Hammerfall

He had ridden with his father to this very plain, and for three years had seen the walls of the holy city as a prize for the taking. He and his father had laid their grandiose plans to end the Ila’s reign: they had fought. They had had their victories.

Now he stumbled in the ruin of boots made for riding.

His life was thirty summers on this earth and not likely to be longer. His own father had delivered him up to the Ila’s men.

“I see the city!” the woman cried to the rest. She was a wife, an honorable woman, among the last to join the march. “Can’t you see it? See it rise up and up? We're at the end of this!”

Her name was Norit, and she was soft-ski

Now increasingly the visions overwhelmed her, and she rocked and mourned her former life and poured out her story in her interludes of sanity. Over and over she told the story of her husband, who was the richest man in Tarsa, who had married her when she was thirteen. She wasted her strength crying, when the desert ate up all strength for grief and all water for tears. Her husband might have been relieved to cast her out.

The old man next in line, crookbacked from old injury, had left an aged wife in Modi, a woman who would live, likely, as an unwelcome guest on the charity of her children. The old man talked to spirits, and could not remember his wife’s name. He wept about this, and asked others if they knew. “Magin,” they would tell him in disgust, but he would forget, and ask again in a few hours. He had hidden his madness longest of all of them. Sometimes he forgot why they walked. But so did the rest of them. The walking had gone on so long it had become ordinary, a condition of existence.

The boy, the young boy, Pogi, who rocked and talked to himself whenever they stopped and sat down… he had been the butt of village jokes in Tijanan. Everyone had accounted him harmless, but in what the Ila’s men said, the village grew anxious and delivered him to their hands, throwing rocks at him when he tried to go back to their street. He was no one’s son. The village had found him one morning by the well, which they said was reason enough for suspicion. A devil might have put him there. So they thought, after the Ila’s men asked for the mad: he was the only madman in that village.

The others all had their stories. The caravan was full of the cursed, the doomed, the rejected. Villages had tolerated them as long as they dared. In Kais Tain long before this, Tain had issued a pogrom to cleanse his province of the mad, ten years ago; but the god laughed at him. Now his own son and heir proved tainted. Tain of Kais Tain had successfully rebelled against the Ila and the Lakht, undefeated for ten years, and had all the west under his hand. But his own son had a secret, and betrayed himself in increasing silences, in looks of abstraction, in crying out in his sleep. He had been mad all along. His father had begun to suspect, perhaps, years ago, and denied it; but lately, after their return from the war, the voices had grown too persistent, too consuming to keep the secret any longer. His father had found him out.

And when shortly afterward his father heard the Ila’s men were looking for the mad, his father had sent to the Ila’s men… had given him up, his defiance of the Ila’s rule broken by the truth.

His own son, his own son, Tain said over and over. Tain blamed his wife, and sat gloomy and furious in his hall, a man of war finally seeking peace.

For the rest of his life, Tain said in the document he signed, he would not make war. Tain said this aloud to the Ila’s men, and signed their book, and they gave him amnesty in exchange for his only son. That was how much sane men feared the mad, who lately, so the rumors said, proliferated in ungodly fashion: the mad appeared all over the land, more and more of them, a plague among the sane, and the sane began to fear a contagion.

“Marak,” his mother had called to him as he marched away, Marak! like the voices that resounded in his head. Marak, Marak! But his sister Patya, who was the soul of laughter, had drawn her striped aifad over her face, casting sand on herself, as if he were already dead. He still saw her sitting there in the street of Kais Tain, a heap of bright cloth and grief.

In his dreams he saw his mother, who had spilled tears for days before his leaving, who walked beside the caravan as it filed out of Kais Tain, and who had walked with him all that afternoon, until sunset.

Then she had agreed to go back to the village, to what fate he was not sure. He had no idea whether she had walked back to Kais Tain at all. She was Haga, out of the lowland tribes, and might have turned aside and gone by paths the Haga knew, and sought wells the Haga knew.

The taint is in your blood, his father had shouted at her when he knew the truth, but he had not struck her. If he had done that, Marak would have struck him down. But his father then looked at him and asked that damning question: “When did it come on you?”

“I don’t remember,” he had had to confess to Tain, to that strong, scarred face. “From very young.”

His father had turned his face away and said not a thing more. So the madness reached back and back to stain all they had ever done together. All the trust they had for each other was a lie. That was the last time they had looked at one another eye to eye.

The sun reached the zenith. The caravan spread its canvas for shelter from the light, the mirage of the city having faded, and the wife of Tarsa, still talking to herself, subsided sobbing into rest.

The others huddled together and averted their eyes from the sun outside their patch of shade, and the boy rocked and talked to himself. The red-bearded man, a middle-aged ta

Marak did none of these things. He only sat and stared at the horizon, beneath that shade of an open-sided tent, as sure as his guards and the caravan master that tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow evening, they would reach the end of their journey.

None of the other madmen had ever made the trek across the Lakht. None of the other raving prisoners had ridden to war against the Ila’s long-lasting power, and helped the fiercest of the abjori rain fire on those towers.

None of the others had risen so high on a lie. None of the others had been the heir of Kais Tain, or the hope of Tain’s long-surviving ambition.

In those days his dreams were secret, mostly at night. A young fighter bent on following his father’s path could keep that secret even if he bit his lip bloody, even if the voices distracted him at his father’s table or blinded him while he was riding breakneck down a dune face.

But their war had failed before their love did.

Three years had passed since the retreat from the holy city. And in this last year the secrets had multiplied into visions and visions gained voices. Visions that came like threads and sticks of fire wove themselves tighter and tighter until the sights they conjured unpredictably replaced the sight of his eyes.

Come to us, the i