“But it’s also the most beautiful time,” Toglo zev Pamdal said. “Pictures of Trench Park after a rain first made me want to come here, and I was lucky enough to see it myself on my last visit.”

“May I be so fortunate,” Dokhnor of Kellef said. “I brought colorsticks as well as charcoal, on the off chance I might be able to draw post-rain foliage.”

“The odds are against you, though the freelady was lucky before,” Radnal said. Dokhnor spread his hands to show his agreement. Like everything he did, the gesture was tight, restrained, perfectly controlled. Radnal had trouble imagining him going into transports of artistic rapture over desert flowers, no matter how rare or brilliant.

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.