Kingdoms of the Wall

17

We climbed, and the world itself altered as we ascended, flattening and broadening behind us, drawing itself together into a needle’s point before us, while strange new lands rose about us and flowed past as though we were a rock sitting motionless in a river. And all the while two potent new forces exerted themselves upon us. One was the call of the Kavnalla, which was not long in making itself known to us, and the other was the presence of Thrance among us.

We had entered a new and darker phase of our Pilgrimage with his coming, and even the least thoughtful among us knew that. Perhaps Thrance was no demon—I quickly ceased thinking, even in jest, that he was—but his transformation in the land of the Kavnalla had turned him into some kind of elemental being, black and fierce of soul, who walked in our midst like a creature out of nightmare. His towering twisted form, so strange and monstrous in hue and shape, rose above us like the Wall itself.

There was a rough magnetism about him that drew us to him whether we wanted to be drawn or not. I felt it keenly. He seemed to take nothing seriously, to turn anything into some occasion for harsh laughter, to offer biting quips when a kinder word would have been more appropriate; and we expected it and even were entertained by his manner. That he was heroic, a man of enormous strength and endurance, we could not doubt. But he was also perplexing and difficult, a malcontent, a disturber of the peace, every bit as troublesome as Muurmut had predicted.

He was forever taking favorites among us, but the favorites kept changing. One day it was my company that he sought, and one day Kilarion’s, and then he would only march with Galli on one side of him and Tull the Clown on the other; and so it went. If he had no interest in you, he would tell you straight out: “Keep away from me, you bore me,” he would say. He said that to Muurmut. He said it to Naxa. But he said it also once to Jaif, that good-hearted clear-souled Singer, and Jaif could never understand why.

The women in particular were fascinated by him, hideous as he was: all but Thissa, who would not go near him. Grycindil seemed especially drawn to him, which didn’t improve Muurmut’s frame of mind. Often I saw her jostling to be at Thrance’s side, while Muurmut rumbled and grumbled from afar. But at night Thrance always slept alone, at least in the early days of our march. For a time it seemed to me that he must have no interest at all in making the Changes in the usual sense of that term; a Change had been made upon him, certainly, a very great one, and it had put him into a mode of existence that was not in any way like ours. But I was wrong about that.

He never spoke of his life in the village, or of the fate of the Forty with whom he had set out upon the Wall so many years before, or indeed of any aspect of himself or of his past. The majestic Thrance of my childhood, whom I had watched so often racing in the winter games or casting javelins or winning the high leap, was dead and buried somewhere within his altered and deformed body. His conversation was all banter and gibe and wild mockery, or sarcasm and riddle. Perhaps the most mysterious thing about him was the volatility of his moods; for he was often fiery and outgoing, capering along the trail despite his limp and calling jubilantly to us to keep up with him, and then abruptly he would become sullen and ashen-souled and distant. It was as if a god sometimes would possess him, or some evil spirit; and when the god was gone from him, or the spirit, nothing remained but a husk. The change could happen three times in five minutes: you never knew which Thrance it was that you would be dealing with a moment from now.

When we had been on the trail with him for a week or so, he dismissed Muurmut from our midst.

I never knew precisely what happened. Grycindil was at the heart of the matter, that much was sure. Evidently she had gone to Thrance’s sleeping-place in the night, and he had taken her in; so much for my theory that he was beyond the need or desire for making the Changes. And then—so Kath believed, for he had been sleeping nearby and heard a little of the dispute—Muurmut had gone to them to bring her back.

That was a childish thing to do, for although Muurmut and Grycindil had become lovers, they weren’t sealed to each other—sealings are unthinkable on Kosa Saag—and Grycindil was free to sleep wherever she chose. But Muurmut would not have it. And so in the night there were words between Muurmut and Thrance. I heard them myself, angry sounds far away, but I was too tired from that day’s march to give them much thought, and Hendy drew me down into her arms, sleepily telling me that it was nothing, that I should pay no attention. And in the morning Muurmut was gone.

