Gene Wars - Hammerfall Part 13

And if he was the G.o.d himself, Marak asked himself, beyond that, then would he flinch from the dust and the blasts of wind?

And if he were a ghost or a G.o.d, would he have watering eyes?

Marak thought not.

And was thisIan the end of his visions, and all the madness?

Was thisall ?

Marak drew in a deep breath and folded his arms, feet braced against any inclination to move. "What do you want?" he asked this Ian bluntly.

Not welcomely so, he thought, since Ian looked at him, looked at him long and hard, not pleased. He might have been a curiosity, a momentary obstacle, a piece of some pa.s.sing and despised interest.

"You," Ian said. "You. Marak Trin Tain." Ian walked a little past him, and looked at him, and then looked curiously at Norit, and at Hati, one by one. "They are with you."

"Yes," Marak said.

"You three," Ian said. "Come with me. The others, stay in camp. You'll be supplied whatever you need."

No, was Marak's first impulse, defiantly no.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices cried, pleading with him.Come .

His madness acquired a direction, and leaned toward this man, this stranger. He could have run screaming at the sun, turned circles like Maol.Marak, Marak, Marak , they said, deafening him, showing him memories of riding in the hills, confronting his father, walking away from all he knew... recalling for him the acclamation of an army, and the straggling, ragged line of the mad.

Marak!

He would do nothing,nothing to conform to his madness. Pride prevented him. He trembled, he gathered his strength, knowing he could not walk away in disdain and resist the eastward tilting without falling down.

"Come," Ian said to him more civilly. "Come."

The tilting made him stagger, finally, rarely, it swayed him off his balance, and he feared it would fling him down in the dirt if he resisted. Besides, thisIan offered him answers, offered him the courtesy of asking repeatedly. Reluctantly, grudgingly, he followed, Hati and Norit walking with him: at least he had them where he could watch over them.

But then he was aware of another presence, another soft tread on the sand. Ian turned and said, harshly, "I said the three."

Marak turned, too, and saw the au'it, who clutched her book to her chest and wide-eyed, thin-lipped, resisted the dismissal.

"She is the Ila's au'it," Marak said. "She has orders to go where I go."

"Whose orders?"

"The Ila's."

"The Ila's orders have no weight here," Ian said.

"They have with me." They had stopped on the exposed hill, where the wind battered them and the heavier sand stung bare skin, Ian's scent came to them on that wind, too, a curious scent, like sun-heated cloth, like living plants. "We're all mad here except the young master, the two slaves, and the au'it. We see visions and hear voices. Do you?"

Ian gazed at him a long, long moment, seeming to measure him twice and three times and perhaps not to like the sum he arrived at. He was a strange sort of man, strange in his smell, tanned, with wisps of pale hair blowing out from under the headcloth, and with narrow, close-lidded eyes. Marak had never seen such sun-bleached hair, and never seen green eyes, green like stagnant water. The cloth of the sand-colored robes was fine as that in the Ila's court, cloth of gauze of many lengths and layers, so that they blew and whipped in the wind, individually as light as the dust itself.

Wealth, such cloth said. Power, that wealth said.

And that the Ila's orders did not reach here did not persuade him to trust this Ian, no matter how the voices dinned into his ears and no matter how the feelings in his heart said this was, after all his trials, the place. The Ila ruled everything. In Kais Tain they might have said that the Ila's rule did not extend there, but they did not disrespect an au'it.

"Come," Ian said then, shrugging off the matter of the au'it, ignoring her presence, and led them farther, over the low dune. After that they walked along Ian's back trail-he left tracks like a man-on for some little distance toward a sandstone ridge, and along that for a considerable distance south.

Go with Ian, the voices said.Believe him. This is the place. This at last is the right place .

The desire and the voices grew, overwhelming better sense, and heat, and thirst. But limbs grew weary in walking. Feet ached, and rubbed raw in boots. The au'it lagged, carrying her heavy book, and Norit stumbled.

Still Ian walked at the same pace.

"If we were to trek all afternoon to get where we're going, we might have saddled the beasts," Marak said, vexed, helping Norit.

Ian turned and confronted him for another lengthy stare, a test of wills, perhaps.

Or perhaps Ian heard voices of his own. It occurred to Marak at that moment that such might be the case.

"Not far, now," Ian said, and led them, at a slower pace, up another rise.

In the great distance and through the blowing dust a slope-walled spire rose up ahead of them, rising out of the flat desert as the land rose. It was an anomalous thing, and yet familiar, so very familiar it sent chills down Marak's spine.

