“He will,” I said again, with less conviction than before. “In the proper time.”
“Why do you trust him, Poilar?” Galli asked.
I had no answer for that.
“What I think is that we should throw him over the cliff,” said Talbol abruptly. “And make our way down from this place and take some other route upward, before we discover that there’s no longer any turning back for us. There is change-fire here, somewhere nearby. We are in great danger. And he brings us ever closer to it.”
“Just so,” said Jaif, who had hung back until this moment, saying nothing. “Kill him now, while we still can.”
“Kill him?” I said, astounded. This from Jaif, the kindest of men?
“Kill him, yes,” Jaif said again. He looked a little stunned at his own audacity. But then Galli nodded vehemently and said, “There’s something to the idea, Poilar. I took Thrance’s side when he first came to us, but also I said then that we should kill him if he made problems for us. I didn’t really mean it then, but now I do. He’s rotten through and through. He’s nothing but trouble, don’t you see?” Naxa too spoke up in favor of our ridding ourselves of Thrance, and Talbol also, and suddenly they were all talking at once, crying out for an end to him and an immediate descent from this hill of voices, while beneath all their hubbub I heard the Kavnalla’s urging louder than ever, pounding like the beating of a drum in my brain. Come, come, come.
My head was whirling. There was a great roaring in my ears.
“Quiet, all of you!” I cried out over the turmoil, and there must have been such madness in my tone that it awed them all into silence. They stood in the opening of the cave, gaping at me. Then in a quieter voice I said, “There’ll be no talk of killing Thrance, or anyone else, unless it comes from me. I’ll speak again with him tomorrow, and tell him that the time has arrived for him to teach us how to ward off the song of the Kavnalla. And he will give me the answer we need to have him give, or he’ll regret it, I promise you that. And now good night to you all. Go. Go.”
They looked at me and went, without another word.
My skull throbbed as though someone had been drumming on it. My thoughts raced in circles.
Hendy said, after a long while, “What if they’re right, Poilar? What if Thrance is really our enemy?”
“If that is so, then I’ll deal with him as he needs to be dealt with.”
“But if we’re already caught in the snare of the Kav—”
“You too?” I asked. “Gods! I see there’s to be no peace for me tonight.” I lay stiff and trembling. Her fingers crept along my shoulders, trying to give me some ease. But my every muscle was tight and my forehead ached dismally. The voice behind it seemed louder and louder. Come to me. Come to me. Come to me. The Kavnalla wasn’t merely beckoning any longer, but commanding. Despair engulfed me. How could we ever resist that urgent pull? I have led us all into the serpent’s jaws, I told myself. We will be swept up in the change-fire that blazes in its lair, and our forms will be lost and we will become as monsters. And why have I brought us to this dire place? Because Thrance had once been a glorious hero whom I revered; because I had allowed myself to be deceived for the sake of the Thrance that once had been, when I was a boy. I should have thrust him away when he first approached us in the land of the red spires. Instead I had taken him into our Forty, and this was how he had repaid us. In that moment I could have killed Thrance with my own hands.
Hendy rubbed against me and I felt the soft swelling of a breast. She had begun to enter the Changes. But pleasure now was far from my mind, or even the higher unity that the Changes give us. I murmured an apology to her and got up, and went out into the night.
A light rain was falling, more of a mist. The blurred light of several moons glimmered faintly through it. I saw a figure moving about not far away, and thought at first it was one of the sentries of the watch, Gazin or Jekka; but a moment later, when my eyes were better adjusted to the darkness, I recognized the grotesque elongated form of Thrance, outlined like a bizarre nightmare wraith against the darkness.
He waved to me. “You want to kill me?” he said. He sounded almost cheerful. “Well, then, here I am. How do you want to do it? A knife? A cudgel? Or with your bare hands, Poilar? Do it and be done with it, if you like.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked him. My voice was like a rasp in my own ears. Thrance made no immediate reply, but sauntered toward me in his lopsided way, his head bobbing and weaving and lurching about with every awkward step he took.
