About the watchers in the heavens, however, Marak was just a little concerned. He expected Procyon, in the ordinary cycle. He discovered he had Drusus instead. Something strange had happened in the earth, and now something else strange had taken place in the heavens, at a time when he most wanted his information flow to be ordinary and dependable. First his contact had gone on and off, intermittent in the storm. That had steadied, and now other things seemed unreliable.

“Is Procyon well?” Marak asked Drusus, when first he came in clear. “Is he taken ill?” Hati expressed her concern, too, to her watcher, Carina, who joined her uninvited. That was the measure of worry on Ian’s part. They suddenly had watchers left and right, Hati’s called back to duty, but his not the one he expected.

“Brazis has sent him on an errand today,”Drusus answered his inquiry. “A request from an Earther lord. Earth seems concerned with his appointment because of his young age. Procyon will pay his courtesies to that person and return, either today or tomorrow. The Earther lord is considered benign. There is no reason for worry, and this is an inquiry, not a matter for concern. I hope, omi, you will accept my being here early, today.”

“We understand,” Marak said, to end the protestations. He was, at the moment, at a difficult traverse, on a strip of sandstone scarcely wide enough for safety. He had his answer, but he remained annoyed and just a little suspicious—halfway moved to demand Procyon’s immediate attendance, never mind the affairs of lords in the heavens, who had no right to demand the attendance of persons who lived under his personal protection. He knew about Earther lords, he had experienced them, that they were prone to nose about and interfere where they could. And this request was damned ill timed.

Lords and directors came and went in that place in the heavens that by all description was like the Refuge, all corridors, plain walls, and lights, with here and there a garden, by what Marak had gathered. There the ondat,too, once hostile, thanks to the sins of the Ila, lived and watched over the world with some suspicion, still dangerous—but Earth, at some distance, being the birthplace of all humans and even the beshti and no few of the now-extinct vermin, thought its history gave it a special right to send out its governor to rule this metal world.

So the Ila said, along with much else he had read in the Books of the Record.

But Earth certainly picked a time of great nuisance to make its demands. He knew his own right not to be annoyed by what happened above—particularly where it regarded his watchers. He wanted Procyon with him today—the cheerful young watcher who even in his routine weather reports managed a heartening enthusiasm. Drusus was the director’s man, full of rules and cautions. He had the niggling suspicion someone thought Drusus was the watcher he should have right now, since the quake—and that suspicion more than annoyed him. If he thought the boy’s inexperience would be a hazard, hewould make that call. He was determined not to blame Drusus for the situation, but he could blame Brazis, when he had time, because he was not at all sure there wasan Earth lord.

Meanwhile, however, he could try to moderate his temper and find out the truth of what was going on.

“Procyon is paying court to some Earth lord,” he told Hati, who could be overheard, but who could not overhear Drusus. “No long venture, so Drusus assures us. He’s come in early to fill Procyon’s place.”

“So,” Hati said, frowning. Hati was an’i Keran, Keran tribe, quick to the knife, even in these latter days when the land grew wider and water was no longer a matter of dispute. “Today of all days, and without consulting us. We can well remember such favors.” Let the director and the Earther lord hear that. Hati had an opinion of her own, and, unlike him, felt no obligation to be reasonable.

They were neither of them happy, at the moment. They had another aftershock, and their fugitives took out down a slope—they came on the tracks, a wide wallow in a breakneck sand-slip. There were no beshti lying dead at the bottom, which argued they had made it.

But it was a chancy ride, and they had to do it. They worked their way down, and tracked the runaways southeastward, while Drusus kept prudent silence.

The wind was less down here, at least, and haze was less in the air, but they had been cautious coming down, and their fugitives almost certainly opened a wider lead, breaking low brush—a sparse, low-lying spiny growth that spread like fingers from a single plant, and branched and rebranched among the rocks and on the sand, putting down new roots—a warfare like that of nations, vegetative dueling for broader and broader territory. The weed actually poisoned the ground to discourage its competition, and made a thick mat that cracked and broke as their beshti crossed it, behind others that had cracked and broken it in passing. Beshti, who ate most things, found no attraction in this stuff, which the Refuge had never chosen to seed, but which survived and thrived since the hammerfall. And now it helped obscure the ground and made footing less certain in precarious places. It hid holes and crevices.

“Prickle-star,” he said to Drusus. “It smells like graze and burns the tongue. One of the worst things will thrive, and the succulents gain no foothold here, in consequence.”

He felt another aftershock coming. The beshti felt it. It was a hard shaking, and long.

“Stronger than the last,” Hati said.

The young men up on the spine, minding the tent, were surely getting an education they had not expected on this tame journey.

And their fugitives, invisible among the spires, would not have stood still.

“Another quake,” he said to his watcher.

“Are you all right?”Drusus asked him.

“Well enough,” he told Drusus, amicably. “It was stronger, however.”

Hati was used to him talking to his voices in moments of crisis. She talked to her own, today, and told her watcher to let her alone, that there was no difficulty. She was never patient with them. They reached a place of vantage, above the dust-hazed depth of the pans. And an area of darker dust showed in the haze below.

“Can you see them?” he asked Hati. Hati had risen up with her knees on the saddle in their pause, to have a look with a collapsible glass.

“Yes,” Hati said. “Well away down the slope, toward the next terrace.”

“Where are you, omi?”Drusus asked.

“Two terraces down toward the pans,” Marak answered, and tapped his beshta with the quirt, as Hati dropped down to the saddle and put away the glass. They both started down.

“Have the beshti gone off again?”Drusus asked, annoying him with questions.

“What else would beshti do?” he answered shortly, then amended the answer. “They have gone down, risking their necks. The gorge rim was too steep for them. This is not.”

“It’s too dangerous to go down, omi,”Drusus told him. “ The quake was not minor. Ian believes the Southern Wall is about to fail.”

It took a moment to reach his attention. Then did. “Ian thinks the Southern Wall may have cracked,” he said to Hati, but he thought she might have heard it from her own watcher. Her jaw was set in a deep frown. And he abandoned his annoyance with his watcher. “Is it breaking where we thought, Drusus?”

“The epicenter was out under Halfmoon Bay.”

“It was at Halfmoon,” Marak said, for Hati—all he needed say to convey extreme chagrin, because the Halfmoon area of the Wall was their planned destination, the point where the spine they were on intersected the Southern Wall.

It was the site they had thought would be a safe place to set the next relay.

“Observers are less sure now how or where the Wall will crack,”Drusus said to him. “Don’t go down into the pans, omi. The director thinks it best you come back up to camp and let Ian send a mission out from the Plateau, not with trucks. He says he can put Alihinan aware and have his riders bring beshti to your camp….”