“It means a slight detour, but there is a town so equipped, not far from our destination. You were right to point this out. Next time, however, please consider simply voicing the problem, without starting out quite so confrontationally.”

Sara stared at him, then burst out with a guffaw. It seemed to cut some of the tension when he joined with a booming chuckle — one that took Sara back to her earliest days as a student, underneath the overhanging fist-of-stone.

“Dedinger,” she said, breathing the name without voice.

The smile was still thin, disdainfully bitter.

“I wondered if you’d recognize me. We labored in different departments, though I’ve followed your work since I was expelled from paradise.”

“A paradise you sought to destroy, as I recall.”

He shrugged. “I should have acted, without trying for consensus first. But collegial habits were hard to break., By the time I was ready, too many people knew my beliefs. I was watched night and day until the banishment.”

“Aw, too bad. Is this your way of getting another chance?” She motioned toward the bonfire.

“Indeed. After years in the wilderness, ministering to a flock of the fallen — humans who have progressed furthest along the Path — I’ve learned enough—”

UrKachu’s shrill whistle of impatience was not in any known language, yet its short-tempered insistence was plain. Again, Dedinger lifted an eyebrow.

“Shall we go, now?”

Sara weighed trying again to get him to name a destination, out loud. But Dedinger was insane, not stupid. Her insistence might rouse suspicions and maybe even give Blade away.

With an acquiescent shrug, she clambered back aboard the patient donkey. Watching with narrowed eyes, the Stranger remounted, too, followed by Kurt and Prity.

The remaining survivors of the ill-starred caravan seemed both pitying and relieved to be less important to the Urunthai. As the fast group rode out of the Oasis, heading south, the fading bonfire wafted bitter odors, along with dust and pungent animal smells.

Sara glanced back toward the moonlit pool.

Did you hear any of that, Blade? Were you asleep? Was it a garbled blur of uncertain noise?

Anyway, what good could a lone blue qheuen do, in the middle of a parched plain? His best bet was to stay by the pond till help came.

A mutter of beasts lifted behind Sara as the second party got under way, more slowly, following the same path.

Makes sense. The larger bunch will trample the trail of the smaller. At some point, UrKachu will veer us off, letting any pursuers keep following the main party.

Soon they were alone on the high steppe. Urunthai trotted alongside, agile and contemptuous of the awkward humans, who winced, dragging their toes as they rode. In reaction, the men began taking turns sliding off their mounts to run at a steady lope for several arrow-flights before swinging back aboard. This shut up the derisive urs and also seemed a good way to avoid saddle sores.

Alas, Sara knew she was in no physical condition to try it. If I live through this, I’m definitely getting into shape, she thought, not.for the first time.

The man with slate eyes ran next to Sara for a few duras, sparing her a wry, eloquent smile^He was so wiry and strong, it amazed Sara that she recognized him. The last time she had seen Savant Dedinger, he was a pale intellectual with a middle-aged paunch, an expert on the most ancient scrolls, and author of a text Sara carried in her own slim luggage. A man once honored with status and trust, till his orthodox fanaticism grew too extreme for even the broad-minded High Council.

These days, the sages preached a complex faith of divided loyalty, split evenly between Jijo, on the one hand, and the ancestors’ outlaw plan, on the other. It was a tense trade-off. Some solved it by choosing one allegiance over the other.

Sara’s brother gave his full devotion to the planet. Lark saw wisdom and justice in the billion-year-old Galactic ecological codes. To him, no fancied “path of redemption” could ever make up for flouting those rules.

Dedinger took the opposite extreme. He cared little about ecology or species preservation, only the racial deliverance promised by the Scrolls. Seeking pure innocence as a way to better days. Perhaps he also saw in this crisis a way to regain lost honors.

By moonlight, Sara watched the banished sage move with wiry grace — alert, focused, powerful — living testimony for the simpler style that he preached.

Deceptively simple, she thought. The world has countless ways of not being quite as it seems.

The Urunthai slowed after a while, then stopped to rest and eat. Those with pouched husbands or larvae needed warm Simla blood every midura or so, although the human raiders chafed and complained, preferring a steady pace over the urrish fashion of hurry-and-relax.

Soon after the second of these breaks, UrKachu veered the party onto a stony ledge that extended roughly southeast like the backbone of some fossilized behemoth. Rougher terrain slowed the pace, and Sara took advantage to dismount, giving respite to the donkey and her own bottom. Exercise might also take some chill stiffness out of her joints. She kept her right arm on the saddle though, in case some unseen stone made her stumble in the dark.

The going went a little easier with second moonrise. Backlit by silvery Torgen, the mountains seemed to loom larger than ever. North-side glaciers drank the satellite’s angled light, giving back a peculiar blue luminance.

The Stranger sang for a while, a sweet, soft melody that made Sara think of loneliness.

It was Anglic, though of a dialect Sara had never heard, with many strange words. It was problematical how much the star-man still grasped. Still, the unrolling verses doubtless roused strong feelings in his mind.

The recital ended when UrKachu trotted back, nostril flaring, to complain about unbearable Earthling caterwauling. A purely personal opinion, Sara felt, since none of the other urs seemed to mind. Music was on the short list of things the two races tended to agree about. Some urs even said that, for bringing the violus to Jijo, they could almost overlook human stench.

For an auntie, UrKachu seemed a particularly irritable sort.

The man from space fell silent, and the group traveled in a moody hush, punctuated by the clip-clop of the animals’ hooves on bare stone.

The next blood-stop took place on the wind-sheltered lee side of some towering slabs that might be natural rock forms but in the dimness seemed like ruins of an ancient fortress, toppled in a long-ago calamity. One of the weathered desert-men gave Sara a chunk of gritty bread, plus a slab of bushcow cheese that was stale, but tasty enough to one who found herself ravenously hungry. The water ration was disappointing, though. The urs saw little point in carrying much.