“Where is he?” I asked, because his bulky presence was always conspicuous and so was his absence. “Who has seen him?”

Thrance gestured toward the steep slope behind us. “He has resigned from our company.”

“What?”

“He fears the high country. He told me so. He thinks his soul will be devoured there. And I said, ‘So it will be, Muurmut. You should go home. Slink down the hill to the village, Muurmut, and tell them to take you in.’ He saw the wisdom in what I was saying to him. And so he is gone. He will be a Returned One, and he will be very good at it.”

Thrance’s words bewildered me. I had never known Muurmut to take orders from anyone, nor could any threat I was capable of imagining have frightened him into such a capitulation. “What nonsense is this?” I said, looking around. “Where’s Muurmut? Who has seen Muurmut?” But no one had. We searched for his tracks, and Ment the Sweeper, who was skillful at such things, thought he saw a trail leading downward from our camp. I told Gazin and Talbol and Naxa to follow it and search for him. Thrance laughed and stood with folded arms, saying that Muurmut was gone and no one would find him. Some hours went by, and the searchers returned. We waited there all day, but Muurmut did not return. There was nothing to do but to go on. I took Grycindil aside and asked her to tell me what had happened, but all she could say was that Muurmut had come to her where she was sleeping with Thrance, and that Thrance and Muurmut had spoken in the night, and then Thrance had returned to her side. It had been a night of no moons. She had no idea which way Muurmut had gone, or why. Nor did we ever learn those things. What Thrance had said to Muurmut, or what enchantment he had worked on him, is something I do not know. I never will.

Strangely, I felt a great empty place in my spirit at Muurmut’s disappearance. I hadn’t ever liked him; he had been nothing but trouble for me; I should have rejoiced that he was no longer with us. But I am not like that. He had been a nuisance but he was of our Forty, and I mourned his going for that reason, and also because he was strong and sometimes valuable to the group. In a curious way I would miss him. It occurred to me that in trading Muurmut for Thrance I had not improved my situation. Muurmut, negative force though he had been in the group, had been easy enough for me to outflank and control. Thrance was a different matter: older, shrewder, with that strange burned-out quality that made him indifferent to ambition but highly dangerous all the same, since by his own admission he no longer cared about anything at all. When most of us act, it is usually with some thought for the consequences of what we are doing. Not so with Thrance. For him every moment was an independent thing, born with neither antecedent nor successor. In Thrance, I realized, I had acquired a much more complicated and deadlier rival than Muurmut ever had been. I would need to keep close watch on him.

During these days, also, we were drawing nearer and nearer to the Kingdom of the Kavnalla.

We had all begun feeling its pull almost as soon as we left our camp in the place of the red spires. Dorn was the first to come to me complaining of it: he spoke of a strangeness in his head, like an itching or a tickling within his skull, and on his heels came two of the women, Scardil and Pren, and then Ghibbilau, to tell me the same. They were relieved to find that they weren’t the only ones afflicted that way, that in fact we all were. I called the group together and told them that what we were experiencing was a phenomenon particular to this sector of the Wall and that there was nothing to fear from it, at least not yet.

“Is that the Kavnalla that we feel?” I asked Thrance. And he nodded and pointed up the slope, grinning almost as though he were looking forward to a rendezvous with an old friend.

The force of it grew stronger hour by hour. At first it was as Dorn had said, no more than a kind of tickling inside our skulls, a barely perceptible feather-stroke, odd and a little disturbing, but light, very light. Then it grew more powerful and it became as Traiben and I had experienced it on our preliminary reconnoitering march: a clear voice within our heads, articulate and unmistakable, saying to us, Come, come, this is the way, come to me, come. There was a definite pull, but not an unpleasant one, nothing troublesome or alarming: something was beckoning to us like a mother opening her arms to her children.

