Kingdoms of the Wall

12

In the gathering darkness we watched the Melted Ones roaming about, foraging over the dusty ground for their dinner. They appeared to eat whatever struck their fancy—twigs, dirt, even their own excrement—and we stared at them in revulsion, scarcely able to believe that they were anything other than brute beasts. But greater horror came with nightfall. The sky-demons returned, swooping up out of the blackness at the base of the Wall, and circled swiftly overhead, their powerful wings beating in steady unhurried pulses, their green eyes blazing like angry disks of strange fire above us.

They had come to feed, but not on us.

It was a dreadful sight. The Melted Ones stood smiling vacantly as if lost in dreams, heads upturned, arms—those which had such things as arms—spread wide. And the demons, shrieking ferociously as they came, flew down upon them to drink their blood. Frozen, we watched the flying creatures fasten upon their victims, descending on the Melted Ones and grasping them with their talons, enfolding them in their great shaggy wings, sinking their curving yellow teeth into their throats. The ones that they chose made no attempt to flee or to defend themselves. They gave themselves to their devourers unhesitatingly, almost ecstatically.

The monstrous meal went on and on. For minutes at a time the feeding demons would cling to their prey, busy at their work. Then the wings would open and throb, the winged creatures would spring into the air, and the Melted Ones—emptied and pale, red trickles of blood running from their ravaged throats down onto their chests—would stand statuelike, still upright for a moment or two, before toppling to the ground. When one fell, it lay without moving. But the demon who had drunk its life, after circling the sky in a burst of wild energy, came quickly enough down to feed again, and again and again.

Though we were numb with shock and disgust we remained on guard, ready with our cudgels. But the demons never ventured into our little camp. They had enough ready provender waiting for them just across the way.

I turned to Traiben after a time and saw him looking upward, more fascinated, so it seemed, than appalled. His lips were moving. I heard him counting under his breath: “Seven … eight … nine. One … two … three …”

“What are you doing, Traiben?”

“How many demons do you make it out to be, Poilar?”

“About a dozen, I suppose. But why should that matter in the slight—”

“Count them.”

“Why?”

“Count them, Poilar.”

I humored him. But it was difficult to get a good count; the demons were in constant motion, alighting, feeding, leaping aloft again. At any time there might be four or five of them sucking blood and four or five more wheeling through the night sky, but one would descend and another would arise while I was making my tally, and I had a hard time keeping them sorted out. Irritably I said, “Something like nine or ten, is what I get.”

“Nine, I would say.”

“Nine, then. How many there are hardly seems of any importance.”

“What if these are the Nine Great Ones, Poilar?” said Traiben quietly.

“What?” I blinked at him uncomprehendingly. Traiben’s notion had taken me utterly by surprise.

“Suppose that these are the kings of the Melted Ones,” he went on. “Perhaps created by whatever force it is that has brought the Melted Ones themselves into being. And reigning over them by strength of will, or perhaps by some kind of magic. Breeding them, even, to serve as sources of food.”

I fought back a shudder. More carefully, this time, I counted again, following the wheeling winged forms as they moved in the darkness. Nine, so it seemed. Nine. Yes. Who moved as they pleased among these miserable creatures, feeding on them at will. The Nine Great Ones? These repellent blood-drinkers? Yes. Yes. Surely Traiben was right. These demon-birds, or whatever they were, were the masters of this Kingdom.

“And we’re supposed to ask permission of them to pass through this place?”

Traiben shrugged. “There are nine of them,” he said. “Who else can they be, if not the Nine Great Ones who rule here?”

I slept very little that night. The sky-demons remained with us far past midnight, feasting insatiably, and I sat up, clutching my cudgel, afraid that they would attack us when they tired of the blood of the Melted Ones. But they went only to their own. At last they disappeared, flapping off to the west, and then the moons themselves vanished from sight, dropping behind the looming bulk of the Wall, so that we were plunged into darkness. It was then that I slept, but briefly and poorly, dreaming that hairy wings were fastened about my body and glistening fangs were reaching toward my throat.

My sleep, such as it was, was broken by a cry of anguish. I came awake at once and heard the sound of Thissa’s wailing.

“Thissa? What is it, Thissa?”

“Death!” she called hoarsely. “I smell death!”

I went to her side. “Where? Who?”

“Death, Poilar.” She was shivering. Words in an unknown language came tumbling out of her. Unknowable santha-nilla words, I suppose: magic-talk, the voice that rises out of the well of mysteries. I held her and she fell asleep in my arms, murmuring, “Death … Death …”

There was nothing I could do in the darkness. I sat holding her until Ekmelios crossed the horizon and the plateau was lit by brilliant morning light.

Dozens of Melted Ones, drained white, lay motionless across the way, scattered about on the ground like broken boughs after a wind has rampaged through the forest. They appeared to be dead; very likely they were. The rest, the whole immense horde, sat huddled close together, watching us sullenly. No demons were in evidence. I was without any idea of what to do next. The Melted Ones had allowed us to come this far but evidently they would let us go no farther unless we acknowledged them in some unfathomable way, and if we tried to move forward without the blessing of the Nine Great Ones they would surely resist our advance, so I supposed, and throw us back by sheer force of numbers. I saw no way to reach the Wall other than through the Kingdom of the Melted Ones. But how could I parley with those blood-drinking birds? We were stymied. It was the first great test of my leadership and I felt myself faced with failure.

