Hammerfall

“I’ll listen,” he said. “You keep your damned hands off us. And bring Hati here!”

The sunlight grew on the walls, and whitened, and the vision was done. He found Norit’s trembling had spread to his own limbs. Nothing he knew was true? Where did lies start and stop?

The door whisked open. He expected a monster. He saw instead a perfectly ordinary woman, in house clothes, without a robe, like a prostitute. She had no definite age. With robes, she might have been a baker, a potter, a weaver. But she was very, very pale. Only the Ila had such skin.

The Ila, and, he guessed, Luz.

“Marak,” Luz said in her own voice, and with an accent neither westerly nor easterly, only mildly strange. “Norit.” This with a nod to his companion, who clung trembling to his arms.

“So what do you want?” Marak asked. He held Norit close, and then on a second thought, put her apart from him. He had drawn the Ila’s lightning. He might draw this woman’s: he expected it, because he was not in a mood to bow down, with Hati unaccounted for. “One thief calls the other a liar. What does it mean to the man who’s lost his silver?”

“Bad news,” Luz said. “The Ila could tell you, but she erased all the records five hundred years ago. The Ila settled here, where she had no right to settle. Her enemies have found her, they’ve set about to wipe this earth clean of life, and we’ve argued that we can unmake her makers and create benign ones. There, do you understand it?”

“I understand you want something from us, and I doubt you’re telling more truth than the Ila does.”

“Are you willing to die for her sake?”

“No, I’m not willing to die. No more than the rest of us.”

“Yet you promised to go back to her.”

“I’ve reason.”

“So you will go.”

“I may.”

“You might save no few lives if you did. But I warn you that you may lose your own. There’s safety here, and if you leave it, you run a risk of not getting back in time. It’s moments before the destruction.”

“And this is a safe place?”

“It will remain safe. Her enemies have agreed. They let us be here, to work out this problem.”

“Problem,” he scoffed.

“Not that we don’t share it, Ian and I. We’ve agreed to be down here. We’ve agreed not to leave this place, ever. That’s no small thing.”

“Down here. Where is here?”

“On this world, so to speak. This earth. This patch of land. You’re on a round world circling a star, Marak Trin Tain. That’s knowledge she took from your grandfather’s grandfathers.”

“Does it matter?” He disbelieved anything she offered. “Does it matter, except that I get out of here with the people I walked in with?”

“Direct and to the point. I know your reputation. I can see why you got here. Dare I believe you’re one who might get back?”

“I’m supposed to tell the Ila what I find here.”

“Tell her. Perhaps she’ll want to come here.”

The Ila, travel across the desert? Join madmen?

“She won’t.”

“Don’t be so sure. I’ll send you with a message. She may hear it.”

“What message?”

“The same she sent to me.”

Therewas a flaw in the woman’s omniscience. Slight as it seemed, he leapt on it, took perverse satisfaction in that flaw. “She sent you nothing. She doesn’t even know you exist.”

“Oh, but she did send, all the same. She doesn’t know whatI am, but she sent you to find that out. Her message is that she understands what we’ve done, she understands it’s challenged her creation, she understands her makers have failed against ours, and take it for granted that she’s tried to cure the mad. But she can’t. She’s gathered all the visions. She knows their meaning. She knows someone is here, and by the fact we’ve beaten her makers, she has an idea who we are. But she wants to know what we mean to do, and why, and that’s what you’re to tell her.”

“What do you mean to do?”

“Gather survivors. Keep them alive. And when the ondatchange this world so that nothing she’s loosed will survive, we’ll set new makers loose, ones the ondatwill approve.”

“The ondat.”

“Her enemies.”

“And our lives?”

Luz was silent a breath or two, then: “I regret risking them again. But if there’s one power that can call the rest to shelter, it won’t be a handful of madmen urging the village lord to come here. She can call them. Her priests can. We couldn’t make war on her: her hold is too secure. But we can use her influence over her own creation. The god of this world can bring us the people and save their lives. But you’re almost too late… if you’re not too late already. I can direct you. I can talk to you and I can talk to the ondatand I may secure you a safe course, but not if they know I’m bringing the Ila herself to safety. It’s a risk.“

“Then why do you take such a risk?”

“She’s not as i

“With the mad? The Ila of Oburan, to live with the mad?”

“Oh, very much so,” Luz said. “One needs not erase history. One needs only fail to teach one generation of children. Fail with two, and the destruction widens. She may deserve her damnation for what she has done, but it was done, perhaps, to keep you content with what limited things she could give. To make you her good servants. And keep you alive, for company.”

The land circling a star and wars with some tribe named the ondat, and dots and creatures let loose in their very blood. He had had nature to explain the world that was, but he had never understood why nature was what it was, either. He had never understood the vermin, or where men came from, except what the priests said, that the First Descended dropped down from the heavens and divided beasts from vermin.

“Where are the ondat?” he asked.

“Up above, where you can’t reach them. Believe this: that you threaten the peace. It’s not the land you have. The enemy doesn’t care about that. It’s that youexist according to the Ila’s plan, and that the Mercy of the Ila continues to pour out makers; useless, we say, since you’ve overburdened the land as it is, and never will be more than you are, but it’s your existence, all the same, that prolongs the war. You loosed makers on theirworld. They don’t forget that. They wish you dead.”

He understood everything down to their world. He had no idea where that was. But he understood revenge. He understood it was useless to plead against it, and he knew that survival required allies.

“They gave us thirty years,” Luz said, “to loose our own makers, and to gather our people and our goods and our records, before this world changes into what it will be. Thirty years ago we set to work. Thirty years ago we went out across the Lakht and into the villages, such as we could reach. We loosed new makers, in your blood, and they set to work, and enabled you to hear us, and brought a great many to us. Then the Ila, as you call her, gave us this final gift, in you. So we send you back to her with a message. A last chance. That’s all you need to know.”