And if something was beckoning, we were responding. We were in a steep land now, heavily wooded, where the hills were of a grayish-white stone deeply pockmarked by caves, and though the path was difficult, we made our way up the ever more rugged incline with such frantic zeal that we outstripped our own strength, and from time to time had to halt and drop to the ground, laughing and gasping, until we could catch our breath. And then we were onward again, furiously slashing through brambles, scrambling over boulders, clawing our way upward, upward, upward, moving faster than we would have thought possible. The higher we went, the more urgent became the call. Come to me! Come! Come!

Traiben spoke to me and expressed his concern. I shared it. “We’re starting to lose control of ourselves,” I said uneasily to Thrance. “You said that you would guard us against the Kavnalla’s song.”

“And so I will.”

“Shouldn’t we be taking some precautions by this time, then?”

“Soon. Soon. There’s no need at this point.” Nor would he say more than that, however hard I pressed him.

And upward we sped, willy-nilly. We were all but running up the slope now. The thought came to me once again that despite his protestations Thrance might indeed be the creature of the Kavnalla, and was merrily leading us toward our doom.

Others now were beginning to wonder, not just Traiben. Our ever-swifter pace was taking its toll on their bodies and stirring troublesome questions in their minds. Where were we going in such a hurry? they asked. What is this thing that speaks in our heads? Is there danger? Tell us, tell us, tell us, Poilar!

But there was nothing I could say. I knew no more than they did.

I felt that it was my responsibility to take some action. But what? Thrance was elusive. Often he walked ahead, moving with remarkable swiftness for one whose body was so transformed into twistedness and deformity. Watching him striding so swiftly, I was reminded again of the shining young Thrance of years ago, bursting from Pilgrim Lodge and running ahead of all his Forty up the road that led to Kosa Saag. So there is still some of Thrance within that ruined body, I thought. I pushed myself to catch up with him. He moved serenely, his breathing utterly normal, as though this pace were nothing for him.

I said, “We can’t go on like this. The voice grows louder and louder, and people are speaking out. We have to know what we’re getting into, Thrance.”

“Wait. There’s time yet for you to learn.”

“No. Now.”

“No, not now. The time will come.” And with a new burst of speed he streaked ahead. I followed him, but it was hard for me to match his pace, and my bad leg began to ache. How did he do it? There had to be a demon in him. Again I caught up with him, and again I pressed him, and again he eluded me with grinning evasions, putting me off, telling me the time was not yet.

I felt a burst of rage. I should kill him, I thought. And take us all away from this place. Unless he is killed he will never let us alone, and ultimately he will destroy us. For he is a demon, or else he has one in him.

But the thought of killing Thrance appalled me. I tried to sweep it from my mind. Another day, I told myself, or two or three, and then I would confront him once again, and this time I wouldn’t let him wriggle from my grasp. It was a weak decision, and I had no illusions about that. But Thrance baffled me. I had never had to deal with anyone like him before.

My companions were growing even more restless now. After dark one night a delegation came to me, troubled and angry, when we had halted after a day of wild climbing that left us all exhausted: Galli, and Naxa, and Talbol, and Jaif. The pull was so strong now that we were climbing virtually from dawn to dusk; but finally we had stopped from sheer weariness, despite the insistent booming in our minds, and were camped in a place of little shallow caverns against the pitted and eroded Wall.

Hendy was with me in the small dank cavern I had chosen. Galli said, very brusquely, “Send her out.”

“What is this?” I asked. “Am I to be murdered?”

“We want to speak with you. What we have to say is between you and the four of us, and no one else.”

“Hendy shares my sleeping-place, and much else of mine besides. Whatever you have to say you can say in front of her.”

“It makes no difference to me,” said Hendy softly, and began to get up to go.

“Stay,” I said, catching her by the wrist.

“No,” Galli said. She seemed gigantic, standing there in the mouth of my shallow little cave. Her face was fierce. I had never seen her with such a look as she had now. “Send her outside, Poilar.”

