Kingdoms of the Wall (31 page)

Who would believe such a thing? But that was all we needed to shield ourselves against this dread monster.

In the morning Thrance told me to summon the entire group; and as we gathered round him, he explained what we must do. The Kavnalla waited for us just on the far side of these white hills. From the moment we broke camp, he said, we must raise our voices in song, loudly, lustily, bellowing any tune that came into our heads, or no tune at all. It was the noise that was important. More than a moment or two of silence could be fatal. And if anyone should lose their voice through overuse, those nearby must seize them and hold them tight, pulling them forward through the Kavnalla's territory until they had recovered.

"And what is the Kavnalla itself, then?" Traiben asked.

"A dire creature of the Wall," said Thrance. "A thing that is placed here to lure the weak from their proper path. More than that, what can I tell you? A gigantic thing: a parasite: an enemy of our kind. Sing, and pass it by. Why do you need to know what it is? Sing, boy. Sing and run past, and save yourself."

Of true Singers we had only two, Jaif and Dahain. We placed them at the head of our column next to Thrance, for by virtue of their House they knew the secret of making a very great sound with relatively little effort. The rest of us, but for a few, had no ear for melody at all, and when we sang it was more of a croaking or a screeching or a wailing than any kind of a music. But Thrance said our lives depended on our singing, and so we sang. I moved up and down the ranks, listening to the others while I sang myself, making certain they were doing as Thrance said. Thissa, always shy, was giving forth only a tiny silver thread of sound, and I took her by the shoulder and shook her, crying, "Sing, woman! For Kreshe's sake, sing!" Little Bilair the Scholar likewise could produce no more than a pitiful breathy wheeze, out of fear, I suppose, and I stood beside her, roaring a crude drinking-song to which I knew hardly half the words, and made encouraging gestures at her with my hands until she managed to bring some volume of sound up from her lungs. I went by Naxa, who was droning away on a single terrible wearisome note, but very loudly, and Tull, who sang a rollicking clownish tune in a high, stabbing voice, and Galli, booming some bit of bawdiness in a voice fit to bring down the mountain upon us, and Grycindil almost as loud, and Kath babbling a hymn of his House in quick tumbling phrases, and Kilarion red-faced and grinning as he yelled tremendous raucous whoops into the air. Thrance's own song was a raw tuneless rasping thing, like metal against metal, very painful to hear. And so we all went. If Thrance were playing a joke on us by this, he was getting his full measure of amusement. Surely no such noise had ever been heard in the world's whole history as we made upon that morning on Kosa Saag.

Thrance was playing no joke, though. Beneath all our horrendous noise I still could hear the Kavnalla's own song, trying to lure us on.
This is the way, yes... come... come....
But it was buried beneath the force of our outcries. It was down there in the depths of our mind, but it was small and scratchy and tinny now. You know what they say, that a sound is so great that one can scarcely hear oneself think? That was what we achieved with our singing. And if we could not think we could not succumb to the pull that we felt in our minds. We were hiding the Kavnalla's urgings from ourselves with all our crazy clamor.

Roistering and braying and howling like a pack of madmen, then, we came over the crest of the white hills and found ourselves in a broad basin rimmed by soft low yellow slopes half covered in sand. New peaks rolled upward as always beyond the basin's far border: jagged fierce black ones, sharp as awls, forbidding, dismaying, stabbing deep into the ice-blue sky. Dark birds that must have been of great size, but seemed to us no bigger than specks, circled above those remote daggers of stone.

Closer at hand, at the edge of the rounded yellow slopes just to our left, I saw a long shallow-vaulted cave, broad-mouthed and dark within, with a deep track beaten in the sand leading up to it. I knew without needing to be told that within that cave lay the source of the secret voice that we had been hearing all during this part of our climb. Thrance saw me staring at it, and sang into my ear in his croaking tuneless way, "The Kavnalla is there, the Kavnalla is there!"

