Kingdoms of the Wall

18

On the far side of the basin of the sandy hills, when the Kavnalla’s voice was only a tinny echo in my brain, I said to Thrance, “Why did you take me in there?”

“How do I know? I wanted to go in again. I knew I could withstand it. I thought you could.”

“You were drawn.”

“Maybe I was.”

We had crossed a district of crumbling tawny rock that seemed to be a boundary. Now we were entering the country of the dagger-sharp black pinnacles, which rose high before us, gleaming like mirrors by the light of bright Ekmelios. Some of my earlier pessimism returned. The Wall exhausts the resources of even the most determined; it tests you constantly, draining you of your vitality and waiting to see if you will find some new reserve of strength. For the moment I could not. We will climb this Wall forever, I told myself dully, and there will always be some new level, some continued unfolding of the endless challenge, and there is no Summit anywhere, only Wall upon Wall upon Wall. My head ached; my throat was as sore from all my singing as if I had been swallowing fire.

To Thrance I said, “The Kavnalla did its Changes on you, and still you escaped? How?”

“The transformation was only partial. I never was attached by the tail. First it puts its blood in you, which makes you very vulnerable to the change-fire that glows in every rock of this place, and you begin to shift shape, and become what those in that cave became; and then after a time you grow the tail, which is the last of the change; and finally you fasten it to the Kavnalla, and then you are lost forever. It’s like that all over the Wall, whenever there are transformations.”

“There are more Kavnallas?”

“That’s the only one, I think. But there are other Kingdoms, and other kinds of transformations. Those who have a mind to surrender to the forces of the Wall are ever at risk on its slopes.” Thrance spoke calmly, as though from an immense distance. I looked at him in wonder, understanding now something of why he was the way he was. He had slept with demons and had awakened to tell the tale; but he was no longer anything like the rest of us. He said, as we walked along, “I thought I could overpower the Kavnalla and take command of it, once I was connected to it. It’s only a great helpless slug, a thing that lies there in the darkness at the back of the cave and depends on others to feed it. I would defeat it by the strength of my will, and then we would rule together, the Kavnalla and I, lying side by side in the darkness, and I would be the King of the Kingdom of the Kavnalla and the Kavnalla would be my Queen.”

I couldn’t take my eyes from him. I had never heard such strangeness, such insanity, from anyone’s lips before.

He said, “But no, no, of course there was no way to achieve that. I realized that after a little while: the creature was stronger than I thought, there could be no overpowering it. Another day or two, and I’d have had a tail like all the rest, and I’d be a slave forever inside that cave, foraging like a beast in the muck. So I wrenched myself free before I was fully joined. I had that much strength. I sang my way out when I was only half transformed. And so you see me.”

“There can be no changing back to what you once were?”

“No,” he said. “I am what I am.”

A narrow gravel-strewn path bordered by little twisted shrubs with dusty gray leaves took us upward into the land of the narrow black pinnacles, which was the Kingdom of the Sembitol. What the Sembitol was, whether it was some parasitic denizen of the caves like the Kavnalla, is something I never learned. But I suppose that it must have been a thing of a similar sort, for it seemed to hold its people in some kind of spell of the mind, as did the Kavnalla. While we were still in the outskirts of their land Thrance pointed out to us the creatures who were in thrall to the Sembitol, moving about on steep winding trails high above us. Though at such a distance they seemed hardly bigger than little flecks, we could see that there was a strangeness about their movements, a curiously stiff and jerky way of carrying themselves, like dancers in the double-lifer dance, who pretend to be very old. And they never seemed to go one by one but only in chains of fifteen or twenty or more. Each member of the chain held a long wooden staff in one hand, with the tip pointed backward, and with his other hand grasped the staff of the one just before him as they traversed the narrow trails, which coiled around and around the outer edges of the black pinnacles the way the sacred inscriptions on a holy baton follow a coiling track along the length of the baton.

“Do they cling to each other like that because the trails are so dangerous?” I asked Thrance.

He gave me his remote, indifferent smile, no warmer than the light of far-off red Marilemma. “The trails are dangerous, yes. But they do it because they do it, and for no other reason. It is the way they are.”

