“Is it coming?” asks Martin Silenus.

“It’s confirmed the command. We’ll need to stow our gear for transfer. I told it to land just above the entrance to the valley.”

Lamia is surprised to find that she has been weeping. She wipes her cheeks and smiles.

“What’s funny?” asks the Consul.

“All this,” she says, stabbing at her cheeks with the back other hand, “and all I can think about is how nice it’ll be to have a shower.”

“A drink,” says Silenus.

“Shelter from the storm,” says Weintraub. The baby is taking milk from a nursing pak.

Kassad leans forward, his head and shoulders outside the tent. He raises his weapon and clicks off the safety. “Telltales,” he says. “Something’s moving just beyond the dune.” The visor turns toward them, reflecting a pale and huddled group, the paler body of Lenar Hoyt.

“I’m going to check it out,” he says. “Wait here until the ship arrives.”

“Don’t leave,” says Silenus. “It’s like one of those fucking ancient horror holos where they go one by one to… hey!” The poet falls silent. The entrance to the tent is a triangle of light and noise. Fedmahn Kassad is gone.

The tent is beginning to collapse, stakes and wire anchors giving way as the sand shifts around them. Huddled together, shouting to be heard over the wind roar, the Consul and Lamia wrap Hoyt’s body in his cloak. Readouts on the medpak continue to blink red. Blood has ceased to flow from the crude millipede suture.

Sol Weintraub sets his four-day-old child in the infant carrier on his chest, folds his cape around her, and crouches in the entrance. “No sign of the Colonel!” he shouts. As he watches, a lightning bolt strikes the outstretched wing of the Sphinx.

Brawne Lamia moves to the entrance and lifts the priest’s body. She is amazed at how light it is. “Let’s get Father Hoyt to the ship and in surgery. Then some of us will come back to search for Kassad.”

The Consul tugs his tricorne cap low and shrugs his collar high.

“The ship has deep radar and movement sensors. It’ll tell us where the Colonel’s gone.”

“And the Shrike,” says Silenus. “Can’t forget our host.”

“Let’s go,” says Lamia and gets to her feet. She has to lean into the wind to make progress. Loose ends of Hoyt’s cloak flap and crack around her, while her own cloak streams behind. Finding the path by the intermittent flashes of lightning, she moves toward the head of the valley, glancing back only once to see if the others are following.

Martin Silenus steps away from the tent, lifts Het Masteen’s Möbius cube, and his purple beret whips away in the wind, climbing as it goes.

Silenus stands there and curses impressively, stopping only when his mouth begins to fill with sand.

“Come,” shouts Weintraub, his hand on the poet’s shoulder. Sol feels the sand striking his face, littering his short beard. His other hand covers his chest as if sheltering something infinitely precious. “We’ll lose sight of Brawne if we don’t hurry.” The two help each other move forward against the wind. Silenus’s fur coat ripples wildly as he detours to retrieve his beret from where it has come down in the lee of a dune.

The Consul is the last to leave, carrying both his own pack and Kassad’s. A minute after he leaves the small shelter, stakes give way, fabric tears, and the tent flies into the night, surrounded by a halo of static electricity. He staggers the three hundred meters up the trail, occasionally catching glimpses of the two men ahead of him, more frequently losing the path and having to walk in circles until he comes across it again. The Time Tombs are visible behind him when the sandstorm ebbs a bit and the lightning flashes follow one another in close succession. The Consul sees the Sphinx, still glowing from repeated electrical strikes, the Jade Tomb beyond it, its walls luminescent, and beyond them the Obelisk, no glow there, a vertical swipe of pure black against the cliff walls. Then the Crystal Monolith. There is no sign of Kassad, although the shifting dunes, blowing sand, and sudden flashes make it seem as if many things are moving.

The Consul looks up, seeing the wide entrance to the valley now and the rushing clouds low above it, half expecting to see the blue fusion glow of his ship lowering through them. The storm is terrible, but his spacecraft has landed in worse conditions. He wonders if it is already down and the others are waiting at the base of it for him to arrive.

But when he reaches the saddle between cliff walls at the opening of the valley, the wind assaults him anew, he sees the four others huddled together at the beginning of the broad, flat plain, but there is no ship.

“Shouldn’t it be here by now?” shouts Lamia as the Consul approaches the group.

He nods and crouches to extract the comlog from his pack. Weintraub and Silenus stand behind him, bending over to offer some shelter from the blowing sand. The Consul extracts the comlog and pauses, looking around. The storm makes it appear as if they are in some mad room where the walls and ceiling change from instant to instant, one second closing in on them, scant meters away, the next second receding to the distance, the ceiling floating upward, as in the scene where the room and Christmas tree expand for Clara in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker.

The Consul palms the diskey, bends forward, and whispers into the voice square. The ancient instrument whispers back to him, the words just audible above the rasp of sand. He straightens up and faces the others. “The ship was not allowed to leave.”

There is a babble of protest. “What do you mean 'not allowed'?” asks Lamia when the others fall silent.

The Consul shrugs and looks skyward as if a blue tail of flame might still announce the ship’s coming. “It wasn’t given clearance at the spaceport in Keats.”

“Didn’t you say you had clearance from the fucking queen?” shouts Martin Silenus. “Old Gallstone herself?”

“Gladstone’s clearance pip was in the ship’s memory,” says the Consul. “Both the FORCE and port authorities knew that.”

“So what the hell happened?” Lamia wipes her face. The tears she had shed back at the tent have left tiny rivulets of mud in the coating of sand on her cheeks.

The Consul shrugs. “Gladstone overrode the original pip. There’s a message here from her. Do you want to hear it?”

For a minute, no one answers. After their week of voyage, the thought of being in touch with someone outside their own group is so incongruous that it does not register at once; it was as if the world beyond the pilgrimage had ceased to exist except for the explosions in the night sky. “Yes,” Sol Weintraub says, “let’s hear it.” A sudden lull in the storm makes the words seem very loud.

They gather around and crouch near the old comlog, setting Father Hoyt in the center of their circle. In the minute they have left him unattended, a small dune has begun to form itself around his body.

The telltales are all red now except tor the extreme-measures monitors glowing amber. Lamia sets another plasma cartridge in place and makes sure that the osmosis mask is secure on Hoyt’s mouth and nose, filtering pure oxygen in and keeping sand out. “All right,” she says.

The Consul triggers the diskey.

The message is a fatline squirt, recorded by the ship some ten minutes earlier. The air mists with the data columns and spherical-image colloid which characterizes comlogs dating back to the Hegira. The image of Gladstone shimmers, her face distorting bizarrely and then almost comically as millions of specks of windblown sand rip through the image.

Even at full volume, her voice is almost lost to the storm.

“I’m sorry,” says the familiar image, “but I cannot allow your spacecraft to approach the Tombs just yet. The temptation to leave would be too great, and the importance of your mission must override all other factors. Please understand that the fate of worlds may rest with you. Please be assured that my hopes and prayers are with you. Gladstone out.”