City of Illusions

Falk struggled helplessly to defend himself, to get free. The man on his left spoke sharply. Then there was silence for some while.

"I meant no harm coming here," Falk said at last, as steadily as he could through his anger, pain and fear.

"All right," said the one on the left, Argerd, "go on and tell your little story. What did you mean in coming here?"

"To ask for a night's shelter. And ask if there's any trail going west."

"Why are you going west?"

"Why do you ask? I told you in mindspeech, where there's no lying. You know my mind."

"You have a strange mind," Argerd said in his weak voice. "And strange eyes. Nobody comes here for a night's shelter or to ask the way or for anything else. Nobody comes here. When the servants of the Others come here, we kill them. We kill toolmen, and the speaking beasts, and Wanderers and pigs and vermin. We don't obey the law that says it's wrong to take life—do we, Drehnem?"

The bearded one gri

"We are men," Argerd said. "Men, free men, killers. What are you, with your half-mind and your owl's eyes, and why shouldn't we kill you? Are you a man?"

In the brief span of his memory, Falk had not met directly with cruelty or hate. The few people he had known had been, if not fearless, not ruled by fear; they had been generous and familiar. Between these two men he knew he was defenseless as a child, and the knowledge both bewildered and enraged him.

He sought some defense or evasion and found none. All he could do was speak the truth. "I don't know what I am or where I came from. I'm going to try to find out."

"Going where?"

He looked from Argerd to the other one, Drehnem. He knew they knew the answer, and that Drehnam would strike again if he said it.

"Answer!" the bearded one muttered, half rising and leaning forward.

"To Es Toch," Falk said, and again Drehnem struck him across the face, and again he took the blow with the silent humiliation of a child punished by strangers.

"This is no good; he's not going to say anything different from what we got from him under penton. Let him up."

Then what?" said Drehnem.

"He came for a night's shelter; he can have it Get up!"

The strap that held him into the chair was loosened. He got shakily onto his feet. When he saw the low door and the black down-pitch of stairs they forced him towards, he tried to resist and break free, but his muscles would not yet obey him. Drehnem arm-twisted him down into a crouch and pushed him through the doorway. The door slammed shut as he turned staggering to keep his footing on the stairs.

It was dark, black dark. The door was as if sealed shut, no handle on this side, no mote or hint of light coming under it, no sound. Falk sat down on the top step and put his head down on his arms.

Gradually the weakness of his body and the confusion in his mind wore off. He raised his head, straining to see. His night-vision was extraordinarily acute, a function, Ra

Twenty-one steps, two, three—level. Dirt. Falk went slowly forward, one hand extended, listening.

Though the darkness was a kind of physical pressure, a constraint, deluding him constantly with the notion that if he only looked hard enough he would see, he had no fear of it in itself. Methodically, by pace and touch and hearing, he mapped out a part of the vast cellar he was in, the first room of a series which; to judge by echoes, seemed to go on indefinitely. He found his way directly back to the stairs, which because he had started from them were home base. He sat down, on the lowest step this time, and sat still. He was hungry and very thirsty. They had taken his pack, and left him nothing.

It's your own fault , Falk told himself bitterly, and a kind of dialogue began in his mind:

What did I do? Why did they attack me?

Zove told you: trust nobody. They trust nobody, and they're right.

Even someone who comes alone asking for help?

With your face—your eyes? When it's obvious even at a glance that you're not a normal human being?

All the same, they could have given me a drink of water, said the perhaps childish, still fearless part of his mind.

You're damned lucky they didn't kill you at sight , his intellect replied, and got no further answer.

All the people of Zove's House had of course got accustomed to Falk's looks, and guests were fair and circumspect, so that he had never been forced into particular awareness of his physical difference from the human norm. It had seemed so much less of a difference and barrier than the amnesia and ignorance that had isolated him so long. Now for the first time he realized that a stranger looking into his face would not see the face of a man.

The one called Drehnem had been afraid of him, and had struck him because he was afraid and repelled by the alien, the monstrous, the inexplicable.

It was only what Zove had tried to tell him when he had said with such grave and almost tender warning, "You must go alone, you can only go alone."

There was nothing for it, now, but sleep. He curled up as well as he could on the bottom step, for the dirt floor was damp, and closed his eyes on the darkness.

Some time later in timelessness he was awakened by the mice. They ran about making a faint tiny scrabble, a zigzag scratch of sound across the black, whispering in very small voices very close to the ground, "It is wrong to take Me it is wrong to take life hello heeellllooo don't kill us don't kill."

"I will!" Falk roared and all the mice were still.

It was hard to go to sleep again; or perhaps what was hard was to be sure whether he was asleep or awake. He lay and wondered whether it was day or night; how long they would leave him here and if they meant to kill him, or use that drug again until his mind was destroyed, not merely violated; how long it took thirst to change from discomfort to torment; how one might go about catching mice in the dark without trap or bait; how long one could stay alive on a diet of raw mouse.

Several times, to get a vacation from his thoughts, he went exploring again. He found a great up-ended vat or tun and his heart leaped with hope, but it rang hollow: splintered boards near the bottom scratched his hands as he groped around it. He could find no other stairs or doors in his blind explorations of the endless unseen walls.

He lost his bearings finally and could not find the stairs again. He sat on the ground in the darkness and imagined rain falling, out in the forest of his lonely journeying, the gray light and the sound of rain. He spoke in his mind all he could remember of the Old Canon, begi

His mouth was so dry after a while that he tried to lick the damp dirt floor for its coolness; but to the tongue it was dry dust. The mice scuttled up quite close to him sometimes, whispering.

Far away down long corridors of darkness bolts clashed and metal clanged, a bright piercing clangor of light. Light—Vague shapes and shadows, vaultings, arches, vats, beams, openings, bulked and loomed into dim reality about him. He struggled to his feet and made his way, unsteady but ru

It came from a low doorway, through which, when he got close, he could see an upswell of ground, treetops, and the rosy sky of evening or morning, which dazzled his eyes like a midsummer noon. He stopped inside the door because of that dazzlement, and because a motionless figure stood just outside.