“And what way is that?”

“Wait. See.” It was as if answering my questions was too much effort for him. He withdrew into himself and would say no more.

Soon a party of these strangers came into view, visible two or three turns above us on the spiral path, descending the same precipitous trail that we were climbing. They were altogether silent, moving in tight formation, separated only by the length of their staffs. At close range I saw the reason why they walked in such a stiff-jointed fashion; for their limbs were greatly lengthened and distorted, looking almost as if they had two sets of knees and elbows, though that was not in fact the case. Within this framework of long bony limbs, their bodies, small and slender, hung like afterthoughts. They wore no clothing, and their skins were of a grayish hue with a faint glossy gleam, as though their flesh had hardened into a kind of rigid translucent shell.

Every one of them was like this: every one. Their faces were the same too, with tiny pinched features close together and large staring eyes that had little sign of intelligence in them. Nor did they vary at all in height. In truth they were all of them identical, as though they had all been stamped from a single mold, so that I could not have told one from another if my life depended on it.

They were an odd, disagreeable-looking bunch.

“What are they?” I asked Thrance; and he told me that these were the people of the Kingdom of the Sembitol.

I had no idea what to make of them, though I had a theory, and not a pleasant one. To Thrance I said, “They seem almost like insects; but can there possibly be any kind of insect the size of a man?”

“They were men once, just like us,” he said. “Or women: there’s no way of telling now. But they’ve all undergone transformation here, and turned into insects. Or something of that sort, at any rate.”

It was as I had feared. Change-fire had been at work here as well.

“Will they make trouble for us, do you think?”

“Usually they’re quite peaceful,” he told me. “There’s only the risk that they may want to offer you the chance to become as they are. Which can be easily enough arranged, I suspect; but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

I replied with a sour grin. But we had a more immediate problem to consider. The trail seemed barely wide enough for one person to pass at a time, and I wondered what would happen as the two groups came face to face. When we were still some fifty paces below the other group, though, they performed a rare and extraordinary act: for upon seeing us approaching them they wordlessly broke their tight file and each at the same instant wedged the tip of his staff deep into the soil at the edge of the trail. Then they knelt and lowered their long legs over the edge, and dangled there into the abyss, gripping their staffs with both hands, making room for us to go by.

It was a wondrous sight, those twenty solemn mountaineers hanging above the nothingness like that. As we passed I looked down at them and saw no fear in their eyes, indeed saw no expression at all. They waited, as impassive as boulders, looking beyond us as though we were invisible while we filed past them. Then they scrambled to their feet and freed their staffs, and resumed their formation, and continued along their journey, having said nothing to us throughout the entire encounter. It had been like a meeting in a dream.

Perhaps an hour later we met another party of these people on the same trail; and once again, just as before, they drove their staffs into the ground with one accord and swung themselves out over the nothingness to allow us to pass. But this time there was a mishap: for just as the last of our party—Kilarion and Jaif, who were at the end of our file—went by, the rim of the trail suddenly crumbled and fell away in one place, taking two of the insect-men with it. They plummeted into the void without a sound, and when they struck the cliff face far below, there was an odd quick cracking noise, like the breaking of a day vessel, and then silence.

That was horrifying enough; but what was worse was that the remaining insect-men seemed totally unmoved by their comrades’ deaths, almost as though they were unaware of them. It was impossible that they could be, for they had been dangling one next to another in the usual close formation, and the neighbors of the two who had been lost must surely have seen them drop. But in no way did they react. After it had happened they simply hopped up onto the trail and freed their staffs and moved along without a syllable of comment, not one of them troubling to look down into the great open space that had claimed the lives of their two fellow-marchers.

“Life means nothing to them,” said Thrance. “Neither their own nor yours. They are only vacant-souled things.” He spat into the emptiness below.

I glanced back and saw the insect-men already two turns beyond us on the downward path, hurrying along toward whatever mysterious destination it was that summoned them.

The highest reaches of the dagger-peak afforded us flat ledges where we could make camp, and we halted for the night. Our goal still lay a little way beyond us, a place where a natural bridge of stone connected the uppermost spear of this tapered peak to yet another realm beyond. But darkness was coming on quickly and it seemed unwise to try to go farther until morning.

