Gazin must have been wrong, though. He was simply trying to assert his own importance, as Jugglers will do; but he had never seen a wind-sprite, for such creatures were known only in ancient times. I had always understood the wind-sprites of the old tales to be delicate and elfin things, and these were hardly that. Though their bodies were so little, they were as shaggy as beasts, covered with thick rank grayish-blue fur which gave them a foul, malevolent look. The deliberate motion of their great wings was ominous and disagreeable. When they swooped down over us close enough for us to have a clear view of their faces, we saw that they were astonishingly ugly, with flat black noses and nostrils that were gaping holes and eyes like green fire, and tall ears tipped with tufts of thick hair. They had four great yellow teeth, two above and two below, that jutted far beyond their lips and went across each other like curving daggers. The feeble hands ended in savage talons. Could there have been any creature less spritelike and more hideous?
They circled above us for hours, far into the night, never once attempting to land. One passed almost within reach of me, and I smelled the sour smell of its wings and heard it hissing to itself in a low malevolent voice.
As these wind-sprites, or demons, or whatever they were, soared over us again and again, they screamed at us — harsh, raucous cries. After a time it seemed to me that the rhythm of their shrieks was much like speech: that they were saying something to us — shrieking it at us, rather — using words, actual words, but in a language I could not understand. It was like a language one might hear in a dream, although in dreams one can sometimes understand unknown languages, and I could not make a syllable’s worth of sense of what these flying monstrosities were trying to tell us. But their tone was malign. It had the sound of a spell. Worse: the sound of a curse.
I saw Thissa huddling against a rock, shivering and weeping. Now and then she would make a Witch-sign as one of the sprites passed close to her. Naxa went to her and slipped his arm around her as though to comfort her. I heard him speaking softly to her, and she nodded, and then he put his head back and shouted something to the creatures overhead. But I had no idea what he might be saying to them.
Most of us went sleepless that night, sitting up beside the fire with our cudgels in our hands, ready to defend ourselves if the need arose. The need did not arise, though; and as dawn came the demons vanished as if frightened of the light.
Throughout all that day we marched at an unusual speed, almost as though by going without sleep we had gained some new energy: but in fact I think it was only a mark of our fatigue that we pushed ourselves onward so unreasonably, heedless of the toll it was taking on us, or perhaps we simply moved fast to get ourselves away from the country of the flying demons. If that was our hope, it was an idle one, because they were back above us as soon as darkness fell, circling and circling and circling, shrieking their curses at us once again.
And once again I heard Naxa shouting back to them, seemingly using the words of their own harsh tongue. I went to him and said, “Are you able to understand their language?”
It was the first time Naxa and I had been near each other since I had allowed him to return to the Pilgrimage. He eyed me fearfully, as though he thought I would strike him with my cudgel. Then he threw a nervous glance toward Thissa, who was nearby, perhaps meaning to summon her to his aid if I chose to attack him. But Thissa was staring off into some realm of mystery and whispering to herself.
“Are you?” I asked.
He moistened his lips. “A little,” he said, looking down at the ground. He was terrified of me.
“What language is it that they speak, then?”
“The name of it is Gotarza. A very ancient language, one that was spoken in our land many cycles ago. I studied it when I was a boy. We Scribes keep knowledge of such things.” Naxa hesitated. “And what they are saying, I think, isCome and be melted, come and be melted. Or perhaps it’sYou will be melted. I can’t be sure. My knowledge of Gotarza is very uncertain.”
“Melted?” I said.
“That’s the one word I have no doubt of. Like a waxen figure, is what they mean. It’s a word of change. Think of the way a waxen figure will soften and run and change its form when a Witch heats it to cast her spell.”
“And they want us to melt?” I asked.
Naxa nodded.
“This makes no sense to me.”
“Nor to me, really. I’ve been telling them to go away, that we will never do as they wish us to. Perhaps they can’t understand me. I tell you, Poilar, my command of their language is extremely weak. But Thissa agrees with me that they’re beckoning us onward to something strange.”
“Do Witches study the ancient language also, then?”
“No,” said Naxa. “But Thissa speaks the language of the mind. She reads the demons’ meaning without using words. And that’s why she’s so frightened. Thissa understands all languages — the language of the rocks, the language of the trees, the language of the demons of the air. She is a santha-nilla, Poilar. There’s powerful magic in her. Didn’t you know that?”
I looked at him, taken aback. I had not known, no, though I was aware that Thissa’s powers were strong. But that strong? No more than a handful of santha-nillas are born in any generation. I had lain in Thissa’s arms and made the Changes with her more than once, and yet I had never realized that she was a Witch of the most powerful kind. I wondered now if the troublesome tingling that came from her when she made the Changes, that odd and disturbing emanation, was a sign of her special gift, which I had been too ignorant to understand. But evidently Naxa had not been so obtuse.
“The village allowed a santha-nilla to go on the Pilgrimage?” I asked. “That’s hard to believe. There are so few of them, Naxa. I would think that they’d want to prevent her from going, to save her for the needs of the village.”
