We're going over the rim."

Hati looked aside. The Keran had let Norit down off his besha, and Tofi had gotten down. Norit's besha was, not surprisingly, walking with the rest, riderless, and Tofi called out to Bosginde to catch the beast and bring it. The caravan, meanwhile, never stopped. Such small exchanges dropped behind temporarily, and caught up again, beshti tending to seek their own herd.

But if anyone was as likely as the Ila's priests and servants to be alive with the Ila's own makers, if there was anyone in the Ila's service who could be as aware of the Ila's whims as he was aware of Luz's moods and desires, it was the aui'it.

Her priests, her servants knew the Ila's wishes and obeyed her.

The au'it had reported, that was what.

Looking back, he saw Norit had gained the saddle again, in the weary, moving throng. There was no eagerness in the crowd around them. A kind of glazed desperation had replaced fervor and mirth and anger and all the rest of motives that kept men moving toward the unknown, away from calamity.

"Let me take the baby," Patya said, riding close to him. "I'll hold her."

Marak pa.s.sed her over, glad to surrender the responsibility. "Norit can carry her on the descent," he said, and added, because with his own experience, he pitied Norit: "Her mother doesn't know. She's gone where she goes."

"Will she come back to be-?" Patya asked, and to her mad brother, tried to find words.

"Sane again? Will she be sane? I hope so." But he saw no sign of it, not now, not for time to come. "If she doesn't, we'll take care of her, Hati and I. And you." He saw how Patya took to the waif. "We'll take care of you, too. We're family."

He had to promise that to Patya. But he foreknew her relation to him might soon become a hazard to Patya's well-being, to her very life. He suspected their au'it had been making an extensive, perhaps not favorable, report, that her whole account had gone to the Ila now, and he had to know, before he set out on this risky descent, before people began coming to the Ila, mad for water and in terror of the star-fall, what the Ila meant to do about that report.

He rode beside Hati, not reporting to Memnanan, or to the Ila.

He waited for the Ila, riding within sight of him, to send for him.

He waited for Memnanan to ask him what he had seen out there, or why they had ridden back in disarray. Even if Memnanan had gotten a full report from Aigyan of what Hati had told him-it was good sense to ask the firsthand witness, at least, what he had seen, and why he had changed his mind about Pori.

No query came from either. The au'it-an au'it-rode near them, rode veiled, as she often had, appearing out of the dust.

Why she had left them remained a mystery, one with, he was sure, the Ila at the heart of it, and Memnanan's ignoring him as the wrapping on the affair.

"The Ila asked you no questions?" he asked Hati.

"Not a one. I only talked to Aigyan."

"Don't look back," he said in a low voice. "The au'it's back there. Did you see the au'it immediately when you got back?"

"No." Hati sounded startled. "I don't think she went with us. Or did we lose her?"

"One is with us now," he said. "Something's happened. I don't know what, I don't know why, but something's happened."

"About the Ila, you mean?"

"She didn't want to know about Pori. She only took the easy chance to call the au'it back, maybe to read the book. We have an au'it back there now. I don't know that it's the same one. Memnanan's not talking to us. I can see him. He's not even looking our way. He's under orders."

"We can't completely trust him, then."

"We never could completelytrust him," Marak said. He tried to think what reason the Ila might have for not needing to know about Pori, and all he could think of was that the Ila had foreknown there was no use in their mission there. Failing that-her need to have the au'it's report on them had become more important than her need to know what they did out there at Pori.

Perhaps it was a consultation before their descent of the plateau, her wish to know everything they had said in secret before she went into Luz's territory. Perhaps the Ila herself perceived the approach of the hammer and pondered leaving his venture south, and going east, instead. She was well watered. There were makers in her blood. She might be, herself, mad.

But if the Ila had found out something of Luz's intentions, it was not the au'it who told her, becausethey had no idea and could not have informed her.

The Ila had ceased her daily baths. The Ila's servants no longer cooked for the camp or made tea for the Ila. Presumably the last few days the Ila ate the same dry ration as they ate.

Perhaps the Ila held some intention of dealing with Luz and everyone that served her.

"Do you think she means us harm?" Hati asked him.

"I don't know what she thinks. I wonder if she's begun to hear the voices herself."

"Luz's voice?" Hati asked.

"The makers could do that. Her makers haven't cured us of Luz. Our makers keep us what we are.

Maybe they've gotten intoher , now." He paused on a thought. "Maybe she fears they're going to get into her-maybe she didn'twant to drink water that didn't come from the Ila's Mercy."

"All our water did," Hati said. Her dark eyes went wide and troubled. "And our food came from Oburan. Everything.Pori's wouldn't. Pori belonged to Luz. Didn't it?"

"I think we shed makers," he said. "What if we breed them continually and shed them like old skin?

What if we shed them into the sand and into the water? And the Ila's servants cook for the camp, or they did before we ran short. And the priests, the Ila's priests, they come and go up and down the line.

Maybe it's a kind of war going on. What if the Ila would lose altogether if we took water from Pori, and everybody watered there?"