"Yes," I sang. "I feel the pull pulling." I stared into the darkness, frightened and fascinated. "Tell me," I sang, "will it come out, will it come out?" And Thrance sang in reply to me, "No, no, the Kavnalla goes nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, it lies in wait and we go to it."

And just at that moment the Scholar Bilair bolted from the group, no longer singing but merely whimpering and murmuring to herself, and began to run up the sandy slope toward the mouth of the cave. Instantly I saw what she was doing and ran in pursuit. Thrance also came. We caught up with her midway up the slope. I seized her by one shoulder, spun her around, stared into a wild-eyed face, frozen in a strange grimace.

"Please—" she muttered. "Let—me—go—"

Without pausing in my singing I struck her across the face, not really hard, but stunning her for a moment. Bilair looked at me in bewilderment. She blinked and shook her head; and then the light of understanding returned to her features. She nodded to me and muttered a few indistinct words of thanks and I heard her take up the piping song she had sung before. I released her and she ran like a frightened animal back to the others, singing as loudly as she could.

I turned to Thrance. He laughed and a strange diabolical sparkle came into his eyes and in the same hateful rasping singsong he had been using before he sang, "Let me show you the Kavnalla, let me show you the Kavnalla!"

"What are you saying, what are you saying?" I asked him, singing at the top of my lungs in a rhythm very much like Thrance's own. It was absurd for us to be singing to each other like this. Behind me the whole group had halted and were staring at the dark cave-mouth also, and it seemed to me that some of them had stopped singing. "Sing!" I yelled at them. "Don't stop, not for a moment!
Sing!
"

Thrance gripped my shoulder and bent his head toward mine and sang, "We can go in, you and I. lust for a look! lust for a look!"

Why was the demon tempting me this way? "How can we risk it?" I sang back. "We should just keep moving!"

"Just for a look, just for a look." Thrance beckoned. His eyes were like fiery coals. "Keep singing and nothing will happen. Sing, Poilar, sing, sing, sing, sing!"

It was like a madness. Thrance began to trudge toward the cave-mouth and I followed him, helpless as a slave, along that tight-packed beaten path. The others pointed and gaped but they did nothing to stop us; I think they were too dazed and bemuddled by the proximity of the Kavnalla's powerful mind. Only Traiben left the group and trotted toward us, but it wasn't to prevent me from going in. He ran up to us still singing, and what he sang was, "Take me too, take me too!" Of course. His hunger to know was ever insatiable.

So despite all reason we three went into the cave, right into the mouth of the enemy.

Never once did we cease to sing. Perhaps we had lost our minds but at least that much common sense remained to us. My throat was ragged and inflamed now from this misuse, but still I barked and shrieked and bellowed for all I was worth, and so did Thrance, and Traiben also, the three of us making such a terrible din that I thought the walls of the cave must surely bend outward beneath its force.

Within the cave an eerie gray light prevailed. It came from dark glossy mottled mats of some living, growing thing that clung to the surfaces of the rock; and when our eyes adapted to it, as they did after a moment or two, we saw that the cave was a huge one, deep and extremely wide, and that this light-yielding plant illuminated it even in its farthermost depths. We went in. Occasional clouds of dark spores rose from the mats on the rocks and a thick black juice ebbed constantly from their rough, pebbly surfaces, as if they were bleeding.

"Look, look, look, look!" Thrance sang, on rising pitches.

In the middle sector of the cave were waxy-skinned black creatures crawling about over the mottled mats. They were long and low, with elongated limbs with which they pulled themselves slowly around, and they kept their heads down, feeding in slurping bites on the sticky substance that the mats exuded. Narrow tails of enormous length extended far behind them, tails that were more like long ropes, sprouting from their rumps and snaking off for impossible distances into the rear of the cave.

Thrance, capering about, went to one of these creatures and lifted its head.

"Look, look, look, look!"