There was no wood here, so we had to do without a fire. I could see lights blazing here and there on the nearby peaks, though: each one an encampment of the insect-folk, I supposed. Thrance told me that that was so. They dwelled in hivelike warrens all around these sharp-tipped black mountains. Every one of them was a former Pilgrim; they were villagers like ourselves who had freely chosen to undergo this transformation into something lower even than a beast. I was unable to understand it. To come this far, and then to give up all individuality, all the essence of one’s unique self, in order to become a gray-shelled thing—vacant-souled, as Thrance had said—endlessly marching to and fro on these steep paths! It was incomprehensible to me. Just as the willingness of the victims of the Kavnalla to let themselves be turned into idle cave-dwelling worms feeding on muck had been incomprehensible to me. Those who had yielded to the Kavnalla had allowed themselves to become as infants again; those who had joined the soulless swarms of the Kingdom of the Sembitol in this higher level had descended to an even lower status, and had given up humanity itself.

But then I thought: What are we all, if not some sort of endlessly marching creatures, moving up and down along the trails of our lives? And toward what end? For what purpose is it that we have climbed this far, and will drive ourselves to climb even farther? Isn’t everything ultimately only a deception designed merely to carry us through from one day to the next? And if the rim crumbles and our staff comes loose, what does it matter that we fall crashing into the abyss?

Dark thoughts on a dark night. Hendy, who was beside me as she was every evening now, sensed my turmoil and pressed herself closer against me. Gradually my spirits lifted, and I held her, and we entered into Changes, and then we slept.

But in the morning two of our number were missing.

I must have known, somehow, during that hour when my soul was succumbing to such bleak thoughts, that some terrible thing was happening to our group. For when we gathered by first light to make ready for our day’s march I sensed at once that we were not all present, and a count showed that I was right. Of our original Forty we had already lost five along the way: but now I could count only thirty-three this morning, apart from Thrance. I looked up and down the ranks, trying to see who was missing. “Ment?” I said finally. “Where is Ment? And someone else isn’t here. Tenilda? No, there you are. Bilair? Maiti?”

Bilair and Maiti were still with us, toward the rear of the group. But Ment the Sweeper was gone, yes. And among the women, Tull the Clown. I sent searchers in all directions, in groups of three and four. Though we had camped a fair distance from the edge, I walked to it and peered over, thinking that they might have wandered in their sleep and fallen to their deaths; but I saw no bodies on the crags below. And the searchers returned without any news to report.

Ment had been a quiet, hard-working, uncomplaining man. High-spirited Tull had diverted us in many a somber moment. I was hard pressed to reconcile myself to their disappearance. I called Dorn over, for he was of Tull’s House and knew her well. His eyes were red with weeping. “Did she say anything to you about leaving us?” I asked him. He shook his head. He knew nothing; he was dazed and distraught. As for Ment, he had never been one to open his soul to others. There was no one else of his House among us that I could question, nor even anyone who could be considered his friend.

“Forget them,” Thrance advised. “You’ll never see them again. Pack up and move along.”

“Not so soon,” I told him. I put Thissa to work casting a spell of finding. That was sky-magic, not as arduous for her as the other kind; we gave her some garment that Ment had left behind and a Clown-toy out of Tull’s pack, and she sent forth her soul into the air to see if she could locate their owners. Meanwhile I ordered more search parties out, and they roved the trail behind us and a little way ahead, but with no more luck than before. Then Thissa looked up from her spell-casting and said that she could feel the presence of the missing two somewhere nearby, but the message was confused: they were still alive, she believed, and yet she was unable to tell us anything more useful than that.

“Give it up,” Thrance said again. “There’s no hope. Trust me: this is how a Forty comes apart, when the transformations begin.”

I shook my head. “Your Forty, maybe. Not mine. We’ll look for them a little longer.”

“As you wish,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll wait.” He rose and gave me a mocking courtly bow, and turned and started up the trail. I stared after him, gaping like a fish. Even with his limping gait he was moving at a phenomenal pace; already he was a turn and a half above us on the spiral path.

