. She wants to know what the terms are, whether she can defeat our makers, and by that, whether she has a hope. If you choose to go, tell her we’ve reached an agreement with the ondat: we may reshape what the hammer fails to break. The world will so change that her design will not survive. But I can save her. She established this as a camp on the way to the ondatworld, but she never attacked them. There is forgiveness. We can arrange it.”
It was too vast to understand. There was no reason that this ordinary woman could stand here and convince him of these things. But what was there to believe?
“Can we save the people with me?”
“They’re already safe, camped outside. We will protect them.”
“And Kais Tain? And the villages?”
“I’ve told you. The time is already up. The time you have is what you can steal. Every hour you stand arguing is an hour taken from their survival. If she calls in the villages, can’t she call more in her name, than you in yours?”
It was true.
But there was no fairness about this attack. There was no logic, no reason, no justice in anything she said about the world.
Yet she said this was the appointed refuge from what was coming, whatever it was.
“Where’s Hati?” he asked her.
“Nearby. She can go where she wishes. Anyone here can go where he wishes.”
“And the au’it?”
“May also choose.” Luz had her hand on the door, and the door opened. “It’s not all darkness. If nothing kills you outright, the makers will help you live long enough to have a fair chance. Go tell the Ila, or stay here while the hammer falls. Take the au’it, or send her alone. It’s all your choice.”
“The au’it would never get there by herself.”
“Likely not,” Luz said, and walked out, leaving the door open.
He left Norit and went to the door. Luz was halfway down the metal hall of suns. He knew nothing to say. In just that long, Luz had turned everything upside down, and then begun to reiterate everything she had said, so he knew they were at an end.
“Hati!” he shouted to that vacancy. His temper had risen. Now his fear did.
There were other doors all along the hall, all closed.
Luz opened the door at the end of the hall and went out.
“Hati!”
A door opened on its own, far down the hall.
Hati came through it, clothed in fine cloth as they were. She saw them, and began to run. Marak caught her in his arms, crushed her lean, hard body against him, smelling what was incontrovertibly Hati, and having in his arms all he needed in the world.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“In this place,” Hati said. “In this room. The air never moved. And I saw dark, I saw one thing falling into another. I thought I was falling. I met a woman named Luz. She said the world would die, but we could be safe, or we could go back to Oburan and bring the rest here.”
“So she said.”
“You saw her?”
“Do you trust her?” he asked Hati. Not, Do you believe her? That was one question. But, Do you trust her? That was another. Staying in this claimed safety more than tempted him: it seemed the only sane answer in a mad, death-bound world, the only just answer for Hati, and Norit, and Tofi.
But not for him. He had a mother, a sister, a father, all resting on his promise to come back. He had the memory of villages, and the people he had known, and no few he had grown up with. And he had the word of a stranger and the promise of an enemy, and he was mad as the rest, but he knew what he could live with, and what he could not, right or wrong or fair to Hati, he could not stay.
“I don’t truststrangers,” Hati said. “I don’t trust her.”
“I have to go back. I’m supposed to rescue the god-cursed Ila.” He had no clear notion in his mind what he would do, or how he would do it, except to retrace their steps, walk into the Ila’s hall, and say a woman crazier than he was had sent a message that would not make her happy. Mad as it was, the urgency loomed taller and taller, like the vision of the tower. “I have to. I have to. I said I would come back. She said she’d save my mother and my sister for a year. I don’t know if she’ll keep her word. But I know I have to.”
Hati’s embrace tightened, hard, harder. “Do you know a way out of this place?” she asked.
He thought he knew. It was a sense of direction, like knowing where north was, if he wondered about it. There was a door in the other direction, and he turned toward it, one arm around Hati, the other about Norit. He thought about the au’it, and whether she might join them on their way out, and at a crossing of the next hall, the au’it came out, in her own red robes, but clean, head to toe. She held her book and her writing kit as she joined them, and walked with them quickly as far as the end of the hallway, and another door.
That door opened without warning. Ian was behind it.
“Are you looking for the door?” Ian asked. “Follow me.”
It was not a welcome presence. But Ian led them to the next door, and touched it to make it open.
Outside was the world and the sunlight, a pale blue sky, and red dunes and sandstone, going on forever.
Outside was a camp of white tents at the foot of the glass-strewn hill on which the tower stood.
Marak paid no attention to Ian as they left, and Ian said no further word to them. Marak heard the door shut behind them, and he felt the hot familiar wind in their faces as they walked down to the tents, faster and faster, with mounting desire to be there, and not at the tower.
“It’s Tofi,” Marak said. He knew the beasts that sat comfortably by those strange white tents: he knew the baggage piled up there. Two tents were pitched, white and looking as if they could have nothing to do with the red rock and the dust.
And from under those open-sided tents the mad came out to welcome them, all the madmen clothed in gauze robes the same as they were, waving, happy, cheering their safe return.
“Malin,” Hati said in astonishment as they came down the hill. “That’s Malin.” Kassan and Foragi were there, too, the ex-soldiers. They had made it here, against all expectation.
Tofi came, running. His robe was green-striped brown, a blue aifad, his own, as every stitch about him was his own: the others, destitute, took gifts, but Tofi put on his best, and Marak was glad at the sight of him.
“They said you were well,” Tofi said, as they met and clasped hands. “But I said they should let you go. This strange man came to us. There’s plenty of water here, and people, people from all over…”
The others clustered around them as they came downhill. “Where have you been?” the questions ran. “What have you seen?”