“Do Witches study the ancient language also, then?”
“No,” said Naxa. “But Thissa speaks the language of the mind. She reads the demons’ meaning without using words. And that’s why she’s so frightened. Thissa understands all languages—the language of the rocks, the language of the trees, the language of the demons of the air. She is a santha-nilla, Poilar. There’s powerful magic in her. Didn’t you know that?”
I looked at him, taken aback. I had not known, no, though I was aware that Thissa’s powers were strong. But that strong? No more than a handful of santha-nillas are born in any generation. I had lain in Thissa’s arms and made the Changes with her more than once, and yet I had never realized that she was a Witch of the most powerful kind. I wondered now if the troublesome tingling that came from her when she made the Changes, that odd and disturbing emanation, was a sign of her special gift, which I had been too ignorant to understand. But evidently Naxa had not been so obtuse.
“The village allowed a santha-nilla to go on the Pilgrimage?” I asked. “That’s hard to believe. There are so few of them, Naxa. I would think that they’d want to prevent her from going, to save her for the needs of the village.”
“They didn’t know,” Naxa said. “No one down there did. She hid it from them. Because she felt that the needs of the village would best be served by having her go on the Pilgrimage, I suppose. But I thought you had certainly found it out. Inasmuch as you and she—” He let his voice trail off and shook his head. “You must cherish her, Poilar. And protect her.”
“Yes,” I said.
“The sky-demons frighten her very much. All this talk of melting—”
“No harm will come to her,” I said. “No harm will come to any of us, I promise you. No one’s going to be melted. I won’t allow it to happen.” Though of course I had no idea what it was that I was pledging myself to prevent. Melted? Melted? It made no sense to me at all. But I would wait and see.
There wasn’t long to wait. We were almost to the far side of the plateau, now. The Wall once again rose before us, straight up to the heavens. We had nearly reached the place just in front of it where the black river and the white one flowed together; and as we came down out of a group of low smooth hills round as breasts into the meeting-place of the waters, we saw a congregation of grotesque beings waiting for us there—hundreds, even thousands of them, massed together, milling about. Some were on our side of the water, some were standing right in it, and the rest—the preponderance of them—were fanned out all across the gently rising land on the farther bank, a chaotic multitude that extended well out into the hazy distance.
They were misshapen beyond belief. Nightmare figures, they were. No two of them were alike. There was nothing the mind could imagine that I did not see beside those riverbanks. Some were short and squat like gnomes, and others were tall as giants, but drawn out very thin, so you could snap them with an angry glance. There was one with a single great eye that filled most of his face, and one beside him with a row of little glittering eyes like black beads that ran all around his head, and another that had no eyes at all or nostrils either, only a gleaming half dome from mouth to forehead.
I saw ears as long as arms, and lips like platters, and hands that dangled to the ground. One had no legs, but four arms on which he spun like a wheel. Another had two fleshy wings sprouting from his cheeks and hanging down alongside him like curtains. One had hands like gigantic shovels thrust out before him; one had a male member long as a log jutting forth as though he was in perpetual Change; one had tails fore and aft that lashed like furious whips. There was one that was twisted and gnarled like a tree ten thousand years old; another had no features at all, but was perfectly smooth and blank; and another appeared to be without bones, and moved like a writhing coil of rope.
I saw more, much more. Little shuffling ones, and gaunt angular ones, and great spherical ones. Creatures covered with bristling spines, with rough pebbly bark, with scales like a glittering fish. Ones with grassy skin, and ones with hairy hides, and ones that were transparent, so you could see their organs beating and throbbing and the middlebone running like a white mast through their torsos.
A torrent of questions rose in me. Why were all these creatures here, in this bleak forlorn place? Where had they come from? How was it that they had such variety of form, each one different from the next, each one uglier than the next?
Traiben was beside me. I said to him in awe, “The gods must have had spoiled fish to eat, the day they created these monsters! Can there be anything more ghastly in all the world? What reason could there possibly have been for bringing such things into existence?”
“The same,” he said, “that there was for creating you and me.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“These are people, I think,” said Traiben. “Or were, at any rate. People much like any of us, beneath their deformities.”
That was a dismaying idea. “No!” I cried. “Impossible! How can these be any kin of ours?”
“Look closely,” he said. “Try to see the form that underlies the form.”
I made an effort to do as he urged me: to screen out the superficial manifestations of strangeness, and to look beneath the bizarre chaotic exteriors, seeking not for the things that made these beings so strange but for the aspects of bodily design that they might have in common with one another, and with us. And I saw, as my bedazzled eyes roved down the baffling ranks of them, that the basic structure of their bodies was not very different from ours: that the great majority of them tended to have two arms, two legs, a head, a central torso. Those which had hands had six fingers on each, in the main, just as we do. Those which had eyes generally had two. And so forth. There were wild deviations from the norm wherever I looked, but there was a distinct norm, and that was a shape much like ours.
“Well?” Traiben said.
“They are a little like us in some respects,” I admitted uneasily. “But it’s a coincidence and nothing more. Some bodily forms are universal, that’s all—an obvious shape for beings of a certain shape to have. But such similarities don’t prove any—”
“What do you make of that one?” Traiben asked, pointing. “Or that? And that? There is change-fire at work here, Poilar.”
“Change-fire?” And I shivered out of fear. For as he said the word, I imagined I felt invisible waves of dreadful diabolical force sweeping up out of the parched earth and beginning to turn my body into something as monstrous as any of the creatures before me.
“The power of this place has transformed them into these things you see,” said Traiben. “But once they looked like you and me.”
I looked. What he was showing me, here and there in this nightmare horde, were a few that in a dim light could almost have passed for one of us. Their forms were different from ours in only two or three trivial respects. I said as much to Traiben, and he nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “The transformations haven’t been as great in them as in the others.”
“Are you saying that all these creatures began by looking as we do, and then were reshaped into these forms?”
“Indeed. These things we see before us must be the Melted Ones that Naxa told us of.”
Of course! How else could such shapes have come into being? It was as if they all had been put into a crucible and heated until they were soft, and then drawn out while still pliable, and modeled randomly into a myriad weird and fanciful designs. If that was so, I thought, then the ones that looked somewhat like us might be ones who had incompletely melted, ones in whom the process had not been taken through to its fullest degree.