“Thrance,” I called, shaking with fury. “Thrance!”

Galli came up beside me. She slipped her arm through mine. “Let him go,” she said. “He’s hateful and dangerous.”

“But he knows the way.”

“Let him go. We found our own way well enough before he was ever with us.”

Hendy came to me on the other side. “Galli’s right,” she said quietly. “We’re better off without him.”

I knew that it was true: dark-souled Thrance was useful but at any moment had the capacity to turn disruptive and menacing. From the beginning my alliance with him had been a grudging one, a mingling of uneasy respect and practical need. But his transformation, partial though it had been, had taken him over into a world that was not my own. He might be our fellow villager, but he was no longer entirely one of us. He was capable of anything, now. Anything. Let him go, I told myself.

We searched for Ment and Tull another two hours. A long chain of the mountain-men came through our camp, thirty of them at least, while we combed the nearby caves and crevices for our companions. I put myself in their path and said, “We have lost two of our number. Do you know where they are?” But they looked right through me without responding and did not so much as break their pace. I cried out to Naxa to speak to them in Gotarza, hoping that they might at least understand the old language; he called out some harsh babble to them, but that drew no reaction either, and they went around us and vanished down the trail. In the end I had to abandon the search. And so we went on, having lost Ment and Tull and Thrance also, or so it seemed to me at the time. I fell into deep brooding, once again thinking myself a failure as leader; for it pained me deeply to have members of my Forty fall away from the group.

By midday we were at the natural bridge that would carry us on into the next Kingdom. It was a terrifying place, an airy vaulting span across the steepest of gorges: a curved sliver of shining black stone so narrow that we would have to go single-file on it, with a gulf beyond all measuring dropping off on either side of us. Talbol and Thuiman were the first to reach the bridge approach, and hung back, wide-eyed, unwilling to go across; for the bridge seemed so fragile that it would shatter at the first pressure of a man’s weight. They were no heroes, those two, but still I couldn’t blame them for hesitating. I would have hesitated a moment myself, staring into that brink. But what choice did we have, except to go on? And others must have gone this way often before us.

Galli said, laughing robustly, “Will it break? Let me test it out! If it’ll carry me, it’ll hold anyone!” Without waiting for confirmation from me she set out across the bridge, head held high, shoulders pulled back, arms stretched far to her sides to give her balance. Quickly she went, taking step after step after step with supreme confidence. When she had crossed it she looked back and laughed. “Come on over! It’s solid as can be!”

And so we crossed the bridge, though some had a harder time of it than others. We opened the sucker-pads on our toes to give us the best purchase, but still it was a frightening business. The bridge would bear us, yes; but this was not a place where one might stumble more than once. Chaliza was so green of face that I feared she would lose consciousness and topple to her death midway, though somehow she made it. Naxa did it on hands and knees. Bilair crossed it trembling and shaking. But Kilarion bestrode the bridge as if it were a broad meadow, and Jaif went across singing, and Gazin with a Juggler’s easy stride. Thissa seemed to float across. Traiben moved like one who has no natural skill at these things yet was determined to manage it deftly, and he did. Hendy’s crossing was an agony to me, but she betrayed no fear or uncertainty. And at last it was my turn, having held myself for last as if by staring at my companions from the rear I could help them keep their balance by sheer prayer alone. As I made my way over I had reason to curse my twisted leg, for it made gripping the bridge difficult on that side, but I knew how to compensate for the awkwardness of my deformity and I was skilled enough in mountaineering by this time to understand the art of narrowing my concentration to a single point just ahead of my nose. So I paid no heed to the chill currents of swift air rising out of the abyss and I ignored the flickering movements of the sunlight on the bare walls of stone to my right and to my left and I dismissed from my mind any thought of the huge shadow into which I would fall if I put one foot down awry; I took one step and the next and the one after that, keeping my mind empty of all distractions; and then Kilarion had me by one hand and Traiben by the other and they were pulling me the last step of the way and we were done with the bridge-crossing.

Except then Thissa said, “I feel a presence behind us. Below us.” And she pointed back across the bridge.

