Hammerfall

It seemed the stars came out in this vision. Then a strange thing appeared in the night, white, and looking like a village from a distance.

He drifted closer.

It glittered with lights, some that blinked, others that lit its walls.

And this place, above all visions he had seen, was ominous to him. He had no trust in Luz, that the vision would prove harmless.

Ondat, his voices said to him.

“Do you see it?” he asked Luz in a whisper, and then, thinking that someone else, perhaps Hati, was close to him. “Do you see a village in the night sky?”

“I see something white,” Hati said, and a hand rested on his shoulder, comforting him. “It could be a village. But its towers go off in every direction.”

“Like the tower,” Norit said, from behind her. “It’s a tower in the sky.”

Luz warned them: the ondatwere here. Somehow the ondathad established a village that had no ground under it, and Luz showed them this sight to amaze them.

“What does it mean?” he asked Luz in that absence of other questions. “What are they? Where are they?”

Up, that strange sense of direction told him, as it had at other times told him east. This time it was up, up, up, when he knew there could be nothing up there but the sky and the stars.

Perhaps the ondathad breached their treaty and taken over.

Perhaps after all they would destroy Luz and her tower, and with Luz, their refuge, and all of them would die.

Perhaps their real safety, now that the hammer had fallen, was not the tower, but to scatter into the low desert, and hide in caves, hoping to live in whatever circumstances they could.

“What do you want us to do?” he asked Luz in a whisper, as he always had to speak to Luz aloud to be heard.

He only felt a direction, and that direction was what it had been. East. East.

East.

He felt someone rest a hand on his shoulder. Tofi was there. The tent above him seemed far less fine. Daylight came only from an open flap. There were no lamps lit.

“We’re in danger of drowning,” Tofi said. “We’re going to move the camp.”

“East,” he said. The vision of the tower in the stars broke apart, became irretrievable, something beyond imagination.

“East,” Tofi said, and that satisfied him. Satisfied Luz.

It dawned on him the plain tent above him was his own, and that Hati and Norit were on his other side, with Lelie, and that there were, unaccountably, more points of contact than the three of them. Four, one in this tent, largely unaware, asleep. Five, the last at a little remove from him.

That one was aware, and in pain. It was the Ila.

“We’re going to have to pack the tents wet,” Hati said to him, businesslike. “We have to move. There’s water just flowing through, washing out some of the tents. It’s become the one thing we’re not short of.”

“I probably could ride.”

“Probably you could,” Hati said. “But you’re not going to.”

He shut his eyes.

Eventually they moved him onto a litter, and wrapped him in two blankets and a piece of canvas, and carried him out into the light.

The world had changed its coat. It had been all blowing sand. Now it was murky grays, sandy mud, and a dull sheen of reflections off rain-pocked water. It was as if a well had overflowed. Some water—au’it had not been doing her job.

He shut his eyes. They balanced the litter on two bundles of baggage. Hati bent and kissed him. He heard a small baby crying. Then Lelie set up a howl. A new baby had come out of nowhere and cried, taking attention, and Lelie, he thought, was jealous, and angry.

He went to sleep again. When he waked, he saw tribesmen carrying the litter, tribesmen afoot and walking. He found that curious and went back to sleep.

Mostly he slept, and waked again, once as the earth shivered, then again at a change of bearers.

Then, a distant whisper, he heard his voices. Marak, they said. Marak, Marak.

Calmly. A part of the world. Contact, with Luz.

He drew a wider breath, ignoring the pain in his ribs. He reached up an unwounded finger, pulled down the stiff canvas that covered him above the chin, and gave a critical eye to the world.

It was unremitting gray overhead. The sun went veiled. He ventured more of his hand into the sunlight, and realized then something strange about his hand, as if it was suddenly someone else’s. It lacked the killing-marks. He extracted it completely from the canvas, held it up to the light, and saw only the reddened trace of the marks that had existed on his fingers.

A part of him, a part of his former life, was wiped out.

He shoved the canvas farther back, blankets and all as the bearers carried him, heedless, and he looked at the skin of his chest, which showed only the faintest trace of the abjori mark, as his hands showed the redness of healing cuts, and the wound in his side was sealed, swollen, painful.

“Lie still,” Hati said from the lofty height of her saddle. Her besha moved with lordly ease beside the struggling bearers. “Don’t make trouble.”

“What happened to the Ila?” he asked, but once he asked, he knew, he knewher location, as he knew Hati’s, Norit’s, Lelie’s, at every moment he was near them. And the new one.

“You beat her,” Norit said, also from above. She was riding on his other side, with Lelie on her saddle. “She’s with the priests. Memnanan’s gone to see to her. We knowwhere she is. Always.”

So did he. She was behind him in the line. As weak and sick as he was, he thought, and with the remnant of a hellish headache.

He lay back and drew up the blankets against the chill in the air. He slept again, slept until they camped and raised the tents.

By then the rain had stopped, but a nearby pan had become a pool of water, safe, at least, for the beshti; and the tents went up with the lighter stakes this time, a quicker job.

Hati offered him a drink of sweet water, and he drank, and slept—and waked in the enclosed dark of the tent as the earth shook.

The baby born in the storm—Memnanan’s son—let out an infant cry of disturbance. That point of awareness was active. Then the Ila waked, elsewhere. Hati and Norit were much closer.

Thunder rumbled. The whole world felt strange, the air choked and thick with damp.

Marak rubbed his ears, rubbed his eyes, decided he could sit up, and did. Hati set her hand on his arm.

He moved that arm, embraced her shoulder, drew her close. They sat that way a while, one leaning on the other. Norit slept with Lelie across her lap.

He felt exhausted, drained of all the strength he had ever had.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said. Luz said. Or whatever it was that droned on that way. The world had reached a sort of exhausted peace. He saw Norit wake, and he put out a hand and caressed Norit’s knee without resistance. Norit set her hand on his, looked at him, for the most part sane.

They rested that way until the light crept back, slowly, sullenly.

He decided finally that it was morning enough, and that today he would get on his feet and get into the saddle again.

It took two tries to get on his feet. Hati braced herself and pulled and he made it up, and walked, and passed the tent flap to the outside, into what passed for a dawn.

The air was cold, bitter cold. The sand was wet. He wrapped his coat about him, and saw others stirring out of their tents. He walked past the edge of the tent and looked around the camp, all around, seeing tents as far as he could see. After the wind that had blown over them, after seeing the scoured bone that had landed at the edge of the Ila’s tent, he had feared far worse was the case. Beshti, some of them, bore cuts and gashes. Some were burned over part of their skin, the hair simply gone. They were a sad-looking lot, and some might have died.