Except then Thissa said, “I feel a presence behind us. Below us.” And she pointed back across the bridge.
“A presence? What presence?”
She shook her head. “Ment? Tull? It could be.”
We had attained a wind-raked knob of rock, barren and stark and wholly exposed to the ferocity of the noon sun, which in the thin air of these heights was unrelenting. I saw the crackling flash of blue lightning above us, and that was strange, for the air here was cloudless and parched; and there were the usual dark sinister birds wheeling high overhead. So this was no place of placid repose where I cared to have us linger. But it would be folly not to trust Thissa’s intuitions. I divided the group; most went ahead under Galli’s leadership to find a campsite where we could rest while scouting out our next challenge, while I waited by the bridge with Thissa and Kilarion and a few others to see who or what might be coming toward us from the rear.
For a long while we saw and heard nothing, and even Thissa began to think she had been mistaken. Then Kilarion let out a whoop. We sprang up and stared into the glare of sunlight reflecting from the walls of the gorge: and there was a solitary figure laboring up the spiral path that led to the bridge.
I struggled to make it out against the searing brightness. I thought I saw long spidery limbs, a tiny body, a flash of grayish glossy skin. “One of the mountain-men,” I said in disgust.
“No,” said Traiben. “Tull, I think.”
“Tull? But how—”
“Do the mountain-men ever travel by ones?” he asked me. “Look! Look close!”
“Tull yes,” said Kilarion. “I see her face. But her face—on that body—”
The creature came up the path on the far side, moving in mountain-man fashion but far more clumsily, as though well gone in drunkenness. It appeared to have little control over its elongated limbs, and its every step was a staggering slide. Then it halted, just before the approach to the bridge proper. It stood as though baffled, swaying, fitfully weaving its long narrow arms through the air. It took a tentative step forward and managed somehow to get its legs tangled, so that it had to drop to its knees and crouch there clinging to the ground, befuddled and helpless. I could see its face now: Tull’s, Tull’s, unmistakably Tull’s, the familiar sharp features, the familiar wide grinning clown-mouth. But she wasn’t grinning now. Her lips were pulled down into a terrible knotted grimace of terror and confusion.
“We have to get her,” Kilarion said.
And so we crossed the bridge again, he and I, not for an instant pausing to consider the risks we faced. I have no memory of doing it; but then I was on the far side once more, and Kilarion and I took the altered Tull by the arms and legs, and we brought her across. One convulsion of fear from her would have hurled the three of us into the abyss. But she hung like old rope between us, and he and I moved as though we were a single four-legged entity, and not until we were safe on the other side did we drop down, shaking and shivering like men at the edge of their final illness. Then Kilarion began to laugh, and so did I; and we turned our backs on that terrible bridge for good and all.
The others had settled down a thousand paces ahead in a wooded bowl beneath a dusk-colored mountain so folded and gnarled that it had a look of unthinkable age. We brought Tull to them and our three Healers began their work on her, in the hope of bringing her back to her true form. The rest of us looked away, out of respect for her suffering; but I glanced over, once, and saw Jekka lying with her in his arms, doing the Changes, while Maiti and Kreod held her hands in theirs, and Tull was half like herself again and half the other way. It was so awful a sight that I shut my eyes and tried to blot the image from my mind, but I could not.
It took two hours to return her to herself, and even then she carried a hint of strangeness with her, a slight elongation of the limbs, a faint gray tint in her skin, that I knew she would never lose. Nor did the gaiety that a Clown must have, or at least be able to feign at will, ever come back to her. But I was glad she was back. It did not seem proper to me to ask her why she had chosen to slip away, nor what had made her decide midway through her transformation to return to us; those were Tull’s secrets, no business of ours.
As for Ment, she said, we would never see him again. He was of the Kingdom of the Sembitol now. And I suspected that that was true, so we spent no further time waiting for him.
We rested a little while longer from our bridge crossing and then we went on our way into this new land of tilted and upturned layers of ancient gray rock. We had not traveled more than half an hour along the rough, lizard-infested trail when we came upon Thrance, sitting calmly against a huge boulder beside the road. He nodded to us very pleasantly, and got to his feet and fell in with us without saying a word.
19
We had entered the Kingdom of the Kvuz, Thrance told us. This was the limit of his previous explorations; and it was, he said, by far the most dismal of the Kingdoms of the Wall. “In what way?” I asked him, thinking of the squalid snuffling of the long-tailed prisoners within the Kavnalla’s cave, and the apparent soullessness of those spidery-limbed gray creatures of the high trails who had given themselves to the Sembitol. Thrance only shrugged and said, “Every man is at war against all other men here. It is the worst of places. See if I’m not right, boy.”
Certainly there was no beauty in this Kingdom. It was a parched and crumpled land, somewhat like that grim plateau we had crossed so long ago, but even more brutal to the eye. We went past a place where small conical mountains belched fire and smoke and foul stinking gases, and had to cross a dark plain that was like a sea of ashes which crunched and clinked with every step we took. Dry lakes and withered streams that were no more than streams of gravel lay everywhere. Every gust of wind lifted clouds of fine dust. Now and then some bleak bubbling seepage came out of the ground, with grim little clumps of doleful shrubbery with knotted trunks and dull black leaves springing up around it. Such living creatures as we saw were pallid scuttering legless things like worms, but long as a man’s arm and covered everywhere with short bristly spines. They would wriggle with surprising swiftness across the sandy soil whenever we came upon them and vanish hastily into underground nests.
It was hard for me to see how any sort of settlement could flourish in this cheerless desert. Indeed I had decided it was a Kingdom without a population and said so to Thrance, who said to me, pointing toward a run of low eroded hummocks just to our left, “Look there, there in those stumpy hills. There is the Kingdom.”
“What Kingdom? Where?”
“Do you see holes, down near the ground? In there, that’s where you’ll find it.”
I narrowed my eyes against the sun-glare and was able to make out some small openings hardly big enough for a man to crawl through, sparsely arrayed along the face of the little hills. They were like the burrows of some reclusive animal. Thrance beckoned, and we went a little closer, so that I saw little groupings of sharp stakes set in the earth in front of each one, a sort of defensive palisade. Eyes shining with suspicion looked out at me from opening after opening.
“Those are their homes,” Thrance said. His voice was edged with contempt. “They huddle in the darkness, one by one, each one crouching in there by himself all day long. No man trusts another. Everyone’s hand is lifted against all others. Each has his own time to come forth and search for food; and if by chance two come out at once, and they happen to cross each other’s path, one will kill the other. For they all believe that the population of the Kingdom is too great to provide everyone with enough to eat, and only by murdering the rest does any of them have a hope of surviving.”