I was numb with amazement and horror. “What are these? Who are they? Do you know them?”
Thrance’s laughter traveled up and down the notes of the scale. “This was Bradgar, this was Stit, this was Halimir,” he sang. He pointed to one who wallowed not far from me. “That one there was Gortain.”
I remembered that name.
“Gortain who was Lilim’s lover?”
“Gortain who was Lilim’s lover, yes.”
And I trembled and came close to weeping, for into my mind flooded the memory of sweet Lilim who had been the first to make the Changes with me, and who had told me of her lover Gortain who had gone up the Wall. Lilim who had said to me, “If you see him there when you go up, carry my love to him, for I have never forgotten him.” Lilim’s Gortain crawled at my feet now, a black waxy-skinned thing with a tail, transformed beyond any recognition and linked by that long ropy appendage to the unknown monstrosity at the rear of the cave. I could not help myself. I knelt beside him and sang Lilim’s name to him, for I had promised her that I would. I hoped that he would be beyond understanding; but I was wrong, for his eyes went wide, and I saw such terrible pain in them that I would gladly have ripped my heart from my breast if it could have given him peace. He wept without shedding tears. It was an awful sight. But I had promised Lilim long ago that I would look for her Gortain and give him her greeting, though I was sorry now that ever I had, or that I had found him.
“Sing!” Traiben cried. “Don’t stop, Poilar!”
Sing? How could I sing? I wanted to die of shame. I was silent for a moment with my head bowed, and in that moment I heard the Kavnalla’s voice thundering like ten rockslides in my mind, ordering me to come to it and yield myself up to it, and I took a faltering step inward; but Thrance caught hold of me with a strength beyond all comprehension, holding me back, and Traiben struck me between the shoulders to bring me to my senses, and I nodded and opened my mouth and a shriek came out that someone might shriek while being flayed alive, and another shriek after that one, and another, and that was the song I sang.
“Lilim—” murmured the thing at my feet, in a voice like a groan, which for all its faintness cut through my shrieking like the blaring of a brass bindanay. “Bring me to Lilim—Lilim—I want to go home—home—home—”
I knelt to him. His face was smeared with the juice of the thing he had been eating. Black tears rolled from his tormented eyes.
“Poilar, no, keep back, keep back—”
Thrance. But I paid no heed. I looked into those desperate eyes with pity and love; and Gortain reached to me and wrapped his arms about me like a drowning man. I thought it was a hug of companionship, but then I felt him pulling at me, tugging me, trying to drag me across the floor of the cave toward the Kavnalla. Of course he could not do it. He was just a crawling squirming thing on the ground and his limbs had lost whatever strength they once had had. But I felt the pull all the same, not in my mind this time but on my body, and fear took hold of me. With a sharp twist of my body I broke free of him and rolled to my side, and then, without even thinking, I drew my knife from its sheath and severed the interminable cord that linked him to the thing in the depths of the cave. Gortain howled and rolled himself into a ball, and quivered and jerked for a moment, and then went into wild leaping convulsions, arching up and falling back, arching up and falling back. “Sing!” Traiben ordered me again, as I stood there stupidly.
I opened my mouth and a croaking rusty noise came out. And Thrance, snatching the knife from my dangling hand, plunged it swiftly into Gortain’s chest as the pitiful creature rose and fell.
Gortain was still. But all about us the other slaves of the Kavnalla were roiling and writhing and wriggling up close to us, as though they meant to surround us and drag us somehow toward the back of the cave.
“Out!” Thrance sang. “Out, out, out, out!” And we fled.
18
On the far side of the basin of the sandy hills, when the Kavnalla’s voice was only a tinny echo in my brain, I said to Thrance, “Why did you take me in there?”
“How do I know? I wanted to go in again. I knew I could withstand it. I thought you could.”
“You were drawn.”
“Maybe I was.”
We had crossed a district of crumbling tawny rock that seemed to be a boundary. Now we were entering the country of the dagger-sharp black pinnacles, which rose high before us, gleaming like mirrors by the light of bright Ekmelios. Some of my earlier pessimism returned. The Wall exhausts the resources of even the most determined; it tests you constantly, draining you of your vitality and waiting to see if you will find some new reserve of strength. For the moment I could not. We will climb this Wall forever, I told myself dully, and there will always be some new level, some continued unfolding of the endless challenge, and there is no Summit anywhere, only Wall upon Wall upon Wall. My head ached; my throat was as sore from all my singing as if I had been swallowing fire.
To Thrance I said, “The Kavnalla did its Changes on you, and still you escaped? How?”
“The transformation was only partial. I never was attached by the tail. First it puts its blood in you, which makes you very vulnerable to the change-fire that glows in every rock of this place, and you begin to shift shape, and become what those in that cave became; and then after a time you grow the tail, which is the last of the change; and finally you fasten it to the Kavnalla, and then you are lost forever. It’s like that all over the Wall, whenever there are transformations.”
“There are more Kavnallas?”
“That’s the only one, I think. But there are other Kingdoms, and other kinds of transformations. Those who have a mind to surrender to the forces of the Wall are ever at risk on its slopes.” Thrance spoke calmly, as though from an immense distance. I looked at him in wonder, understanding now something of why he was the way he was. He had slept with demons and had awakened to tell the tale; but he was no longer anything like the rest of us. He said, as we walked along, “I thought I could overpower the Kavnalla and take command of it, once I was connected to it. It’s only a great helpless slug, a thing that lies there in the darkness at the back of the cave and depends on others to feed it. I would defeat it by the strength of my will, and then we would rule together, the Kavnalla and I, lying side by side in the darkness, and I would be the King of the Kingdom of the Kavnalla and the Kavnalla would be my Queen.”
I couldn’t take my eyes from him. I had never heard such strangeness, such insanity, from anyone’s lips before.
He said, “But no, no, of course there was no way to achieve that. I realized that after a little while: the creature was stronger than I thought, there could be no overpowering it. Another day or two, and I’d have had a tail like all the rest, and I’d be a slave forever inside that cave, foraging like a beast in the muck. So I wrenched myself free before I was fully joined. I had that much strength. I sang my way out when I was only half transformed. And so you see me.”
“There can be no changing back to what you once were?”
“No,” he said. “I am what I am.”
A narrow gravel-strewn path bordered by little twisted shrubs with dusty gray leaves took us upward into the land of the narrow black pinnacles, which was the Kingdom of the Sembitol. What the Sembitol was, whether it was some parasitic denizen of the caves like the Kavnalla, is something I never learned. But I suppose that it must have been a thing of a similar sort, for it seemed to hold its people in some kind of spell of the mind, as did the Kavnalla. While we were still in the outskirts of their land Thrance pointed out to us the creatures who were in thrall to the Sembitol, moving about on steep winding trails high above us. Though at such a distance they seemed hardly bigger than little flecks, we could see that there was a strangeness about their movements, a curiously stiff and jerky way of carrying themselves, like dancers in the double-lifer dance, who pretend to be very old. And they never seemed to go one by one but only in chains of fifteen or twenty or more. Each member of the chain held a long wooden staff in one hand, with the tip pointed backward, and with his other hand grasped the staff of the one just before him as they traversed the narrow trails, which coiled around and around the outer edges of the black pinnacles the way the sacred inscriptions on a holy baton follow a coiling track along the length of the baton.