Thrance was playing no joke, though. Beneath all our horrendous noise I still could hear the Kavnalla’s own song, trying to lure us on. This is the way, yes … come … come … But it was buried beneath the force of our outcries. It was down there in the depths of our mind, but it was small and scratchy and tinny now. You know what they say, that a sound is so great that one can scarcely hear oneself think? That was what we achieved with our singing. And if we could not think, we could not succumb to the pull that we felt in our minds. We were hiding the Kavnalla’s urgings from ourselves with all our crazy clamor.
Roistering and braying and howling like a pack of madmen, then, we came over the crest of the white hills and found ourselves in a broad basin rimmed by soft low yellow slopes half covered in sand. New peaks rolled upward as always beyond the basin’s far border: jagged fierce black ones, sharp as awls, forbidding, dismaying, stabbing deep into the ice-blue sky. Dark birds that must have been of great size, but seemed to us no bigger than specks, circled above those remote daggers of stone.
Closer at hand, at the edge of the rounded yellow slopes just to our left, I saw a long shallow-vaulted cave, broad-mouthed and dark within, with a deep track beaten in the sand leading up to it. I knew without needing to be told that within that cave lay the source of the secret voice that we had been hearing all during this part of our climb. Thrance saw me staring at it, and sang into my ear in his croaking tuneless way, “The Kavnalla is there, the Kavnalla is there!”
“Yes,” I sang. “I feel the pull pulling.” I stared into the darkness, frightened and fascinated. “Tell me,” I sang, “will it come out, will it come out?” And Thrance sang in reply to me, “No, no, the Kavnalla goes nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, it lies in wait and we go to it.”
And just at that moment the Scholar Bilair bolted from the group, no longer singing but merely whimpering and murmuring to herself, and began to run up the sandy slope toward the mouth of the cave. Instantly I saw what she was doing and ran in pursuit. Thrance also came. We caught up with her midway up the slope. I seized her by one shoulder, spun her around, stared into a wild-eyed face, frozen in a strange grimace.
“Please—” she muttered. “Let—me—go—”
Without pausing in my singing I struck her across the face, not really hard, but stunning her for a moment. Bilair looked at me in bewilderment. She blinked and shook her head; and then the light of understanding returned to her features. She nodded to me and muttered a few indistinct words of thanks and I heard her take up the piping song she had sung before. I released her and she ran like a frightened animal back to the others, singing as loudly as she could.
I turned to Thrance. He laughed and a strange diabolical sparkle came into his eyes and in the same hateful rasping singsong he had been using before he sang, “Let me show you the Kavnalla, let me show you the Kavnalla!”
“What are you saying, what are you saying?” I asked him, singing at the top of my lungs in a rhythm very much like Thrance’s own. It was absurd for us to be singing to each other like this. Behind me the whole group had halted and were staring at the dark cave-mouth also, and it seemed to me that some of them had stopped singing. “Sing!” I yelled at them. “Don’t stop, not for a moment! Sing! ”
Thrance gripped my shoulder and bent his head toward mine and sang, “We can go in, you and I. Just for a look! Just for a look!”
Why was the demon tempting me this way?
“How can we risk it?” I sang back. “We should just keep moving!”
“Just for a look, just for a look.” Thrance beckoned. His eyes were like fiery coals. “Keep singing and nothing will happen. Sing, Poilar, sing, sing, sing, sing!”
It was like a madness. Thrance began to trudge toward the cave-mouth and I followed him, helpless as a slave, along that tight-packed beaten path. The others pointed and gaped but they did nothing to stop us; I think they were too dazed and bemuddled by the proximity of the Kavnalla’s powerful mind. Only Traiben left the group and trotted toward us, but it wasn’t to prevent me from going in. He ran up to us still singing, and what he sang was, “Take me too, take me too!” Of course. His hunger to know was ever insatiable.
So despite all reason we three went into the cave, right into the mouth of the enemy.
Never once did we cease to sing. Perhaps we had lost our minds but at least that much common sense remained to us. My throat was ragged and inflamed now from this misuse, but still I barked and shrieked and bellowed for all I was worth, and so did Thrance, and Traiben also, the three of us making such a terrible din that I thought the walls of the cave must surely bend outward beneath its force.
Within the cave an eerie gray light prevailed. It came from dark glossy mottled mats of some living, growing thing that clung to the surfaces of the rock; and when our eyes adapted to it, as they did after a moment or two, we saw that the cave was a huge one, deep and extremely wide, and that this light-yielding plant illuminated it even in its farthermost depths. We went in. Occasional clouds of dark spores rose from the mats on the rocks and a thick black juice ebbed constantly from their rough, pebbly surfaces, as if they were bleeding.
“Look, look, look, look!” Thrance sang, on rising pitches.
In the middle sector of the cave were waxy-skinned black creatures crawling about over the mottled mats. They were long and low, with elongated limbs with which they pulled themselves slowly around, and they kept their heads down, feeding in slurping bites on the sticky substance that the mats exuded. Narrow tails of enormous length extended far behind them, tails that were more like long ropes, sprouting from their rumps and snaking off for impossible distances into the rear of the cave.
Thrance, capering about, went to one of these creatures and lifted its head.
“Look, look, look, look!”
I was so astounded I almost forgot for a moment to keep singing. The thing’s face was almost like a man’s! I saw a mouth, a nose, a chin, eyes. It made a grunting sound and tried to pull away, but Thrance held it up for a moment, long enough for me to realize that the face was not simply like a man’s, it was a man’s: I knew that I must be looking at a Transformed One, that what was groveling and nuzzling here before me in the slimy muck of the floor of the cave had to be one who had yielded to the call of the Kavnalla. I trembled at the thought that so many of our kin from the village had been lost this way on the Wall.
“Sing!” Traiben reminded me. “Sing, Poilar! Or you are lost!”