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“From that you know how to talk to us.”
“Ah. But we’ve listenedfor years.”
“Among us.” The prospect chilled. No one had known the ahnit couldspeak; or wanted to know; or cared. Humans chattered on; and ahnit—invisible—listened, going everywhere, because no one could see them. He shook his head, trying to do what the others had done, retreating to a safer oblivion; but he had been in the port, had tried to function as an invisible, and it had not saved him from shame.
Or from this.
“We’ve waited,” said the ahnit.
It was Statement again. “For what?” he asked, playing the game Masters had played with him and he had played with Students in his turn. He became Student again. “For what, ahnit?”
“I don’t know the word,” it admitted. “I’ve never heard it.” It made a sound, a guttural and hiss. “That’s our word.”
“That’s yourreality; it has nothing to do with mine.”
“But you see me.”
It was an answer. He turned it over in his mind, trying to get the better of it. Perhaps it was the pain that muddled him; perhaps there was no answer. He wanted it to let him go ... wantedsomething, if the words would not have choked him on his own pride. The fact was there even if he kept it inside. Had always been there. He had denied it before. Tried to cancel it.
Truth was not cancelable, if there was something that could coerce him; and he had no wish to live in a world that was not of his making ... in which Waden Jenks and his Outsiders, and now an ahnit limited his reach, and crippled him, and sat down in front of him to watch him suffer.
“What do you want?” he challenged it, on the chance it would reveal a dependency.
“You’ve done that already,” it said, and destroyed his hope. “Do you want a drink, Herrin Law?”
It was not i
Patiently it tucked the cloak about him again, silent statement.
“Why did you bring me here?” he asked. Curiosity was always his enemy; he recognized that. It led him places better avoided.
“I rest here,” it said.
Worse, and worse places. “Where, then?”
A dark, robed arm lifted, toward the west and the hills, upriver. The road ran past those hills, but there were no farms there; were no humans there.
I’ll die first, he thought, but in this and in everything he had diminished confidence. “Why?” he asked.
“Where would you go?” it asked him.
He thought, shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, pressing out tears of frustration. He looked at it again.
“I’ll take you into the hills,” it said. “There are means I can find there, to heal your hurts.”
An end of pain, perhaps; it worked on him with that, as Waden Jenks might, and perhaps as pitilessly. “Do what you like,” he said with desperate humor. “I permit it.”
The ahnit relaxed its mouth and small, square teeth glinted. “Mostly,” it said, “humans are insane.” Herrin’s heart beat shatteringly hard when he heard that, for what it implied of realities, and this reality was devastatingly strong. “Who broke your hands, Herrin Law?”
He was trembling. “Outsiders. At Waden Jenks’s orders.”
“Why?”
“So there would be no more statues.”
“You disturbed them, didn’t you?”
He rolled his eyes to keep the burning from becoming tears, but what he saw was stars and that black distance made him smaller still. “It seems,” he said, carefully controlling his voice, “that raw power has its moment.”
“Where would you go?” it asked. “Where do you want to go? What is there?”
He shook his head, still refusing to blink. There was nowhere. Wherever he was, what had happened to him remained.
Carefully it slipped its arms beneath him and gathered him up, wrapped as he was in its cloak. It folded him against its bony chest and he made no resistance. It walked, and chose its own way, a sure and constant movement.
XXIII
Student: What if Others existed?
Master Law: Have they relevancy?
Student: Not to man.
Master Law: What if man weretheir dream?
Student: Sir?
Master Law: How would you know?
Student: (Silence.)
There was a long time that he shut his eyes and yielded to the motion, and passed more and more deeply into insensibility, jolted out of it occasionally when some stitch of pain grew sharp. Then he would twist his body to ease it, faint and febrile effort, and the ahnit would shift him in its arms, seldom so much as breaking stride. Most of all he could not bear to have his hands dangle free, with the blood swelling in them, with the least brush at the swollen skin turned to agony. He turned to keep them tucked crossed on his chest and thus secure from further hurt. He trusted the steadiness of the arms which held him and the thin legs which strode almost constantly uphill. It was all dark to him. He was lost, without orientation; the river lay behind them—there was no memory of crossing the only bridge but his memory was full of gaps and he could not remember what direction they had been facing when the ahnit had pointed toward the hills. Acrossthe river, he had thought; and up the river; but then he had not remembered the bridge, and he trusted nothing that he remembered.
They climbed and the climb grew steeper and steeper. Grass whispered. The breeze would have been cold if not for the ahnit’s own warmth. We shall stop soon, he thought, reckoning that it had him now within its own country, and that it would be content.
But it kept going, and he had time for renewed fear, that it was, after all, mad, and that he was utterly lost, not knowing back from forward. In time exhaustion claimed him again and he had another dark space.
He wakened falling, and flailed wildly, hit his hand on an arm and cried out with surprised misery. His back touched earth gently, and the ahnit’s strong arms let him the rest of the way down, knelt above him to touch his face and bend above him. “Rest,” it said.
He slept, and wakened with the sun in his face. Waked alone, and with nothing but grass and hills about him and a rising panic at solitude. He levered himself up, squeezing tears of pain from his eyes, broken ribs aching, and his hands ... at every change in elevation of his head he came close to passing out. Standing up was a calculated risk. He took it, swayed on his braced legs and tried to see where he was, but there were hills in all directions.
“Ahnit!” he called out, panicked and thirsty and lost. He wandered a few steps in pain, felt a pressure in his bladder and, crippled as he was, had difficulty even attending that necessity. It frightened him, in a shamed and inexpressible way, that even the privacy of his body was threatened. His knees were shaking under him. He made it back to the place where he had slept and sank down, hands tucked upward on his chest, eyes squeezed shut in misery.
There was sun for a while, and finally a whispering in the grass. He looked toward it, vaguely apprehensive, and an ahnit came striding down the hill, cloakless. By that, it was the one which had left him here: it came to him and knelt down, regarded him with wet black eyes and small, pursed mouth, midnight-ski