I was eager for sleep, and I suppose I had the doing of the Changes on my mind also, and the voice of the Kavnalla was louder than ever, like the beating of a drum in my brain. Come, come, come, making me short-tempered and impatient. I turned my back and said, “Let me be, will you? I’m in no mood for discussing anything with any of you now. Talk to me about it in the morning, Galli.”

“We’ll talk now,” Galli replied.

Then Talbol said to her, “What difference does it make if Hendy hears this or not? Let her stay while we speak.”

Galli grunted and shrugged, but offered no objection.

“Will you hear us?” Talbol asked.

“Go ahead,” I said grudgingly.

Talbol swung around toward me. I remembered that he had been Muurmut’s man. Just as well Muurmut was gone, I thought: I could imagine how much difficulty Muurmut would be making for me if he had been a member of this delegation too. I studied Talbol’s broad flat face, brown as the leather that is the trade of his House. This was a strange alliance, I thought, my friends Galli and Jaif with Talbol and Naxa, who never had had much love for me.

He said, “What we want to know is simply this, Poilar: Why are we rushing forward in this lunatic way, when we don’t know where we’re going or what we’re heading toward?”

“We’re going into the Kingdom of the Kavnalla,” I replied. “And through it, and beyond.”

“Into it, yes,” said Naxa, stepping forward to stand at Talbol’s side. “But beyond it? How do you know? What if Thrance means only to deliver us up to this unknown thing that we hear speaking in our minds?”

“Not so,” I said, looking away from Naxa in discomfort, for the fear that Naxa had voiced was of course one that I shared. But I couldn’t say that to him. “He has a way of protecting us against it.”

“Ah, and what may that be?” Galli asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But he intends to teach it to us, sooner or later?”

“When the time comes, is what he told me.”

“And when is that?” she asked me. “What is he waiting for? It seems to us that the time is very close. He protected his own Forty so well that of them all he’s the only one who still survives. My brother was a member of his Forty, Poilar. And now we fly toward your Kavnalla day by day, and its voice grows stronger and stronger within us, and Thrance tells us nothing.”

“He will. I know he will.”

“You know? You think? You believe? You hope? Which is it, Poilar?” Great heavy-set Galli rose up before me like a tower, her eyes ablaze in the dimness of the little cave. “Why don’t you demand that he tell you right now? Are you our leader, or is he? When will he teach us what we need to know in order to defend ourselves?”

“He will,” I said again, with less conviction than before. “In the proper time.”

“Why do you trust him, Poilar?” Galli asked.

I had no answer for that.

“What I think is that we should throw him over the cliff,” said Talbol abruptly. “And make our way down from this place and take some other route upward, before we discover that there’s no longer any turning back for us. There is change-fire here, somewhere nearby. We are in great danger. And he brings us ever closer to it.”

“Just so,” said Jaif, who had hung back until this moment, saying nothing. “Kill him now, while we still can.”

“Kill him?” I said, astounded. This from Jaif, the kindest of men?

“Kill him, yes,” Jaif said again. He looked a little stunned at his own audacity. But then Galli nodded vehemently and said, “There’s something to the idea, Poilar. I took Thrance’s side when he first came to us, but also I said then that we should kill him if he made problems for us. I didn’t really mean it then, but now I do. He’s rotten through and through. He’s nothing but trouble, don’t you see?” Naxa too spoke up in favor of our ridding ourselves of Thrance, and Talbol also, and suddenly they were all talking at once, crying out for an end to him and an immediate descent from this hill of voices, while beneath all their hubbub I heard the Kavnalla’s urging louder than ever, pounding like the beating of a drum in my brain. Come, come, come.

My head was whirling. There was a great roaring in my ears.