“They didn’t know,” Naxa said. “No one down there did. She hid it from them. Because she felt that the needs of the village would best be served by having her go on the Pilgrimage, I suppose. But I thought you had certainly found it out. Inasmuch as you and she —” He let his voice trail off and shook his head. “You must cherish her, Poilar. And protect her.”
“Yes,” I said.
“The sky-demons frighten her very much. All this talk of melting —”
“No harm will come to her,” I said. “No harm will come to any of us, I promise you. No one’s going to be melted. I won’t allow it to happen.” Though of course I had no idea what it was that I was pledging myself to prevent. Melted? Melted? It made no sense to me at all. But I would wait and see.
THERE WASN’T LONG TOwait. We were almost to the far side of the plateau, now. The Wall once again rose before us, straight up to the heavens. We had nearly reached the place just in front of it where the black river and the white one flowed together; and as we came down out of a group of low smooth hills round as breasts into the meeting-place of the waters, we saw a congregation of grotesque beings waiting for us there — hundreds, even thousands of them, massed together, milling about. Some were on our side of the water, some were standing right in it, and the rest — the preponderance of them — were fanned out all across the gently rising land on the farther bank, a chaotic multitude that extended well out into the hazy distance.
They were misshapen beyond belief. Nightmare figures, they were. No two of them were alike. There was nothing the mind could imagine that I did not see beside those riverbanks. Some were short and squat like gnomes, and others were tall as giants, but drawn out very thin, so you could snap them with an angry glance. There was one with a single great eye that filled most of his face, and one beside him with a row of little glittering eyes like black beads that ran all around his head, and another that had no eyes at all or nostrils either, only a gleaming half dome from mouth to forehead.
I saw ears as long as arms, and lips like platters, and hands that dangled to the ground. One had no legs, but four arms on which he spun like a wheel. Another had two fleshy
wings sprouting from his cheeks and hanging down alongside him like curtains. One had hands like gigantic shovels thrust out before him; one had a male member long as a log jutting forth as though he was in perpetual Change; one had tails fore and aft that lashed like furious whips. There was one that was twisted and gnarled like a tree ten thousand years old; another had no features at all, but was perfectly smooth and blank; and another appeared to be without bones, and moved like a writhing coil of rope.
I saw more, much more. Little shuffling ones, and gaunt angular ones, and great spherical ones. Creatures covered with bristling spines, with rough pebbly bark, with scales like a glittering fish. Ones with grassy skin, and ones with hairy hides, and ones that were transparent, so you could see their organs beating and throbbing and the middlebone running like a white mast through their torsos.
A torrent of questions rose in me. Why were all these creatures here, in this bleak forlorn place? Where had they come from? How was it that they had such variety of form, each one different from the next, each one uglier than the next?
Traiben was beside me. I said to him in awe, “The gods must have had spoiled fish to eat, the day they created these monsters! Can there be anything more ghastly in all the world? What reason could there possibly have been for bringing such things into existence?”
“The same,” he said, “that there was for creating you and me.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“These are people, I think,” said Traiben. “Or were, at any rate. People much like any of us, beneath their deformities.”
That was a dismaying idea. “No!” I cried. “Impossible! How can these be any kin of ours?”
“Look closely,” he said. “Try to see the form that underlies the form.”
I made an effort to do as he urged me: to screen out the superficial manifestations of strangeness, and to look beneath the bizarre chaotic exteriors, seeking not for the things that made these beings so strange but for the aspects of bodily design that they might have in common with one another, and with us. And I saw, as my bedazzled eyes roved down the baffling ranks of them, that the basic structure of their bodies was not very different from ours: that the great majority of them tended to have two arms, two legs, a head, a central torso. Those which had hands had six fingers on each, in the main, just as we do. Those which had eyes generally had two. And so forth. There were wild deviations from the norm wherever I looked, but there was a distinct norm, and that was a shape much like ours.
“Well?” Traiben said.
“They are a little like us in some respects,” I admitted uneasily. “But it’s a coincidence and nothing more. Some bodily forms are universal, that’s all — an obvious shape for beings of a certain shape to have. But such similarities don’t prove any — ”
“What do you make of that one?” Traiben asked, pointing. “Or that? And that? There is change-fire at work here, Poilar.”
“Change-fire?” And I shivered out of fear. For as he said the word, I imagined I felt invisible waves of dreadful diabolical force sweeping up out of the parched earth and beginning to turn my body into something as monstrous as any of the creatures before me.
“The power of this place has transformed them into these things you see,” said Traiben. “But once they looked like you and me.”
I looked. What he was showing me, here and there in this nightmare horde, were a few that in a dim light could almost have passed for one of us. Their forms were different from ours in only two or three trivial respects. I said as much to Traiben, and he nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “The transformations haven’t been as great in them as in the others.”
“Are you saying that all these creatures began by looking as we do, and then were reshaped into these forms?”
