Hammerfall

But among them, along the edge, he saw the wife from Tarsa, the potter, the barber, and the rest that had come with him. Then he knew that he was not alone in this audience, only better dressed.

They must be all mad, the scourings of the Ila’s search, not only from the villages of the west, but from all the land. There were that many more of them, filling the hallway as far as the corner.

The metal doors sighed heavily and opened, no hand touching them.

Beyond them was a narrow, pillared hall. At the end of the hall was a dais and a high seat, and on that seat was a figure robed in red.

The Ila. The source of all authority… deathless, immortal, so some said. A god on earth, priests maintained, and the Ila did not refuse their worship.

If she was a god, Marak proposed to find out. Under his brow, head bowed among the herd, he measured the length he must go to reach that figure. He imagined to himself dealing one, just one strong blow to that fragile-seeming neck before they cut him down.

Orders passed in gestures, the permissive lifting of the Ila’s hand, and the guards brought them forward as a group, for the Ila’s examination.

Marak’s heart beat fast. He had seen men and beasts run, even shot through the heart. He could perhaps reach her before the guards even organized an objection.

But until they offered to prevent him from a peaceful, even requested, advance, he made himself as obedient as the rest of the madmen.

Marak, the voices said suddenly, and the mad twitched and turned and spun for the Ila’s amusement. He restrained himself desperately from moving to that urge: it was his one breach from the rest, the one indignity he had refused all his life.

There were drawn blades all around them, guards stationed among the pillars. The Ila’s men were justifiably anxious in this viewing of the mad. They waited for the afflicted to do something more extravagant to prove their madness, and now a guard prodded him in the side, curious about his difference.

Pride would not allow him. He had run into the desert as a boy. He had hidden his fits in storerooms, in privacy, in long rides into the waste. He had learned that the fits had had a rhythm: they came at certain hours of the day, at certain times in the night, regular as the calendar, regular as the moons in waxing and waning. He had learned to live with them, to pretend, to conceal the twitches and the urges.

But lately the fits had gone out of rhythm, out of the ordinary.

This manifestation now was out of rhythm, as if the Ila’s very presence had provoked it.

{ Marak, the voices said. Turn. Walk. Come.} And quietly, biting his lip until the blood came, he would not.

The mad, within the room, became agitated. The Ila sat observing them. An au’it sat nearby, writing, writing. One by one the records went down, as the guards separated each madman from the herd in turn for the au’it to record his name, his origin, his behavior, turning each back when they were done. The Ila seemed bored, impatient.

Then a signal passed, a motion of the Ila’s hand, and the guards held back the latest madman they had cut out of the herd.

“Tain’s son,” the Ila said, and the guards, letting go the one, prodded at Marak instead and moved him forward.

Now, Marak thought, anticipating the next few moments, and became steady as any hunter. Hate fueled his patience. Desire kept his head down and held his gait to an ordinary shamble, all to come as close as he could.

They stopped him just short of the distance inside which he might move and not be stopped. The guards brought chains and put them on his hands. He bore that meekly, too: the chains were a weapon, brass chains, solid and capable of shielding a fist, of looping a throat, of cracking a skull. Then they put a spear backwards through the ring attached, and two men held it, but that was not enough. The spear, too, was a weapon within his reach.

With those precautions they moved him to the very foot of the Ila’s seat.

A great calm came on him, even a sense of leisure in which he could satisfy his curiosity before he used his last chance. He looked up at the Ila, the tyrant, the ruler of all the world, as if he owned her.

“Marak Trin,” the captain said, and the au’it wrote.

Then the traitor voices started in his skull, di

In the desert, on the wide plains of the Lakht, in constant company with the mad, aware of the rest, the voices had grown louder and more insistent. He fought them down. He looked up at the red robes, the blood red robes, up to the Ila’s face, and found it very aptly time to die, before the voices were all he heard. But he had never seen the like of her.

White, white skin, and gloved hands, and booted feet. On the Lakht, they valued white skin, skin the sun had not touched. They whitened the skins of brides and grooms with creams. They valued slender bodies that clearly had never lifted burdens or carried water, or scratched a living from the desert.

All these marks of beauty the Ila had. She wore a close cap of red silk, and i

Yet she seemed frail, in size and strength so like his young sister, he was dismayed.

“Are you truly mad?” she asked him directly, as his sister might have asked, a question, an entangling snare of question that caught his mind and his heart. He had killed enemies. He had never killed a girl.

But he had never failed an intended target, either. He would; he would not; and in desperation he leapt at the steps. He dragged his guards with him. He hauled at the chains and had three men stumbling at his feet. He seized the spear and lifted his hands, aiming it at that slight figure.

A thunderbolt struck him, sizzled through bone and nerve and flung him back in a sliding course down the steps. The guards smothered him with their bodies, wrenched at the chains, and hit him, but that impact of bone on flesh was nothing, nothing to the thunderbolt.

“No, no, no,” the Ila said, a light voice, like chimes. “Don’t harm him. You knew Tain’s son would have tried it.”

Marak could not get his breath past his tongue or move his chest beneath the living weight of the guards pressing down on him. He lay half-buried, on the hard edge of the steps, the object of every eye, and had time to realize the failure of his ambition, the shame of his father, and to know he had once and for all lost his mother’s life.

The gods struck down the hand that touched the Ila. Had he not heard that warning all his life? He had no gods, and the Tain had none… but he had incontrovertibly met a wall of force, and it had stolen all his breath, shaken his heart in his chest, made his limbs twitch. To make it even worse, the voices roared wildly in his ears, a deafening rush like the sound of waters.

The guards raised him up to his knees. He could not even manage to hold that position, once released, and slumped down onto his face on the floor, under the curious stares of the mad, in the spite of the Ila’s men.

“Marak Trin,” the Ila said.

He could lift his head, that much, enough to stare up at her. He moved an arm and, discovering that unthought movement under his command, attempted to draw it beneath him. It moved. He drew one and then the other knee across the cold, polished stone and heaved himself up, laughably like the beasts, rump first, then the forearms. The hands still would not move. He felt nothing but a tingling in his feet.

“Marak Trin Tain.”

The roaring in his ears went on, a torment in itself, making her voice distant. He had succeeded only in kneeling at this tyrant’s feet. There were deaths and deaths in the holy city. Men were impaled on hooks and flung from the walls or hung alive for the vermin of the air. He wondered which death was his, or if the lightning of her fingers would suffice, and burn him to a crisp.