Kingdoms of the Wall

  So we broke camp and set out toward the cave of the Source along the route that Thissa had shown us.

  Despite my fears the Melted Ones offered no opposition. Our bold decision to march on once again into their midst appeared to stun them, as it had before when we were on the other side of the river. They fell back once more like mere phantoms of air as we advanced, glaring at us in suspicion and hatred but retreating steadily with every step we took, Kath and a few of the others wondered out loud if we were marching into a trap. This is too easy, they said. And of course Muurmut let his doubts be heard also. But I ignored them all. Sometimes a time comes when you must simply go onward.

  The soil here was dry and hard, gray and lifeless, with a disagreeable powdery crust. There was a distinct upward trend to the land: as I have said, we were nearing the end of the plateau at last, after all these weeks of flatness, and the next vertical level of the Wall, which once had been nothing but a rosy glow on the horizon, now was so close that it seemed we could reach forward and touch it. It soared above us in the sky, rising to some immense disheartening height, its lofty upper reaches lost in the clouds. But we could not allow ourselves to think about that now.

  “There,” Thissa said, pointing. “Over there. We go that way.” And Min, who for all her weariness had insisted on walking at the front of our line of march, nodded and said, “That’s the cave they took us to, right there. I’m certain of it.”

  I saw a dark round opening in the side of the Wall, a little less than twice the height of a man above the ground. A narrow pebble-strewn path led upward to it. It was like the sort of hole that you see sometimes in the trunk of a great tree, where a swarm of stinging palibozos will make its nest. Crowds of Melted Ones had followed us here; they spread out now to both sides and watched uneasily to see what we would do.

  “Six of us go inside,” I said. “Who volunteers?”

  Min was the first. “No,” I said. “Not you.”

  “I must,” she said, with great force.

  Kilarion stepped forward also, holding his cudgel high. Galli followed, and Ghibbilau, and Narril the Butcher, with six or seven others after them. Traiben was among them, but I shook my head at him.

  “You mustn’t go in,” I told him. “If anything bad happens to us in there, your cleverness will be needed to guide the others afterward.”

  “If anything bad happens in there you may wish you had use of my cleverness then,” he said, and shot me such a poisonous look that I relented. So it was Kilarion and Galli and Traiben and Ghibbilau and Min and Narril and I who entered the cave.

  The place was wider and deeper than I had expected, a great roomy cavity with a high irregular ceiling. There was a small semicircular chamber at the opening, and a larger one beyond. An eerie green glow suffused everything, as though a fire fed by some strange wood were burning in back; but we smelled no smoke and saw no sign of flames. The light was rising through an opening in the floor of the rear chamber. It was clear and steady, not flickering as bonfire-light would be.

  “The Pit,” Min said. “Which leads to the Source.”

  Warily we went deeper in. Min would have moved more hastily. I wouldn’t let her, catching her by the hand when she made as though to go plunging forward. A few of the Melted Ones came in with us; but they hung back, staying well out of our way. There was no immediate sign of Stum. I posted Narril, Galli, and Ghibbilau as guards between the two chambers, and went on inward with Min and Kilarion and Traiben.

  “Look there,” Traiben said. “Behold the Nine Great Ones of this miserable race!”

  At the back of the cave, where the green light was strongest, the upper part of the cavern wall was furrowed and groined by a group of sharply outlined natural arches that sprouted just above the hole in the floor. Each one formed a kind of craggy perch; and from each a sleeping birdlike creature of great size was hanging head downward deep in dreams, with its huge shaggy wings wrapped close about its body. So far gone in their slumbers were they that our intrusion disturbed them not at all. A dozen or more of the Melted Ones knelt in pious postures below them, gazing up worshipfully at the dangling sleepers.

  “The air-demons!” Min whispered. “The blood-drinkers!”

  “Yes,” said Traiben. “But the demons are at rest, now.”

