She paused to observe the effect of her story on Amin Lim, who, having nothing else to do, was listening intently. Rol Sakil’s little eyes became almost hidden in wrinkles as she continued.
“I’d never have thought a mite more of it—I likes a drop of pig’s counsel myself. But round the other side of the tower, what do I find but another body lying there. ‘That’s two fools drunk out of their wits, lying asleep on the ground,’ says I to myself. And I’d never have thought a mite more of it, but when it’s given out that young Klils and his brother Nahkri were found dead together, lying at the bottom of their tower, why, that’s another matter…” She sniffed.
“Everyone said that’s where they were found.”
“Ah, but I found them first, and they weren’t together. So they didn’t fight together, did they? That’s fishy, Amin Lim, isn’t it? So I says to myself, ‘Someone went and pushed them two brothers off the top of the tower.’ Who might it be, who stood most to gain by their deaths? Well, girl, that’s something I leave to others to judge. All I says is, I says to our Dol, ‘You cultivate your fear of heights, Dol. Don’t you go near no edges of towers while you’re with Aoz Roon,’ I says. ‘Don’t you go near no edges of towers and you’ll be all right…’ That’s what I says.”
Amin Lim shook her head. “Shay Tal wouldn’t love Aoz Roon if he did that kind of thing. And she’d know. She’s wise, she’d know for sure.”
Rol Sakil rose and hobbled nervously about the stone room, shaking her head in doubt. “Where men’s concerned, Shay Tal is the same as the rest of us. She doesn’t always think with her harneys—sometimes she uses the thing between her legs instead.”
“Oh, hush with you.” Amin Lim looked sorrowfully down at her friend and mentor. Privately, she wished that Shay Tal’s life were ruled more in the way Rol Sakil indicated: she might then be happier.
Shay Tal lay stretched out stiffly on her left side, in the pauk attitude. Her eyes seemed barely closed. Her breathing was scarcely audible, punctuated by long- drawn-out sighs. Looking at the austere contours of that loved face, Amin Lim thought she was watching someone facing death with composure. Only the mouth, growing tighter occasionally, indicated the terror it was impossible to suppress in the presence of the denizens of the world below.
Although Amin Lim had once gone into pauk herself, under guidance, the fright of seeing her father again had been enough for her. The extra dimension was now closed; she would never again visit that world until her final call came.
“Poor thing, poor little thing,” she said as she stroked her friend’s head, lovingly regarding its grey hairs, hoping to ease her passage through the black realm lying below life.
Though the soul had no eyes, yet it could see in a medium where terror replaced vision.
It looked down, as it began to fall, into a space more enormous than the night sky. Into that space, Wutra could never come. This was a region of which Wutra the Undying had no cognisance. With his blue face, his undaunted gaze, his slender horns, he belonged to the great frosty battle taking place elsewhere. This region was hell because he was not. Every star that gleamed was a death.
There was no smell except terror. Every death had its immutable position. No comets flared down here; this was the realm of entropy absolute, without change, the event death of the universe, to which life could respond only with terror.
As the soul did now.
The land-octaves wound over real territory. They could be likened to paths, except that they more resembled winding walls, endlessly dividing the world, only their tops showing above the surfaces. Their real substance went down deep into the seamless ground, penetrating to the original boulder on which the disc of the world rested.
In the original boulder, at the bottom of their appropriate land-octaves, the gossies and fessups were stacked, like thousands of ill-preserved flies.
The gaunt soul of Shay Tal sank down on its predestined land-octave, negotiating a course between the fessups. They resembled mummies; their stomachs and eye sockets were hollow, their boney feet dangled; their skins were coarse as old sacking, yet transparent, allowing a glimpse of luminescent organs beneath. Their mouths were open like fish, as if they still recalled the days when they breathed air. Less ancient gossies had their mouths stuffed with things like fireflies which issued forth in smokey dust. All these old put-away things were without motion, yet the wandering soul could sense their fury—a fury more intense than any of them could have experienced before obsidian claimed them.
As the soul settled between their ranks, it saw them suspended in irregular rows which stretched to places she could not travel, to Borlien, to the seas, to Pannoval, to far Sibornal, and even to the icy wildernesses of the east. All were relegated here to being units of one great collection, filed under their appropriate land-octaves.
To living senses, there were no directions. Yet there was a direction. The soul had its own sail. It had to be alert. A fessup had little more volition than dust, yet fury pent in its eddre gave it strength. A fessup could swallow any soul sailing too close, thus freeing itself to walk upon the earth again, causing terror and disease wherever it went.
Well aware of danger, the soul sank through the obsidian world, through what Lailanun had called scratched emptiness. It arrived finally before the gossie of Shay Tal’s mother. The drab thing appeared made of wires and twigs, which formed patterns like dried halters of breasts and thrusting hipbones. It glared at its daughter-soul. It showed its old brown teeth in its slack lower jaw. It was itself a brown stain. Yet all its details could be viewed, as a pattern of lichen on a wall can perfectly depict a man or a necropolis.
The gossie emitted a noise of unceasing complaint. Gossies are negatives of human lives and believe nothing good of life in consequence. No gossie considers that its life on earth was long enough, or that its tenure there achieved the happiness it deserved. Nor can it believe that it has earned such oblivion. It craves living souls. Only living souls can give ear to its endless grievances.
“Mother, I come dutifully before you again and will listen to your complaints.”
“You faithless child, when did you last come, how long, and reluctant, oh, always reluctant, evermore reluctant, as in those thankless days—I should have known, I should have known—when I bore you not wishing another offspring squeezed from my poor sore loins—”
“I will listen to your complaints—”
“Pah, yes, reluctantly, just as your father cared nothing, nothing for my pain, knew nothing, did nothing, just like all men but who’s to say children are any better sucking your life from you—oh, I should have known—I tell you I despised that clod of a man always demanding, demanding everything, more than I had to give, never never satisfied, the nights of grief, the days, caught in that trap, that’s what it was, and you come here, a trap designed to swindle me out of my youth, pretty, yes, yes, I was pretty, that damned disease—I see you laughing at me now, little you care—”
“I care, I care, Mother, it’s agony to behold you!”
“Yes, but you and he you cheated me out of it, out of all I had and all I hoped for, he with his lust, the filthy pig, if men only knew the hatreds they stir when they overpower us, override us in the dim unendurable dark, and you with that piddling feebleness, that ever sucking mouth forever with that mouth like his prod demanding too much, too much by far in patience and your scumble ever needing wiping, witless, wailing, wanting something all the while, the days, the years, those years, draining my strength, ah my strength, my sweet strength and I once so lovely, all stolen, no pleasure left for life, I should have known, no life my mother promised me at her breast and then she too no better than the rest dying damn her dying curse the stinking milkless bitch that bore me dying when I needed her…”