Then, while I hesitated, Grycindil came running to me, crying that Min and Stum were missing.

A group of the women, said Grycindil, had gone down to the river at daybreak to bathe. Min and Stum had not been among them, which Grycindil thought was odd, for of us all Min was the most fastidious about such things; and Stum, who was her friend, always went wherever Min went. When they were done bathing, the women filled a flask with cold water and went looking for them, thinking that they were still asleep, and planning to splash them for a prank. But no one could find them, Grycindil said. She and Marsiel and Tenilda and Tull had searched through the entire camp.

“Perhaps they’ve gone off for a morning walk by themselves,” I said, and the foolishness of my words made them die in my throat even as I spoke them.

I called everyone around me and told them of the disappearance. There was great consternation. I went to Thissa, who still sat stunned and trembling, and asked her to cast a searching-spell.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will.”

She gathered little sticks and said the words and threw the sticks again and again. But each time she shook her head and snatched the sticks up and said it was no good, that there was too much noise and confusion all about her. Even when she drew Witch-lines on the ground and knelt to whisper god-names to them, and dropped the sticks within those lines, she could learn nothing that was of any use to us. The strain on her was terrible: her eyes became very bright and large, her face grew rigid.

“Are they still alive?” I asked her. “Can you tell us that much?”

“Please,” she said. “Let me rest. All this is beyond my understanding, Poilar.” And she began to weep and shake like one who has been taken ill. I told Kreod the Healer to comfort her.

We divided ourselves into six search parties and went off in different directions, with Kilarion leading one group back across the river to look for them to our rear. Seppil and Dorn and Thuiman and I went forward, toward the masses of Melted Ones, and I stared into the teeming multitude of them, trying to catch some glimpse of Min and Stum among them. But I saw nothing. Nor did any of the other search parties. We didn’t learn a thing. There were muddy tracks all over, but who could say what they meant?

Everyone was looking at me. I was supposed to tell them how we were going to deal with this. But I was far from having any solution.

I looked to Traiben, to Jaif, to Naxa, to Kath. They had no help to offer me.

Then I became aware of a stirring behind me in the ranks of the Melted Ones. I saw Talbol gaping and pointing, and Muurmut grunted sharply like one who has been struck. I turned and stared, as amazed as they were by the terrible apparition that was approaching us.

A Melted One who might almost have been Min—whose face and form were oddly like hers, although much deformed and distorted in the manner of their kind—had emerged out of that hideous multitude and was making her way unsteadily toward us. My first thought was that the creatures who had captured Min had made a crude copy of her after their own fashion. But then she came closer, and I recognized Min’s familiar lively eyes and the tattered green shawl of her House that she always wore, and I realized that this was no copy of Min, but Min herself, a Min who had undergone a strange transformation: a melted Min, in fact.

She moved in a dazed, tottering way. Tenilda and Tull ran to her, reaching her just as she was about to fall, and carried her into our camp.

“Min?” I said, kneeling over her. She had a deathly pallor and the alterations in her appearance were frightful. It was as if she had been softened and reworked all down the left side of her face and upper body, but not on the right. Her ear, her nose, her lips, her cheekbones, all bore the mark of the change. She had had fine delicate features but now, on one side, they looked blurred, coarse, as though they had flowed and run. The texture of her skin on the changed side was different too, glossy and unnaturally sleek. I bent close to her. “Can you hear me, Min? Can you tell us what has happened to you?”

She seemed no more than half conscious. Something like a convulsion swept through her for a moment. She rose a little. Her eyes rolled in her head; she grimaced and her lips turned back to bare her teeth in a frightening way. Then she fell back and grew calm again, though her breath was coming in harsh gusts.

Change-fire, I thought. She has felt the touch of change-fire on her body, and it has done this thing to her.

“The Pit—” she murmured. “The Source—Stum—”

Her voice trailed off.

“Min? What are you saying, Min?”

Someone tugged at me. It was Jekka the Healer. He said, “Step aside, Poilar. Can’t you see she’s in no condition to talk right now?”

I gave way, and Jekka bent above her and touched her the way a Healer touches one who is ill. Deftly he redirected the flow of the life-forces through the channels of her body, guiding air and warmth and light into beneficial paths. After a time some color came into Min’s cheeks and her breathing grew normal. She put her hand to her face, her shoulder, her arm, exploring the things that had been done to her. Then she made a little despondent sound and I saw her shape flicker quickly, as though she were trying to return herself to her proper form. A quick shuddering eddy of Change passed over her but when it ended her body remained distorted as before.

Quietly Jekka said, “Save your strength, Min. There’ll be time later to put you back the way you were.”

She nodded. I heard someone softly sobbing behind me. Min was a terrible thing to behold.

She sat up and looked about like one who is awakening from a dreadful dream. No one spoke. After a time she said, very quietly, “I’ve been among the Melted Ones.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, we know.”