  How peaceful they seemed, basking in the warmth from below! But I could see the dreadful wide-nostriled faces and the great curving yellow teeth, and what held them so tightly to their stone perches were the hooked talons that had gripped the victims whose throats they meant to rip. So this was how they spent their days, hanging in placid sleep above the Source that sustained them, before emerging at dusk to feed upon the blood of their faithful followers.

  “Stum?” Min called. “Stum, where are you?”

  No answer came. Min took a step forward, and another, until she was almost at the rim of the Pit. Holding one hand over the maimed side of her face as though to protect it from the force from below that had changed it, she looked over the edge of the abyss.

  Then she uttered a sudden sharp cry and a moan; and I thought she was going to cast herself in. Quickly I seized her by the wrist and pulled her back. Kilarion took her from me and gathered her against his broad chest and held her fast. I went to the edge and peered down.

  I saw a long sloping narrow-walled passageway, descending farther than I could measure. There was something that might have been a stone altar down at the bottom of it, with something dark and squat, like an idol, seated upon it. Pulsating waves of brilliant light radiated from it, crashing against the walls of the shaft and blurring my sight with its tremendous dizzying force. And I knew that the tales of change-fire we had heard during our training were true, that this must be one of the places where it radiates from the bowels of the mountain, that terrible force that we are shielded against in our snug village at the bottom of the Wall, because we live so far from its source. I felt the powerful warmth of that light licking against my cheek; I could feel the shapechanging power within my body instantly awakening and unlimbering itself, and fear ran through my soul. We were at risk here, I knew; and would be, I suspected, all the rest of the way to the Summit.

  I saw one other thing before I pulled back from that dread abyss: something lying sprawled at the foot of the altar, something shapeless and puddled and terrible which might once have been alive.

  “Poilar, what do you see down there?” Kilarion asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Is it Stum? Is she dead?”

  “Yes,” I said. “At the bottom. They must have thrown her in. Come on: let’s get out of this place.”

  At that Min let out a piercing wail of such power and fury that the startled Kilarion let go of her. I thought that what she intended to do was to hurl herself into the Pit after Stum, and I braced myself to block her; but no, no, she went around to the other side, snatching Traiben’s cudgel from his hands and running up a little ridge in the cave wall to a place where she would have access to the sleeping Great Ones. With a swift vehement swing she knocked the nearest one from its perch. It dropped with a thump and lay on the stone floor, feebly fluttering. Swinging again, Min smashed it a crushing blow across the middle of its back and kicked its broken body behind her toward the abyss. Kilarion, with a cry of glee, picked it up by one scaly taloned leg and flung it over the side.

  Min, meanwhile, had knocked a second of the demons down, and a third. They flopped about helplessly, barely awake and understanding nothing, as she killed them. The Melted Ones who had been kneeling below the sleepers seemed stunned into paralysis by Min’s wild onslaught. They drew together, trembling and whimpering. Kilarion now was enthusiastically cudgeling alongside Min, and I caught the fever too, wrenching one of the Great Ones down with my bare hand and breaking its wings with a single cudgel-blow before tossing it into the Pit. Ghibbilau and Galli came in at the noise, with Narril right after them, and they joined us as we slew. Only Traiben stood aside, looking on in amazement.
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  Six, seven, eight, nine — the last of the evil birds went over; and for good measure Kilarion encircled half a dozen of the bleating, blathering Melted Ones in his great arms and shoved them down also. Then we all rushed forward, out of that dismal cave, into the sweet holy light of day.

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  13

  ON A BARREN STONYoutcropping swept by harsh winds, half a day’s march above the plateau, we held a memorial service in honor of Stum. We were saddened greatly to think that she would never come to behold the gods of the Summit. Stum had been an earnest, sturdy, buoyant woman unafraid of all obstacles: she deserved better fortune than she had had.

  I asked Min and Maiti to say the words of the Book of Death for her as they had for Stapp, but Min was lost in grief for her friend and could not do it, so Grycindil spoke in her place. Once again Jaif sang and Tenilda played; and then we built a cairn for Stum and made our farewells to her, and set about continuing our journey toward the upper regions of the Wall. For life is brief and the world holds many perils, but the Pilgrimage must go ever onward.