Hati touched his arm, for a moment stopped still, and half whispered, "The spire."

"The tower," Norit said.

Closer, the voices whispered.Closer, Marak Trin Tain .

"Come," Ian said again.

They struggled to keep Ian's pace, and it was hard to ignore the clamor of voices, now, urgingFaster, faster, faster .

Hard, but possible. They were not fools, and he was not a slave to his madness. Marak deliberately slowed his pace, walking at a rate he thought Norit and the au'it could sustain. Hati slowed. So they all fell behind. Ian looked back, displeased, but none of them walked faster, so Ian fell to their pace.

Slower still, as the tower grew clearer out of the air, and clearer. They came close enough to see the stony ground around about it, a strange depression atop a hill of cindery rocks, with bits of gla.s.s catching the light.

Marak paused for rest, to Ian's great annoyance, as the sun was setting, as those bits of gla.s.s were catching the red light.

It was a tower as great as any in the holy city, and not a structure of air and fire. Its sand-colored walls, casting back the sunset glow in the west, might be stone, but if so, there was no joint of masonry.

"It has no windows," Norit said, "nor doors."

And what use was it in itself, Marak asked himself, and why had it haunted the mad, and what did it mean to any of them? As a dream it had seemed to mean things on its own, a high place, a landmark to guide the mad.

If it was a real place it had to have uses, and occupants, and a reason for being there.

For that reason, too, he sat down where he stood, and Hati and Norit and the au'it settled by him.

"It's not that far," Ian said, standing as if ready to walk again.

"Why should we trust you?" Marak said. "Why should we go any farther? We've seen what it is."

"Have you?" Ian asked. "You haven't seen everything. And you knownothing . Get up."

Up, up, up, the voices echoed in Marak's head. He saw the cave of suns, and now Norit's figures moving within that cave. Norit and Hati each had his hands, and Norit's was cold. Hati's sweated; and the au'it wrote, hunched over to protect her book from the wind.

"Stubborn," Ian said. "Your reputation has reached us. But I won't stand out here all night. You can sit here as long as you like, and go back and make up lies to tell the rest, for all I care. The au'it may be the only one of you with courage to investigate what this place is. Will you come, au'it?"

The au'it stopped her writing, and lifted her head, and considered the proposition.

Marak found the proposition as impossible to ignore. The truth was he could not walk away from it without answers. But he was not inclined to meet a fortified position without looking it over and thinking it through, if nothing more than the evident fact that it had no weak points, and it had no evident communication with the outside, and it gave every evidence of being like the Beykaskh in its defenses.

The au'it looked at him, however, instead of folding her book. Everyone looked at him, as if he should know the risks. He did not, and knew he could only guess what they were venturing into.

But he got up. "Go back to the others," he said to Hati. "Take Norit with you." The au'it was doomed as he was, to carry out the Ila's orders: in that matter he had no authority over her.

Hati, however, refused to do as he asked. "I came to see this place," she said, and brought home to him the simple truth that he was not alone in his obsession and his visions: Hati's were as strong; and maybe neither of them stronger than Norit's. She had stood up and moved toward Ian.

Marak gave an exasperated sigh and stood up, and Hati and the au'it with him, and the three of them walked where Ian led, subtly uphill for a long walk toward the tower's base. Hot gla.s.s, as if from some army of gla.s.sworkers, seemed to have fallen on the sand all about, cooling, including grains and holes and bubbles in its convolutions. If they had had to walk over that in the dark, they might have had hard going.

But there was a broad walkway of safe, plain sand as the sun sank and lengthened shadows to their greatest extent, even the shadows of bits of gla.s.s that studded the sand.

"I've seen this," Hati said under her breath. "I have seen this kind of gla.s.s."

So had he, long ago, with the army. "At Oburan," he said. "At Oburan, when the wind blew clear the western plain."

"There's nothing like this in the lowlands," Norit said, clinging to Marak's hand. "Nothing at all like this in the lowlands."

Ian, meanwhile, walked steadily before them. The open sand was a tablet slowly erased, revised every time the wind blew, but the walkway through the plain of gla.s.s showed the pa.s.sage of feet both coming and going: Marak did not miss it, and he had not, as they entered that pathway and added their prints to the rest, the fact there had been a traffic going around the depression of gla.s.s, and beyond the dune.

