Kingdoms of the Wall

19

We had entered the Kingdom of the Kvuz, Thrance told us. This was the limit of his previous explorations; and it was, he said, by far the most dismal of the Kingdoms of the Wall. “In what way?” I asked him, thinking of the squalid snuffling of the long-tailed prisoners within the Kavnalla’s cave, and the apparent soullessness of those spidery-limbed gray creatures of the high trails who had given themselves to the Sembitol. Thrance only shrugged and said, “Every man is at war against all other men here. It is the worst of places. See if I’m not right, boy.”

Certainly there was no beauty in this Kingdom. It was a parched and crumpled land, somewhat like that grim plateau we had crossed so long ago, but even more brutal to the eye. We went past a place where small conical mountains belched fire and smoke and foul stinking gases, and had to cross a dark plain that was like a sea of ashes which crunched and clinked with every step we took. Dry lakes and withered streams that were no more than streams of gravel lay everywhere. Every gust of wind lifted clouds of fine dust. Now and then some bleak bubbling seepage came out of the ground, with grim little clumps of doleful shrubbery with knotted trunks and dull black leaves springing up around it. Such living creatures as we saw were pallid scuttering legless things like worms, but long as a man’s arm and covered everywhere with short bristly spines. They would wriggle with surprising swiftness across the sandy soil whenever we came upon them and vanish hastily into underground nests.

It was hard for me to see how any sort of settlement could flourish in this cheerless desert. Indeed I had decided it was a Kingdom without a population and said so to Thrance, who said to me, pointing toward a run of low eroded hummocks just to our left, “Look there, there in those stumpy hills. There is the Kingdom.”

“What Kingdom? Where?”

“Do you see holes, down near the ground? In there, that’s where you’ll find it.”

I narrowed my eyes against the sun-glare and was able to make out some small openings hardly big enough for a man to crawl through, sparsely arrayed along the face of the little hills. They were like the burrows of some reclusive animal. Thrance beckoned, and we went a little closer, so that I saw little groupings of sharp stakes set in the earth in front of each one, a sort of defensive palisade. Eyes shining with suspicion looked out at me from opening after opening.

“Those are their homes,” Thrance said. His voice was edged with contempt. “They huddle in the darkness, one by one, each one crouching in there by himself all day long. No man trusts another. Everyone’s hand is lifted against all others. Each has his own time to come forth and search for food; and if by chance two come out at once, and they happen to cross each other’s path, one will kill the other. For they all believe that the population of the Kingdom is too great to provide everyone with enough to eat, and only by murdering the rest does any of them have a hope of surviving.”

“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 Mairi 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.

What he said to us, quietly, almost feebly, was: “Please—friends—I mean you no harm, friends—”

I stared and said nothing. There was a strangeness beyond strangeness about this being. And the voice of the box was like a voice that spoke from the tomb.

“Can you understand me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Good,” he said. “And are you planning to climb this cliff?”

“Yes,” I told him. I saw no harm in that.

“Well, then. If you do, I ask you to take me up it with you. Can you do that? There are friends waiting for me at the top and I’m not able to manage the climb by myself.”

I looked at my companions, and they looked back at me. We were all at a loss to know what kind of creature this strange travel-worn being might be; for though he was something like us in superficial form, having two arms and two legs and a head and an upright stance, the differences seemed almost as great as the similarities, or perhaps even greater.

This was a very strange one, I thought, even for a Transformed. Unless he was not a Transformed at all but something else, a god or a demon or something that has come forth out of someone’s dream and made itself real. But in that case, why did he look so tired? Was it possible for a supernatural being to get tired? Or was his appearance of great weariness and frailty only some form of deception that he was playing on us?

He held one hand toward me. As if imploring me—begging me. “If you would be so kind,” he said. And again he said, “My friends are waiting for me. But I can’t—I’m not able—”

“What are you?” I asked, and made some of the sacred signs at him. “If you are a demon or a god, I conjure you in the name of everything holy to speak the truth. Tell me: Are you a demon? A god?”

“No,” he said, and his face curled to one side in an expression that might have been a smile. “No demon. Not a god, either. I’m an Earthman.”

That word was meaningless to me. I glanced puzzledly at Traiben, but he shook his head.

“An Irtiman?” I said.

“An Irtiman, yes.”

“Is that some kind of Transformed One?”