  It was a blessed mercy to be climbing again after such a long while in the flatlands; and we rejoiced to be leaving the doleful plateau and the dire Kingdom of the Melted Ones behind. There was a fresh spring in our step and we moved up the face of Kosa Saag with quick, steady strides.

  From far away this part of the Wall had seemed to be an impassable steep curtain of stone, ascending in a single straight leap to the gates of Heaven. But that was just a trick of the eye. Once we were on it we found that it was not in fact as vertical as it appeared when viewed across the great expanse of the plateau, but rose in a more gradual way, climbing by curves and sweeps and swoops. There was many a foothold for the climber and frequent stretches where the slope was easy indeed. So in that respect this inner spire of the Wall was much like the outer face where we had begun our climb. And we moved swiftly, exceedingly swiftly, in those early days after leaving the plateau.

  To cheer ourselves after the loss of Stum we told ourselves that the ascent would be an easy one from here on, that we would soon find ourselves in the home of the gods. It was the sort of thing Stum would have said.

  But we were deceiving ourselves. The difficulties of the plateau might be behind us now, but new difficulties were already making themselves apparent.

  How can I begin to tell you of all the hardships we experienced in this zone of Kosa Saag?

  The air, for one thing, grew amazingly chill before we had climbed very far, and there were occasional white patches of unmelted snow on the ground, a truly strange thing for children of the torrid lowlands such as we were. Sometimes when we looked up we saw dark crusted clumps of old ice clinging to high spurs of the mountain that were hidden from the light of the sun. They seemed to have been there for centuries. The cold snowy crusts burned us when we touched them out of curiosity. They stung our fingers; they chapped and cracked our skin.

  By our fifth day above the plateau we were huddling together at night for warmth, shivering and miserable. Well, our instructors had warned us that we must expect the air in these high altitudes to be colder. “I should think it would be warmer, rather,” said Kilarion, pointing to bright Ekmelios blazing in the sky above us. “After all, we’re getting closer to the sun with every step we take.”

  We all laughed at Kilarion’s simplicity. But no one, not even Traiben, could make a proper answer to him on that.

  Our skins thickened once again to shield us from the worst of the bite and our hearts pumped faster to make our blood surge warmly within us. We were adapting to the cold, as we had earlier to the thinning of the air. But I wondered privately what sort of chill we would meet in the truly high regions of the Wall, if this was what we were encountering here.

  Not only was the weather colder up here but the season was turning against us. We had had dry, bright weather for most of our climb thus far. But now came a time of frequent icy rain and occasional snow. One night there was a fearful storm when black howling winds raked the mountain, so fierce that I thought we would be hurled back down onto the plateau. Sharp sleet rode on the winds, sleet that nipped our faces and hands like fire, sweeping in upon us until we cried out to the gods to spare us. We found crevices and crannies and little caverns and tried to hide ourselves from the storm’s fury, nestling together by twos and threes to give warmth to one another.

  That night cost us a life. When I emerged at dawn, stiff and sore and more than half-frozen, the first thing that took my eye was the rigid, staring face of Aminteer the Weaver, white as bone, jutting like a trail-marker above a white field of snow. He was buried to his neck. I shouted for help and we dug him out, but it was no use. Aminteer had chosen an unlucky place to pass the night, a pocket where the wind could pile the flakes high very quickly, and the sleet had trapped him as he slept. Perhaps he had died without knowing what was happening to him.

  So there were three of us lost already, and we were scarcely beyond the first of the Kingdoms. I understood now why so few Pilgrims ever return from this journey. The mountain is very high and the hazards are beyond counting. That anyone ever reached the Summit was beginning to seem miraculous to me.

