City of Illusions

Falk straightened up and looked westward, but the low hills rose up soon and the low sky closed down, leaving no distant view.

"Metock," he said, I've been thinking there's no point in my going on to Ransifel. I may as well be on my way. There seemed to be a trail leading west along the big stream we crossed this afternoon. I'll go back and follow it."

Metock glanced up; he did not mindspeak, but his thought was plain enough: Are you thinking of ru

Falk did use mindspeech for his reply: "No, damn it, I'm not!"

"I'm sorry," the Elder Brother said aloud, in his grim, scrupulous way. He had not tried to hide the fact that he was glad to see Falk go. To Metock nothing mattered much but the safety of the House; any stranger was a threat, even the stranger he had known for five years, his hunting-companion and his sister's lover. But he went on, "They'll make you welcome at Ransifel. Why not start from there?"

"Why not from here?"

"Your, choice." Metock worked a last rock into place, and Falk began to build up the fire. "If that was a trail we crossed, I don't know where it comes from or goes. Early tomorrow we'll cross a real path, the old Hirand Road. Hirand House was a long way west, a week on foot at least; nobody's gone there for sixty or seventy years. I don't know why. But the trail was still plain last time I came this way. The other might be an animal track, and lead you straying or leave you in a swamp."

"All right, I'll try the Hirand Road."

There was a pause, then Metock asked, "Why are you going west?"

"Because Es Toch is in the west."

The name seldom spoken sounded flat and strange out here under the sky. Thurro coming up with an armload of wood glanced around uneasily. Metock asked nothing more.

That night on the hillside by the campfire was Falk's last with those who were to him his brothers, his own people. Next morning they were on the trail again a little after sunrise, and long before noon they came to a wide, overgrown trace leading to the left off the path to Ransifel. There was a kind of gateway to it made by two great pines. It was dark and still under their boughs where they stopped.

"Come back to us, guest and brother," young Thurro said, troubled even in his bridegroom's self-absorption by the look of that dark, vague way Falk would be taking. Metock said only, "Give me your water-flask, will you," and in exchange gave Falk his own flask of chased silver. Then they parted, they going north and he west.

After he had walked a while Falk stopped and looked back. The others were out of sight; the Ransifel trail was already hidden behind the young trees and brush that overgrew the Hirand Road. The road looked as though it was used, if infrequently, but had not been kept up or cleared for many years. Around Falk nothing was visible but the forest, the wilderness. He stood alone under the shadows of the endless trees. The ground was soft with the fall of a thousand years; the great trees, pines and hemlocks, made the air dark and quiet. A fleck or two of sleet danced on the dying wind.

Falk eased the strap of his pack a bit and went on.

By nightfall it seemed to him that he had been gone from the House for a long, long time, that it was immeasurably far behind him, that he had always been alone.

His days were all the same. Gray winter light; a wind blowing; forest-clad hills and valleys, long slopes, brush-hidden streams, swampy lowlands. Though badly overgrown the Hirand Road was easy to follow, for it led in long straight shafts or long easy curves, avoiding the bogs and the heights. In the hills Falk realized it followed the course of some great ancient highway, for its way had been cut right through the hills, and two thousand years had not effaced it wholly. But the trees grew on it and beside it and all about it, pine and hemlock, vast holly-thickets on the slopes, endless stands of beech, oak, hickory, alder, ash, elm, all overtopped and crowned by the lordly chestnuts only now losing their last dark-yellow leaves, dropping their fat brown burrs along the path. At night he cooked the squirrel or rabbit or wild hen he had bagged from among the infinity of little game that scurried and flitted here in the kingdom of the trees; he gathered beechnuts and walnuts, roasted the chestnuts on his campfire coals. But the nights were bad. There were two evil dreams that followed him each day and always caught up with him by midnight One was of being stealthily pursued in the darkness by a person he could never see. The other was worse. He dreamed that he had forgotten to bring something with him, something important, essential, without which he would be lost. From this dream he woke and knew that it was true: he was lost; it was himself he had forgotten. He would build up his fire then if it was not raining and would crouch beside it, too sleepy and dream-bemused to take up the book he carried, the Old Canon, and seek comfort in the words which declared that when all ways are lost the Way lies clear. A man all alone is a miserable thing. And he knew he was not even a man but at best a kind of half-being, trying to find his wholeness by setting out aimlessly to cross a continent under uninterested stars. The days were all the same, but they were a relief after the nights.

He was still keeping count of their number, and it was on the eleventh day from the crossroads, the thirteenth of his journey, that he came to the end of the Hirand Road. There had been a clearing, once. He found a way through great tracts of wild bramble and second-growth birch thickets to four crumbling black towers that stuck high up out of the brambles and vines and mummied thistles: the chimneys of a fallen House. Hirand was nothing now, a name. The road ended at the ruin.

He stayed around the fallen place a couple of hours, kept there simply by the bleak hint of human presence. He turned up a few fragments of rusted machinery, bits of broken pottery which outlive even men's bones, a scrap of rotten cloth which fell to dust in his hands. At last he pulled himself together and looked for a trail leading west out of the clearing. He came across a strange thing, a field a half-mile square covered perfectly level and smooth with some glassy substance, dark violet colored, unflawed. Earth was creeping over its edges and leaves and branches had scurfed it over, but it was unbroken, unscratched. It was as if the great level space had been flooded with melted amethyst. What had it been—a launching-field for some unimaginable vehicle, a mirror with which to signal other worlds, the basis of a force-field? Whatever it was, it had brought doom on Hirand. It had been a greater work than the Shing permitted men to undertake.

Falk went on past it and entered the forest, following no path now.

These were clean woods of stately, wide-aisled deciduous trees. He went on at a good pace the rest of that day, and the next morning. The country was growing hilly again, the ridges all ru

A fallen oak that had been an obstacle became in one startled moment a defense: he dropped down behind it and with drawn gun spoke aloud: "Come on out!"