Just as we were beginning to think once again that the climb would be as simple as this all the way to the Summit, we came to a place where all trails seemed to end and there was no way to proceed. This had happened to us before, and we had found some means of getting around the obstacle. But this time it seemed as though we were blocked wherever we turned.
We had been following a northerly track around the eastern face of the Wall. The wind, coming briskly out of the north, was strong in our faces, and the air was clear and fresh as young wine, and far below we could see the dull silver line of what must have been some gigantic river, seemingly no thicker than a hair to us as it wound its way through a distant blue valley. We moved with a swift step, singing joyously as we marched. In late afternoon we found our path swinging sharply toward the west, and then abruptly came the great surprise, for we discovered ourselves looking into a gigantic rift that sliced deep into the heart of Kosa Saag. It was many leagues wide—how many, I could not say—from south to north, and seemed to plunge on westward to the limits of our vision, as though the Wall were actually two pieces from here on up, cut in half by this immense sundering that we now confronted.
We halted, astonished by the splendor and magnitude of what we beheld. Wherever we looked we saw new peaks, a host of them, pink stone strongly ribbed with black, an army of peaks of great size and majesty high above us on both sides of the rift. Lightning flashed atop those peaks. Feathery strands of cloud, like veils of the sky, blew straight southward from their tips, quivering as if whipped by a terrible gale.
I had never seen such beauty. There was a wondrous music in it that filled my soul so full that I had to struggle for breath. What a grand sight it was! It was so grand that it terrified me. It seemed as if the sky were breaking open up there, and strange light was shining through a window that opened out of the future. I felt sure that it must be the light of other days I saw, time running backward, events from beyond the end of the world shining toward the beginning. There were gods walking around up there. I heard their rumbling footsteps. I wondered if the First Climber had come this way in His pioneering ascent, whether He had looked upon this sight which now so dazzled me. He must have, I thought. He must. And had been inspired by the grandeur of it to continue His upward journey to the abode of the gods. As was I. As was I.
I stood staring, lost in awe.
Naxa came up alongside me and said, “It is the land of the Doubles that we see. Or rather, we see its light, for there is no way we can see the land of the Doubles itself.”
“The Doubles?”
“Our other selves, perfect and invulnerable. They live in the Double World, which hangs downward in the sky and touches the upper reaches of the Wall. It is all written in the Book of the Double World.”
“That’s not a book that I know,” I said. “You must tell me more about it some day.”
“Yes,” Naxa said, and smiled his annoying little smile; and I knew I would never hear a thing about the Double World from him again. But I would learn of it somehow from another source, I vowed.
I couldn’t take my eyes from those lofty peaks. None of us could. Wherever we looked, great stony spires whirled toward Heaven. A hundred craggy pyramids of tumbled rock jutted into the sky on all sides of us. Some seemed kindled into pink flame by the light of setting Ekmelios. Some, which must have been capped by snow, blazed such a fierce white that we could hardly bear to look at them for long. Bright rainbows leaped from gorge to gorge. Below us, looping saddles of rock descended dizzily into a dark chasm that seemed to have no floor. We saw the tops of gigantic black trees, far below, trees which must have been fifty times a tall man’s height.
As we stood lost in all this magnificence, Dorn the Clown came to my side and said quietly to me, “Poilar, our path ends a hundred paces in front of us.”
“This is no moment for joking, Dorn.”
“And I offer you no jokes. The path drops off into utter nothingness. I’ve just been to see. There’s no way forward from here at all.”
It was the truth. Our little cliffside trail ran a short way into the rift, narrowing as it went, and simply disappeared not very far ahead. I followed it to its end and finally found myself standing in a place scarcely wider than my own feet, clinging to the mountain’s rough skin and peering awestruck into windy emptiness. There was nothing whatever in front of me but the open air of the great rift. To one side of me was the Wall, to the other was the air. Only one direction remained, and that was behind me, the path by which we had just come. We were trapped in this stony pocket. We had wasted many days: weeks, even. It seemed to me we had no choice but to retrace our way, returning along the gentle, deceptive grade we had been following until we discovered some line of approach that would allow us to resume the ascent.
“No,” said Kilarion. “We’ll go up the Wall.”
“What?” I said. “Straight up?”
Everyone was laughing at poor stolid Kilarion.
“Straight up,” he said. “It can be done. I know that it can. There’s a place a little way behind us where the face is cracked and knobby. That’ll provide us with handholds. The gods have already given us sucker-pads. Between the one and the other, we’ll be able to make it.”
I turned and looked back. What I saw was a bare sheet of vertical stone that rose so high it made my neck ache to look up at it. In the afternoon shadows I made out what might have been a few spurs of rock protruding from it, far above.
“No one can climb that, Kilarion.”
“I can. You can. We all can. It’s not as high as it looks. I’ll go up and show you. And then we’ll all go up. Otherwise we might have to turn back as far as the place where Stapp died before we find another way through. I’d rather walk up the side of this mountain than see Stapp’s grave again.”
Kilarion had shown us already that he was good at finding trails, that in fact he had some natural gift for divining the ways to conquer Kosa Saag. Perhaps he was right again. But it was getting too late in the day to make this attempt, even assuming it could be done at all. I said, “We’ll go back until we find a place to camp, and stay there for the night. In the morning you and I will try this wall, Kilarion.”
“I know we can make it.”
“You know that you can make it. I want to see if the rest of us can.”
And so we doubled back through the deepening shadows to locate a campsite. In our exhilaration that day none of us had noticed the way the trail was pinching in; retracing it now, I thought for a time we would have to go all the way back to last night’s campsite to find a place wide enough to be safe for sleeping, and that would mean many hours of risky hiking in the dark. But we did not have to do that. Another campsite that we hadn’t troubled to take note of when we were coming the other way lay only an hour back from trail’s end, next to a tiny trickle of fresh water. The site was small but adequate, and we huddled in there as best we could, listening to the wind whistling above us.
In the morning Kilarion and I set out together to attempt the climb.
We both carried our full packs. The test would have been meaningless otherwise. Kilarion chose the place where we would ascend, walking back and forth along the trail for nearly an hour before deciding on it.
“Here,” he said at last.
I looked up. The Wall here seemed smooth and utterly vertical.
“There’s water oozing here,” said Kilarion. “See? There will be cracks in the rock.” We unpacked our climbing-ropes and hitched them about our waists. Then we turned away from each other to transform our left hands for the climb. Like most men I am uneasy about performing any sort of shapechanging in front of a stranger of my own sex, and it seemed that Kilarion was the same way. When we faced each other again we had brought forth our sucker-pads. I saw Kilarion’s eye dart questioningly toward my lame leg, as though he was wondering why I had not changed that too while I was at it. But he didn’t say it. I gave him a flinty glance by way of telling him that there was nothing I could do about that leg, and that in any case it was no handicap to me And I reached around behind me into the pack, where I kept the little idol of Sandu Sando that Streltsa had forced upon me on the day of Departure, and rubbed it twice for luck along its holy place.