Hammerfall

—The Priest, in his Book.

The wind that had made pitching the tents so difficult at least blew the clouds away. Tofi laughed when they waked after noon rest and saw a bright blue sky. “I thought we might never see the sun again,” he said. His voice attempted levity, but it was relief everyone must feel.

Norit seemed calmer, and had done with crying. She seemed to have forgotten having named Lelie, and they failed to mention the messenger. Norit rode with them, and measured the fringed edge of her aifad, over and over and over, lost in her own thoughts, or in Luz’s: there was no telling. The voices were quiet.

But that night as they rode, the stars fell again in all their terrible glory. No few were the fiery sort, that stitched their way in silver and gold across the night before they plunged below the horizon.

Memnanan rode with them a time. The messenger had not yet returned.

“I regret asking the favor,” Marak said. “Something may have happened.”

“It may,” Memnanan said. “But it may not. I’m not yet worried. It may simply take that long.”

“I hope for his safety,” Marak said. Norit was near them, but he had never yet told her about the search.

“Has the fall been this thick before?” Memnanan asked, with a look aloft. This was a man who had spent days before this in the heart of the city, where lights blotted out the sky.

“It’s become ordinary these days,” Hati said. “I suppose it will be ordinary for a long time.”

“No,” Norit said suddenly. “It’s not ordinary. That’s why we have to hurry. The hammer of heaven will fall.”

“The hammer of heaven,” Memnanan said.

“A very large star,” Marak said; that was the way he interpreted it. “Where will it fall, Norit? On the Lakht?”

Sometimes Norit seemed to intervene in Luz’s answers, or failed to understand them. She turned and pointed, back, behind them. “Not on the Lakht. Out in the bitter water.”

“Then not on us,” Memnanan said with relief.

“But wherever we are, still, the wind will reach us, and when that wind blows, the sun will stop shining and the stars will vanish. The earth will ring like an anvil. When it comes, we have to be off the Lakht. If nothing else, we have to be off the Lakht, and down below it. The wind up here will be terrible.”

“Is this the truth?” Memnanan asked.

“That we have to be off the Lakht before this great star comes down?” Marak said. “I don’t know about the sun and the stars. But she’s saved our lives before.” Under the streaks of the star-fall, the desert showed cold, and the wind bit as it came. The sand blew along the surface, a light film of fine dust, and in Norit’s doom-saying, it struck him with peculiar force just then that in all this riding since starting out from Oburan, he had seen no birds, no vermin, and no trace of them. It was more than strange, and what was strange lately became ominous.

“Can we reach the edge by then?” Memnanan asked.

“If the weather holds,” Norit said. “If it turns against us, we don’t know. I can’t prevent the storms.”

Memnanan laughed at the strangeness of that I can’t prevent, as if he thought it a grim and impertinent sort of joke, but Marak was less sure, Luz would want to prevent the storms. If anyone could, Luz might be able; but she told them it was beyond her power.

Their own contingent, third in line, moved at the pace of a very large caravan, which was to say, very slowly, still, despite Norit’s warning. It was his intention to anchor the line, not to let the Keran and the Haga and the tribes with their travel-hardened beasts run a race to the detriment of all those village contingents behind. The villages, unaccustomed and containing many weak, could surely go no faster, and those afoot above all else could not match the tribes’ pace.

But now he wondered if that kindness to the hindmost was not risking all of them. “We could go some bit faster,” he said to Norit, when Memnanan had gone his way, “but that would mean those afoot will likely die. What should we do?”

Norit looked for a moment apt to burst into tears and shook her head distractedly as they rode.

And for the first time he added up the fact that all the mad had heard the same voices, their own, and seen the same visions, at the same time, and so had Norit, on the way. But now he became keenly aware of what they had begun to believe beneath the surface and never saying it: that Norit had special warnings, and special visions, and that Luz’s constant possession of her was different than what afflicted them.

In a way he had known it for days; he had known it when Norit had warned them of a storm he had had no idea was coming. He had known it when Norit ran mad, alone, under the sky.

It was not that he was hardheaded and failed to listen; it was not that he and Hati were too resistant to the voices—but that Norit’s voice was a special one, and that it had begun to be a special voice in the tower, where he and Hati and Norit had spent an amount of time they had never added up.

Now he believed Luz had done something special to Norit. She had done something special, and cruel, and Norit was not the same as she had been. Norit heard things constantly, and that flow of images that had once united the mad did not reach them… only Norit, who suffered.

There was nothing they could do for her but find this lost person named Lelie. Norit had asked for that. But whether Norit would even continue to care for this Lelie, there was no promise. Every time he made an effort to get her back from Luz, Luz’s possession of her was fiercer and harder when it set in.

He looked at Hati, riding near them, and found no better answer. He no longer knew what to do: but he knew that he had no wish to end that possession entirely—their lives depended on it. Even Norit’s life depended on Luz’s voice continuing.

And all night long the star-fall continued, obscured at times by threads of cloud, dark strips in the heavens. By morning those strips glowed pink, then faint purple, then white.

Even by this morning, there was no word from the young man they had sent down the line. Marak tried to imagine how far that was, and whether in fact it did extend all the way back to the holy city.

But now he had to reckon that perhaps the young man had come to grief… nothing to do with vermin or bandits. The Ila’s men were not loved in the villages.

By midmorning two of the younger priests worked their way up the line, afoot, breathless, to ask the Ila questions, it seemed. They were from among a small set of priests taken in by Kasha village, among the first behind the tribes, so they said, they had not paid attention to the small traffic along the line, and after a brief sojourn near the Ila, but never directly with her.

“Have you seen a young man of the Ila’s guard?” Marak asked them afterward.

“Yes, omi,” they said. “But only going. Not coming.”

What had they asked the Ila, or what had they to report? Marak wondered, but dared not ask.

They offered Norit their courtesies, wished the God’s blessing on her, and by implication, he supposed, they asked for enlightenment. “Have you seen other visions?” the seniormost asked.

“The hammer will fall,” she said. “We have to hurry.” After that she waved them away, disinterested in their prayers, having no more cheerful prophecy to give them, and no counsel.

“Omi,” the priests said to Marak, and the same to Hati, seeing that they were a group. They paid their parting respects to him and Hati as much for being associated with Norit, as for leading this company, so he suspected; but he felt better for their gesture. They rejoined their companions by the simple expedient of going outside the line and sitting still for as long as they had walked double the pace, and were gone.

The au’it recorded their visit, afterward, but that was all the information they had from it: Norit had posed them no questions, the Ila offered no answers, and being distrustful of priests, he had made no detailed inquiry, either.