“They stole us in the darkest part of the night, Stum and me, so quickly we had no time to cry out. Hands over our mouths—they lifted us—carried us—”

“Rest now,” Jekka said to her. “There’s time to talk about it later.”

“No. No, I have to tell it. You need to know this.”

Nor would she be denied. Shaken and weak though she was, she forced the story out of herself.

She and Stum, she said, had settled down for the night at the edge of the camp, perhaps in an unwise location, where they were more vulnerable to marauders than the rest of us. But how a party of Melted Ones had been able to steal unnoticed into our camp, Min could not say: perhaps those on watch, whoever they had been at that time, had fallen briefly asleep, or perhaps a spell had been cast, or possibly the whole thing had happened so swiftly that even the most vigilant of sentries might not have noticed. In any event, however they had managed it, the Melted Ones had seized Stum and Min with great efficiency and had taken them quickly off into the darkness for a considerable distance in what Min believed had been the direction of the Wall: though she had been unable to see anything at that moonless hour, she was certain that her captors had been moving on a steady uphill grade.

“We entered a kind of cave,” she said. “I think it must have been right at the base of the Wall. Everything was very dark all around, but the moment we were inside I could see a strange sort of light, a green glow that seemed to be coming right out of the ground. There was a sort of antechamber, and then an opening in the floor of the cave, which was the mouth of a long steep passageway that slanted sharply downward to form a deep shaft. The light was rising from the bottom of the shaft. The Melted Ones let us look right over the edge. It is the Source, they kept saying. It is the Source. They speak the old language, the Gotarza. We Scribes understand a little of that.”

“Yes. Yes, I know,” I said.

“I couldn’t tell you what’s down there at the bottom. Something bright, something warm. Whatever it is, it’s the thing that melts the Melted Ones.” Min’s hand went to her transformed cheek, perhaps without her realizing it. A deep shudder ran through her and it was a moment before she was able to speak again. “They wanted to change us,” she said finally. “And send us back to you as ambassadors of a sort, in order to show you what a wonderful thing it is to be melted. They pushed us forward—toward the rim of the Pit—”

“Kreshe!” someone murmured, and we all made the sacred signs that ward off evil.

Min said, “I felt the heat of it. Just on one side, the side of me that they were holding toward the glow. And I knew that I was beginning to change, but it was no kind of change I had ever felt before. I heard Stum cursing and struggling next to me, but I couldn’t see her, because they had me turned facing away from her. She was closer to the Source than I was. They were chanting and singing and dancing around like savages. Like animals.” Min faltered. She closed her eyes a moment and drew several slow, heavy breaths. Jekka put his hands to her wrists and held her, calming her. Then she said, “I kicked someone, very hard. His body was soft and it gave against my foot like jelly, and there was a scream of horrible pain. I kicked again and then I got my hand loose and poked my finger into someone’s eye, and my other hand was loose, and a moment later there was confusion all over the place. Stum and I both were able to break free. They came running after us, but I was too fast for them. They caught up with Stum, though. I managed to get to the mouth of the cave, but when I looked back I saw her still deep inside, practically at the edge of the Pit, fighting with half a dozen of them. She was yelling to me to get out, to save myself. I started to go back for her. But then they swarmed all over her and I knew that there wasn’t a chance—I couldn’t see her any more, there were so many of them—like a mound of insects, the whole heap of them piling on top of her, and all of them moving forward, pulling her closer and closer to the Pit—”

“Kreshe!” I muttered, and made holy signs again.

“I knew it was hopeless to try to rescue her. There was no way I could do anything for her and they’d only get me again too if I went back in. So I turned and ran. They didn’t try to stop me. I came outside—it was still dark—and tried to find my way back to camp. I must have wandered in circles for a long while, but finally the sun came up and then I knew which way to head. There were Melted Ones everywhere around, but when they saw me they simply nodded and let me go by, as though I were one of them.” The harsh glitter of sudden fear entered Min’s eyes. She touched her altered cheek again, prodding it fiercely with her fingers as though the flesh were stiff as wood. “I’m not one of them, am I? Am I very ugly? Is it disgusting to look at me? Tell me—Poilar—Jekka—”

“One side of your face looks a little different,” I said gently. “It isn’t so bad. It won’t be hard to fix it—isn’t that so, Jekka?”

“I think we should be able to induce a complete counter-Change, yes,” he said, in that ponderous way that Healers sometimes use. But it seemed to me that there was very little confidence in his tone.

We resolved to go into that cave and see what had become of Stum. By brilliant white noonlight Thissa cast a spell of wind and water that carried her into some other world, and when at last she rose from her trance she pointed a little way to the west and north and said, “There is the path we must take.”

Would Stum be still alive when we found her? Thissa offered us nothing about that. But few of us thought so, and I for one hoped she was not. By now the power of that hot glowing thing which Min had called the Source must surely have transformed Stum into something that was very little like the good sturdy Carpenter we had known. Better by far that she had perished at their hands, or found some way of doing away with herself. Yet if there was any chance at all that Stum lived, it would be a sin to leave her behind, however altered she might be; and even if she were dead, honor required us to make an attempt at retrieving her body and giving it a proper burial.

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.

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.