I was so astounded I almost forgot for a moment to keep singing. The thing's face was almost like a man's! I saw a mouth, a nose, a chin, eyes. It made a grunting sound and tried to pull away, but Thrance held it up for a moment, long enough for me to realize that the face was not simply
like
a man's, it
was
a man's: I knew that I must be looking at a Transformed One, that what was groveling and nuzzling here before me in the slimy muck of the floor of the cave had to be one who had yielded to the call of the Kavnalla. I trembled at the thought that so many of our kin from the village had been lost this way on the Wall.

"Sing!" Traiben reminded me. "Sing, Poilar! Or you are lost!"

I was numb with amazement and horror. "What are these? Who are they? Do you know them?"

Thrance's laughter traveled up and down the notes of the scale. "This was Bradgar, this was Stit, this was Halimir," he sang. He pointed to one who wallowed not far from me. "That one there was Gortain."

I remembered that name.

"Gortain who was Lilim's lover?"

"Gortain who was Lilim's lover, yes."

And I trembled and came close to weeping, for into my mind flooded the memory of sweet Lilim who had been the first to make the Changes with me, and who had told me of her lover Gortain who had gone up the Wall. Lilim who had said to me, "If you see him there when you go up, carry my love to him, for I have never forgotten him." Lilim's Gortain crawled at my feet now, a black waxy-skinned thing with a tail, transformed beyond any recognition and linked by that long ropy appendage to the unknown monstrosity at the rear of the cave. I could not help myself. I knelt beside him and sang Lilim's name to him, for I had promised her that I would. I hoped that he would be beyond understanding; but I was wrong, for his eyes went wide, and I saw such terrible pain in them that I would gladly have ripped my heart from my breast if it could have given him peace. He wept without shedding tears. It was an awful sight. But I had promised Lilim long ago that I would look for her Gortain and give him her greeting, though I was sorry now that ever I had, or that I had found him.

"Sing!" Traiben cried. "Don't stop, Poilar!"

Sing? How could I sing? I wanted to die of shame, I was silent for a moment with my head bowed, and in that moment I heard the Kavnalla's voice thundering like ten rockslides in my mind, ordering me to come to it and yield myself up to it, and I took a faltering step inward; but Thrance caught hold of me with a strength beyond all comprehension, holding me back, and Traiben struck me between the shoulders to bring me to my senses, and I nodded and opened my mouth and a shriek came out that someone might shriek while being flayed alive, and another shriek after that one, and another, and that was the song I sang.

"Lilim—" murmured the thing at my feet, in a voice like a groan, which for all its faintness cut through my shrieking like the blaring of a brass bindanay. "Bring me to Lilim—Lilim—I want to go home—home—home—"

I knelt to him. His face was smeared with the juice of the thing he had been eating. Black tears rolled from his tormented eyes.

"Poilar, no, keep back, keep back—"

Thrance. But I paid no heed. I looked into those desperate eyes with pity and love; and Gortain reached to me and wrapped his arms about me like a drowning man. I thought it was a hug of companionship, but then I felt him pulling at me, tugging me, trying to drag me across the floor of the cave toward the Kavnalla. Of course he could not do it. He was just a crawling squirming thing on the ground and his limbs had lost whatever strength they once had had. But I felt the pull all the same, not in my mind this time but on my body, and fear took hold of me. With a sharp twist of my body I broke free of him and rolled to my side, and then, without even thinking, I drew my knife from its sheath and severed the interminable cord that linked him to the thing in the depths of the cave. Gortain howled and rolled himself into a ball, and quivered and jerked for a moment, and then went into wild leaping convulsions, arching up and falling back, arching up and falling back. "Sing!" Traiben ordered me again, as I stood there stupidly.

I opened my mouth and a croaking rusty noise came out. And Thrance, snatching the knife from my dangling hand, plunged it swiftly into Gortain's chest as the pitiful creature rose and fell.

Gortain was still. But all about us the other slaves of the Kavnalla were roiling and writhing and wriggling up close to us, as though they meant to surround us and drag us somehow toward the back of the cave.

"Out!" Thrance sang. "Out, out, out, out!" And we fled.

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?"