“I’m Marak Trin,” he said in a voice unreliable with dryness and exhaustion. “I’m on the Ila’s commission, with her au’it.” He almost asked the man to report their presence, but before he could, their au’it held the curtain aside with one hand, holding her book with the other, and nodded, a gesture for them to follow, the guards doing nothing at all to prevent her.
So they walked through, into a small space between curtains. An officer stood there by a camp table and a chair under a lantern, and that worried, wearied officer was one of the Ila’s captains.
“Marak Trin,” Captain Memnanan said, as if he had met the dead. “Marak Trin Tain.”
“I have a message from the far side of the Lakht,” Marak said. “Obidhen’s dead. His son had a chance to stay safe, the other side of the Lakht, but he came back… his father’s duty, he said. He needs help: two freedmen and too many beshti to keep contained out there at the well. These two,” Marak added, meaning Hati and Norit, his last attempt at cleverness, “these two can help with that. The Ila will needthose animals. And the master.”
Memnanan heard all that with a weary, dazed look, and then went to the curtain and passed curt, coherent orders to the soldiers to get slaves and assist at the well.
He let the curtain fall then, and looked at the several of them, dusty and dirty as they were, in this immaculate place, Hati and Norit making no attempt to leave.
“I am the Ila’s au’it,” the au’it said in a soft, little-used voice, “with herbook.”
She might have said I am the god’s right hand. It was that kind of utterance.
“Go through,” Memnanan said, and lifted his arm to forbid Marak. “Have you any answer worth delivering,” Memnanan asked him, all other things aside, “considering what you see outside?”
“I have the onlyanswer worth delivering,” Marak said, and succeeded at least in surprising the man.
Came a rumble in the earth, then, a shudder, and the walls even of this tent billowed and moved. Cries of panic resounded outside the canvas walls, far and away across the camp.
He saw pools of fire burning in the dark, walls of fire racing across the land.
Be patient, he told his voices, and threatened them in desperation. Be still— or fail.
Memnanan moved as soon as the earth was still, and swept that curtain back. Servants moved it farther, sent it traveling on gold rings that sang as they went. A desk was beyond, and servants, with a black curtain at their backs. They parted it.
Behind that curtain a red one.
Slaves hastened the third curtain back, gathering its folds in their arms, carrying aside several small chairs and a lamp from what had been a small room.
The Ila maintained her state beyond, on her gold chair, on a wide dais of far fewer steps. She was robed and gloved and capped in red. An au’it—not their au’it—sat cross-legged at her feet.
They stood at the edge of a priceless carpet, the three of them, with boots scuffed and coated with dust, in the dusty gauze robes of Luz’s tower.
Here was what remained of power. Above them was white canvas, extravagantly lighted with bronze lamps. About them were all the trappings of wealth and control of the lives of men, even in the desolation of the city.
But above that canopy was thunder in the heavens, and under their feet was the shiver of a newly restless earth.
The Ila lifted her hand, motioned, and from a shadowed curtain an au’it came, holding her book, and scurried to sit at the Ila’s feet—their au’it, dusty and soiled as she was.
“Marak Trin,” the Ila said.
He walked forward, three paces, four, until the guards at the Ila’s far left and right reacted, until the Ila herself, in the same moment, turned to him the back of her uplifted hand. Stop. So he stopped. Hati and Norit stopped somewhere farther back.
The Ila looked at him, assessing what she saw, or realizing what she saw: Marak had no idea, in the quarrel between Luz and the Ila, how much either knew of the other. For everyone else’s sake, he waited, asking himself where to find the right words, the few words that might catch her attention, and her belief.
“What have you found?” the Ila asked.
Where to begin? Most desperately—where to begin.
“There’s a tower off the edge of the Lakht,” he said, “ruled by a woman named Luz. She says she’s your cousin.” He saw the Ila’s breath come in, deeply, and go out. That was the only sign of emotion she gave. “More,” he said, risking everything, “she speaks through us. I think she sees through us. She guided us a new way through the storms. The mad stayed there at the tower… with Luz… but they’re no longer mad. There’s water. There’s sweet water, and tents, and all the madmen that ever wandered away from the villages are camped around the place, as sane as…” As the rest of us? he almost said to that white, implacable face, and stopped himself in time. “She chose us three, and took us into the tower. Its doors open with no one touching them. Lights burn without fire. She talked to us. She gave us a message for you. She sent us because it’s not too late.“
Rocks hitting spheres, and pools of fire. Luz was aware at this very moment, aware of all three of them, he was sure of it. Luz was looking out through Norit’s eyes, and dared he make the Ila aware of that fact? What would she do to Norit if she knew?
“Nanoceles,” Norit said from the back of the chamber, taking every guard by surprise, and she strode forward. Men started to move, but the Ila lifted her hand and stopped the drawing of weapons, stopped their rush to prevent Norit, who took her place at his side.
“You understand that word,” Norit said in that cold, clear, terrible voice. “You know what you’ve done, you know what your predecessors did to the world of the ondat. In revenge they’ve begun to reshape this world, but with us, your cousins, they have peace. And I came here to offer you a choice that they allow me to offer you.”
“Luz takes her,” Marak said, with a distracted glance at Norit. Her face was white and still, terrified. “She can’t stop it. She’s a woman from Tarsa; she’s never been outside her village. She isn’t doing this.”
“This is a dangerous woman,” the Ila said considerately, the hand half-lifted. “This is an extremely dangerous woman.”
“I’m your hope of salvation,” Norit said sharply. “You’ve lost. Your enemies have found you. We bargained with them for your lives. We’ve worked here thirty years to save somethingof what you built, first, because we couldn’t come closer to you inside your guards and your protection, and second, because we didn’t think you wouldhear us, and third, because we wouldn’t lose the rest, trying to save you. When we knew we had Marak Trin among the mad, we triedto take the Lakht and gain your attention, but he couldn’t reach his father, and his father couldn’t reach you.”
“With Tain’s army?” The Ila laughed as a man might laugh at a very grim joke, on his father, on his entire house and all their effort, and it stung. “From the beginning, that wasn’t likely.”
“But you reached him,” Norit said, while Marak remained paralyzed by this step-by-step disclosure of the facts of his life, a simple process of logic and history. “Knowing what we had made him, but not thatwe had made him, you chose him for your messenger. Entirely reasonable. There was no one better, no one more likely. And having sent a messenger, I assume you intended something more than to wish us well.“
Luz daredto challenge the Ila, to question her. The guards, the whole chamber poised and braced for retaliation.