Kingdoms of the Wall (34 page)

"What are they?" I asked in wonder.

Thrance laughed his harsh laugh. "Transformed Ones. Pilgrims who have lost their way. Thus far they came, and no farther, and here they let the change-fire work its way with them, and they clambered into these holes." Then his eyes glittered with sudden savage fury. "Do you know what I'd do, boy, if we had time enough? I'd build fires and smoke them out, one at a time, and club them to death as they emerged. It would be the kindest thing. Their lives are a living death."

All this while we kept up a steady pace. The others of the Forty had noticed the holes now, and the mysterious suspicious eyes peering from them. I saw Galli making pious signs as quickly as she could, and Traiben staring with the deepest curiosity, and Kilarion grinning stupidly and nudging little Kath to look.

Hendy came up to me and clutched my forearm. "Do you see them, Poilar? The eyes?"

I nodded. "They are the people of this Kingdom."

"In those little holes?"

"Their homes," I said. "Their palaces."

"People?" she said. "Living in
there
?" And her fingers tightened on my arm so hard that I winced.

We turned a sudden corner in the trail just then, and came upon a citizen of this Kingdom out of his hole. He—or it—was even more surprised than we were. This must have been its feeding-time, for it had emerged some ten or fifteen paces from its burrow and was making its way toward a moist sump-hole in a declivity some fifty paces farther on. As it saw us it halted, frozen in utter horror, and stared with bulging eyes; and then it bared long yellow fangs and began to make a repetitive chattering sound at us so sharp and piercing that if noises were daggers we would all have been flayed to bits by it.

This inhabitant of the Kingdom of the Kvuz was a loathsome thing, with no trace of humanity about it that I could detect. It sprawled low against the ground like a serpent, but a serpent that had limbs: its legs were tiny shrunken things, but its arms, though short, were thick and obviously muscular, terminating in evil curving talons. Naked and hairless it was, with colorless skin that hung in folds around a gaunt, baggy body, and its face, swollen and contorted with fear and hatred, was all eyes and mouth, with the merest slits for nostrils and no sign of ears.

I could have wept for its ugliness, and its misery, and its terrible transformation: for if Thrance had told us true, this was someone of our own kind, or had been once.

"Vermin! Monster!" Thrance yelled, and snatched up a flat rock to hurl it. But I knocked it from his hand. The creature looked up at me in such amazement that for a moment it ceased its wild chattering cry. Then it grabbed up a rock itself, and flung it my way with a seemingly casual backhand flip. I ducked just in time. The rock flew past me with enough force to have smashed my skull.

"Do you see?" Thrance asked. "How well it rewards your charity?" He reached for another rock; and this time I think I would have let him throw it. But the creature had pivoted around and was scampering for its burrow with tremendous speed, moving on its belly like one of those legless spiny wrigglers we had seen a little while before. In a moment it was safely out of our reach. We saw it watching us with smoldering eyes from the darkness of its hole, and now and then it uttered a burst of its baleful chattering noise until the last of us had gone by.

At the seepage-place we saw the fresh corpse of another of the same sort, lying to one side and already decomposing. So there had been an encounter here not long before, and a slaying. Nor had it been the only one: little heaps of whitening bones were scattered here and there, turning slowly into powder under the merciless sky. I poked at one of these skeletons. It showed how the transformation had reached down even to the bone; for the legs, though crumpled into mere tiny appendages, had all the proper bony parts.

We helped ourselves to water—brackish stuff, but it was all there was—and moved ourselves along our way.

That was the Kingdom of the Kvuz. We crossed it as quickly as we could, for Thrance had spoken the truth: it was indeed the most dismal of places. Each of the Kingdoms we had passed through, I realized, brought a different kind of transformation to those Pilgrims incapable of fending off its pull. The Kavnalla brought pitiful helplessness and the Sembitol brought barren selflessness and the Kvuz brought bleak and utter isolation of the spirit. I wondered what allure it could have had for those who chose to dwell in it; or what flaw of character it was, rather, that had driven certain Pilgrims to make it their home. I saw, not for the first time, of course, that the Wall was a testing place; but the nature of the test and the essence of the Pilgrim's response to it was still a mystery to me. I knew only that the Wall offered mysterious temptations amidst all its dread ordeals, and that the weakest links in each Forty thus were stripped away by the differing force of the secret, invisible change-fire that prevailed in this place or that as the ascent went on.

Now and again as we proceeded we saw beady eyes gleaming in a hillside hole, and there were other bodies and crumbling skeletons at every watering-place. Once we caught sight of a battle under way at a great distance, two struggling serpent-men writhing desperately in each other's grip.

We were so frightened of this Kingdom that we kept close by one another, going elbow to elbow as we marched. I asked Traiben what possible temptation there might be to cause a Pilgrim to defect and take up living in this place; but he only shrugged and answered that these must be ones who had parted with the power of reasoning under the adversities of the climb, and had turned themselves into these rock-dwelling things because they could not bear facing whatever hardships lay ahead. Which did not strike me as a satisfying answer, but it was all that he offered. I watched my people carefully after that, in case any of them should feel such an urge. But none was so inclined.

* * *

It was an unkind country in every way. We heard thundercracks and saw the flashes of blue lightning again, which were so strange to have when there was no hint of rain. But it was a bird that caused them, a lightning-bird that flew low above us, hurling fiery bolts from its rump. They left scorching tracks in the land, and Ijo the Scholar had his arm singed by one, though he was not badly hurt. We pelted these pests with rocks and drove them off, though sometimes one made a quick foray past us even so, stitching the ground with its blazing emissions. Then one day a thing that looked like a huge upright stone wheel came rolling toward us; but it was an animal of some sort, sharp-edged, and this was its manner of hunting. It passed so close to Malti the Healer that I thought she would lose her leg, but she jumped aside just in time. Talbol and Thuiman knocked it over with their cudgels: once it had fallen it had no way of rising again, and we beat it to death.