  The snow and sleet abated and the cold lessened somewhat, but now we had rain, a steady maddening downpour that threatened to go on forever. We waited two days in a dank cave for it to end. During that time Jekka and Thissa and, I think, Maiti, made an attempt to heal Min’s ruined face with Changes and spells. I saw them huddled together in a far corner, murmuring and clasping hands and chanting, and lighting aromatic tapers and giving her potions and holy images to hold. But it was a failure. There was no way they could persuade her flesh to flow back to its original form and, if anything, I think they made matters a little worse. When they had done with her, Min moved back into the deepest shadows of the cave and huddled there with her cloak pulled up over that side of her face. I heard her sobbing. I would have gone to her, but she waved me away. Later Galli tried to comfort her, and she too was refused. But afterward Marsiel and a few of the other women were able to talk with her, though she still remained withdrawn and somber and kept herself apart from the rest of us.

  The next day, although the rain was still falling, we decided to go on.

  It would have been better if we had stayed where we were. Soon after we took the trail we heard a deep rumbling sound from above. “Thunder,” said Kath. But thunder was not what it was. A moment later Ijo the Scholar put his hand to his forehead and drew it away bloody. “Strange sort of rain,” he muttered. I felt a stinging blow myself. Others cried out. A scattering mist of light pebbles was falling upon us. And then came the heavy thump of a solid boulder bigger around than my outspread hand could cover, which landed almost at my feet.

  “Take cover!” Traiben cried. “Landslide!”

  A moment later it was as if the whole mountain were falling upon us. The world shook beneath our feet. But Kreshe the Savior provided for us in that dark time of danger. An overhanging brow of stone was jutting from the breast of the Wall not far in front of us, and we ran frantically toward it while rocks great and small volleyed down all around us.

  We got to the shelter just before the main burden of the rockfall hit, pressing ourselves in against it so wildly and chaotically that we began to laugh despite the gravity of the moment. But it was not a happy laughter. There we stood, jammed tight against one another, stunned and fearing for our lives, while a tremendous hail of tumbling rock came crashing down. The sound it made as it bounced along the flank of the Wall was like the hammering of giants on the mountain’s side. The rain, no doubt, had loosened some slope far overhead. From our safe place we watched, astounded, as the great boulders slammed into the path we had just been on and went bouncing over the edge of the cliff.

  It went on for minute after minute. We thought it would never stop. Tenilda and Ais began to beat time to imaginary drums as if they heard a secret music in the endless crashing. Jaif began to chant
to their rhythm, a Song of the Falling Mountain. But then came one great earthshaking thud more terrible than anything that had gone before, and a second almost as frightful, and a third, and we all fell silent and stared at one another, thinking that this was the end of us. After that third crash, though, there were no more. An awesome hush descended. At last the thunderous booming had ceased, and we heard only the lesser sound of falling pebbles once more against the hissing of the rain. And then, only the rain.

  Cautiously we peered out. A tremendous rocky mound, three times the height of a tall man, covered the place where we had been only a few moments before. It could easily have served as a cairn for us all. The trail we had been following was utterly shattered and buried behind us.

  Through the providence of the gods none of us had been killed or even injured. And gradually we began to shake off the impact that so much noise and fury had had upon us. But we had let our packs and bedrolls drop as we ran for safety, and much of what we had left exposed on the trail lay buried now beneath tons of stone. There was no hope of uncovering it. We had lost a great deal in the way of equipment and would have to share and make do with double service from now on. But we paused anyway to give thanks to Kreshe for our preservation before continuing onward.

  Then I said, as we made ready to go, “Where is Min?”

  My glance went up and down, up and down, and I saw no sign of her anywhere. I walked to the edge of the rockpile and kicked at it despairingly, thinking that she must have failed to reach the shelter in time, that she lay entombed now under that great mass here.

  Then Hendy came forward and said, “I saw her turning back, just before the rocks fell.”

  “Back? Back where?”

  “To the land of the Melted Ones. She was running. Down the path we had just come. I called to her but she kept going, and then there was the rockslide.”

  “It was because of her face,” offered Marsiel. “She told me yesterday that she didn’t think she could bear to let anyone look at her. It was after the Healers tried to repair her and failed — she said she was thinking of running away, that she didn’t see how she could stay with us any more. And also on account of Stum — she was so very miserable about Stum. She was talking about going back to the place where Stum had died.”