Hammerfall

The door was shut, a plain brown panel, showing no more feature than the wall and no means to open it. It was cold like iron. He thought of the Ila’s metal doors, the power of them, and refused to be daunted. He had met this riddle before, and looked for a plate to touch.

“Ian!” he shouted at the door, and struck it with his hand.

The door opened. But it was Norit who appeared, Norit, dressed as he was, in the sand-colored gauze.

She simply stood there.

“Are you all right?” he asked. Her silence, her lack of joy, sent a chill through him. He embraced her as a man ought to greet his wife, and she acted as if he had never touched her before. Then she pushed away and went and sat down on the rumpled bed.

He found nothing right. His ears suddenly roared. His balance went uncertain, and Norit for a moment looked like an utter stranger to him.

The door was still open. He looked outside, down a metal hall like the vision of the cave.

But it was not the same hall: in small points, the number of suns and the number of doors, it was different than where they had been. They were about halfway down it, in a room to the side.

“It’s a hallway,” Norit whispered. “It’s just a hallway. That’s all it ever was, the cave of suns.”

“Have you seen all of this place? Have you met anyone? Who is the woman?”

“Luz.” Norit, who was a simple woman and a villager, never experienced in the outside, let alone the heart of mysteries. “Her name is Luz.”

“Where’s Hati?”

“I think she’s somewhere near.”

“Have you talked to them?”

“They talk to me,” Norit said, and shuddered. “I can hear them.”

He could not. There was only the roaring. “What is this place?”

A second shudder. Norit drew in a deep breath. “The woman named Luz. She told me her name is Luz. She wants me to be still, now, and let her talk.”

If he were not a madman all his life he might have shaken his head and refused to understand. But they were both mad. This room was mad. The things they had seen and heard for years were mad.

Now a woman named Luz wished to speak to him through Norit’s lips, and Norit was starkly terrified.

“What does she want?”

That seemed a more than difficult question. Norit seemed to wrestle with it, and put her hands to her temples as if her head ached unbearably.

“I don’t know,” Norit said. “She wants to talk. She wants to talk!”

“Then let her,” he said, thinking only that Norit was in pain, but the second after he said it he regretted the advice.

Norit winced, and set her eyes on him, her back straightening.

“Marak.”

Someone else was there. Someone elseframed that word through Norit’s lips.

“I see you,” the stranger said.

“Don’t hurt her,” Marak warned the stranger, not remotely knowing how he might separate this stranger from Norit. “Don’t hurt her.”

For an instant there was a break, a less rigid backbone. “She isn’t hurting me,” Norit said. “But she scares me. She wants me to say… she wants me to say exactly the words, and not to think about them. All these things. I’m scared. But she says I’m safe if I don’t get up. She wants to talk to you.”

“Then, damn her, why doesn’t she come talk to me herself?”

“She says you’ll believe it if it comes through me. She says she wants you. She wants you, most of all, to listen to her.”

He was not well-disposed to anyone in this place. “To do what?”

“I think—” Norit began. “I think—I don’t know. I don’t know what she wants.”

“What do any of them want?” he retorted in anger at the powers behind the walls. Norit squeezed her eyes shut and held her hands to her ears. “Damn it, where is Hati?”

Marak! Marak! Marak!

The roaring grew and grew, and deafened him, and he flung himself down onto the bed, took Norit in his arms, and held her and rocked her against him, both of them rocking to the tides in the sound and the light and the noise. He would not surrender her to them, he would not surrender Hati, or himself.

“Don’t!” Norit cried, pushing at him. “Don’t, don’t, don’t!”

He began to understand it was at him Norit shouted. He relaxed his hold, letting her pull away, and tried to still the voices in his head. Marak, they said. Be calm—when his being calm was only to their advantage, none of his.

“We are mad,” Norit said, having captured half a breath, “we are mad because we have these creatures in our blood. And they have them inside, too. Luz has them, very, very tiny, so tiny no eye can see; but they move through our blood and through our ears and our eyes and they make us have the visions. They make the fever. They heal us. They make the sound and the pain and they build the lines we see in our eyes: they trace them on our eyes, and they whisper them into our ears. They take words out of the air, from the tower, to a place in the sky, to us, wherever we are.”

“Why?”

“They’re our gift.”

“A gift, is it?” He pushed Norit back to look at her, to see within her eyes whether he could see any trace of these engravings on her eyes. “Is it a gift, to be outcast from every civilized village? Is it a gift, to be whipped across the desert and die within a day of a village?”

“I am Luz,” she whispered, this woman almost within his arms, this body he had held tenderly at night and held now at arm’s length, like some venomous animal. “I say it is a gift. A gift we give, Marak Trin Tain, risking our lives!”

“Damn your gift!” he said, and shook her, and then was appalled, because it was Norit he had hurt. “ Damn your gift. We’re the ones who die for it. My mother and my sister will die because of your gift! I’ve sworn my life to the Ila because of your gift! Take it back! Let us go!”

“You need it.”

“For what?”

“Life,” Norit’s lips said, whispered. “Life, if you’ll take it. Life for more than the ones you’ve brought if you’ll listen.”

There had been a time he had chased the truth. He was not willing to find it in what this Luzdictated things to be. He would not take her word for the truth, not her desires, not her rules, not her half promises like some seller in the bazaar. None of it. He rose up off the bed, or began to, but Norit reached for his wrist.

He would have rejected the effort. It was the fumbling, desperate character of the grip that restrained him and reminded him that Norit, too, was there to suffer for what he said and did.

“She wants you to listen,” Norit said. “Please listen.”

There were many, many hostages, in the Ila’s hands, in Luz’s hands.

And where could he go? What could he do, to find Hati, and to rescue Norit?

“Listen to what?” he answered not Norit, but Luz.

“She wants you,” Norit said. “She wants you, because you’re Marak Trin Tain, because she knows your name, she knows who you are, she knows what you did in the war, and she knows the Ila sent you.”

“Yes the Ila sent me. The Ila gathered all the mad together and chose me to find her answer, to find out what we see and why we walk off into the desert to die like damned fools.” Temper rose up, the temper that was Tain’s curse, and his, and he choked it back, because it was only Norit he could hurt if he let it fly. “So what is this great truth? Why have we been tormented all our lives, and what good is it to anyone, and why should this Luz orthe Ila care about a handful of madmen?”

“She’s given us a gift,” Norit’s lips repeated, trembling at every word. Her eyes were immense, dark and haunted. She drew a deep breath, shut her eyes, and the tremor went away. “We have had our thirty years. Thirty years to gather in those that will listen, thirty years to store away your knowledge, so what you know… will not… will not perish.” She spoke. Then terror overwhelmed Norit. Her lips trembled into silence, as if she denied all that had flowed through her mouth.