“Quiet, all of you!” I cried out over the turmoil, and there must have been such madness in my tone that it awed them all into silence. They stood in the opening of the cave, gaping at me. Then in a quieter voice I said, “There’ll be no talk of killing Thrance, or anyone else, unless it comes from me. I’ll speak again with him tomorrow, and tell him that the time has arrived for him to teach us how to ward off the song of the Kavnalla. And he will give me the answer we need to have him give, or he’ll regret it, I promise you that. And now good night to you all. Go. Go.”

They looked at me and went, without another word.

My skull throbbed as though someone had been drumming on it. My thoughts raced in circles.

Hendy said, after a long while, “What if they’re right, Poilar? What if Thrance is really our enemy?”

“If that is so, then I’ll deal with him as he needs to be dealt with.”

“But if we’re already caught in the snare of the Kav—”

“You too?” I asked. “Gods! I see there’s to be no peace for me tonight.” I lay stiff and trembling. Her fingers crept along my shoulders, trying to give me some ease. But my every muscle was tight and my forehead ached dismally. The voice behind it seemed louder and louder. Come to me. Come to me. Come to me. The Kavnalla wasn’t merely beckoning any longer, but commanding. Despair engulfed me. How could we ever resist that urgent pull? I have led us all into the serpent’s jaws, I told myself. We will be swept up in the change-fire that blazes in its lair, and our forms will be lost and we will become as monsters. And why have I brought us to this dire place? Because Thrance had once been a glorious hero whom I revered; because I had allowed myself to be deceived for the sake of the Thrance that once had been, when I was a boy. I should have thrust him away when he first approached us in the land of the red spires. Instead I had taken him into our Forty, and this was how he had repaid us. In that moment I could have killed Thrance with my own hands.

Hendy rubbed against me and I felt the soft swelling of a breast. She had begun to enter the Changes. But pleasure now was far from my mind, or even the higher unity that the Changes give us. I murmured an apology to her and got up, and went out into the night.

A light rain was falling, more of a mist. The blurred light of several moons glimmered faintly through it. I saw a figure moving about not far away, and thought at first it was one of the sentries of the watch, Gazin or Jekka; but a moment later, when my eyes were better adjusted to the darkness, I recognized the grotesque elongated form of Thrance, outlined like a bizarre nightmare wraith against the darkness.

He waved to me. “You want to kill me?” he said. He sounded almost cheerful. “Well, then, here I am. How do you want to do it? A knife? A cudgel? Or with your bare hands, Poilar? Do it and be done with it, if you like.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked him. My voice was like a rasp in my own ears. Thrance made no immediate reply, but sauntered toward me in his lopsided way, his head bobbing and weaving and lurching about with every awkward step he took.

I squared myself away, in case he had some thought of striking first. But when he came closer I saw that he was unarmed, and his stance was not that of a man who was expecting combat.

He said, “I have many enemies in this camp, I see. Well, all right. What do you want to do?”

“You were listening?”

“I was out and about. Voices carry.” He seemed utterly indifferent to anything that had been said. “That Galli—I remember her. Her brother was my friend, once. A lively girl, Galli, but a great deal too fat for my taste, is what I thought back then. And of course still too young for the Changes when I left Jespodar. I had my pick of them, back then. But that was when I was beautiful.” He bent himself over into a sort of crooked arch, so that his eyes were on a level with mine. “What do you say, Poilar? Am I really as despicable as they say, your Galli and her friends? Kill me, then. And then deal with the Kavnalla whatever way you can.”

“There’ll be no killing. But this thing called the Kavnalla frightens us.”

“You need only sing to it,” Thrance said coolly. “That’s the whole secret. I was going to tell you tomorrow. But now you know it. Sing. Sing. Open your mouths and sing. There, the secret’s out. You can kill me, if you like. But why bother?” And he laughed in my face.

It was as he said, nothing more. The way to counteract the lure of the Kavnalla was simply to sing. Anything, the more discordant the better.

Who would believe such a thing? But that was all we needed to shield ourselves against this dread monster.

