“When did she become god?” Tofi cried. Their voices had become raw and unpleasant from the dust, and Tofi’s voice broke on the shout.
“Obey her,” Marak said wearily. “Where else will you go?”
“To hell,” Tofi said bleakly. “We’re all going to hell.”
But Tofi roused up the freedmen, who moved about loading their baggage and getting the beasts up.
As they were packing up, a small thing that lived in buried rocks came out and hissed and dived back again. One of the men threw a rock at the burrow in the Besh Karat.
“It will die on its own,” Norit said.
The bitter spring was covered by deep sand. It would not flow again until the vermin dug it up. The beshti themselves, water-short, still showed no disposition to seek it out.
What Norit prophesied haunted Marak as they rode away from that place.
Should even the ill-tempered creature in its house of stone perish?
Should winds like that cover the wells? From that small comprehension he truly began to grasp the height and depth of the devastation, east to west, from the highest to the lowest.
He wished he had stayed at the white tents. He wished he had told Hati to stay. He wished he had never undertaken this fool’s errand with Norit. There was no way out of this. There wasno safety. He was a fool, and he had led them all to their destruction.
But he had lived before by imposing strict conditions on his death.
He would not die and leave Hati and Norit alone to face what came. That was his underlying resolve. He would not die without speaking to the Ila and relaying what she had asked to hear. That was his mission; and it was not that far. They would at least attempt the return, whatever the Ila did, and if, in the Ila’s wrath, he could not, theywould go back to the tower. He would put the fear in Tofi and have him promise that.
Both these things he promised himself, while he roused Osan to his feet and turned Osan’s head toward the holy city.
Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said to him. By noon, they passed bones that jutted up from the sand, a besha’s carcass already stripped by vermin. They came to others, four and five, and the bones of two men on the other side of the caravan track, but those bones were gnawed for the marrow and scattered, dug up by some creature after the sand had covered them. A scrap of canvas lay against a distant rock, looking as the wind had carried it and bunched it around the base of the boulder. It might have sheltered a man, but if it did, that man was dead by now, beyond their help. And the visions were now of fire, fire flowing like water from a broken spigot, fire coursing through land and eroding it.
They found other remnants of passage, as if bit by bit the whole caravan before them had come to grief, overwhelmed by the wind and the sand. Other debris was blown up against the rocks, far from their path, which now was as smooth as if no caravan had ever gone before them. When the desert destroyed, it both preserved and obliterated, even this close to the holy city.
But the day-early mirage that usually heralded the holy city failed. The sky was dirty yellow, and the air was cold. They doled out a little water to the beshti, and wondered what was ahead of them.
He contrived to speak to Tofi alone, riding side by side with him for a space, while Hati lagged back with the au’it. “I have a proposition for you,” he said. “We both have a promise to the Ila. But she may reward you. If things go badly for me, as they may, take Hati and Norit and go back as fast as you can.”
“To the tower?” Tofi asked.
“There,” Marak said. “There’s no safety here. You know that.”
“I already know,” Tofi said unhappily. The young man who had thought at the beginning of this trek that the world would survive now had different ideas. “There isnone here. We’re lucky it’s not our bones lying back there in the sand.”
“We had warning. They didn’t. Wehave Norit. Listen to her.”
“The question is, what’s there? Is it any better there than here?”
“Norit will know,” he said. “I think she knows as well as anyone what the state of the tower is. If anyone can get you back there alive, she can.” He thought of the Ila’s promise to save his mother and his sister, and now he knew that calling the Ila into the tangled affairs of his family might have put Hati and Norit in danger, and if things went wrong in the Ila’s eyes, and she decided to blame him, he knew that she would never release those related to him: that was not the pattern of the Ila’s justice. He could not ask Tofi to save his mother and sister in that case: there was no likelihood at all that Tofi could pry them from the Ila’s hands and far less that Tofi could rescue him. But Hati—Hati was not a name the Ila even knew about.
“Don’t let Hati come with me once we reach the city,” he said. “If you have to carry her off by force, do it. Claim her as if she were yourfamily.”
“Can you argue with her?”
“I’ll give her that instruction. I’ll tell her to take care of you. Go along with it.”
“I’ll do my best,” Tofi said, and joined the scheme to get the most of them back. “If the Ila’s men ask, I’ll lie and say she’s my wife.”
That was the measure of Tofi’s courage, his loyalty to a stranger… that he would lie to the Ila’s men and rescue Hati. It was what happened to men on campaign together; and Tofi was no longer a boy, no longer a youngest son, struggling with a man’s burden. The ex-slaves obeyed him… respected him, that had happened day by day.
Now Marak discovered the courage that was in Tofi, as great as any man’s he had ever ridden with; and he went to Norit, too, riding alongside her.
“Tell Luz,” he said, “if anything goes wrong, go to Tofi and tell him to get you to the tower. You’ll need Hati, too. I can promise you, you’ll get nowhere without her. Hati’s of the tribes. You don’t know enough about the desert on your own to live the day out. Your advice is dangerous to the inexperienced.”
Norit looked at him, frightened, as all her waking hours were a chaos of fear and Luz’s presence. For a moment it was Norit, wholly Norit who gazed at him. Then the fear dimmed, and it was Luz. “Do what you came to do,” Luz said sharply, and that was all she would say, leaving him angry and worried both.
He delayed talking to Hati. He knew it would be an argument.
Haste, the voices said. Don’t stop. Don’t rest.
The sky remained the same dirty yellow toward the night, until the sun went down in a red sky the like of which none of them had seen; and that night the stars were hidden by cloud. Now and again in the far distance a trail of fire came through, and once a great boom resounded across the pans.
Day came with a different shade, gray murk above their heads, streaked with dirty yellow high, high aloft.
They had ceased to point at wonders. Tofi looked up gape-mouthed at this one, and so did Hati. The au’it began to write, and seemed to lose heart, and folded her book under this leaden sky.
Norit had nothing to say.
“We should keep moving,” Tofi said. “The mirage has failed us. But I know we’re not that far.”
The yellow dust of the western pans was on the move. Sometimes, being newly fallen, dust ran along the ground, a light film of it, streaks across the red sand of the Lakht.
But by midmorning a dark haze was on the northern horizon, and by noon a low black pall obscured the face of the Qarain’s red rock.
“Fire,” Hati said. “ Smoke.”
It was the city itself they were seeing. They saw nothing like the tall graceful towers. The city lacked its towers and was surrounded by a field of dull gray and red-brown their eyes had taken for sand.
Tents stood on the outskirts of the holy city… many, many tents spread all about it.