“No.”

“Nor any sort of demon, nor a god? You swear?”

“Not a demon, absolutely not. I swear it. And if I were a god, I wouldn’t need any help getting back up the mountain, would I?”

“True,” I said, though of course gods can always lie, if they so choose. But I preferred not to think that. “And these friends of yours that are waiting for you above?” I asked him. “They are Irtimen also?”

“Yes. People like me. Of my kind. There are four of us altogether.”

“All Irtimen.”

“Yes.”

“And what may Irtimen be?” I asked.

“We came here from—well, from a place very far away.”

Indeed it must be, I thought: very far away and very different. I tried to imagine a whole village full of people who looked like this. Wondered about their Houses, their rites, their customs.

“How far away?” I asked.

“Very far,” he said. “We come here as visitors. As explorers.”

“Ah. Explorers. From a place very far away.” I nodded as though I understood. I thought I did, almost. These Irtimen must be one of the unknown peoples who are said to live on the other side of the Wall, beyond even the lands subject to the King, in the remote regions where no one of our village has ever gone. That was why this being looked so strange, I thought. But I was wrong about that. He came from much farther away even than the far side of the Wall: farther than any of us could conceive.

He said, “The highlands were all that we really intended to explore, just the uppermost zone of the mountain. But then I decided to go part way down, in order to find out a little of what conditions were like down below, and now I can’t get back up to the top, because this cliff here is too much for me. And my friends tell me that they’re not able to come down and help me. Having problems of their own, they say. Not possible just now for them to offer assistance.” He paused a little, as though the effort of so much talking was a great strain for him and he needed to catch his breath. “You’re Pilgrims, aren’t you? Coming up from the lowlands?”

“Yes. That is what we are.” Then I hesitated, for I was almost afraid to ask the next question that had come into my mind. “You say that you’ve been to the top?” I said, after a moment. “The Summit, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“And have you seen the gods, then? With your own eyes?”

Now it was the stranger’s turn to hesitate, which made me wonder. For a time I heard no sound other than that of his hoarse wheezing breath. But then he said very quietly, “Yes. Yes, I’ve seen the gods.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

“At the Summit, in their palace?”

“At the Summit, yes,” the Irtiman said.

“He’s lying,” said Thrance sharply, a harsh voice out of nowhere. He had come hobbling up alongside us while we spoke and I had not seen him arrive.

I signaled to him angrily to be silent.

“What are they like, the gods at the Summit?” I asked the Irtiman. I leaned forward eagerly to him. “Tell me. Tell me what they’re like.”

The Irtiman grew restless and uneasy. He paced about to and fro, he scratched with the toe of his boot in the sand, he shifted his little speaking-box from one hand to the other. Then he looked at me with those strange deep-set eyes of his and said, “You’ll need to go and discover that for yourselves.”

“You see?” Thrance cried. “He knows nothing! Nothing!”

But the Irtiman said, calmly speaking over Thrance’s outburst, “If you are Pilgrims, then you have to experience the great truths yourselves, or your Pilgrimage will be without meaning. You must already know that, having come this far. What good is it to you if I tell you what the gods are like? You might just as well have stayed in your village and read a book.”

I nodded slowly. “This is so.”

“Good. Then let’s not talk of the gods down here. Do you agree? Finish your Pilgrimage, my friends. Go onward to the Summit. You’ll find out what the gods are when you get to the top and stand in their presence at last.”

“Yes,” I said, for I knew that what he was telling me was right. “We must finish our Pilgrimage. To the Summit—to the home of the gods—”

“And you’ll take me with you, then?” the Irtiman asked.

Once more I was slow to reply. His unexpected request baffled me. Take him with us? Why should I? What was this Irtiman to me? He had no place in our Forty. He wasn’t even of our kind. We have an obligation to help our own kind, yes, but it does not extend to those of other villages and surely not to those of an alien race. And this Irtiman looked half dead, or more than half; he would be so much helpless baggage on the way up. It would be challenge enough just getting our own weakest Pilgrims up this cliff, Bilair and Ijo and Chaliza and ones like that.

And there was Thrance pressing up against my side like a dark angel, hissing at me the very things that were already in my own mind: “Leave him! Leave him! He has no strength; he’ll only be a burden. And he means nothing to us, nothing at all!”