In the morning Thrance told me to summon the entire group; and as we gathered round him, he explained what we must do. The Kavnalla waited for us just on the far side of these white hills. From the moment we broke camp, he said, we must raise our voices in song, loudly, lustily, bellowing any tune that came into our heads, or no tune at all. It was the noise that was important. More than a moment or two of silence could be fatal. And if anyone should lose their voice through overuse, those nearby must seize them and hold them tight, pulling them forward through the Kavnalla’s territory until they had recovered.

“And what is the Kavnalla itself, then?” Traiben asked.

“A dire creature of the Wall,” said Thrance. “A thing that is placed here to lure the weak from their proper path. More than that, what can I tell you? A gigantic thing; a parasite; an enemy of our kind. Sing, and pass it by. Why do you need to know what it is? Sing, boy. Sing and run past, and save yourself.”

Of true Singers we had only two, Jaif and Dahain. We placed them at the head of our column next to Thrance, for by virtue of their House they knew the secret of making a very great sound with relatively little effort. The rest of us, but for a few, had no ear for melody at all, and when we sang it was more of a croaking or a screeching or a wailing than any kind of a music. But Thrance said our lives depended on our singing, and so we sang. I moved up and down the ranks, listening to the others while I sang myself, making certain they were doing as Thrance said. Thissa, always shy, was giving forth only a tiny silver thread of sound, and I took her by the shoulder and shook her, crying, “Sing, woman! For Kreshe’s sake, sing!” Little Bilair the Scholar likewise could produce no more than a pitiful breathy wheeze, out of fear, I suppose, and I stood beside her, roaring a crude drinking-song to which I knew hardly half the words, and made encouraging gestures at her with my hands until she managed to bring some volume of sound up from her lungs. I went by Naxa, who was droning away on a single terrible wearisome note, but very loudly, and Tull, who sang a rollicking clownish tune in a high, stabbing voice, and Galli, booming some bit of bawdiness in a voice fit to bring down the mountain upon us, and Grycindil almost as loud, and Kath babbling a hymn of his House in quick tumbling phrases, and Kilarion, red-faced and grinning as he yelled tremendous raucous whoops into the air. Thrance’s own song was a raw tuneless rasping thing, like metal against metal, very painful to hear. And so we all went. If Thrance were playing a joke on us by this, he was getting his full measure of amusement. Surely no such noise had ever been heard in the world’s whole history as we made upon that morning on Kosa Saag.

Thrance was playing no joke, though. Beneath all our horrendous noise I still could hear the Kavnalla’s own song, trying to lure us on. This is the way, yes … come … come … But it was buried beneath the force of our outcries. It was down there in the depths of our mind, but it was small and scratchy and tinny now. You know what they say, that a sound is so great that one can scarcely hear oneself think? That was what we achieved with our singing. And if we could not think, we could not succumb to the pull that we felt in our minds. We were hiding the Kavnalla’s urgings from ourselves with all our crazy clamor.

Roistering and braying and howling like a pack of madmen, then, we came over the crest of the white hills and found ourselves in a broad basin rimmed by soft low yellow slopes half covered in sand. New peaks rolled upward as always beyond the basin’s far border: jagged fierce black ones, sharp as awls, forbidding, dismaying, stabbing deep into the ice-blue sky. Dark birds that must have been of great size, but seemed to us no bigger than specks, circled above those remote daggers of stone.

Closer at hand, at the edge of the rounded yellow slopes just to our left, I saw a long shallow-vaulted cave, broad-mouthed and dark within, with a deep track beaten in the sand leading up to it. I knew without needing to be told that within that cave lay the source of the secret voice that we had been hearing all during this part of our climb. Thrance saw me staring at it, and sang into my ear in his croaking tuneless way, “The Kavnalla is there, the Kavnalla is there!”

“Yes,” I sang. “I feel the pull pulling.” I stared into the darkness, frightened and fascinated. “Tell me,” I sang, “will it come out, will it come out?” And Thrance sang in reply to me, “No, no, the Kavnalla goes nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, it lies in wait and we go to it.”