“A presence? What presence?”

She shook her head. “Ment? Tull? It could be.”

We had attained a wind-raked knob of rock, barren and stark and wholly exposed to the ferocity of the noon sun, which in the thin air of these heights was unrelenting. I saw the crackling flash of blue lightning above us, and that was strange, for the air here was cloudless and parched; and there were the usual dark sinister birds wheeling high overhead. So this was no place of placid repose where I cared to have us linger. But it would be folly not to trust Thissa’s intuitions. I divided the group; most went ahead under Galli’s leadership to find a campsite where we could rest while scouting out our next challenge, while I waited by the bridge with Thissa and Kilarion and a few others to see who or what might be coming toward us from the rear.

For a long while we saw and heard nothing, and even Thissa began to think she had been mistaken. Then Kilarion let out a whoop. We sprang up and stared into the glare of sunlight reflecting from the walls of the gorge: and there was a solitary figure laboring up the spiral path that led to the bridge.

I struggled to make it out against the searing brightness. I thought I saw long spidery limbs, a tiny body, a flash of grayish glossy skin. “One of the mountain-men,” I said in disgust.

“No,” said Traiben. “Tull, I think.”

“Tull? But how—”

“Do the mountain-men ever travel by ones?” he asked me. “Look! Look close!”

“Tull yes,” said Kilarion. “I see her face. But her face—on that body—”

The creature came up the path on the far side, moving in mountain-man fashion but far more clumsily, as though well gone in drunkenness. It appeared to have little control over its elongated limbs, and its every step was a staggering slide. Then it halted, just before the approach to the bridge proper. It stood as though baffled, swaying, fitfully weaving its long narrow arms through the air. It took a tentative step forward and managed somehow to get its legs tangled, so that it had to drop to its knees and crouch there clinging to the ground, befuddled and helpless. I could see its face now: Tull’s, Tull’s, unmistakably Tull’s, the familiar sharp features, the familiar wide grinning clown-mouth. But she wasn’t grinning now. Her lips were pulled down into a terrible knotted grimace of terror and confusion.

“We have to get her,” Kilarion said.

And so we crossed the bridge again, he and I, not for an instant pausing to consider the risks we faced. I have no memory of doing it; but then I was on the far side once more, and Kilarion and I took the altered Tull by the arms and legs, and we brought her across. One convulsion of fear from her would have hurled the three of us into the abyss. But she hung like old rope between us, and he and I moved as though we were a single four-legged entity, and not until we were safe on the other side did we drop down, shaking and shivering like men at the edge of their final illness. Then Kilarion began to laugh, and so did I; and we turned our backs on that terrible bridge for good and all.

The others had settled down a thousand paces ahead in a wooded bowl beneath a dusk-colored mountain so folded and gnarled that it had a look of unthinkable age. We brought Tull to them and our three Healers began their work on her, in the hope of bringing her back to her true form. The rest of us looked away, out of respect for her suffering; but I glanced over, once, and saw Jekka lying with her in his arms, doing the Changes, while Maiti and Kreod held her hands in theirs, and Tull was half like herself again and half the other way. It was so awful a sight that I shut my eyes and tried to blot the image from my mind, but I could not.

It took two hours to return her to herself, and even then she carried a hint of strangeness with her, a slight elongation of the limbs, a faint gray tint in her skin, that I knew she would never lose. Nor did the gaiety that a Clown must have, or at least be able to feign at will, ever come back to her. But I was glad she was back. It did not seem proper to me to ask her why she had chosen to slip away, nor what had made her decide midway through her transformation to return to us; those were Tull’s secrets, no business of ours.

As for Ment, she said, we would never see him again. He was of the Kingdom of the Sembitol now. And I suspected that that was true, so we spent no further time waiting for him.

We rested a little while longer from our bridge crossing and then we went on our way into this new land of tilted and upturned layers of ancient gray rock. We had not traveled more than half an hour along the rough, lizard-infested trail when we came upon Thrance, sitting calmly against a huge boulder beside the road. He nodded to us very pleasantly, and got to his feet and fell in with us without saying a word.