I think it was that poisonous hiss of Thrance’s and the hateful glare in his eyes that turned me in the Irtiman’s favor. That and a sense that if I left this weary creature here he would not be likely to survive for long, for he was almost at the end of his strength. His death would be on my conscience, then. And who was Thrance to tell me what I should do, he who was not even a member of our Forty himself? He too had asked us to take him in, and we had; how could he now deny the same kindness to another? I looked quickly about the group, at Traiben, at Galli, at Jaif: people of good will, whose souls were clean, whose spirits were free of the venom that had corrupted Thrance. And I saw nothing on their faces but assent.

“Yes,” I told the Irtiman. “We’ll take you. Yes.” Sometimes you must make a gesture of this sort out of pure charity’s sake, with no regard to whether there is wisdom in it. Thrance, who had small understanding of such things, grunted and turned away, muttering. I glowered at his broad twisted back in contempt and anger. But then it seemed to me that I felt some pity for him mingled with my contempt.

Before we began to climb I took out the tiny image of Sandu Sando the Avenger which I had had unwillingly from the madwoman Streltsa at Denbail milepost, and which I had carried with me all this way in my pack. It seemed like a thousand tens of years ago that she had given it to me as we were leaving the uppermost precincts of the village, and I had rarely thought of it since. But I wanted the special protection of the gods now in the ordeal that lay just ahead, and although the Avenger is perhaps not the appropriate one to invoke for such a reason, the little idol was the only thing of that sort that I had with me. So I looped a bit of cord between its legs and anchored it over its little erect penis and fastened it around my neck. Also I asked Thissa to cast a climbing-spell for us, and ordered everyone down to kneel and pray. Even Thrance knelt, though I would not want to guess what sort of prayer went through his mind, or to whom. Only the Irtiman stood to one side, not kneeling; but I thought I saw his lips moving silently. And then we commenced our ascent.

It was a long time since we had faced any such climb of this kind, on a bare rock face, and though our long march through tier after tier of Kosa Saag had hardened us beyond all measure it had also taken some measure of resilience from our muscles. And as I have said we were without most of our ropes and climbing-hooks and other such gear.

So we would have to rely on shrewdness as we climbed, and of course agility, and luck, and beyond all else the kindness of the gods. We would need to calculate every move we made on this unforgiving rock with unusual care: the angle at which we leaned to meet the tilted stone slabs, the way we balanced the backward push of one foot against the forward stride of the other as we climbed, the shifting of our weight in every step, the placement of our fingers in the little crevices on which our lives depended. To deal with the Irtiman required special measures that we had to devise on the spot: with some of our remaining rope we fashioned a kind of sling, and I took one end of it around my waist and sturdy uncomplaining Kilarion took the other, with the Irtiman lashed to its center. This meant that Kilarion and I would have to climb in close parallel tracks, however different the rock formations we each might encounter; but I saw no other way. Kilarion would have carried the Irtiman on his back if I had asked him, but I would not do that. The presence of the Irtiman among us was my doing, and therefore I must share in the risk and effort involved in transporting him to the top.

We gave what remaining rope we had to the least proficient climbers among us, who were mainly women, though Naxa was a poor climber also and so was Traiben. Naxa was glad of the help, but Traiben refused to let himself be roped, I suppose because he was weary of all the favors of this kind I had done for him along the way, or abashed by them; and in fact he was one of the first to spring up onto the rock wall, setting out with such defiant haste that I feared more than usually for him.

Yet once we were climbing we all moved with wondrous precision and excellence, so that we might almost have been so many ants, walking untroubledly straight up the stone face as though we were on a horizontal surface. Of course it was not as simple as that. But in many places the grade, though steep, was nevertheless well within the range of our abilities, and we could go forward quickly at only a slight lean, steadying ourselves with our hands on the ledge above. Where the rock was slick we found ways of holding on. And when I came to a place where the only way ahead for me was through a narrow chimney where I would have to brace myself against one side with my feet and against the other with my back, Kilarion was able to wait for me and even to ease me upward with the rope that linked us, which took some of the pressure off my crooked foot.