And just at that moment the Scholar Bilair bolted from the group, no longer singing but merely whimpering and murmuring to herself, and began to run up the sandy slope toward the mouth of the cave. Instantly I saw what she was doing and ran in pursuit. Thrance also came. We caught up with her midway up the slope. I seized her by one shoulder, spun her around, stared into a wild-eyed face, frozen in a strange grimace.

“Please—” she muttered. “Let—me—go—”

Without pausing in my singing I struck her across the face, not really hard, but stunning her for a moment. Bilair looked at me in bewilderment. She blinked and shook her head; and then the light of understanding returned to her features. She nodded to me and muttered a few indistinct words of thanks and I heard her take up the piping song she had sung before. I released her and she ran like a frightened animal back to the others, singing as loudly as she could.

I turned to Thrance. He laughed and a strange diabolical sparkle came into his eyes and in the same hateful rasping singsong he had been using before he sang, “Let me show you the Kavnalla, let me show you the Kavnalla!”

“What are you saying, what are you saying?” I asked him, singing at the top of my lungs in a rhythm very much like Thrance’s own. It was absurd for us to be singing to each other like this. Behind me the whole group had halted and were staring at the dark cave-mouth also, and it seemed to me that some of them had stopped singing. “Sing!” I yelled at them. “Don’t stop, not for a moment! Sing! ”

Thrance gripped my shoulder and bent his head toward mine and sang, “We can go in, you and I. Just for a look! Just for a look!”

Why was the demon tempting me this way?

“How can we risk it?” I sang back. “We should just keep moving!”

“Just for a look, just for a look.” Thrance beckoned. His eyes were like fiery coals. “Keep singing and nothing will happen. Sing, Poilar, sing, sing, sing, sing!”

It was like a madness. Thrance began to trudge toward the cave-mouth and I followed him, helpless as a slave, along that tight-packed beaten path. The others pointed and gaped but they did nothing to stop us; I think they were too dazed and bemuddled by the proximity of the Kavnalla’s powerful mind. Only Traiben left the group and trotted toward us, but it wasn’t to prevent me from going in. He ran up to us still singing, and what he sang was, “Take me too, take me too!” Of course. His hunger to know was ever insatiable.

So despite all reason we three went into the cave, right into the mouth of the enemy.

Never once did we cease to sing. Perhaps we had lost our minds but at least that much common sense remained to us. My throat was ragged and inflamed now from this misuse, but still I barked and shrieked and bellowed for all I was worth, and so did Thrance, and Traiben also, the three of us making such a terrible din that I thought the walls of the cave must surely bend outward beneath its force.

Within the cave an eerie gray light prevailed. It came from dark glossy mottled mats of some living, growing thing that clung to the surfaces of the rock; and when our eyes adapted to it, as they did after a moment or two, we saw that the cave was a huge one, deep and extremely wide, and that this light-yielding plant illuminated it even in its farthermost depths. We went in. Occasional clouds of dark spores rose from the mats on the rocks and a thick black juice ebbed constantly from their rough, pebbly surfaces, as if they were bleeding.

“Look, look, look, look!” Thrance sang, on rising pitches.

In the middle sector of the cave were waxy-skinned black creatures crawling about over the mottled mats. They were long and low, with elongated limbs with which they pulled themselves slowly around, and they kept their heads down, feeding in slurping bites on the sticky substance that the mats exuded. Narrow tails of enormous length extended far behind them, tails that were more like long ropes, sprouting from their rumps and snaking off for impossible distances into the rear of the cave.

Thrance, capering about, went to one of these creatures and lifted its head.

“Look, look, look, look!”

