Hammerfall

“Not far, now,” Ian said, and led them, at a slower pace, up another rise.

In the great distance and through the blowing dust a slope-walled spire rose up ahead of them, rising out of the flat desert as the land rose. It was an anomalous thing, and yet familiar, so very familiar it sent chills down Marak’s spine.

Hati touched his arm, for a moment stopped still, and half whispered, “The spire.”

“The tower,” Norit said.

Closer, the voices whispered. Closer, Marak Trin Tain.

“Come,” Ian said again.

They struggled to keep Ian’s pace, and it was hard to ignore the clamor of voices, now, urging Faster, faster, faster.

Hard, but possible. They were not fools, and he was not a slave to his madness. Marak deliberately slowed his pace, walking at a rate he thought Norit and the au’it could sustain. Hati slowed. So they all fell behind. Ian looked back, displeased, but none of them walked faster, so Ian fell to their pace.

Slower still, as the tower grew clearer out of the air, and clearer. They came close enough to see the stony ground around about it, a strange depression atop a hill of cindery rocks, with bits of glass catching the light.

Marak paused for rest, to Ian’s great a

It was a tower as great as any in the holy city, and not a structure of air and fire. Its sand-colored walls, casting back the sunset glow in the west, might be stone, but if so, there was no joint of masonry.

“It has no windows,” Norit said, “nor doors.”

And what use was it in itself, Marak asked himself, and why had it haunted the mad, and what did it mean to any of them? As a dream it had seemed to mean things on its own, a high place, a landmark to guide the mad.

If it was a real place it had to have uses, and occupants, and a reason for being there.

For that reason, too, he sat down where he stood, and Hati and Norit and the au’it settled by him.

“It’s not that far,” Ian said, standing as if ready to walk again.

“Why should we trust you?” Marak said. “Why should we go any farther? We’ve seen what it is.”

“Have you?” Ian asked. “You haven’t seen everything. And you know nothing. Get up.”

Up, up, up, the voices echoed in Marak’s head. He saw the cave of suns, and now Norit’s figures moving within that cave. Norit and Hati each had his hands, and Norit’s was cold. Hati’s sweated; and the au’it wrote, hunched over to protect her book from the wind.

“Stubborn,” Ian said. “Your reputation has reached us. But I won’t stand out here all night. You can sit here as long as you like, and go back and make up lies to tell the rest, for all I care. The au’it may be the only one of you with courage to investigate what this place is. Will you come, au’it?”

The au’it stopped her writing, and lifted her head, and considered the proposition.

Marak found the proposition as impossible to ignore. The truth was he could not walk away from it without answers. But he was not inclined to meet a fortified position without looking it over and thinking it through, if nothing more than the evident fact that it had no weak points, and it had no evident communication with the outside, and it gave every evidence of being like the Beykaskh in its defenses.

The au’it looked at him, however, instead of folding her book. Everyone looked at him, as if he should know the risks. He did not, and knew he could only guess what they were venturing into.

But he got up. “Go back to the others,” he said to Hati. “Take Norit with you.” The au’it was doomed as he was, to carry out the Ila’s orders: in that matter he had no authority over her.

Hati, however, refused to do as he asked. “I came to see this place,” she said, and brought home to him the simple truth that he was not alone in his obsession and his visions: Hati’s were as strong; and maybe neither of them stronger than Norit’s. She had stood up and moved toward Ian.

Marak gave an exasperated sigh and stood up, and Hati and the au’it with him, and the three of them walked where Ian led, subtly uphill for a long walk toward the tower’s base. Hot glass, as if from some army of glassworkers, seemed to have fallen on the sand all about, cooling, including grains and holes and bubbles in its convolutions. If they had had to walk over that in the dark, they might have had hard going. But there was a broad walkway of safe, plain sand as the sun sank and lengthened shadows to their greatest extent, even the shadows of bits of glass that studded the sand.

“I’ve seen this,” Hati said under her breath. “I have seen this kind of glass.”

So had he, long ago, with the army. “At Oburan,” he said. “At Oburan, when the wind blew clear the western plain.”

“There’s nothing like this in the lowlands,” Norit said, clinging to Marak’s hand. “Nothing at all like this in the lowlands.”

Ian, meanwhile, walked steadily before them. The open sand was a tablet slowly erased, revised every time the wind blew, but the walkway through the plain of glass showed the passage of feet both coming and going: Marak did not miss it, and he had not, as they entered that pathway and added their prints to the rest, the fact there had been a traffic going around the depression of glass, and beyond the dune.

He doubted that Hati had missed that fact, either, but he said nothing, only stored it up as an indication there might be more than one destination hereabouts, perhaps another one beyond the hill that obscured their vision of all the land beyond, and perhaps more to this place than the tower. The prints he saw went around the scattered glass, and up on the other side, and out of sight, as the land either stretched on in a broad flat or fell away in a depression. There was no place round about higher than the base of the tower.

At this range it filled all their vision, and those footprints went confidently toward a bare wall at its base, where a subtle jointing showed where a door might be.

So there were mundane accommodations like doorways, Marak said to himself. Ian did not walk through walls, or expect it of them.

That seam cracked before they reached it, and let out a warm bright light, welcoming rather than threatening: as a door, like the Ila’s doors, a large square dropped back and slid to one side, rapidly, and with no hand to move it.

Inside, a series of lighted globes marched along the ceiling of a long, long hall.

It was the cave of suns. Marak recognized it, and his heart skipped a beat. They were within the vision. Hati and Norit must realize it.

Ian walked ahead of them, booted feet echoing sharply on a floor like glass, under blinding suns that now assumed a mortal scale, floating globes of brilliant, fireless light.

“This is the place,” Norit whispered as she walked. Her voice trembled. “This is what I always see.”

Marak pressed her hand, and Hati’s, and the au’it hovered close by. He trembled. He was ashamed to acknowledge it to himself and twice ashamed to have Hati and Norit know it, but he trembled. He was here, within his lifelong vision, and he could not but think of all the hours of misery, all the days and nights he had fled his father’s house, trying not to be discovered in his madness; of nights on the Lakht, on campaign, trying to conceal from the men he led that he heard voices and saw this place, over and over and over again.

All these things… all the years, all the losses of self and pride… came to this hallway, and proved, not madness, but prophecy. And for what, he asked himself angrily. For what?

He freed his hand of Hati’s and pulled down the lap of his aifad to have a better look, to breathe the cold, strange air of this place. The air smelled faintly of water and herbs and things like asphalt.

There were doors, countless doors in this hall of light, if those seams meant anything; and there were doors at the end of the hall.