“Do they cling to each other like that because the trails are so dangerous?” I asked Thrance.
He gave me his remote, indifferent smile, no warmer than the light of far-off red Marilemma. “The trails are dangerous, yes. But they do it because they do it, and for no other reason. It is the way they are.”
“And what way is that?”
“Wait. See.” It was as if answering my questions was too much effort for him. He withdrew into himself and would say no more.
Soon a party of these strangers came into view, visible two or three turns above us on the spiral path, descending the same precipitous trail that we were climbing. They were altogether silent, moving in tight formation, separated only by the length of their staffs. At close range I saw the reason why they walked in such a stiff-jointed fashion; for their limbs were greatly lengthened and distorted, looking almost as if they had two sets of knees and elbows, though that was not in fact the case. Within this framework of long bony limbs, their bodies, small and slender, hung like afterthoughts. They wore no clothing, and their skins were of a grayish hue with a faint glossy gleam, as though their flesh had hardened into a kind of rigid translucent shell.
Every one of them was like this: every one. Their faces were the same too, with tiny pinched features close together and large staring eyes that had little sign of intelligence in them. Nor did they vary at all in height. In truth they were all of them identical, as though they had all been stamped from a single mold, so that I could not have told one from another if my life depended on it.
They were an odd, disagreeable-looking bunch.
“What are they?” I asked Thrance; and he told me that these were the people of the Kingdom of the Sembitol.
I had no idea what to make of them, though I had a theory, and not a pleasant one. To Thrance I said, “They seem almost like insects; but can there possibly be any kind of insect the size of a man?”
“They were men once, just like us,” he said. “Or women: there’s no way of telling now. But they’ve all undergone transformation here, and turned into insects. Or something of that sort, at any rate.”
It was as I had feared. Change-fire had been at work here as well.
“Will they make trouble for us, do you think?”
“Usually they’re quite peaceful,” he told me. “There’s only the risk that they may want to offer you the chance to become as they are. Which can be easily enough arranged, I suspect; but I wouldn’t recommend it.”
I replied with a sour grin. But we had a more immediate problem to consider. The trail seemed barely wide enough for one person to pass at a time, and I wondered what would happen as the two groups came face to face. When we were still some fifty paces below the other group, though, they performed a rare and extraordinary act: for upon seeing us approaching them they wordlessly broke their tight file and each at the same instant wedged the tip of his staff deep into the soil at the edge of the trail. Then they knelt and lowered their long legs over the edge, and dangled there into the abyss, gripping their staffs with both hands, making room for us to go by.
It was a wondrous sight, those twenty solemn mountaineers hanging above the nothingness like that. As we passed I looked down at them and saw no fear in their eyes, indeed saw no expression at all. They waited, as impassive as boulders, looking beyond us as though we were invisible while we filed past them. Then they scrambled to their feet and freed their staffs, and resumed their formation, and continued along their journey, having said nothing to us throughout the entire encounter. It had been like a meeting in a dream.
Perhaps an hour later we met another party of these people on the same trail; and once again, just as before, they drove their staffs into the ground with one accord and swung themselves out over the nothingness to allow us to pass. But this time there was a mishap: for just as the last of our party—Kilarion and Jaif, who were at the end of our file—went by, the rim of the trail suddenly crumbled and fell away in one place, taking two of the insect-men with it. They plummeted into the void without a sound, and when they struck the cliff face far below, there was an odd quick cracking noise, like the breaking of a day vessel, and then silence.
That was horrifying enough; but what was worse was that the remaining insect-men seemed totally unmoved by their comrades’ deaths, almost as though they were unaware of them. It was impossible that they could be, for they had been dangling one next to another in the usual close formation, and the neighbors of the two who had been lost must surely have seen them drop. But in no way did they react. After it had happened they simply hopped up onto the trail and freed their staffs and moved along without a syllable of comment, not one of them troubling to look down into the great open space that had claimed the lives of their two fellow-marchers.
“Life means nothing to them,” said Thrance. “Neither their own nor yours. They are only vacant-souled things.” He spat into the emptiness below.
I glanced back and saw the insect-men already two turns beyond us on the downward path, hurrying along toward whatever mysterious destination it was that summoned them.
The highest reaches of the dagger-peak afforded us flat ledges where we could make camp, and we halted for the night. Our goal still lay a little way beyond us, a place where a natural bridge of stone connected the uppermost spear of this tapered peak to yet another realm beyond. But darkness was coming on quickly and it seemed unwise to try to go farther until morning.
There was no wood here, so we had to do without a fire. I could see lights blazing here and there on the nearby peaks, though: each one an encampment of the insect-folk, I supposed. Thrance told me that that was so. They dwelled in hivelike warrens all around these sharp-tipped black mountains. Every one of them was a former Pilgrim; they were villagers like ourselves who had freely chosen to undergo this transformation into something lower even than a beast. I was unable to understand it. To come this far, and then to give up all individuality, all the essence of one’s unique self, in order to become a gray-shelled thing—vacant-souled, as Thrance had said—endlessly marching to and fro on these steep paths! It was incomprehensible to me. Just as the willingness of the victims of the Kavnalla to let themselves be turned into idle cave-dwelling worms feeding on muck had been incomprehensible to me. Those who had yielded to the Kavnalla had allowed themselves to become as infants again; those who had joined the soulless swarms of the Kingdom of the Sembitol in this higher level had descended to an even lower status, and had given up humanity itself.
But then I thought: What are we all, if not some sort of endlessly marching creatures, moving up and down along the trails of our lives? And toward what end? For what purpose is it that we have climbed this far, and will drive ourselves to climb even farther? Isn’t everything ultimately only a deception designed merely to carry us through from one day to the next? And if the rim crumbles and our staff comes loose, what does it matter that we fall crashing into the abyss?