Hammerfall

Haste, the voices seemed to say now. Haste, as if someone were waiting and impatient. Was the vision of Kassan and Foragi added to the rest? Or did ordinary men see such things? He had never understood, having been mad all his life.

There was still loud complaint from the beasts, from the village edge to the caravan track outside, and onto the flat that stretched before them. But, Marak! the voices said, over and over and over, and the fire was in the rest of them. Water and fresh fruit and willing flesh had no power like what seethed in the mad now. It had overpowered the soldiers. Now it overpowered even Malin, who might have wanted to stay in Pori. She wept. She ran off among the buildings. And she crept back again, and sought her riding beast, catching its rein. But she had no one to help her mount. She tried to make it kneel, and it only circled and bawled.

“Damn you!” she shouted. It made some of the villagers laugh, but none of the mad was amused.

“Do we want her?” Hati asked, in the haze of images and the din of voices.

Malin had gotten two village men to lift her up, and suffered indignities of their hands on the way. But she landed astride, her clothes utterly in disarray, and took the rein in both hands, and kicked the recalcitrant beast as fiercely as she could. It threw back its head and complained, but she had the rein in her hands, and turned him, to the howling mirth of the villagers.

“Let us go,” Marak said to Tofi, who was already out of countenance with the sudden departure, and with Malin, and the missing soldiers.

“This isn’t wise,” Tofi said. “This isn’t a race, omi.”

Marak was sure it was not. But it satisfied the voices. And not even Malin could slither out of their grip.

Chapter Nine

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The stars in heaven are numbered and the Ila knows the names of them.

—The Book of Oburan

They found their missing pair staggering along toward noon, glassy-eyed and confused, on a steep shale. Alive. That was the wonder.

“Where are you going, fools?” Marak asked.

“To the tower,” Foragi said, and the other, Kassan:

“The cave.”

“Give them water,” Marak said. “They seem alive enough to save.”

“Things are growing in our eyes,” the one cried, and it was all too true: Marak knew; all the mad knew: there were times that the lines of fire seemed to proliferate, to demand attention, to build and build and build.

They had brought beasts saddled for their fellow fools, but it was too steep to mount, and they were big men, too heavy to lift up at the disadvantage of the slope. The ex-soldiers had to walk down.

“These men we can do without,” Tofi said in a low voice as they rode. “The woman we can do without, most of all. They’re the troublemakers. There always are, in a caravan, and these are ours.”

“There always are,” Marak agreed. “Without their bad example, someone else would have to be the fool. Would they not?”

Tofi gave an uncertain laugh, and thought about it on the way down the shale.

By the time they got down it was noon, and Foragi had cut his boot on a rock, and bloodied his foot. That was not good. Tofi was out of sorts, and Marak this time agreed with him.

“We shouldn’t camp near this accident,” Tofi said. “We should bind that up, and get him on his beast, and be another hour away before we rest.”

“We’ll do that,” Marak said, well knowing the reasons. He himself got the kit and bound up the wound and dried it with powders, and scoured the boot out with sand and liniment. The au’it recorded the men’s recovery, and their treatment.

In the meanwhile they all baked in the sun, and the beasts grew ill-tempered before they set themselves under way, several of the pack beasts having sat down, then refusing to rise until they were completely unpacked and allowed to stand. Then they had to be packed up again, all to grumbling and complaint and bawling up and down the line.

They were at the edge of a stony plain, lower than the highlands of the Lakht, a region littered with fragments of shale. The persistent wind moved the sand always in the same direction, in great red ripples flecked with black, and there was no easy way across. The beasts complained. Men complained.

Tofi avowed he had no idea, beyond Pori, where they were bound, except the star Kop still would provide their easterly direction.

“East is all we have,” Marak confessed to Hati, to Norit, to the au’it, and necessarily to the men who shared his tent, two hours later, in the hellish heat of a still afternoon on the pan. “East. I don’t know what else to do, now.”

Since the debacle at noon, he had regretted leaving Pori. His haste to put them on the road seemed foolish to him now that they had found the soldiers alive, even if another night might have lost them. They had lost others. Proffa the tailor had been a fine man, worth ten of those two. But an underlying urgency gnawed at his reason. He saw it working in the soldiers. He saw it building in others. There was no more economy and no more common sense where that impulse took over. Structures built within his eyes. They shaped letters. Hurry, they said. No delay.

They burned there, overlying the world.

“I see words,” he admitted to Hati.

“How can you see words?”

“I see them,” he said. “Like the au’it. I read. We’re late for something. We have to hurry. I don’t know why that’s so. The soldiers knew it. Maybe they can read, though I’d have doubted it.”

The au’it wrote all they said, for the Ila’s record.

“I see people walking,” one of the others said, Kosul the potter, who sat nearby, and that, it struck him, was exactly what Norit had said. “They want us all.”

“The people there in the tower want us,” Norit said in this council of equals they had made in their tent. “I don’t know why.”

Heads generally nodded agreement.

And who had said there were people in the tower? But now they all believed it, and everyone agreed. Whether or not the soldiers could read, he had no idea. They had chosen the shade of the other tent, preferring the company of Maol and Tofi and the slaves, who detested them… most of all preferring Malin, who would not come near Hati, and there were only two tents in which to shelter.

Marak’s skin crawled. He wanted to rise up and deny all relationship with the rest of them.

And yet he increasingly formed a notion in his head not only of a threat sweeping down on them from every quarter of the earth, but of a refuge toward which they walked, one at the very heart of all the mystery they pursued, one they must reach soon, or die.

He shivered, and Norit caught the shiver, and so did Hati, then no few of the others.

All at once, for no reason whatsoever, he—all of them, perhaps—saw a hall of suns; and figures moving shadowlike among them. Structures traced fire across his vision.

He shouted. He clenched his hands and saw a door before him, and that door moved with no hand touching it, like the Ila’s doors, but what was behind that door he could not answer and did not want to know.

A man cried out near him, and fell down in a fit. “I see spirits!” he cried. “The god! The god! Ila save us and intercede! I see the god!”

Fever rushed over Marak’s skin, making his heart beat hard and his ears roar with sound.

Marak, a single voice said, wishing his attention, and he tried to give it, but the images came pouring through. From the other tent, at greater remove, there were shrieks and shouts.

Tower and cave and star, and each opened, and divulged a heart of structures and shapes and forms and light, all jumbled together. Walls were built of light and fire. Structures had tastes. Sounds had texture like rough sand.

He shouted. He leapt up and found something to lean on, the smooth strength of a tent pole, proving where he was. He rested his head against it, and stayed there long, long, not daring move until the visions stopped.