What should he do? Starve? No. Climb? How?
He thought of using his second sight to catch Haniman’s attention. That was a forbidden thing, to turn one’s second sight upon a fellow member of the tribe, and thus to violate the sanctuary of his mind. But was he supposed to rot here in the darkness rather than go against custom?
Gathering his strength, Hresh sent forth his second sight.
Upward through the darkness went the tendrils of his perception. Someone was up there, yes. He felt life, he felt warmth. Haniman. Asleep! Dawinno take him, he had fallen asleep!
Hresh gave him a jab with his mind. There was a stirring overhead. Haniman murmured and grumbled. Hresh had a sense of Haniman turning in his sleep, perhaps brushing at his face as if trying to brush away a bothersome dream. He jabbed again, harder. Haniman! You imbecile, wake up! And harder yet. Haniman was awake now. Yes, sitting up, eyes open. Hresh saw the upper floor through Haniman’s eyes. That was a weird sensation, being in someone else’s mind. Hresh knew that he should withdraw. But he remained, lingering another moment, out of sheer curiosity. Feeling Haniman’s mind all around his like a second pelt. Touching Haniman’s little yearnings and hungers and angers. Discovering something of what it had been like to grow up fat and slow in a tribe of thin agile folk. Hresh felt an unexpected flood of compassion. This was almost like a twining; and in some ways it was more intense, more intimate. His annoyance with Haniman remained; but now it was like being annoyed at one’s own self, an irritation tinged with amusement and forgiveness.
Then Haniman’s mind shook itself angrily, tossing Hresh aside, and hastily Hresh withdrew, shivering at the impact of the breaking of the contact.
“Hresh? Was that you?”
Haniman’s voice floated downward, faint, vague, shrouded in echo.
“Yes! Bring me up, will you?”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I’ve been calling for ten minutes. Were you asleep?”
“Asleep?” came the voice from far above. But Hresh could not be sure whether it was Haniman repeating his word, or his own voice returning to him from the vault of the cavern.
In a moment the slab emitted its familiar groaning, sighing sound. Hastily Hresh scrambled aboard it, and it began to rise. He lay still, feeling the ache of fatigue in all his limbs.
He emerged into the upper level. Haniman stood beside the slab, arms folded, regarding him sourly.
“I don’t care if you are the chronicler,” he said. “You touch me like that again and I’ll push you into the sea.”
“I had to get your attention somehow. I was calling and you weren’t answering.”
“You weren’t calling loudly enough, maybe.”
“Enough to knock rocks loose from the cavern roof.”
Haniman shrugged. “I didn’t hear a thing.”
“You were asleep.”
“Was I? How could I have been? You weren’t down there more than two minutes.”
Hresh stared in amazement. “Are you serious?”
“Two minutes! No more than that! You went down below, I laid myself down to rest, and maybe I closed my eyes for a moment, and next thing I knew there you were, grubbing around inside my mind in that filthy way, and—” Haniman halted abruptly. He walked toward Hresh and peered at him closely. “Yissou! What happened to you down there?”
“What do you mean?”
“You look a hundred years old. Your eyes are strange. Your whole face — it’s all different. As if you’ve been hollowed out inside.”
“I had a vision,” Hresh said. He touched his face, wondering if it had been transformed as Haniman said, wondering if he looked as old as old Thaggoran now. But his face felt the same as ever. Whatever transformation he had undergone must have been within.
“What did you see?”
Hresh hesitated. “Things,” he said. “Strange things. Disturbing things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Never mind,” said Hresh. “Let’s get out of this place.”
A great weariness gripped him on the journey back to the settlement. He had to pause often to rest, and once he became sick and knelt behind a broken column, gagging and retching for an almost interminable spell. He felt old and feeble all the rest of the way, lagging behind as Haniman went bounding ahead, and then feeling abashed as Haniman found it necessary to come back and look for him. Only as they reached the settlement itself did his youthful vitality assert itself and his strength begin to return. He moved more quickly, he paused less frequently, though Haniman still turned again and again to beckon impatiently.
Hresh knew he would be a long time pondering what he had learned in the vault of the plaza of thirty-six towers. The jeering hissing laughter of that sapphire-eyes artificial by the south gate swelled in his soul until it seemed to fill the world.
Little monkey, little monkey, little monkey.
It was impossible now for him to clear his spirit of that bitter mockery. And yet he had found the key to lost Vengiboneeza as well. A great triumph, a shattering defeat, each wrapped in the other: it bewildered him. He resolved to keep his own counsel until he came to some deeper comprehension of these matters. But the treasures of Vengiboneeza lay open to him now. He had to tell Koshmar at least that much.
Just outside the chieftain’s house he came upon Torlyri.
“Where’s Koshmar?”
The offering-woman pointed toward the house. “Inside.”
“I’ve got things to tell her! Marvelous things!”
“She’s busy now,” Torlyri said. “You’ll have to wait a little while.”
“Wait? Wait?” It was like a bucket of cold water in the face. “What do you mean, wait? I saw the Great World, Torlyri! I saw it alive, as it had been! And I know now where everything we came to Vengiboneeza to find is hidden!” In his sudden enthusiasm his fatigue and confusion fell away. “Listen, go to her, will you? Tell her to drop whatever she’s doing and let me in. All right? Will you? What’s she so busy doing, anyway?”
“She has a stranger with her,” said Torlyri.
Hresh stared, not comprehending at first.
“A stranger?”
“A scout from a strange tribe, so it seems.”
Hresh’s hand went, as it so often did, to Thaggoran’s amulet at his throat. A stranger!
He gaped. “What? Who?”
“A spy, in fact. Harruel and Konya caught him snooping around on Mount Springtime a little while ago.” Torlyri smiled and put her hands over his. “Oh, Hresh, I know you’re bubbling over with things to tell her. But can you wait? Can you wait just a little while? This is important too. It’s an actual man from another tribe, Hresh. That’s an enormous thing. She can’t deal with more than one enormous thing at a time. Nobody can. Do you understand that, Hresh?”
Koshmar stood straight and tall in front of the dark rat-wolf skin that hung as a trophy on the wall of her room. Her wide shoulders were drawn tightly back, her face was set in determination. Harruel was at her left, Konya at her right, both of them armed and ready to protect her; but she knew that spears were useless in this situation. What was unfolding now was a challenge that intelligence alone could deal with. It was something that she had anticipated since the Time of Coming Forth; but now that it had finally arrived she was far from sure of the best way to proceed.
Now, if ever, she needed old Thaggoran. Another tribe! It was only to be expected; and yet it was almost beyond belief. Throughout all their history her people had thought of themselves as the only people in the world, and in essence that had been so. And now — now—