There were other such creatures, just as unappealing. But we were able to fend them off and we suffered no harm.

As we marched Thrance amused us with tales of things he had seen in his years of wandering in these heights. He spoke of other crests that were inhabited, this strange Kingdom and that one, and of the false Summit that ended nowhere and had claimed the lives of so many Pilgrims who had wasted months or even years on its futile slopes. He talked of the Drinkers of Stars, who lived on some high headland and drew energy from the sky that allowed them to rove freely through the night like gods, though they had to return to their bodies by dawn or they would perish. He told us of places where mirages became real and where reality turned into mirage, and of the swirling tempests of the highest levels, where the clouds were of fifty colors and gigantic rainbow-hued wind-whales grazed placidly in the sky. And also he told us, as Naxa once had done, of the Land of the Doubles, which hangs inverted above the Summit and is populated by our other selves, who live in a life beyond life and watch us with kindly amusement, chuckling when we make mistakes and suffer harm, for they are perfect beings. "When we get higher," Thrance said, "we'll see the tip of the Land of the Doubles pointing downward, almost touching the Summit. And I hear that there are Witches up there who are in touch with the Double World, and who can put us into dreams that allow us to consult our other selves and receive advice from them."

I asked Thissa about that. But she only shrugged and said that Thrance was speaking of matters about which he knew nothing, that he was spinning fables out of air.

That seemed very likely to me. By Thrance's own admission he had never gone beyond the Kingdom of the Kvuz; and though he had lived a long while on these high slopes, no doubt hearing many a traveler's tale, how could we be sure that anything they might have told him, or anything he was telling us, had any basis in reality? I was reminded of the solemn teachings that had been offered us in Jespodar village during our years of training, the stories of the dancing rocks, the demons who pulled their limbs loose and flung them at Pilgrims, the walking dead people with eyes in the backs of their heads. These tales of Thrance's had to be like those stories which are told credulous young Pilgrims-to-be by the instructors in the village, who speak in ignorance of the very subject that they claim to teach. We had seen many a strange thing on Kosa Saag, but nothing such as we had been warned to expect, at least not yet. For the teachers know nothing; the Wall is a world unto itself and the truth of its nature is made known only to those who go and look for themselves.

The things that Thrance told us may not have been real but they were at least diverting. And diversion was what we badly needed as we made this dreary crossing. We scarcely dared to sleep at night, for fear we would wake to find some crawling denizen of the Kvuz among us, lifting its yellow fangs to strike. Or perhaps the lightning-birds would come in the darkness; or the whirling wheel would roll through our camp. None of these things happened, but they preyed on our minds.

Then at last we began to come to the end of the Kingdom of the Kvuz. But there was little comfort in that, for over the past several days a dark shadow had begun to appear ahead of us, and as we drew near to it we recognized it for what it was: a wide cliff that rose in a single great vertical sweep, a lofty barrier that cruelly terminated these somber plains, confronting us once more with a wall within the Wall. We would surely have to climb it if we meant to continue our Pilgrimage; but it seemed so steep that climbing it was unimaginable.

Well, we had faced such things before; and we were hardened now to the difficulties of our Pilgrimage. Beyond any question we were bound for the top of the Wall and, having come this far, we meant to let nothing stand in our way. But when I asked Thrance if he knew a route that would carry us up this formidable obstacle, he shrugged his familiar shrug, and said with his familiar indifference, "This is as far as I ever managed to go. For all I know there's no way to climb it at all."

"But the Summit—"

"Yes," he said, as though I had uttered some meaningless sound. "The Summit, the Summit, the Summit." And he walked away from me, laughing to himself.

* * *

When we were directly under this challenging cliff we saw to our great relief that as was often the case it had cracks and furrows and crevices and chimneys in it that would probably allow us some way of scaling it. But it was bound to be a fierce struggle for us; and also we had lost most of our ropes and other climbing gear very early on, in the rockslide that nearly had buried us on the slopes above the Kingdom of the Melted Ones.

As I stood with Kilarion and Traiben and Galli and Jaif, staring upward and contemplating the task that faced us, Jaif touched my elbow and told me quietly to turn and look. I swung quickly about.

A curious figure in a hooded robe had emerged from the shadows like some sort of apparition and was coming toward us, moving in a slow, laborious way.

When he came close he pushed back his hood, revealing a face that was like no face I had ever seen. In bodily form too he was very strange, stranger even than Thrance. He was thin and long and stiff-framed, and carried himself oddly, as though his frame were strung on a set of bones that were very little like ours. His legs were too short for his torso, and his shoulders were wrong and his eyes were set too far back in his head, and his nose and ears and lips, though I could recognize them for what they were, were nothing much like ours. Something was wrong about his hands too. From where I stood I wasn't sure what it was, but I suspected that if I were to count the fingers the number would be unusual, four on each hand or at best only five. They had no sucker-pads on them that I could see. He had pale skin that looked like something that had been dead a long time and his hair was rank and soft, like dark string. His breath came in heavy wheezing gusts. So this must be another of the Transformed, I thought: yet one more of the grotesques with which these Kingdoms of the Wall are so abundantly populated. Automatically I drew back a little in surprise and alarm; but then I checked myself, for I saw how weak and weary the newcomer seemed, as though he had wandered in these parts a long while and was nearing the end of his strength.

In his hand he held some small device, a box with the bright sheen of metal. He lifted it and at once words came to us out of the box. But the accent was thick and odd and all but impossible to understand. At first I failed to realize even that the stranger was speaking in our language. But then he touched something on the top of his little box and repeated his words, and this time, curiously, they were somewhat easier to comprehend.