Hati simply stared at him, the two of them riding side by side. "She hasn't given up, then."

"I don't think she's given up," he said.

"Do you think she's planning some sort of attack on Luz?"

"I don't know. But Luz hears us." It was hard to remember that they were spied on, constantly. But it was true. "Luz knows, now, everything we just said. We can't help that. I hope Luz figures how to protect us." The last he said like a pet.i.tioner in a village court, hoping Luz was listening carefully. "She's asked all these people to come to her tower. If she meant all of us to die, we could have done that in Oburan.Surely she has something she can do. She won't just turn on us, because of the Ila. She wanted her. I think she still wants her. But the Ila doesn't want to be taken." He was afraid, as he said it. He had met two small anomalies in the way things had worked: the au'it's desertion, and now her return, and neither might mean more than that the au'it had decided not to take an arduous journey, an ordinary simple decision.

But the Ila was going into danger at the very heart of their safety: he understood more and more that peace between the Ila and Luz was not likely, and he grew as worried about what the Ila might do as they came closer to Luz, as their journey became harder and the decisions more dangerous.

He worried about the Ila's unantic.i.p.ated action now as he worried about the failing water supply, as worried as he was about the beshti's strength, about thepeople's strength to make the climb down from the Lakht-as worried about all those things near him, perhaps, as he was about the remote calamity coming to the world. The hammerfall was still distant: the Ila's independent action might come before they reached the cliffs, before they entered Luz's domain, and it might be anything, even a decision deliberately to kill all of them.

And she might be mad. She might be as mad as the rest of them. She might do things that only made sense to the mad, just before they attempted the climb down with many, many people that, already, would not survive.

Buteast anddown was increasingly the only choice that would serve. If calamity was coming as a star-fall, then surely, he said to himself, it would be something the like of which they had accompanying the lesser star-fall. They had their forewarning in that: it would be quake and wind and blowing sand, ten times, a hundred times worse than before. Andthat , unlike the Ila, could not change.

He gathered up his wits and his courage for confrontation and went to Memnanan instead, who rode behind the Ila's servants.

"Pori's lost to us," he said.

"So I gather," Memnanan said.

"The Ila knows?"

"She knows."

"Quake and storm are coming," he said plainly, "worse than we've ever seen. And it's coming soon.

This next camp of ours will be only a short rest, with no stakes driven. After that..." He felt his way onto quaking ground, with a man he had generally trusted, who had trustedhim , more to the point, and who had the Ila's ear. "After that, and it's not far from here, we go down the climb off the Lakht, and we try to get as many as we can alive to the bottom."

"Is there any spring at the bottom? Is there anything near the cliffs?"

"Not that I know. But we do what we can. We get down off the edge, and we immediately get the deep stakes driven, and we trust the cliffs to shelter us." He wanted to ask, and saw no course but to ask.

"Pori was completely infested. Did the Ila already know that?"

Hati, to his dismay, had followed him. Now both of them rode beside the captain, one on a side, and the au'it trailed them at a distance, as she always had.

Memnanan had a grave, a worried expression, and did not look quite at him or at Hati. And failed to answer.

"You don't need a report," Marak challenged him. "Why don't you need one? Why don't you ask?

Isn't she taking advice?"

"The Ila said let you try what you could, and if you couldn't, or if you didn't come back, then we would go down to the lowlands without you." Memnanan did look at him then. "She believes in your calamity.

She expects a storm. She doubted Pori would be enough shelter." Memnanan seemed to weigh saying something further, then did. "She thinks most will die, and if anyone will live, we have to a.s.sume most will die."

"More likely we'll die if we sit on our rumps. We're going to try not to. Tell her that. Tell her she needs to listen to advice." Tell her she was not in charge of decisions? Tell her she would not give orders to the tribes? That was too much to expect of Memnanan. If he tried to make that point, he would lose this man, and everything. "Tell her we can't rest long. Not a moment more than we have to."

"I will."

"What did the au'it tell her, in her report? Good, or bad?"

"I don't know," Memnanan said.

"Is that the same au'it with us now?"

Memnanan's eyes traveled in that direction, and back. "I have no idea."

"If the Ila orders anything that prevents us getting down off the rim," Marak said, "for her life, don't let her. Don't do anything to prevent us. It's corning. That's all I know now. It's coming."

"I said: she's in favor of the descent," Memnanan said. "As soon as possible." He added, in a low voice, with as much desperation as a man might feel: "I trust you for my household, Marak Trin."

Memnanan's wife, his mother. His unborn child.

"I'll have a good man walk beside your wife when we make the climb down," Marak said, rea.s.sured that Memnanan had asked the favor, not quite admitting it. "To steady the besha."

The au'it had moved up beside them. She wrote as she had written all the conversations before, all of which the Ila now knew-at least those the au'it might think most important.

It was their au'it, he decided, in one glance, and then in the next, had his doubts return.

He knew their own au'it's face, her mannerisms. And how often in the past had it been some different woman, when the aui'it frequently wore the veil, against the unkind sun and the drying wind? Their own au'it might still be reporting. The Ila, riding with the aui'it, ahead of them, might be making her own plans, outside Memnanan's knowledge.