“Indeed. These things we see before us must be the Melted Ones that Naxa told us of.”
Of course! How else could such shapes have come into being? It was as if they all had been put into a crucible and heated until they were soft, and then drawn out while still pliable, and modeled randomly into a myriad weird and fanciful designs. If that was so, I thought, then the ones that looked somewhat like us might be ones who had incompletely melted, ones in whom the process had not been taken through to its fullest degree.
And I felt new terror. Bodily transformation is no unusual thing among us, as I scarcely need tell you. It is our birthright, our natural condition, for us to be able to alter our forms in certain small ways as the need requires. But this was shapechanging beyond all reason or possibility. No Changes that we do create transformations anywhere near as grotesque as could be seen here at this meeting-place of the two rivers, and of course we take pains to return ourselves to our basic forms when the occasion for Changes is ended. Here was an entire population of people who had gone through the most extreme Changes imaginable, and must have stayed that way, locked perpetually into this terrible strangeness. But why? Why? And how? It was in our training days that we first had heard, and only half believed, those dire tales of change-fire, the force that rises from the depths of the mountain, and the strangenesses that it creates. We believed it now. The ghosts we had seen early in the climb must have felt change-fire’s power. But what stood before us now went far beyond that, and struck bewilderment into me, both because I feared we ourselves were at risk, and because I could not imagine what purposes of the gods there could be that were served by allowing such monstrosities to be brought into being. That was beyond my understanding.
But I knew now what Thissa feared.
To Traiben I said, “Are we at risk of being altered the way these people were?”
“It could be. I have no understanding of how change-fire works, whether it strikes you against your will, or you must yield yourself up to it. We need to move carefully here.”
“Yes. And so we will.”
BY NOW ALL THIRTY-NINEof us had descended to the river-valley, and we stood in little groups, staring in shock at the scene before us. The closest of the monsters were ranged along the water’s edge in a tight pack right in front of us, separated from us by an open stretch of sandy ground no more than twenty or thirty paces deep. Here they had taken up a stance as though they were the front line of a defending army and were staring back at us, pointing and gaping and calling out to us in harsh thick-tongued voices. Even if I had had any comprehension of their language, it would have been impossible to make out anything clearly in such a great hubbub.
“They’re speaking Gotarza,” Naxa said. “The same language the demons used. That much I can tell.”
“But can you understand what they’re saying?”
“A little. Just a little.”
I asked him to translate for me, but he simply shook his head impatiently and cocked his head forward, frowning, murmuring to himself. I waited. The Melted Ones seemed to grow more unruly: they were grimacing, glaring, shaking their fists at us if they had anything that was like a fist. It looked certain that they would attack us. Kilarion, just behind me, said into my ear, “We should put our strongest people in front, Poilar. And get ready to fight.”
“We wouldn’t have a chance against this many,” I told him.
“Poilar’s right,” said Kath. “We’ve got to bluff them. Walk straight forward as though we own this land, and make them give way before us.”
That sounded best to me. Retreating would be pointless. The Wall lay before us; we had to move ahead. I started to give the signal to advance.
Naxa, just then, turned to me and said, “I think I’ve made some sense out of what they’re yelling now. The Nine Great Ones are waiting for us, is what they say.”
“And who might they be?”
“How would I know? But they’re telling us that the Nine Great Ones are waiting for us somewhere on the other side of the river. The rulers of this Kingdom, is my guess. Or its gods, maybe. We’re supposed to go across to them. We have to ask their permission to cross their territory — that’s what I think they’re telli
ng us.”
“And how are we going to know which ones they are? What do these Nine Great Ones look like? Are they giving you any clue?”
Naxa shrugged. “I don’t really know. They aren’t being very clear, and now they’re all shouting at once. I can barely pick out individual words, let alone figure out very much of what they might mean.”
“All right,” I said. I stared into the chaos on the far side of the river. “Let’s go across and look for the Nine Great Ones, then. And try to find out what they want with us.”
Once more I gave the signal, and we went forward. The Melted Ones grew even more agitated as the distance between their front rank and ours dwindled. It seemed as if they meant to hold their ground, or even to move in around us. But when we were nearly close enough to be touching them with the tips of our cudgels they began to back away, keeping just out of reach but maintaining their massed formation and effectively restraining us from any rapid march through their number.
In that way we approached the river. As we strode forward they continued grudgingly to retreat. The water swirled up around our thighs and hips, but went no higher; and though we staggered and stumbled on the rocky bed as the force of the swift flow struck us, we made it across to the far side without serious accident.
They seemed taken aback that we had crossed. Now that we had, they gave ground more rapidly, allowing us a foothold on the riverbank and watching us uneasily from a distance, where they drew together in a tight, dense phalanx. They muttered and glowered at us. I had a sense that any attempt on our part to proceed further into their domain without the blessing of the Nine Great Ones, whoever or whatever they might be, would be met by fierce resistance. But of them I saw no apparent sign: only these multitudes of deformed and bizarre creatures, none seemingly having any more authority than any of the others.