Kingdoms of the Wall (33 page)

"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 Malti 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.

19

We had entered the Kingdom of the Kvuz, Thrance told us. This was the limit of his previous explorations; and it was, he said, by far the most dismal of the Kingdoms of the Wall. "In what way?" I asked him, thinking of the squalid snuffling of the long-tailed prisoners within the Kavnalla's cave, and the apparent soullessness of those spidery-limbed gray creatures of the high trails who had given themselves to the Sembitol. Thrance only shrugged and said, "Every man is at war against all other men here. It is the worst of places. See if I'm not right, boy."

Certainly there was no beauty in this Kingdom. It was a parched and crumpled land, somewhat like that grim plateau we had crossed so long ago, but even more brutal to the eye. We went past a place where small conical mountains belched fire and smoke and foul stinking gases, and had to cross a dark plain that was like a sea of ashes which crunched and clinked with every step we took. Dry lakes and withered streams that were no more than streams of gravel lay everywhere. Every gust of wind lifted clouds of fine dust. Now and then some bleak bubbling seepage came out of the ground, with grim little clumps of doleful shrubbery with knotted trunks and dull black leaves springing up around it. Such living creatures as we saw were pallid scuttering legless things like worms, but long as a man's arm and covered everywhere with short bristly spines. They would wriggle with surprising swiftness across the sandy soil whenever we came upon them and vanish hastily into underground nests.

It was hard for me to see how any sort of settlement could flourish in this cheerless desert. Indeed I had decided it was a Kingdom without a population and said so to Thrance, who said to me, pointing toward a rim of low eroded hummocks just to our left, "Look there, there in those stumpy hills. There is the Kingdom."

"What Kingdom? Where?"

"Do you see holes, down near the ground? In there, that's where you'll find it."

I narrowed my eyes against the sun-glare and was able to make out some small openings hardly big enough for a man to crawl through, sparsely arrayed along the face of the little hills. They were like the burrows of some reclusive animal. Thrance beckoned, and we went a little closer, so that I saw little groupings of sharp stakes set in the earth in front of each one, a sort of defensive palisade. Eyes shining with suspicion looked out at me from opening after opening.

"Those are their homes," Thrance said. His voice was edged with contempt. "They huddle in the darkness, one by one, each one crouching in there by himself all day long. No man trusts another. Everyone's hand is lifted against all others. Each has his own time to come forth and search for food; and if by chance two come out at once, and they happen to cross each other's path, one will kill the other. For they all believe that the population of the Kingdom is too great to provide everyone with enough to eat, and only by murdering the rest does any of them have a hope of surviving."