A path of gentle slope that seemed as if it would lead us onto the flank of the mountain lay before us; and once more we took up our climb. It reminded us of the very beginning of our Pilgrimage, for this was like leaving the village all over again; quickly the pleasant wooded valley where we had camped in ease for these days or weeks, and which had begun to seem almost as familiar as home to us, dropped away behind us, and we began to wind up and up a mountain trail into a cool, rocky country of which we knew nothing at all. And above us once again rose a colossal mass of stone that came close to filling the sky, just as in the first days of our climb. Back then, though, in our innocence, we had had no way of knowing that what we called the Wall was only the merest foothill of Kosa Saag; and now we understood that this tremendous overhanging peak on whose lowest outcroppings we trod was in truth the last of our challenges and the goal of all our striving.
What lay ahead for us on the flanks of this mountain, we soon would discover, was a richly populated land. For in the new realm which we were entering we were to find that one Kingdom tumbled upon the next in enormous profusion; and I can scarcely tell you of them all, so many and various were they. On this innermost and loftiest peak, all those whose Pilgrimages had carried them this far had stayed and settled and bred and multiplied. We soon were seeing their Kingdoms on every side, here just below the abode of those whom we took to be our gods. Each of the many Kingdoms of the Wall, it seemed to me, embodies some lesson for the Pilgrims who pass through them: certainly that was true of the Kingdoms of the Kavnalla, the Sembitol, and the Kvuz. But in the higher reaches of the Wall the Kingdoms are so numerous that one could spend ten lifetimes seeking to learn such lessons as they offer, and still not have encompassed a fraction of the whole.
Many a strange fate waited for us in those Kingdoms before those few of us who survived would stumble up the last few paces to the Summit.
But our Irtiman was not one of those who did.
The end arrived for him just as we were crossing into one of the populated territories of the mountain; for I was ahead of the column of marchers, studying the smoke of settlements not far ahead of us on the path, when Kath the Advocate jogged up alongside me and said, “You had better come.”
He was lying against Galli’s bosom, shivering convulsively. Jekka and Maiti crouched beside him, and Thissa was murmuring spells not far away, with Traiben watching dourly from a distance. But it was obvious that neither Galli’s comforting presence nor the potions of the Healers nor Thissa’s witchcraft would be of any use now. Life was leaving the Irtiman so swiftly that you could almost see his soul issuing forth above him like rising steam. And as I went to his side his eyes rolled up in his head and he made a little whimpering sound.
I bent forward over him.
“Irtiman? Irtiman, can you hear me?”
I wanted to ask him this final time, as he stood on the threshold of eternity, whether he had been telling me the truth about the dwellers on the Summit when he had said that he had seen only Irtimen there and had not found the gods. But there was no possibility of asking him any such thing now. The little box through which he spoke to us had rolled from his hand and lay uselessly in the grass. He could not have understood me, nor I him, even if he had still been conscious.
“Irtiman!”
He jerked back in one last quiver and was still, with his arm upraised and his fingers spread out toward the sky, toward the Summit, where his companions were. I looked at that outspread hand, those upthrust fingers, there were five of them, as I had thought, a thumb at one side but none at the other, nor any sign that there ever had been one there, and four others that were arranged in the usual way of fingers. I took that strange alien hand in mine and held it a moment, and then I lowered it to his breast and folded the other one across it, and closed his eyes.
Traiben said to me, as I turned away, “I tried to talk to him a little while ago about the gods and the Irtimen, to find out more of what he had seen and what he knew. I saw that it was our only chance. But he was already far gone, and unable to speak.”
I had to smile at that. Traiben was ever my other and cleverer self, thinking of the same things I did, but always sooner. This time, though, even Traiben had been too slow.
Kilarion came up to me and said, “I’ll dig a grave for him. The ground here shouldn’t be too hard. And there are plenty of rocks for a cairn.”
“No,” I told him. “No grave, no cairn.” An idea had come to me in that moment; a mad one, perhaps, engendered by the thin air of that lofty place I looked around. “Where’s Talbol? Get me the Leathermaker. And Narril the Butcher. And Grycindil too—a Weaver, yes.”
They came to me and I told them what I wanted done. They stared at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, and maybe I had; but I said that I had promised to deliver the Irtiman to his friends who dwelled above, and I would keep that pledge regardless. So they drew the Irtiman’s body aside and went to work on it. Narril emptied it of its organs—I saw Traiben peering at them in wonder—and Talbol did whatever it is that Leathermakers do to cure a skin, using such herbs as he could find by the roadside, and finally Grycindil filled the empty body with aromatic preserving herbs that Talbol found for her, and strips of cloth and such light filling things, and sewed up the incisions that Narril had made. The whole thing took three or four days, during which time we camped where we were, keeping out of sight of the habitants of the Kingdom just above us. When it was done, the Irtiman lay as though sleeping in the hammock we had made for him; but he weighed practically nothing when we lifted him, and we carried him along without difficulty. Since he had been an Irtiman and it was plain even to the slowest among us that an Irtiman was a kind of being entirely different from ourselves, I heard no objections to what I had done; for who could say what the burial customs of Irtimen might be? Certainly we were under no obligation to bury one in the same way as we would one of our own, with a cairn and all. So we took him along with us on our march toward the Summit, and in time we grew quite accustomed to having him still with us, even though he was dead.
The road—and a road was what it was, as distinct and well maintained as the one on which we had begun our journey up from Jespodar village—spiraled up and up around the outside of the mountain, and every few days there was a different Kingdom. The people of some of these Kingdoms came out to stare at us, and others took scarcely any notice of us as we went by; but in no instance were we interfered with. In these high realms of Kosa Saag Pilgrims evidently were allowed to go onward as they pleased.
The inhabitants of the high Kingdoms had once been Pilgrims themselves, of course; or at least their ancestors had. But you would not know it from the look of them. All these multitudes of people who had created a new world for themselves far above the world that was our world were failed climbers, who had given up the holy quest, just as the creatures writhing in the Kavnalla’s cave had been, or the insect-beings of the Sembitol—all of them members of the legion of the Transformed, as varied and strange in form as the beings that populate our dreams.
But there was a difference up here. The folk of the high Kingdoms had pushed the limits of our ability to change our shapes beyond anything we had ever imagined, and they had done it willingly and knowingly. These were no victims of change-fire, I think. They were of another kind from the Melted Ones, those pitiful things that had been deformed and made hideous by the heat of an irresistible force outside themselves, nor were they like the hapless slithering servants of the Kavnalla, or the insectlike creatures who stalked the narrow trails of the Sembitol, or the hateful ground-crawling people of the Kvuz, all of whom had lost themselves to the potent rays that come from the mountain’s core. No, it seemed to me that these folk must have altered themselves from within, apparently of their own free choice, here in these high Kingdoms. And in this shimmering mountain air they had drawn on inner resources to unleash the whole range of possibilities that the shapechanging power affords, and then had extended that range.