“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.

“Because,” the Ila said, as if it were no consequence, and with a turn of her wrist, as if she deflected a blow. “ Because we wished to send him, cousin. Because through him you challenged us. Because he is less mad than the rest, and because I saw if any of that herd would come back across the Lakht, he was the likeliest. And if there were madmen appearing across the land, it was as clear a sign of something arrived as was likely to come. Yes, I sent him. I sent him to find an answer to the madness, and to explain it, and he has, beyond any doubt.”

“But they’re no longer mad, those I keep. They are safe. They will besafe in what will come. You know the nature of their voices. You know the source of their visions. I don’t need to explain. More than that, you feared, Ila Jao, you fearedwe were the ondat. We are not.”

“ Butin their service.”

“Not in their service, only having made peace with them. You know what they fear and why they fear it and why they will reshape the world.”

The Ila stared, stone-faced. “I can guess.”

“Omatbarat. Do you know that name?”

“I know it. I was not there.”

“As we know. You were not there.”

“Yet they come here to destroy the world.”

“To reshape it. To stir the pot and be sure that what arises here out of the soil of this world is shaped by this world, notby you, Ila Jao. When wesay to them that the makers weloose have had their way with the world, then, thenthe armistice will hold and the ondatwill admit their war is over. But until that day a handful of us of your own kind have set ourselves down here, damned ourselves along with you, for yourfathers’ sins, Ila Jao. We bear you personally no ill will. More than that. We can save you, if you aren’t a fool.”

There was a heartbeat of terrible silence.

The Ila’s white hand lifted abruptly, made a gesture for silence as a hushed murmur began among the officers. Pens made rapid strokes—ceased, as the au’it stopped, both of them.

“And the other madmen?” the Ila asked.

“Remained at the tower,” Norit said.

“Who is this woman?” the Ila asked aside, of Memnanan, and, looking straight at Hati: “Are you a prophet, too?”

“No,” Hati said. “No, Ila. But I saw the tower. I saw tents all around it, white tents, that cool the air. I saw a river with green banks.”

“White tents,” Marak said, drawing the Ila’s dangerous attention to himself, “and as much water as anyone wants. Craftsmen. Farmers. All that survived to reach the tower are in that camp. Luz wants you to come there before it’s too late. She wants everyone to come.”

The Ila looked straight at her, eyes burning in her white and angry face.

“Listen to him,” Norit said— Luzsaid. “You know. You know, Ila Jao. There’s nothing to gain. Your war is lost. You knew it was lost when you came here, five hundred years ago, and you knew it was hopeless when your makers couldn’t defeat what we loosed. You couldn’t cure the mad. You tried, but you couldn’t, so you sent to know what we are. But it’s not hopeless. I’m offering you a refuge from what you’ve brought on yourself.”

“Take that woman out!” the Ila said, and the guards moved at once.

Norit held up her hand abruptly, as yet untouched, and turned, and walked of her own accord toward the curtain.

There she stopped, faltered, felllike the dead.

Marak started to move without thinking. But guards had reached Norit, and felt of her pulse.

“Fainted,” a guard said.

“It’s Luz in her,” Marak, appealing to the Ila, for fear what consequences Norit might suffer. “The body is only Norit. She’s an honest woman, a shy, gentle woman… she’d never say what Luz said. She wouldn’t know how to answer you.”

“And are you Marak, and only Marak?”

He had never wondered. It was a terrifying question. “As far as I know.”

“And this?” The Ila gave a wave of her gloved hand toward Hati.

“Hati. An’i Keran. She knows the desert. She knows the way to the tower as well as I do. She helped me reach Oburan.” He had no idea of the Ila’s motives in asking, or her intentions afterward, and had no idea whether it was better for Hati to be important or invisible, but now he had no choice. “Out on the pans we’ve seen two storms on the way. Stars fall in their thousands. We passed places where they make pits in the sand. We saw rain, on the Lakht. Luz said the world would change. And it’s changing all around us. The earth is shaking. The storms are like nothing anyone’s ever seen.” He had trouble thinking of the wreckage the other side of these canvas walls, but it was all around her: how could she be ignorant of it? “She says we’re almost out of time. That something worse is coming.”

“I trust all the things you saw on your journey are in the au’it’s book,” the Ila said with a glance at their au’it, and the au’it nodded slightly. “So. I will read them at my leisure.”

“Everything we saw in our visions,” Marak said, desperate for time to make his point, such as it was, “everything we saw came true. All the mad had the same visions. And now we three, Hati and I, and Norit, as far as I know, we’re the only ones who see visions beyond those. We see rings of fire, spreading over villages. But if we come to the tower, Luz claims she can keep everyone safe there. I don’t know what the truth is. I don’t know who’s right. I told you I’d come back, and I came back, and I’ve made my report, such as I can. I don’t knowwhat’s right.”

“Come here,” the Ila said, beckoning, and beckoning twice called him forward, and forward again, and a third time, until he stood face-to-face with her.