Hammerfall

Au’it and servants moved around them, and Marak, his voices said, Marak, Marak. It waswar. His hands and arms and back took fever-fire. Pain enveloped him, enveloped her, a shared environment, and the ache in his side and his skull fed her hurts.

If the makers in his blood bred and multiplied to heal him, he thought they must exist in hordes and clots by now, his whole body become a furnace of healing.

And they met the Ila’s makers, and hers met his.

Marak, his voices said, thrumming in his head, Marak.

It might be his imagination, but the voices seemed perilously fainter, perhaps failing him—or appeased at last by what he had done, or perhaps just preoccupied.

He felt the ground. He had gone down on one knee and dragged the Ila with him, locked in his arms. He heard Norit in that moment as if she were right beside him. He was aware of Hati, and Patya and Tofi being near her.

Hati knew what had happened: she knew about the fight, about his father. Norit did. Memnanan told them. Memnanan, for some reason, was dripping wet; and when he wondered he knew what Hati saw, looking out, knew that that crack was lightning, that, outside their struggle, water poured down in sheets and blew in veils. They welcomed Memnanan into the tent. They besieged him with questions that made no sense.

Marak, his voices said, but he made no sense of what followed.

The water kept coming on the roof, and made pools and puddles. He heard it. The Ila did.

Luz knew. Luz told them.

The fever built in him, threatening to sweep everything away. Hati was ru

Marak, his voices said, and he was aware of the Ila’s limbs, fever-hot, and the war they fought, each holding the other up.

“Why take up my father?” he asked, and, for his pride’s sake: “How long?”

The Ila laughed, not a pleasant laugh, near his ear. “During your search, mymen found him. I’ve always taken alternatives. Always alternatives. He was in and out of my tent, from time to time. He followed, outside the column, in a Haga’s robes. I’m tired. Lie down with me. See which of us wins.”

It was easier to sink down, both on their knees, then on the carpet, twined together. After a time he saw them lying there like the dead, two bloody figures locked in embrace. He saw, and knew he looked from outside himself, and that it was a vision of sorts, Luz’s vision, what Luz saw of him, but he had no idea how she saw.

Then Norit came and touched his forehead ever so gently. His wives and his sister Patya and his brother-in-law Tofi all came to that bloody place, and sat down near him and waited, and waited. They expected—they feared, perhaps, for him to lose consciousness in fever, or to die. The Ila’s servants moved about them. The au’it were there, perhaps their own au’it as well.

A moment of darkness. “Marak,” a voice said then, asking his attention, and someone lifted his head and gave him water, an abundance of water, as many drinks as he wanted. He was fever-hot. Heat swept through him then like a furnace, as if water were all the makers had waited to have.

Thunder walked overhead. Water dripped somewhere. It sounded like a fountain, dripping and gurgling like the Ila’s Mercy-water, the universal condition of life, had become that abundant.

Someone came at that point, someone who wanted Hati, and Norit, wanted them urgently. He thought it was Patya. He dreamed it was Patya, who bent and kissed him before she took away all his help, all his protection, leaving him entirely alone with the Ila.

But shadows immediately came and peered down at him, a handful of veiled, armed shadows, who had no possible reason for being where they were, in the Ila’s tent.

They retreated and sat, with their weapons, and they watched… Keran, he was sure. But were those Haga, sitting with them?

“Your helpers,” the Ila said to him, faintly, wryly, from beside him, in this makeshift bed they shared, of pillows and blankets and blood-soaked carpet. “I made a good throw, didn’t I? Now, one way or the other, webecome allies… and what will we dowith Luz, do you think? Or what will Luz do with you and me?—Or what, do you suppose, will we alldo with the ondat?”

“I don’t know,” he said, in pain, not knowing where to take the Ila’s words, or how to answer. The fever produced unbearable headache, and swelled the flesh around the wounds. He had nothing to do with the Ila’s questions. The makers were at work. He had to endure it.

And the way he had held Lelie, and shed makers into her blood, he had pressed his wounds to the Ila’s wounds, and hers to his—both of them, makers shared. Makers at all-out war not only with the wounds… but with each other, live or die, win or lose.

He understood the Ila’s dealing with Tain, when she caught him. What else was she to use for weapons, when her makers had consistently lost their battles with Luz’s makers?

What else was she to use, when Tain fell into her hands?

Tain, being Tain, to be sure, meant to seize power for himself… he had not made his move yet, but that had been his intention, and surely the Ila knew it, being old as the world and still alive.

But Tain was also her weakness: Tain had notknown how far Memnanan had allegiances elsewhere. Tain had not known how much a man could love a wife, that a man could have a friend against his own interests. Therewas Tain’s downfall, in every ca

Kaptai, against all odds, had taught him otherwise.

His head throbbed. Pain shot through his ears and eyes. It might have been a skirmish his makers had just won. Or lost.

One au’it among the lot of au’it, perhaps their own, wrote and wrote. He was aware of the movement. The drip of water. The rumble of thunder.

And he became aware of Hati, of Hati and Norit, near Memnanan, and he saw a vision, Tofi struggling to heat a pan of water.

Hati’s impatience came through. And Norit’s.

They were not in his war. They had Luz’smakers in them. And he heard them, saw them.

They shoved Tofi sharply aside.

“ Push,” the women cried together. “Push! Now! Now, woman!”

Came a woman’s shout, then, and cries from the others, and then from the men.

A newborn baby cried protest, newly arrived, as the heavens poured.

“ A boy!” Memnanan’s mother cried above a crack of thunder. “My son has a son!”

Chapter Twenty-Five

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Things change. That is what I arrange to happen. In a limited system, in an alien environment, that means frequent intervention, with only my returning nanoceles to report on the local health of the system. That means I am the living template, and in my own cells I assure a standard. Whenever I am tempted to create a match for myself, I ask myself whose would be the standard then? And would they understand at all what I have done, and why I have done it, even if I told them?

—The Book of the Ila

Visions ceased, the providers of visions grown exhausted, and resting. The dark lost all feature except a red glow that pulsed, more and less, more and less, like the fire that burned through his veins.

Marak lay still, measuring his breaths until the pain became bearable. He heard thunder. The rush of wind.

But the tent ropes held. The canvas did.

Marak, the voices whispered, wanting his attention, and visions claimed him.