I was so astounded I almost forgot for a moment to keep singing. The thing’s face was almost like a man’s! I saw a mouth, a nose, a chin, eyes. It made a grunting sound and tried to pull away, but Thrance held it up for a moment, long enough for me to realize that the face was not simply like a man’s, it was a man’s: I knew that I must be looking at a Transformed One, that what was groveling and nuzzling here before me in the slimy muck of the floor of the cave had to be one who had yielded to the call of the Kavnalla. I trembled at the thought that so many of our kin from the village had been lost this way on the Wall.

“Sing!” Traiben reminded me. “Sing, Poilar! Or you are lost!”

I was numb with amazement and horror. “What are these? Who are they? Do you know them?”

Thrance’s laughter traveled up and down the notes of the scale. “This was Bradgar, this was Stit, this was Halimir,” he sang. He pointed to one who wallowed not far from me. “That one there was Gortain.”

I remembered that name.

“Gortain who was Lilim’s lover?”

“Gortain who was Lilim’s lover, yes.”

And I trembled and came close to weeping, for into my mind flooded the memory of sweet Lilim who had been the first to make the Changes with me, and who had told me of her lover Gortain who had gone up the Wall. Lilim who had said to me, “If you see him there when you go up, carry my love to him, for I have never forgotten him.” Lilim’s Gortain crawled at my feet now, a black waxy-skinned thing with a tail, transformed beyond any recognition and linked by that long ropy appendage to the unknown monstrosity at the rear of the cave. I could not help myself. I knelt beside him and sang Lilim’s name to him, for I had promised her that I would. I hoped that he would be beyond understanding; but I was wrong, for his eyes went wide, and I saw such terrible pain in them that I would gladly have ripped my heart from my breast if it could have given him peace. He wept without shedding tears. It was an awful sight. But I had promised Lilim long ago that I would look for her Gortain and give him her greeting, though I was sorry now that ever I had, or that I had found him.

“Sing!” Traiben cried. “Don’t stop, Poilar!”

Sing? How could I sing? I wanted to die of shame. I was silent for a moment with my head bowed, and in that moment I heard the Kavnalla’s voice thundering like ten rockslides in my mind, ordering me to come to it and yield myself up to it, and I took a faltering step inward; but Thrance caught hold of me with a strength beyond all comprehension, holding me back, and Traiben struck me between the shoulders to bring me to my senses, and I nodded and opened my mouth and a shriek came out that someone might shriek while being flayed alive, and another shriek after that one, and another, and that was the song I sang.

“Lilim—” murmured the thing at my feet, in a voice like a groan, which for all its faintness cut through my shrieking like the blaring of a brass bindanay. “Bring me to Lilim—Lilim—I want to go home—home—home—”

I knelt to him. His face was smeared with the juice of the thing he had been eating. Black tears rolled from his tormented eyes.

“Poilar, no, keep back, keep back—”

Thrance. But I paid no heed. I looked into those desperate eyes with pity and love; and Gortain reached to me and wrapped his arms about me like a drowning man. I thought it was a hug of companionship, but then I felt him pulling at me, tugging me, trying to drag me across the floor of the cave toward the Kavnalla. Of course he could not do it. He was just a crawling squirming thing on the ground and his limbs had lost whatever strength they once had had. But I felt the pull all the same, not in my mind this time but on my body, and fear took hold of me. With a sharp twist of my body I broke free of him and rolled to my side, and then, without even thinking, I drew my knife from its sheath and severed the interminable cord that linked him to the thing in the depths of the cave. Gortain howled and rolled himself into a ball, and quivered and jerked for a moment, and then went into wild leaping convulsions, arching up and falling back, arching up and falling back. “Sing!” Traiben ordered me again, as I stood there stupidly.

I opened my mouth and a croaking rusty noise came out. And Thrance, snatching the knife from my dangling hand, plunged it swiftly into Gortain’s chest as the pitiful creature rose and fell.

Gortain was still. But all about us the other slaves of the Kavnalla were roiling and writhing and wriggling up close to us, as though they meant to surround us and drag us somehow toward the back of the cave.

“Out!” Thrance sang. “Out, out, out, out!” And we fled.