Hammerfall

Her guards slowly, with backward glances, gathered the mad, some of them standing, some on the floor, and cleared the room even of themselves. The au’it hesitated, last, but even to her the Ila made a sign, and the au’it gathered her ink and her book and slunk away to a door behind the pillars.

Then the Ila rose from her chair and descended three steps, silk whispering, falling like old blood about her movements.

Then she sat down, like some marketwife, midway on those steps. She was that close, as fragile as temple porcelain. But pain ran through Marak’s joints like knives and reminded him at every breath what those gloved hands could do.

Those hands joined, made a bridge against her lips. Highborn women might whiten their faces with cosmetic to show their lack of exposure to the sun, and come outdoors only by night. Her skin left no mark on the gloves. It was translucent white, alive. The eyes were deep as wells.

“I wish your loyalty in this,” she said. “Will I have it?”

He asked himself what other choice he had, compared to life, and being given power to rescue those two on earth he loved. The opposite was implicit in the Ila’s gift: that all he loved were still under her seal.

“I see no recourse,” he said. “No choice.”

“When I heard you were among the mad I gathered, I knew I had a resource above the others. What coin will truly win you, Marak Trin? A province? A great house?”

She mocked him. And he searched his soul and knew to his distress that in company with her offer, life itself interested him, and her proposition interested him. He had lived with death all the way to the holy city. She gave him tomorrow instead and offered him the lives of his mother and sister into the bargain. All his principles ebbed away, gone like the strength in his limbs.

She had sat down like a marketwife. In deliberate mockery of the fear he felt he sank down and sat like a field hand, cross-legged, at the last in a hard collapse against the stone. All she offered might be a lie, but from a posture like hers he answered and he listened, having been caught and corrupted by this idea of hers. Everything in him longed for answers, longed for reason, for purpose, for some logic to his life.

“What if I do this?” he said. “What do you expect me to find out there?”

“If I knew,” she said, “would I have to send anyone?”

“If I’m that mad, how shall I remember to come back?”

“If you are that mad,” she said, “will you care? And if you are not mad, will you serve my needs? I think not. I think only the mad can find this answer.”

“It may be,” he said.

“You attacked my city.”

“So I did.”

“And failed.”

“And failed,” he said.

“Why?” she asked, as if she had no idea at all. “To take? Or to destroy?”

A wise question, an incisive question. It told her everything of his wishes in a word.

He made a move of his hand, about them, thinking of the machines. “If the machines would work for us,” he said, “I would be very content to sit in this hall.”

“And would you do better than I, sitting here?”

“I would not pour water into the desert,” he said. In this mad give-and-take, the memory of such waste still galled him. “I would build a stone cistern, and put it next to the walls, and let whoever wished settle around it and grow fruit.”

It might be a foolish answer, as the holy city saw it. The Ila listened to him, listened very gravely. “You think we waste it.”

“What else is it, when it pours out under the sun? You feed the vermin. They multiply out there.”

Her lips quirked. It might have been a smile. “You would turn us into a village.”

“It’s not likely,” he said.

“Not likely that you would ever have taken Oburan? No. Far from likely. It was far from likely when you and your father came up onto the Lakht. Surely you knew that.”

He shrugged, having no wish to discuss his father’s plans or their misguided strategy, or the failed aim of his thirty years of life. The world might turn again, and, meanwhile, he was alive, and he had eyes, and he had seen the inside of this place. No, it was not likely that he or his father would have sat in this hall, rulers of all the world, but fortunes shifted. If she willed, his were changing; he was not dead yet. He managed not to meet her eyes, and asked himself why he cared for her respect, or what he suddenly had to fear in this debate.

Did he believe in her proposal? He was not sure, that was the thing. And the voices still cried, screamed, roared, all their words confounded in the depths of his hearing.

“You have never renounced your ambition,” she said.

He shrugged, and did look up, discovered, pi

“The voices have always spoken to you?”

“Does it matter?”

“You are to investigate, Marak Trin. You are my eyes and my ears in this matter. I ask, and you’ve promised me answers. How long have the voices spoken to you?”

“Since about my sixth year. Since then.”

“And the visions?”

“They’ve always been there.”

“Did a stranger come to Kais Tain when you were a baby?”

“I have no way to know,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s a common part of the story. A mysterious stranger. A visitation. A baby that grows up mad.”

He found that idea sinister beyond belief. No stranger had touched him that he knew, but his mother had never said, one way or the other.

“It wouldn’t be easy to come into our household.”

“Among the lords of Kais Tain? Perhaps not. But very easy, in most peasant houses. Perhaps it’s why mad lords are so rare, and mad farmers are so common. Farmers are generally more hospitable.”

“I’ve no idea.” They sat so easily, so madly companionable. “Who are these strangers? What do they do, and why?”

“I have some ideas. I know, for instance, that the madness that afflicts you is a specific madness, and that all that have it are under thirty years of age. How old are you?”

“Thirty.” He thought of the old man, and doubted what she said. But had it been the same madness? Was there more than one kind?

“Do you hear the voices now?”

“I hear aroaring.” What she asked was an intimate confession, one he had never made except to his father and his mother. “I sometimes hear my name.”

“That seems common,” she said, leaning forward, as if they gossiped together. “What else do you hear?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Yet you know this thing is in the east.”

“The world tilts that way.”

“Does it?”

“To us it does. It does it morning and evening, regular as you like it. Watch the madmen. Most will fall down.”

She neither laughed nor grew angry. “If I had your ears, if I had your eyes, I could know what I wish to know. If I had your strength, I might walk to the east and know what I wish to know. So I purchase them. I purchase you. Is the price enough?”

“I can’t bargain with you.”

“Ah, but you can. Ask me.”

“I have nothing to ask.”

“If you betray me, I promise you Kais Tain will smoke for days. I promise your mother and your sister will die very unhappily. Does that excite your interest? I thought so. I give you this one year of their safety for free, and all the resources you may need, a regiment of my guard if you wish it. Gold? Gold is sand under my feet. But knowledge? That, you can bring me. Then you and I will talk again. Name what you need to accomplish what I ask.”

He saw she was utterly in earnest. “Keep your regiment,” he said. “Give me my freedom. The safety of my house and its villages for this year. And my father’s life, even if he’s offended your officers.”

“What do you care for him?”

“He’s my father. He’s signed your armistice.”

“Done. What else?”

What else was there? It was the last chance to amend their bargain. “Give me the madmen,” he said. He saw little use for them in the holy city, where they would die, hanged or stoned, the common fate of the mad once discovered. They had walked together, he and the wife of Tarsa, and the potter, and he could not walk away alive and forget their fate. “If you mean all you say, you have no need for them, and I might learn from them.”