She nodded, still not looking at him. "Or at least he knew exactly when they were coming. And he didn't warn anyone. He just came and snatched me away. I tried to tell myself he had no chance to warn the others. I tried and tried... I let myself believe he had saved me because he was a good man.

She shuddered. "After all, he's just a merchant trying to get back his shop, isn't he? And the soldiers who murdered everyone in this town? After this is all over," she said, "they'll all go back to their farms and shops too, won't they? And they'll live long happy lives, and no one will be the wiser about what they did here."

"We will," was all Jordan could think of to say.

Tamsin flicked the reins, and guided her horse off the road. She didn't want to go down there, he saw with relief. He couldn't have prevented her without using force.

The horses objected to entering the sand. Both animals were tired and seemed sick, though from no cause Jordan or Tamsin could discern. They rolled their eyes now and blew, but as the wind changed and they caught the scent coming from the valley, they accepted the new path.

"If this was Integer, that means we're close," said Tamsin at length. "The desal should be a half-day's journey that way." She pointed southeast.

"How do you know?"

She shrugged. "The towns are all built around a low plateau; it's almost invisible unless you know what to look for. See what looks like walls out there?" She pointed into the heart of the desert, where he did indeed see some reddish lines near the horizon. "The land steps up and up for a while in little man-high clifflets like that. In the center is the desal."

"Good. We could be there by nightfall." He tried to bring an optimistic tone back to his voice.

"They should all die."

He kneed his horse to bring it next to hers. The animal wheezed and made a half-hearted attempt to buck, then complied.

Tamsin was crying. "They should all be hung," she said. "But they won't be. They'll get away with it. They'll laugh about it and then when they're old they'll tell their children how noble they were."

"Tamsin—"

"They killed my, my parents—" She buried her face in her hands. Awkward, he rode alongside her, scratching his neck and scowling at the sands. He might have said something sharp—Jordan had his own miseries, after all, which Tamsin seldom acknowledged—except that he sensed something different in her tears today.

Eventually she said, "It's true. I didn't want to believe it, all this time. I just let Uncle drag me around, and I said to myself, wait, wait, it'll end soon. Like I'd be back home at the end of the adventure, with mom and dad and everything okay again. But it won't end. They burned Callen to the ground like they burned Integer. And I saw it, I remember looking back and seeing smoke coming up over the dunes, and I didn't believe it. Like I didn't believe Uncle knew what was going to happen."

She hesitated, looked away, and said, "I'm a fool."

"A victim," he insisted. "They're the fools."

He thought of the pile of bodies they had seen. Fools, or monsters? For a long moment Jordan felt lost—real men had done that, they were out there still. If men could do that... were the Winds any worse? Maybe their rule was more just than Man's would be.

He closed his eyes, and pictured the queen of Iapysia, standing lost within the fine clutter of her library. But I had to try, she had appealed, to end this long night that has swallowed the whole world.

Tamsin continued to weep, and there were no words he could have said to take away her pain. Some things, once broken, could never be healed.

End this long night...

In an age of miracles, would men still massacre their neighbors? Maybe they would just do it on a far greater scale, once they could command the oceans to drown continents or the earth to swallow cities.

It seemed it must be true since the powerful, who wanted of nothing, were the very ones who commanded these massacres.

The thought filled him with fury—the same fury that had made him run into the night after Emmy, that had made him taunt the Heaven hooks into leaving their destruction of the Boros mansion to chase him. He would not accept this truth. Let them kill him, let the whole world come crashing down when he told Armiger the secrets of the desals. Despite all evidence, he would never accept that such miseries were destined to happen forever.

A short, vertical line wavered on the horizon. The spire of the desal? He would find out soon enough. Then, he would demand that the Winds answer for the burned towns, the sundered families, all his and everyone's miseries in all this long age of night.

Jordan would not have known he was on a plateau had Tamsin not told him. The ground became less sandy as they went, and now and then they took little climbs up tumbled rock slopes. Eventually they had to dismount and lead the horses, because the beasts both breathed laboriously, their mouths foaming. The belly of Jordan's horse seemed swollen, and it trembled when he touched it. Jordan and Tamsin finally had to carry most of the supplies they had scrounged, while the horses walked painfully beside them.

"What's wrong with them?" Tamsin tried to soothe her mare; it nuzzled her hand and shivered.

"I don't know," said Jordan. His voice had a whining tone to it, he realized. "Ka?"

The little Wind could not diagnose the horses' ailment. Ka was a spy, not a doctor.

"Is there water at the desal?"

Tamsin shook her head. They could see it now, a small collection of upthrust spikes on the horizon. Between it and them lay a blasted russet landscape of sand and scattered plates of stone. Nothing grew here; the wind blew fitfully, raising an intermittent hiss from sand sliding over rock. Over it all brooded clouds that threatened rain but never seemed to deliver it. Jordan felt exposed here, more than anywhere he had yet been. Maybe it was because the horizon seemed so impossibly far away; the eyes of Hooks or Swans might easily pick him out against the ruined ground, and he would have nowhere to run to when they came.

Nothing moved, no force for good or ill appeared to interrupt their slow progress across the plateau. Now and then dust devils swept past, and he could see the inevitable mecha swept up in them, busy gnats in a garden of dust. The desal must see them coming, but he could not bring himself to imagine it as a living, aware thing. It looked like nothing more than an abandoned, half-built tower.

Tamsin fretted over her horse; it seemed a good distraction from her own grief. Her tears had brought back memories of home to Jordan, and brooding on whether he would ever reconcile, or even see his family again had him depressed. He didn't know what he was doing here, in the middle of nowhere, about to expose himself to the very forces that had pursued him all these months. He was out of ideas, he had to admit. If this didn't work, he saw no future.

The prospect of losing the horses didn't bother him all that much. He didn't think it likely they would need them.

Finally they reached a flat table of rock about two kilometers across. The desal rose in the center of it. This desal had five sentinel spires set in an even star around the middle spike. This spike was possibly the highest spire Jordan had ever seen; it was at least sixty meters tall. All the spires tapered to very sharp points, and as the travellers approached Jordan could see that the stone around their bases was buckled and cracked, as though the desal had grown up through the bedrock itself. Jordan expected that was true, and it actually made the thing easier to comprehend, since he knew mecha ate rock. The desal seemed like the visible irruption of an underground body, a sort of mechal mushroom.