A red-gloved hand waved away inconsequences. “Take them. Do as you please with them. A caravan and its hire. Riding beasts. All these things.”

“Weapons.” His were gone. “Tents enough for all of us.”

She laughed like a child, as if, together, she on the steps, he on the ground, they were two children planning a delicious prank. “An au’it to write things down.”

“I can write,” he said in offended pride.

“I write,” she said with a wave of her hand, “but I find it tedious. An au’it, I say.”

“What if the au’it runs mad? Shall I be blamed?”

“You will not be blamed.” The red-gloved hands clasped silken knees. The eyes deep as wells stared at him. “The east is full of strange things. So is the Lakht. Take the regiment.”

“I never needed one. I rode all about these hills and your regiments couldn’t find us. The sand and the stones are no threat to me.”

“The vermin are. Bandits are.”

“Only when you feed them on corpses and fat caravans! The holy city is their source of food. Pour out water, and vermin and bandits alike fight among themselves.” He shrugged. “A regiment will take more time than an ordinary caravan. I know the Lakht. I don’t need them. Give me a good caravan master. Good sound canvas.”

“And the mad.”

“And the mad.”

“Better than a regiment?”

“We’ve learned the desert, have we not? We walked here.”

A long, long moment that dark gaze continued, intimate and close.

“I shall be very disappointed if you fail. Is there anything you might ask of me, any favor for yourself alone.”

“Only what I’ve asked,” he said.

Perhaps it disquieted her to find a man who wanted so little. But there was nothing at all he wanted. There was absolutely nothing she could give, except his freedom, and the lives of his mother and sister and his father.

“I dreamed of the east,” she said in a low voice. “As the mad do. I will have an answer, Marak Tain. I willhave an answer.”

“If I’m alive to come back, I will come back. Let my mother and my sister go where they choose and you’ll have your answer and all my effort. I’ve lied in my life. But I’ve never broken a promise.”

The Ila drew off a glove, finger by finger, as they did in the market, as they did in a court of law. Her hand was long and white, blue-veined marble, and she offered him her fingers to touch, concluding a bargain, flesh to flesh, with no au’it to write it. Her flesh was warm as his own. She smelled of fruit and rain, smelled of wealth and water.

“Your household keeps its word,” she said. “It always has. Its one virtue. Go outside. Bring my captain in.”

He rose with difficulty. The joints of his knees felt assaulted, still aching with the fire she had loosed. A roaring was in his ears, making him dizzy. He was not fit to ride, not today; but he would. If her promise brought him the means to leave this place and walk out under the sky again, he would do that. He made out the voices past the roaring in his ears. East, they cried, east! and he realized he was set free, to do what the voices had wanted all his life. Freedom racketed about his whole being, demanding a test, demanding immediate action.

East. East. East.

He backed away, wobbling. The Ila rose and mounted the steps, and sat down in her chair, composed and still.

But reaching the door he realized it had no latch, and he had no knowledge how to open it. She made a fool of him, consciously, perhaps. He gazed at it in dismay, reminded in such small detail how far the holy city was beyond his expectation.

She opened the door, perhaps. At least it sighed a steamy breath and admitted one of her chief captains, a man scowling, hand on dagger, ready to kill.

“Here are my orders,” the Ila said from her chair high at the end of the room. “Give him the madmen, an au’it, and a master caravanner, and whatever canvas and goods and beasts he requires. Marak Trin Tain is under my seal. When he goes out from this hall, respect him. When he comes back to these doors, admit him. Write it!”

The au’it, Marak saw from the doorway, had slunk back to sit at the Ila’s feet. Quickly she spread out her book, and the au’it wrote whatever seemed good to write.

“I have sent for the wife and daughter of Tain Trin Tain, and spared Tain his fate. Write it!”

What would they cry through the holy city and through the market? Marak Trin is the Ila’s man?

His father would hear it, sooner or later. His father would be appalled, outraged, and, yes, shamed a second time.

But could he refuse to yield up to the Ila’s demand his cast-off wife and daughter, where he had sent his son?

And could his son have done otherwise, when Tain Trin Tain had once bowed to the Ila and signed their armistice?

In that sense it was not his decision. It became the Ila’s. And Tain would have known, when he threw down the damnation against his wife, that he had cleaved the two of them one from the other and thrown conscience after, a casual piece of baggage. He only hoped the Ila’s men reached Kais Tain in time for his mother’s safety.

Love of his father? Loyalty? He no longer knew where to find that in himself. In the Ila’s promise, he had lost one direction and found another. He did not resent the pain of the Ila’s blow: lords struck when offended. It was an element, like heat, like thirst, to be endured. She had met the price, and he wasbought. Had his father done as much, for all his blows through the years?

He walked out with the captain, sure as he did so that here was a man, like his father, who had sooner see him dead. But the captain said not a word against the Ila’s wishes, took him directly to the armory and let him equip himself with good, serviceable weapons: a dagger, a boot-knife, even considering that rarest of weapons, a pistol, difficult to keep in desert dust, and hungry for metal.

“Sand will impair it,” the captain said, plainly not in favor of him having it. “And aim is a matter of training.”

“I have no time for that,” he said, and put aside that piece that, itself, could have hired a regiment.

A bow—there were numerous good ones—might give him both range and rapidity of fire, but nothing to defeat a mobbing among the vermin, and it was a lowland weapon. In the summer heat of the Lakht the laminations outright melted and gave way.

In the end he settled for the machai, a light, thin blade, as much tool as weapon, that he hung from his belt, and a good harness-knife.

The captain looked at him oddly, and honestly tried to press at least a spear on him.

“An encumbrance,” Marak said. It was the same reason he wished none of the Ila’s regiments, which encumbered themselves with all these things and baked in hardened leather besides, in the desert heat. “I want only this. For the rest of us, good boots. We’ll ride. We’ll all ride. But good boots. One never knows.”

“As you wish,” the captain said, but after that the captain seemed worried, as if he had failed somehow in his duty, in sending him out short of equipment with an army of well-shod madmen, of which he was chief. The captain tried to make up for it in other offerings, silver heating-mirrors, a burning-glass, two fine blankets, and a personal, leather-bound kit of salves and medicines, all of which Marak did take.

Then the captain walked him out to the pens, a fair distance, and pulled a riding beast from the reserve pens, a creature of a quality Kais Tain rarely saw.

That, he prized, and found that he and the captain had reached an accommodation of practical cooperation. Under other circumstances they would have been aiming weapons at one another. But now the captain seemed to understand he was not there to steal away goods, but to carry out the Ila’s wishes, economically, and asking no great show about it.

In that understanding they became almost amiable, and the captain chided sergeants who hid back the better harness. They laid out the best. The captain’s name, he learned, was Memnanan. He had spent all his life in the Ila’s service as he had spent his in Tain’s.