“Why, what difficulty is there? You take me in; I march with you and share your toil; we go to the top together.”
“But a Forty is a Forty. We are pledged to one another by special vows, as you must surely know. There’s no way we can admit a stranger to our group.”
“Of course there is. You simply do it. ‘Here, Thrance, come join us,’ is what you say. ‘Be one of us,’ is what you say. That’s all there is to it. We are beyond the point where vows have meaning. Vows are for children; in this place your lives are at stake. I can be very useful to you. I know a great deal about the Kingdoms that lie ahead. Whereas you know nothing at all.”
“Perhaps so. But nevertheless—”
“Listen, Poilar, I’ll be your guide. You can have the benefit of my knowledge. It wasn’t won easily, but it’s yours for the asking. I’ll take you around the obstacles. I’ll keep you off false trails. I’ll steer you clear of the dangers. Why should you have to suffer as I did?”
There was some logic to that. But nothing in our training suggested any precedent for recruiting new members to our group during the climb. It seemed almost a blasphemy. And the thought of having this dark turbulent stranger marching amongst us from this moment onward was far from pleasing to me.
“You have your own Forty,” I said to him. “Why are you still here, after so many years on the Wall? Why aren’t you climbing with them, far beyond this level?”
“Oh, no,” he replied. “I have no one at all.” There was nothing left of his group, the Forty that I had seen set out so bravely the year when I was twelve.
Thrance told me that at the outset of their climb they had chosen him by unanimous acclamation to be their leader; but—so I gathered from certain things he said—he had been a difficult leader, erratic and violent and rash, and soon some of them had begun to creep away from him, one by one, two by two, disappearing in the night. Others, though taking no issue with Thrance’s leadership, had succumbed to the byways of the Wall, vanishing into this Kingdom or that and failing to come back. In the end he was left by himself. All these years he had wandered this level of the Wall and those adjacent to it, neither ascending nor descending any great distance, but mainly staying here, drifting in circles, aimlessly roaming this unforgiving land of broken red rock. A kind of madness had come to veil his mind. For long spells of time he forgot who he had been, or what he had hoped to be. Sometimes he caught sight of other bands of Pilgrims passing by, later ones along the path, but he shrank away from them like the wild animal he had become. He lived on roots and nuts, and whatever small beasts he was able to trap. He slept in the open, at all seasons of the year. The great strength that had made him such a master athlete had stood him in good stead. His endurance was enormous; but he passed his days in a long hazy dream. Occasionally the thought of resuming his Pilgrimage would occur to him, or else of going down into our village again and taking up lodging in the roundhouse of the Returned Ones. But he did neither. This dry barren zone of the Wall had become his home. It had become his world. He had virtually forgotten why he was on the mountain at all. But now, he said, seeing us coming up the saddle from the meadowlands below, it had come back to him: the purpose was to climb, to get to the top. That was all it was for him, apparently: just to get to the top. He said nothing of gods or the acquisition of wisdom or the fulfillment of ancient oaths. The urge to reach the Summit was reborn in him simply for its own sake. He had had enough of this level of the Wall, and it was time for him to move onward. But he realized that it was impossible for him to get very far on his own. And so now he was offering himself to us—a new member of our Forty, tempered by experience, familiar with many of the perils that awaited us. If we wanted him, he would earn his keep by helping us to avoid the pitfalls ahead. But if we chose otherwise, he wished us well, and would wait for the next year’s band of Pilgrims to arrive.
He fell silent, and waited almost indifferently for me to speak.
I remarked after a moment, “In all this lengthy narrative you’ve told me nothing of how these changes in your appearance came about. Or where, or why.”
“Is it such a mystery? You must surely know that Kosa Saag is a place where the unwary are at great risk of undergoing transformation. And the wary as well, sometimes.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know that. Below us, in the First Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Melted Ones, I saw how it can happen. Is that where—”
“No, not there,” he said scornfully. A shadow crossed his twisted face. “It was higher up. I passed the First Kingdom without any difficulty. Who would want to live in that miserable land, and worship blood-drinking demons? I’m no Melted One, Poilar. They’re hardly better than beasts, as you must already have observed. No, no, I am of the Transformed. And of my own free will, for the advantage I thought it would bring me.”
It seemed a very subtle difference to me: Melted, Transformed, what did it matter which word you used? Either way, it was a horror, a mutilation, when you gave yourself up to the change-fire. But I let the question pass.
“Will you speak of it?” I asked.
“It was in the Kingdom of the Kavnalla that this transformation happened to me. This partial transformation, I should say. For the job went unfinished, which is why I look the way I do.”
“The Kavnalla?” That name meant nothing to me.
“The Kavnalla, yes. You’ll be finding out about the Kavnalla soon enough, my friend. You’ll have your chance to greet the Kavnalla in person, and listen to its song. And unless you take great care, you’ll find yourself tempted to offer yourself up to it as I did, and so to join the legions of the Transformed.”
I thought of the silent voice that Traiben and I had heard on the trail that morning, that seductive murmuring in our minds, urging us forward. Had that been Thrance’s Kavnalla? Very likely it was. But we had turned away from that coaxing voice without difficulty.
“I doubt that very much,” I told him. “I’m not so easily seduced.”
“Ah, is that the case, Poilar? Is it really?” He smiled. He had a way of making me feel like a child with that condescending smile of his. “Well, perhaps. You do seem a little unusual. But many are lured by the Kavnalla, make no mistake of that. I was one of them.”
“Tell me about it.”
“All in good time, when we stand at the gate of its Kingdom. What I’ll tell you now is what you already suspect, which was that my transformation was the greatest error of my life. I thought I could play the Kavnalla’s game and win. Indeed I believed that I could make myself a King on this mountain. When I realized that I was wrong, I managed to get away—not many succeed at that, boy, not many at all—but not before I had been turned into what you see before you, which is a shapechanging from which there is no return.” His eyes drilled into mine. I had not failed to notice that patronizing “boy” of his, but I chose to let that pass also. “The Kavnalla sings a very tempting song,” he said. “I learned too late how to close my ears to it.”
“Is it far from here, this Kavnalla?” I asked.
“Its domain is the very next Kingdom. You could be there in no time at all.” Then that had been the Kavnalla’s voice we had heard. “And before you know what’s happening,” Thrance said, “your people will be lining up and offering themselves up for transformation, if you don’t take care. That was where I lost the greater part of my Forty, in the Kingdom of the Kavnalla. And as you see, I came close to losing myself as well. Many’s the Pilgrimage that has come to grief in the Kingdom where the Kavnalla reigns. The change-fire is very strong there: it boils from the ground, it rises up and conquers everything that will not fight back.”