The direct-to-Tredegarh contingent comprised four mobes, each with one owner/driver and one Tenner: Tulia, Wyburt, Rethlett, and Ostabon. Other seats in these vehicles were taken up by Hundreders who wanted no part of an Orolo expedition or by other extras who had volunteered to come on the journey.

With the exception of Cord and Rosk, all of the extras appeared to be part of religious groups, which made all of the avout more or less uncomfortable. I reckoned that if there had been a military base in this area the Sæcular Power might have ordered some soldiers to dress up as civilians and drive us around, but since there wasn’t, they’d hit on the idea of relying on organizations that people were willing to volunteer for on short notice, which in this time and place meant arks. When I explained it to people in those terms, it seemed to settle them down a little bit. The Tenners sort of understood it. The Hundreders found it quite difficult to fathom and kept wanting to know more about the deologies espoused by their would-be drivers, which in no way shortened the process of getting them into vehicles.

Ganelial Crade was probably in his fourth decade, but you could mistake him for a younger man because he was slender and whiskerless. He announced that he knew the location of Bly’s Butte and that he would lead us there and we should follow him. Then he got into his fetch and started the engine. Ferman Beller ambled over and grinned at him until he opened his window, then started talking to him. Pretty soon I could tell that they were disagreeing about something—mostly by watching Crade’s passenger, who was glaring at Beller.

I got that mud-on-the-head sense of embarrassment again. Ganelial Crade had spoken with such confidence that I’d assumed he’d already gone over this plan with Ferman Beller and that the two of them had agreed on it. Now it was obvious that no such thing had ever happened. I’d been prepared to follow Crade wherever he led us.

I could now see that this business of being the leader was going to be a pain in the neck because people would always be trying to get me to do the wrong things or get rid of me altogether.

“Some leader!” I said, referring to myself.

“Huh?” asked Lio.

“Don’t let me do stupid things any more,” I ordered Lio, who looked baffled. I started walking towards Crade’s fetch. Lio and Arsibalt followed at a distance. Crade and Beller were openly arguing now. I really wanted no part of this but I had been cornered into doing something.

The problem, I realized, was that Crade claimed to have knowledge we didn’t have as to the location of Bly’s Butte. That was my fault. I’d made the error of admitting that I didn’t know exactly where it was. Inside the concent it was fine to admit ignorance, because that was the first step on the road to truth. Out here, it just gave people like Crade an opening to seize power.

“Excuse me!” I called out. Beller and Crade stopped arguing and looked at me. “One of my brothers has brought with him ancient documents from the concent that tell us where to go. By combining this knowledge with the skills of our Ita and the topographic maps on the cartabla, we can find our own way to the place we are going.”

“I know exactly where your friend went,” Crade began.

“We don’t,” I said, “but as I mentioned we can figure it out long before we get there.”

“Just follow me and—”

“That is a brittle plan. If we lose you in traffic we will be in a bad way.”

“If you lose me in traffic you can call me on my jeejah.”

This hurt because Crade was being more rational than I was, but I couldn’t back down at this point. “Mr. Crade, you may go on ahead if you like, and have the satisfaction of beating us there, but if you look in your rearview and notice that we are no longer visible, it is because we have decided to keep our own counsel as to how we should get there.”

Crade and his passenger now hated me forever but at least this was over.

This plan, however, necessitated a shake-up that put me and Sammann in Ferman Beller’s vehicle with Arsibalt. The three of us would navigate. Lio and a Hundreder moved to Cord’s fetch to balance the load; they would follow. Ganelial Crade sprayed us with loose rocks as he gunned his fetch out into the open.

“That man behaves so much like the villain in a work of literature, it’s almost funny,” Arsibalt observed.

“Yes,” said one of the Hundreders, “it’s as if he’d never heard of foreshadowing.”

“He probably hasn’t,” I said. “But please remember that our driver is the only extra in this vehicle and so let’s show him the courtesy of speaking Fluccish at least part of the time.”

“Go ahead,” said the Hundreder, “and I’ll see if I can parse it.”

Fraa Carmolathu, as this Hundreder was called, was a little bit of a dork, but he had volunteered to go fetch Orolo, so he couldn’t be all bad. He was five or ten years older than Orolo, and I speculated that he was a friend of Paphlagon.

“How many roads lead northeast, parallel to the mountains?” I asked Beller. I was hoping he’d say only one.

“Several,” he said. “Which one do you want to take, boss?”

“By definition a butte is free-standing—not part of a range,” Arsibalt said in Orth, “so—”

“It rises from the plateau south of the mountains,” I announced in Fluccish. “We don’t need to take a mountain road.”

Beller put the vehicle into gear and pulled out. I waved goodbye to Tulia. She was watching us go, looking a little shocked. Our departure had been abrupt, but I was afraid that if we waited one more minute there would be another crisis. Tulia had elected to go directly to Tredegarh so that she could try to find Ala. Perhaps I ought to have done the same. But this was not an easy choice, and I thought I was choosing rightly. If all went well, we’d get to Tredegarh only a couple of days later than Tulia’s contingent. She’d do a fine job of leading them there.

Before leaving town we stopped, or rather slowed down, at a place where we could get food without spending a lot of time. I remembered this kind of restaurant from my childhood but it was new to the Hundreders. I couldn’t help seeing it as they did: the ambiguous conversation with the unseen serving-wench, the bags of hot-grease-scented food hurtling in through the window, condiments in packets, attempting to eat while lurching down a highway, volumes of messy litter that seemed to fill all the empty space in the mobe, a smell that outstayed its welcome.

By the time we’d finished eating, we’d passed out of view of the Præsidium. We had left most of the slines’ quarter behind us and were moving across a sort of tidal zone that was part of the city when the city was big and part of the country when it wasn’t. Where a tidal zone would have driftwood, dead fish, and uprooted seaweed, this had stands of scrawny trees, animals killed by vehicles, and tousled jumpweed. Where the tidal zone would be littered with empty bottles and wrecked boats, this had empty bottles and abandoned fetches. The only thing of consequence was a complex where fuel trees that had been barged down from the mountains were chewed up and processed. There we were caught for a few minutes in a traffic jam of tanker-drummons. But few of these were going our way, and soon we had got clear of them and passed into the district of vegetable gardens and orchards that stretched beyond.