I squared myself away, in case he had some thought of striking first. But when he came closer I saw that he was unarmed, and his stance was not that of a man who was expecting combat.
He said, “I have many enemies in this camp, I see. Well, all right. What do you want to do?”
“You were listening?”
“I was out and about. Voices carry.” He seemed utterly indifferent to anything that had been said. “That Galli—I remember her. Her brother was my friend, once. A lively girl, Galli, but a great deal too fat for my taste, is what I thought back then. And of course still too young for the Changes when I left Jespodar. I had my pick of them, back then. But that was when I was beautiful.” He bent himself over into a sort of crooked arch, so that his eyes were on a level with mine. “What do you say, Poilar? Am I really as despicable as they say, your Galli and her friends? Kill me, then. And then deal with the Kavnalla whatever way you can.”
“There’ll be no killing. But this thing called the Kavnalla frightens us.”
“You need only sing to it,” Thrance said coolly. “That’s the whole secret. I was going to tell you tomorrow. But now you know it. Sing. Sing. Open your mouths and sing. There, the secret’s out. You can kill me, if you like. But why bother?” And he laughed in my face.
It was as he said, nothing more. The way to counteract the lure of the Kavnalla was simply to sing. Anything, the more discordant the better.
Who would believe such a thing? But that was all we needed to shield ourselves against this dread monster.
In the morning Thrance told me to summon the entire group; and as we gathered round him, he explained what we must do. The Kavnalla waited for us just on the far side of these white hills. From the moment we broke camp, he said, we must raise our voices in song, loudly, lustily, bellowing any tune that came into our heads, or no tune at all. It was the noise that was important. More than a moment or two of silence could be fatal. And if anyone should lose their voice through overuse, those nearby must seize them and hold them tight, pulling them forward through the Kavnalla’s territory until they had recovered.
“And what is the Kavnalla itself, then?” Traiben asked.
“A dire creature of the Wall,” said Thrance. “A thing that is placed here to lure the weak from their proper path. More than that, what can I tell you? A gigantic thing; a parasite; an enemy of our kind. Sing, and pass it by. Why do you need to know what it is? Sing, boy. Sing and run past, and save yourself.”
Of true Singers we had only two, Jaif and Dahain. We placed them at the head of our column next to Thrance, for by virtue of their House they knew the secret of making a very great sound with relatively little effort. The rest of us, but for a few, had no ear for melody at all, and when we sang it was more of a croaking or a screeching or a wailing than any kind of a music. But Thrance said our lives depended on our singing, and so we sang. I moved up and down the ranks, listening to the others while I sang myself, making certain they were doing as Thrance said. Thissa, always shy, was giving forth only a tiny silver thread of sound, and I took her by the shoulder and shook her, crying, “Sing, woman! For Kreshe’s sake, sing!” Little Bilair the Scholar likewise could produce no more than a pitiful breathy wheeze, out of fear, I suppose, and I stood beside her, roaring a crude drinking-song to which I knew hardly half the words, and made encouraging gestures at her with my hands until she managed to bring some volume of sound up from her lungs. I went by Naxa, who was droning away on a single terrible wearisome note, but very loudly, and Tull, who sang a rollicking clownish tune in a high, stabbing voice, and Galli, booming some bit of bawdiness in a voice fit to bring down the mountain upon us, and Grycindil almost as loud, and Kath babbling a hymn of his House in quick tumbling phrases, and Kilarion, red-faced and grinning as he yelled tremendous raucous whoops into the air. Thrance’s own song was a raw tuneless rasping thing, like metal against metal, very painful to hear. And so we all went. If Thrance were playing a joke on us by this, he was getting his full measure of amusement. Surely no such noise had ever been heard in the world’s whole history as we made upon that morning on Kosa Saag.