He said, “The flowers are beautiful, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg, if you’ll let me use a wildly inappropriate comparison. All life in Trench Park depends on water, the same as everywhere else. It’s adapted to get along with very little, but not none. As soon as any moisture comes, plants and animals try to pack a generation’s worth of growth and breeding into the little while it takes to dry up.”

About a quarter of a daytenth later, a sign set by the side of the trail announced that the tourists were farther below sea level than they could go anywhere outside the Bottomlands. Radnal read it aloud and pointed out, rather smugly, that the salt lake which was the next most submerged spot on dry land lay close to the Bottomlands, and might almost be considered an extension of them.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son said, “I didn’t imagine anyone would be so proud of this wasteland as to want to include more of the Great Continent in it.” His brown skin kept him from roasting under the desert sun, but sweat sheened his bare arms and torso.

A little more than halfway down the trail, a wide flat rest area was carved out of the rock. Radnal let the tourists halt for a while, stretch their legs and ease their weary hindquarters, and use the odorous privy. He passed out ration packs, ignored his charges’ grumbles. He noticed Dokhnor of Kellef ate his meal without complaint.

He tossed his own pack into the bin by the privy, then, a couple of cubits from the edge of the trail, peered down onto the floor of the Bottomlands. After one of the rare rains, the park was spectacular from here. Now it just baked: white salt pans, gray — brown or yellow — brown dirt, a scattering of faded green vegetation. Not even the area around the lodge was watered artificially; the Tyrant’s charter ordained that Trench Park be kept pristine.

As they came off the trail and started along the ancient sea bottom toward the lodge, Evillia said, “I thought it would be as if we were in the bottom of a bowl, with mountains all around us. It doesn’t really feel that way. I can see the ones we just came down, and the Barrier Mountains to the west, but there’s nothing to the east and hardly anything to the south — just a blur on the horizon.”

“I expected it would look like a bowl, too, the first time I came here,” Radnal said. “We are in the bottom of a bowl. But it doesn’t look that way because the Bottomlands are broad compared to their depth — it’s a big, shallow bowl. What makes it interesting is that its top is at the same level as the bottom of most other geological bowls, and its bottom deeper than any of them.”

“What are those cracks?” Toglo zev Pamdal asked, pointing down to breaks in the soil that ran across the tour group’s path. Some were no wider than a barleycorn; others, like open, lidless mouths, had gaps of a couple of digits between their sides.

“In arid terrain like this you’ll see all kinds of cracks in the ground from mud drying unevenly after a rain,” Radnal said. “But the ones you’ve noticed do mark a fault line. The earthquake we felt earlier probably was triggered along this fault: it marks where two plates in the earth’s crust are colliding.”

Nocso zev Martois let out a frightened squeak. “Do you mean that if we have another earthquake, those cracks will open and swallow us down?” She twitched her donkey’s reins, as if to speed it up and get as far away from the fault line as she could.

Radnal didn’t laugh; the Tyranny paid him for not laughing at tourists. He answered gravely, “If you worry about something that unlikely, you might as well worry about getting hit by a skystone, too. The one has about as much chance of happening as the other.”

“Are you sure?” Lofosa sounded anxious, too.

“I’m sure.” He tried to figure out where she and Evillia were from: probably the Krepalgan Unity, by their accent. Krepalga was the northwesternmost Highhead nation; its western border lay at the eastern edge of the Bottomlands. More to the point, it was earthquake country too. If this was all Lofosa knew about quakes, it didn’t say much for her brains.

And if Lofosa didn’t have a lot of brains, what did that say about her and Evillia picking Radnal to amuse themselves with? No one cares to think of a sexual partner’s judgment as faulty, for that reflects upon him.

Radnal did what any sensible man might have done: he changed the subject. “We’ll be at the lodge soon, so you’ll want to think about getting your things out of your bags and into your sleep cubicles.”

“What I want to think about is getting clean,” Moblay Sopsirk’s son contradicted.

“You’ll each be issued a small bucket of water every day for personal purposes,” he said, and overrode a chorus of groans: “Don’t complain — our brochures are specific about this. Almost all the fresh water in Trench Park comes down the trail we rode, on the backs of these donkeys. Think how much you’ll relish a hot soak when we come out of the park.”

“Think how much we’ll need a hot soak when we come out of the park,” said the elderly Strongbrow man Radnal had tagged as someone spending the silver he’d made in his earlier years (to his embarrassment, he’d forgotten the fellow’s name). “It’s not so bad for these Highheads here, since their bodies are mostly bare, but all my hair will be a greasy mess by the time this excursion is done.” He glared at Radnal as if it were his fault.

Toglo zev Pamdal said, “Don’t fret, freeman vez Maprab.” Benter vez Maprab, that’s who he was, Radnal thought, shooting Toglo a grateful glance. She was still talking to the old Strongbrow: “I have a jar of waterless hair cleaner you can just comb out. It’s more than I’d need; I’ll share some with you.”

“Well, that’s kind of you,” Benter vez Maprab said, mollified. “Maybe I should have brought some myself.”

You certainly should, you old fool, instead of complaining, Radnal thought. He also noted that Toglo had figured out what she’d need before she started her trip. He approved; he would have done the same had he been tourist rather than guide. Of course, if he’d arranged to forget his own waterless hair cleaner, he could have borrowed some from her. He exhaled through his nose. Maybe he’d been too practical for his own good.

Something small and dun-colored darted under his donkey’s hooves, then bounced away toward a patch of oleander. “What was that?” several people asked as it vanished among the fallen leaves under the plants.

“It’s one of the species of jerboa that live down here,” Radnal answered. “Without more than two heartbeats’ look, I couldn’t tell you which. There are many varieties, all through the Bottomlands. They lived in arid country while the inland sea still existed, and evolved to get the moisture they need from their food. That preadapted them to succeed here, where free water is so scarce.”

“Are they dangerous?” Nocso zev Martois asked.

“Only if you’re a shrub,” Radnal said. “No, actually, that’s not quite true. Some eat insects, and one species, the bladetooth, hunts and kills its smaller relatives. It filled the small predator niche before carnivores proper established themselves in the Bottomlands. It’s scarce today, especially outside Trench Park, but it is still around, often in the hottest, driest places where no other meat eaters can thrive.”

A little later, the tour guide pointed to a small, nondescript plant with thin, greenish-brown leaves. “Anyone tell me what that is?”

He asked that question whenever he took a group along the trail, and had only got a right answer once, just after a rain. But now Benter vez Maprab said confidently: “It’s a Bottomlands orchid, freeman vez Krobir, and a common type at that. If you’d shown us a red-veined one, that would have been worth fussing over.”

“You’re right, freeman, it is an orchid. It doesn’t look much like the ones you see in more hospitable climates, though, does it?” Radnal said, smiling at the elderly Strongbrow — if he was an orchid fancier, that probably explained why he’d come to Trench Park.