Dark thoughts on a dark night. Hendy, who was beside me as she was every evening now, sensed my turmoil and pressed herself closer against me. Gradually my spirits lifted, and I held her, and we entered into Changes, and then we slept.
But in the morning two of our number were missing.
I must have known, somehow, during that hour when my soul was succumbing to such bleak thoughts, that some terrible thing was happening to our group. For when we gathered by first light to make ready for our day’s march I sensed at once that we were not all present, and a count showed that I was right. Of our original Forty we had already lost five along the way: but now I could count only thirty-three this morning, apart from Thrance. I looked up and down the ranks, trying to see who was missing. “Ment?” I said finally. “Where is Ment? And someone else isn’t here. Tenilda? No, there you are. Bilair? Maiti?”
Bilair and Maiti were still with us, toward the rear of the group. But Ment the Sweeper was gone, yes. And among the women, Tull the Clown. I sent searchers in all directions, in groups of three and four. Though we had camped a fair distance from the edge, I walked to it and peered over, thinking that they might have wandered in their sleep and fallen to their deaths; but I saw no bodies on the crags below. And the searchers returned without any news to report.
Ment had been a quiet, hard-working, uncomplaining man. High-spirited Tull had diverted us in many a somber moment. I was hard pressed to reconcile myself to their disappearance. I called Dorn over, for he was of Tull’s House and knew her well. His eyes were red with weeping. “Did she say anything to you about leaving us?” I asked him. He shook his head. He knew nothing; he was dazed and distraught. As for Ment, he had never been one to open his soul to others. There was no one else of his House among us that I could question, nor even anyone who could be considered his friend.
“Forget them,” Thrance advised. “You’ll never see them again. Pack up and move along.”
“Not so soon,” I told him. I put Thissa to work casting a spell of finding. That was sky-magic, not as arduous for her as the other kind; we gave her some garment that Ment had left behind and a Clown-toy out of Tull’s pack, and she sent forth her soul into the air to see if she could locate their owners. Meanwhile I ordered more search parties out, and they roved the trail behind us and a little way ahead, but with no more luck than before. Then Thissa looked up from her spell-casting and said that she could feel the presence of the missing two somewhere nearby, but the message was confused: they were still alive, she believed, and yet she was unable to tell us anything more useful than that.
“Give it up,” Thrance said again. “There’s no hope. Trust me: this is how a Forty comes apart, when the transformations begin.”
I shook my head. “Your Forty, maybe. Not mine. We’ll look for them a little longer.”
“As you wish,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll wait.” He rose and gave me a mocking courtly bow, and turned and started up the trail. I stared after him, gaping like a fish. Even with his limping gait he was moving at a phenomenal pace; already he was a turn and a half above us on the spiral path.
“Thrance,” I called, shaking with fury. “Thrance!”
Galli came up beside me. She slipped her arm through mine. “Let him go,” she said. “He’s hateful and dangerous.”
“But he knows the way.”
“Let him go. We found our own way well enough before he was ever with us.”
Hendy came to me on the other side. “Galli’s right,” she said quietly. “We’re better off without him.”
I knew that it was true: dark-souled Thrance was useful but at any moment had the capacity to turn disruptive and menacing. From the beginning my alliance with him had been a grudging one, a mingling of uneasy respect and practical need. But his transformation, partial though it had been, had taken him over into a world that was not my own. He might be our fellow villager, but he was no longer entirely one of us. He was capable of anything, now. Anything. Let him go, I told myself.
We searched for Ment and Tull another two hours. A long chain of the mountain-men came through our camp, thirty of them at least, while we combed the nearby caves and crevices for our companions. I put myself in their path and said, “We have lost two of our number. Do you know where they are?” But they looked right through me without responding and did not so much as break their pace. I cried out to Naxa to speak to them in Gotarza, hoping that they might at least understand the old language; he called out some harsh babble to them, but that drew no reaction either, and they went around us and vanished down the trail. In the end I had to abandon the search. And so we went on, having lost Ment and Tull and Thrance also, or so it seemed to me at the time. I fell into deep brooding, once again thinking myself a failure as leader; for it pained me deeply to have members of my Forty fall away from the group.
By midday we were at the natural bridge that would carry us on into the next Kingdom. It was a terrifying place, an airy vaulting span across the steepest of gorges: a curved sliver of shining black stone so narrow that we would have to go single-file on it, with a gulf beyond all measuring dropping off on either side of us. Talbol and Thuiman were the first to reach the bridge approach, and hung back, wide-eyed, unwilling to go across; for the bridge seemed so fragile that it would shatter at the first pressure of a man’s weight. They were no heroes, those two, but still I couldn’t blame them for hesitating. I would have hesitated a moment myself, staring into that brink. But what choice did we have, except to go on? And others must have gone this way often before us.
Galli said, laughing robustly, “Will it break? Let me test it out! If it’ll carry me, it’ll hold anyone!” Without waiting for confirmation from me she set out across the bridge, head held high, shoulders pulled back, arms stretched far to her sides to give her balance. Quickly she went, taking step after step after step with supreme confidence. When she had crossed it she looked back and laughed. “Come on over! It’s solid as can be!”
And so we crossed the bridge, though some had a harder time of it than others. We opened the sucker-pads on our toes to give us the best purchase, but still it was a frightening business. The bridge would bear us, yes; but this was not a place where one might stumble more than once. Chaliza was so green of face that I feared she would lose consciousness and topple to her death midway, though somehow she made it. Naxa did it on hands and knees. Bilair crossed it trembling and shaking. But Kilarion bestrode the bridge as if it were a broad meadow, and Jaif went across singing, and Gazin with a Juggler’s easy stride. Thissa seemed to float across. Traiben moved like one who has no natural skill at these things yet was determined to manage it deftly, and he did. Hendy’s crossing was an agony to me, but she betrayed no fear or uncertainty. And at last it was my turn, having held myself for last as if by staring at my companions from the rear I could help them keep their balance by sheer prayer alone. As I made my way over I had reason to curse my twisted leg, for it made gripping the bridge difficult on that side, but I knew how to compensate for the awkwardness of my deformity and I was skilled enough in mountaineering by this time to understand the art of narrowing my concentration to a single point just ahead of my nose. So I paid no heed to the chill currents of swift air rising out of the abyss and I ignored the flickering movements of the sunlight on the bare walls of stone to my right and to my left and I dismissed from my mind any thought of the huge shadow into which I would fall if I put one foot down awry; I took one step and the next and the one after that, keeping my mind empty of all distractions; and then Kilarion had me by one hand and Traiben by the other and they were pulling me the last step of the way and we were done with the bridge-crossing.