He doubted that Hati had missed that fact, either, but he said nothing, only stored it up as an indication there might be more than one destination hereabouts, perhaps another one beyond the hill that obscured their vision of all the land beyond, and perhaps more to this place than the tower. The prints he saw went around the scattered gla.s.s, and up on the other side, and out of sight, as the land either stretched on in a broad flat or fell away in a depression. There was no place round about higher than the base of the tower.

At this range it filled all their vision, and those footprints went confidently toward a bare wall at its base, where a subtle jointing showed where a door might be.

So there were mundane accommodations like doorways, Marak said to himself. Ian did not walk through walls, or expect it of them.

That seam cracked before they reached it, and let out a warm bright light, welcoming rather than threatening: as a door, like the Ila's doors, a large square dropped back and slid to one side, rapidly, and with no hand to move it.

Inside, a series of lighted globes marched along the ceiling of a long, long hall.

It was the cave of suns. Marak recognized it, and his heart skipped a beat. They were within the vision.

Hati and Norit must realize it.

Ian walked ahead of them, booted feet echoing sharply on a floor like gla.s.s, under blinding suns that now a.s.sumed a mortal scale, floating globes of brilliant, fireless light.

"This is the place," Norit whispered as she walked. Her voice trembled. "This is what I always see."

Marak pressed her hand, and Hati's, and the au'it hovered close by. He trembled. He was ashamed to acknowledge it to himself and twice ashamed to have Hati and Norit know it, but he trembled. He was here, within his lifelong vision, and he could not but think of all the hours of misery, all the days and nights he had fled his father's house, trying not to be discovered in his madness; of nights on the Lakht, on campaign, trying to conceal from the men he led that he heard voices and saw this place, over and over and over again.

All these things... all the years, all the losses of self and pride... came to this hallway, and proved, not madness, but prophecy. And for what, he asked himself angrily. For what?

He freed his hand of Hati's and pulled down the lap of his aifad to have a better look, to breathe the cold, strange air of this place. The air smelled faintly of water and herbs and things like asphalt.

There were doors, countless doors in this hall of light, if those seams meant anything; and there were doors at the end of the hall.

"Ian," someone said, behind them.

Marak stopped; they all stopped, and turned.

A woman stood behind them, in the same sand-colored robes.

"Is this Marak?" she asked, and an unantic.i.p.ated flood of heat rushed through Marak's head, filling his face, his neck, his whole body with fever warmth. His pulse hammered in his temples, for no reason, none. The heat came from inside him, but what caused it was here, this place, this woman.

Marak, the voices said, echoed in his head,Marak Trin Tain, Hati Makri ani Keran, Norit Tath, and a nameless au'it belonging to the Ila .

The words went round and round and echoed from up above the suns.

All at once the hall went blank. The hard gla.s.s floor met Marak's right knee. Norit and then Hati tumbled past his arms, and he tried to save them from the hard floor. They tumbled through his hands.

Numb, he reached for his knife-toppled, simply toppled, hit the cold gla.s.sy floor with his shoulder and then with his head.

This was foolish, he thought in dismay. He had fallen over like a child that had forgotten how to walk.

There was no cause for this weakness. Nothing had happened to him. There was no pain. He should not have fallen.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said. Visions poured through his head. Voices numbed his ears with nonsense, roaring like the storm wind.

Of course he had weapons. Following Ian, coming in here, he had had at least that confidence.

But he knew now he had carried his defeat inside him, the same enslavement that had drawn him across the desert.

His father won this argument. Worthless, his father had said, and the suns burned and blinded his eyes, each with a curious white-hot pattern at its heart.

"Marak," Ian said, and reached down a hand. He could no longer move. In jagged red lines the visions built towers, then letters beneath them, but he could make no sense of them. The letters streamed into the dark of the towers, and down twisting corridors, deep, and deeper and deeper by the moment.

"Fool," his father said.

He had fallen at practice, in the dust of the courtyard. If he did not get up, his father would hit him. He tried. He kept trying.

Chapter Ten.

All metal belongs to the Ila. When it is broken its reshaping must be written down and its weight accounted, whether it be iron or silver or gold or copper. All metal the Ila gives for the good of villages. The earth will not grow it. It will not spring up like water. If a village or a tribe finds any metal, they must make it known to a priest. If it is traded, an au'it must write it. If it is sold, an au'it must write it. If it is lost in a well, that well must be drained. So also if it is lost in sand or carried off by a beast, an au'it must write it, and it must be hunted out.