So we all steadily made our way. From time to time I risked a quick glance toward the others, and saw them advancing strongly, Galli here with Bilair roped to her, and Traiben there well beyond me, and Jekka and Maiti climbing side by side, and Grycindil, and Fesild, and Naxa, and Dorn. We were scattered all across the face of the cliff. Far off to my left was Thrance by himself, pivoting and twisting and wriggling up the rock like some crawling thing of the forest floor that must double itself up into a loop with every movement it makes; and when our eyes met he grinned at me fiercely, as if to say, You hope I’ll fall, don’t you, but there’s no chance of it, boy, no chance whatever! But he was wrong about what I felt. I wished him no harm.

Then I turned my gaze away from the others and lost myself totally in the effort of my own ascent. I paid no heed to anything except the need to find the next handhold, and the next, and the next.

But as I continued to climb, a terrible thought came over me, which was that the ascent had been easier than expected only because we were being beguiled to our destruction by some treachery of the governing spirits of the Wall once we were high up above the drylands; and I had a sudden vision of the mountain angrily shaking as soon as we were a little higher, throwing us off like fleas, all my bondfellows falling to their deaths, those I most loved, Traiben, Galli, Hendy, Jaif. All of them, one by one flung out into the void and tumbling into oblivion.

For an instant or two I trembled with fear and nearly lost my own grip. It was only the brooding fantasy of a bad moment, though. The Wall has no reason to want to slay us so casually; it wants only to test us, and eliminate those who are weak or unworthy, and send the best of us onward to the end of our Pilgrimage. So we would not perish here. And indeed I looked and my companions were still all about me clinging to the face of the cliff, working their way steadily upward.

So I grew calm again, for a little while. But my soul must have been disturbed in some fashion that day. Perhaps it was Streltsa’s Avenger amulet working some dark magic in me. For now a different strangeness came over me and it began to seem to me that I had done all this before: not just that I had climbed other rock faces much like this, but that I had climbed this one, that I had climbed it many times before, that I would climb it many times again, that I was doomed to spend the rest of eternity climbing this same rock again and again. When I reached the top of it I would find myself at the bottom, and have to begin again. And I felt hot bitter tears running down my face, realizing as I did that for me there was no way back and no way forward, but only this endless rock unrolling beneath me like a scroll that extends itself farther at one end even as it is rolled up at the other. I would live on this rock and I would die on it, and I would be born again, and still I would be climbing, and there would be no end to the climb.

Thus in despair and anguish and, I suppose, a kind of madness, I clambered up and up, with hot dry crosswinds raking me as I went. Then suddenly there was nothing more above me. I had fallen into such a mechanical rhythm of climbing that I could not at first understand where I was and what was happening; I groped for the next handhold, and found none, and brought my right foot a little higher on the rock and reached again, and again there was nothing. It was like falling into a dream within a dream. There was a roaring in my ears and my brain was spinning in my skull. I heard Kilarion’s voice from very far away, and it seemed that he was laughing as he spoke, but the words were indistinct, like sounds heard under water.

I realized then that I must be at the top of the cliff, that there was no place further to go except up and over; and I pulled myself across the edge of the rock face. As I did I scraped the side of my neck against some sharp place and the string that held my little amulet broke, and the amulet fell away quickly, bouncing from rock to rock and vanishing below. I felt a quick pang at the loss of it after having brought it this far; but I was already in the midst of the final levering gesture that brought me to the flat place on top, and I had to think only of what was before me, not behind.

I scrambled up and over. Kilarion, just to my right, came up at the same moment and we brought the Irtiman in his rope sling over with us.

I took a couple of steps forward, shaky-legged, as one often is after such a climb, and it was an instant or two before my eyes cleared and I could focus on my new surroundings. Then what came into view stunned me and astounded me to the roof of my soul; for there were mountains on all sides, a tremendous host of them, a ring of peaks of every shape and size stretching off as far as I could see. Often before I had felt as if this thing that was Kosa Saag was one chain of mountains piled on another on another, world without end, rising infinitely into the sky, and that we must proceed eternally from level to level, coming always into some new realm when we had left the last behind; and once again that was how it seemed to me now, at least at first glance.

But then I saw that this time one mountain stood clearly above the others in the center of the ring, a great jagged king of a mountain. Its upper reaches were streaked with rivers of white snow that glittered brilliantly in the sunlight and its very tip was shrouded in dense clouds so that it could not be seen at all, and I began to tremble as I looked toward those dazzling heights; for I knew beyond doubt that this was the final peak, the mountain of mountains, the true and only Summit of Kosa Saag.