Hammerfall

“We can’t completely trust him, then.”

“We never could completely trusthim,” Marak said. He tried to think what reason the Ila might have for not needing to know about Pori, and all he could think of was that the Ila had foreknown there was no use in their mission there. Failing that—her need to have the au’it’s report on them had become more important than her need to know what they did out there at Pori.

Perhaps it was a consultation before their descent of the plateau, her wish to know everything they had said in secret before she went into Luz’s territory. Perhaps the Ila herself perceived the approach of the hammer and pondered leaving his venture south, and going east, instead. She was well watered. There were makers in her blood. She might be, herself, mad.

But if the Ila had found out something of Luz’s intentions, it was not the au’it who told her, because theyhad no idea and could not have informed her.

The Ila had ceased her daily baths. The Ila’s servants no longer cooked for the camp or made tea for the Ila. Presumably the last few days the Ila ate the same dry ration as they ate.

Perhaps the Ila held some intention of dealing with Luz and everyone that served her.

“Do you think she means us harm?” Hati asked him.

“I don’t know what she thinks. I wonder if she’s begun to hear the voices herself.”

“Luz’s voice?” Hati asked.

“The makers could do that. Her makers haven’t cured us of Luz. Our makers keep us what we are. Maybe they’ve gotten into her, now.” He paused on a thought. “Maybe she fears they’re going to get into her—maybe she didn’t wantto drink water that didn’t come from the Ila’s Mercy.”

“All our water did,” Hati said. Her dark eyes went wide and troubled. “And our food came from Oburan. Everything. Pori’swouldn’t. Pori belonged to Luz. Didn’t it?”

“I think we shed makers,” he said. “What if we breed them continually and shed them like old skin? What if we shed them into the sand and into the water? And the Ila’s servants cook for the camp, or they did before we ran short. And the priests, the Ila’s priests, they come and go up and down the line. Maybe it’s a kind of war going on. What if the Ila would lose altogether if we took water from Pori, and everybody watered there?”

Hati simply stared at him, the two of them riding side by side. “She hasn’t given up, then.”

“I don’t think she’s given up,” he said.

“Do you think she’s pla

“I don’t know. But Luz hears us.” It was hard to remember that they were spied on, constantly. But it was true. “Luz knows, now, everything we just said. We can’t help that. I hope Luz figures how to protect us.” The last he said like a petitioner in a village court, hoping Luz was listening carefully. “She’s asked all these people to come to her tower. If she meant all of us to die, we could have done that in Oburan. Surelyshe has something she can do. She won’t just turn on us, because of the Ila. She wanted her. I think she still wants her. But the Ila doesn’t want to be taken.” He was afraid, as he said it. He had met two small anomalies in the way things had worked: the au’it’s desertion, and now her return, and neither might mean more than that the au’it had decided not to take an arduous journey, an ordinary simple decision.

But the Ila was going into danger at the very heart of their safety: he understood more and more that peace between the Ila and Luz was not likely, and he grew as worried about what the Ila might do as they came closer to Luz, as their journey became harder and the decisions more dangerous.

He worried about the Ila’s unanticipated action now as he worried about the failing water supply, as worried as he was about the beshti’s strength, about the people’sstrength to make the climb down from the Lakht—as worried about all those things near him, perhaps, as he was about the remote calamity coming to the world. The hammerfall was still distant: the Ila’s independent action might come before they reached the cliffs, before they entered Luz’s domain, and it might be anything, even a decision deliberately to kill all of them.

And she might be mad. She might be as mad as the rest of them. She might do things that only made sense to the mad, just before they attempted the climb down with many, many people that, already, would not survive.

But eastand downwas increasingly the only choice that would serve. If calamity was coming as a star-fall, then surely, he said to himself, it would be something the like of which they had accompanying the lesser star-fall. They had their forewarning in that: it would be quake and wind and blowing sand, ten times, a hundred times worse than before. And that, unlike the Ila, could not change.

He gathered up his wits and his courage for confrontation and went to Memnanan instead, who rode behind the Ila’s servants.

“Pori’s lost to us,” he said.

“So I gather,” Memnanan said.

“The Ila knows?”

“She knows.”

“Quake and storm are coming,” he said plainly, “worse than we’ve ever seen. And it’s coming soon. This next camp of ours will be only a short rest, with no stakes driven. After that…” He felt his way onto quaking ground, with a man he had generally trusted, who had trusted him, more to the point, and who had the Ila’s ear. “After that, and it’s not far from here, we go down the climb off the Lakht, and we try to get as many as we can alive to the bottom.”

“Is there any spring at the bottom? Is there anything near the cliffs?”

“Not that I know. But we do what we can. We get down off the edge, and we immediately get the deep stakes driven, and we trust the cliffs to shelter us.” He wanted to ask, and saw no course but to ask. “Pori was completely infested. Did the Ila already know that?”

Hati, to his dismay, had followed him. Now both of them rode beside the captain, one on a side, and the au’it trailed them at a distance, as she always had.

Memnanan had a grave, a worried expression, and did not look quite at him or at Hati. And failed to answer.

“You don’t need a report,” Marak challenged him. “Why don’t you need one? Why don’t you ask? Isn’t she taking advice?”

“The Ila said let you try what you could, and if you couldn’t, or if you didn’t come back, then we would go down to the lowlands without you.” Memnanan did look at him then. “She believes in your calamity. She expects a storm. She doubted Pori would be enough shelter.” Memnanan seemed to weigh saying something further, then did. “She thinks most will die, and if anyone will live, we have to assume most will die.”

“More likely we’ll die if we sit on our rumps. We’re going to try not to. Tell her that. Tell her she needs to listen to advice.” Tell her she was not in charge of decisions? Tell her she would not give orders to the tribes? That was too much to expect of Memnanan. If he tried to make that point, he would lose this man, and everything. “Tell her we can’t rest long. Not a moment more than we have to.”

“I will.”

“What did the au’it tell her, in her report? Good, or bad?”

“I don’t know,” Memnanan said.

“Is that the same au’it with us now?”

Memnanan’s eyes traveled in that direction, and back. “I have no idea.”

“If the Ila orders anything that prevents us getting down off the rim,” Marak said, “for her life, don’t let her. Don’t do anything to prevent us. It’s coming. That’s all I know now. It’s coming.”

“I said: she’s in favor of the descent,” Memnanan said. “As soon as possible.” He added, in a low voice, with as much desperation as a man might feel: “I trust you for my household, Marak Trin.”

Memnanan’s wife, his mother. His unborn child.

“I’ll have a good man walk beside your wife when we make the climb down,” Marak said, reassured that Memnanan had asked the favor, not quite admitting it. “To steady the besha.”