The Ila had no need to ask him questions, if that was the case. In the au'it's report she proved to herself whether he would lie to her, or to his companions, and when he posed himself that question he grew calmer: he never had lied, so far as he recalled. If she was sane, she would know he had never worked against her.

Perhaps the Ila eventrusted him, as far as she trusted anyone, even Memnanan. That was an unlooked-for conclusion.

But whatever the Ila thought, whatever she schemed, whatever she intended toward him, if her intentions agreed with his, getting this ma.s.s of people down off the Lakht before the hammer came down, he decided not to confuse the issue any further with questions.

Or reports.

Or speculations.

For the next number of hours, her motives and his motives might both demand they get off the Lakht and stay alive.

For the next number of hours, if that was her thought, it was good enough.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

In the abyss above the sky, I saw death. Below the heavens, I have made all choices I could make not for lives, but for life itself.

-The Book of the Ila They rested for two measured hours on the tribalclock, simply looking at the sun and trusting the sun, no matter the fate of the world, to stay on its course. They pitched no tents, only unrolled their mats. The Keran and the Haga drank very, very little, allowing the water to stay in their mouths for as long as possible. They gave sweet water to their beshti, as much as they could give, to sustain the legs that carried them. They sorted even the spa.r.s.e goods that a tribe owned, paring down the weight the beshti carried to the least possible, while the sky above them was blue.

At that stop, the horizon of the world was closer than it ever had been. The drop into the rolling flat of the east was clear and distinct to see, seeming so close that Marak would have driven himself and his own to keep moving and to reach it, and to go down, but the distance in that vision was deceptive because of the scale. It was another long walk away, and desperate as they were, they had no choice but to rest-and to ask the Ila, through Memnanan, to be wise: to do as the tribes did, and to cast away anything that could be cast away. The tribes made a small heap of what they abandoned. Yet nothing from the Ila's baggage joined it, and for the Ila, her servants spread a side flap as a canopy and a curtain for a wind-break: the Ila would not lie down in the witness of others, and what she owned, she would not cast away.

Hati had lain down with her veil pulled over her face, like the dead. Norit rocked Lelie... rocked sometimes, simply because she was mad, but it chanced to calm Lelie, all the same, while it calmed Norit.

"Soon, soon, soon," Norit said to no one in particular, and exhausted herself, refusing rest. Marak saw how worn she had come to look, how the bones stood out in the hand that rested on Lelie's back.

It was no wonder. He had watched it happen. He blamed Luz, and hoped Norit had strength enough to carry her down the cliffs. The child-Lelie-was a hazard on the descent, when a suddenly ill-placed weight, like too much weight, could cause a besha to miss its footing, and where one besha falling could wreak havoc on those below. But Norit had taken Lelie back. And he summoned up faith that Norit would make it-hope that she would make it. She was a better rider than Patya: she had become so, on their ride. He appointed the man to go beside Elagan, and keep her steady, and he appointed another to go beside Memnanan's mother and his two frail aunts.

He trusted them. He trusted their own party to get down intact: the tribes knew what they were doing, if the Ila's men did not.

But what disasters would happen after, what would happen if the hammerfall overtook them on the descent, what would happen if the weather turned, what would happen when inexperienced villagers attempted to ride down the cliffs under adverse conditions-during earthquake, or in storm... those were questions with one plain answer, and he blotted it out, as far as he could, while anger at the Ila's obstinacy churned in him-about her decisions, he could do nothing.

He thought he should station someone to check the villagers' loads before they started down. He should have someone to advise certain villagers, inexpert riders, to walk, and certain others to adjust their packs and lower the height of them before attempting the descent.

He might find some tribesman that brave, to linger back behind the tribes, to stand among the d.a.m.ned and save those he could. It galled him to have to ask that of the tribesmen who knew better and had managed better all their lives, and one part of him said he should not; but he imagined the calamity among the helpless and the weak, the unjust, undeserved calamity of villagers who had never learned the Lakht and had no reason to know, and theondat , serene in the heavens, hurling stars at men and women as innocent as the old slaves in the garden. There were G.o.ds-on-earth, and G.o.ds in the skies, so far as men of his ability could ever deal with them, andreason gave way to blind luck andjustice had no place in the reckoning: like the wind, death justwas , and he knew he was going to fail to save some-and more than some.

His orders from Luz were running out. He had gotten them this far. He considered the Ila's arrogant canvas, and began to ask himself what he himself was worth, more than the rest, and why shouldhe tell another man to stand back at the beginning of the descent and advise villagers on the way to get down?

His job was to save lives and get them on their way. But he had done that. Norit would see the rest to safety. She was their guide. Anything he could do, Hati could do.

Was he holier and more righteous than the Ila in her shelter?

And then he looked at Hati, asleep beside him, and knew in his heart that Hati would stay with him, no matter what. It was never just one life that he would risk, taking that hazardous post for himself: he would kill Hati by that decision.