I stared at him in astonishment. “You walked right into their midst? They could have killed you!”
“I don’t think so. They’re more afraid of us right now than we are of them, I suspect. They must have had some bad experiences with Pilgrims in the past. When they saw me they sprang up and ran off right away. So I went into the ship, and when I came out there weren’t any of them in sight. But eventually they’re going to figure out that we aren’t much of a threat to them, and then—”
“Poilar?” a new voice said.
I looked around. It was Thissa. Even by the dim moonlight I saw fear glistening in her eyes. Her nostrils were quivering as though she could smell danger on the air.
“What is it?” I asked her.
She looked uncertainly at Traiben. “I need to tell you something,” she said to me.
“Go on.”
“But he—”
“You can speak in front of Traiben. You know that I trust him, Thissa.—This isn’t some matter concerning him, is it?”
“No. No.” She came closer and held out something in her hand, a small gleaming amulet. “Touch it,” Thissa said. Traiben murmured with interest and bent low to examine it. In annoyance I pushed him aside and put the tip of my finger to the little carved jewel. Its surface felt warm.
“What is this thing?” I asked.
“It is a santha-nilla thing,” she said. “It belonged to my mother, and her mother before her. When there is treachery nearby it begins to glow.”
Traiben said, “You mean it’s actually some sort of thought-sensitive device, which is able to detect—”
“Not now, Traiben,” I told him impatiently. To Thissa I said, “What sort of treachery? By whom?” I had learned long ago to take Thissa’s premonitions seriously. Pointing toward the starship of the Irtimen, I said, “Them?”
“I don’t think so. One of us, I think. But I’m not sure I feel betrayal in the air, Poilar. That’s all I know.”
“Is there a spell you could cast that would tell you more, do you think?”
“I could try.”
“Go, then. See what you can learn.”
She went away. I sat perplexed beside my bedroll, unable to sleep, beleaguered by complexities far beyond my powers of understanding. Traiben stayed with me for a while, trying to offer comfort, companionship, explanation. He meant well, but he was full of contradictory incomprehensible ideas that made my head ache, and I drew little comfort from his companionship just now; so after a time I sent him away.
Hendy came to me, then. She too was finding sleep impossible this night.
She knelt beside me and put her hand—her strange altered hand, fleshless and dry and cool, a skeleton’s hand—into mine. I held it, though I was afraid to squeeze it too tightly. I was glad to have her near me, but my mind was awhirl with the revelations of the Summit and there was nothing I could say to her. I was lost in confusions.
“We should leave here when the sun comes up,” she said. “There’s nothing but grief for us in this place, Poilar.”
“Perhaps so,” I answered. I was barely aware of what she had said.
“And I feel even more grief coming toward us.”
Without looking at her, I said, in a toneless incurious voice, “Do you? Thissa said the same thing. Have you transformed yourself into a santha-nilla, Hendy?”
“I’ve always had a little of the power,” she said. “Just a little.”
“Have you?” I said, still with no great show of interest.
“And it’s become stronger since my transforming.”
“Thissa says there’ll be treachery.”
“Yes. I think so too.”
“From which direction?”
“I feel it everywhere around us,” Hendy said.
This was leading nowhere. I dropped into a dark silence and wished I could sleep. But this was not a place where sleep was easy. We sat without speaking, side by side in the dimness of the one-moon night, and the hours slipped by. Perhaps I slept a little while without knowing that it was happening: certainly I had no sharp sense of the passage of time, but I became aware eventually that it was much later in the night, close indeed to morning. The stars had shifted position and a second moon had risen—Malibos, I think, bright as new metal against the eastern horizon and sending shafts of cold light across the Summit.
Suddenly Hendy grabbed my wrist. “Poilar! Poilar, are you awake?”
“Of course I am.”
“Look there, then!”
“What? Where?” I blinked and shook my head. My mind seemed wrapped in cobwebs, and half dead of frost.
Hendy pointed. I followed the line of her pointing arm.
A figure stood sharply outlined in the icy light of Malibos high atop a rock midway out in the plain. It was Thissa. Her left arm was upraised and both her thumbs were outstretched in the stabbing gesture of accusation.
“I see the traitor!” she cried, in a high ringing voice that must have carried from one side of the Summit to the other. “Do you see him? Do you all see him?” And she stabbed her hand into the air three times, very fiercely, aiming it in the direction of the ancient ruined starship. “Do you see him? Do you see him? Do you see him?”
I saw no one, nothing.
Then out of the grayness of the distance came a twisted distorted form that limped toward her at a furious pace: a man with a monstrous elongated crooked leg, who nonetheless was running so quickly that he seemed almost to be flying. Thrance, of course. He leaped up on the rock beside Thissa with the kind of agility that I remembered from the Thrance of old, the master athlete of my childhood. Three swift bounds and he was beside her. I heard her cry his name in a ringing tone of denunciation. Thrance said something in return, low and muffled and threatening. Once again Thissa cried out his name. And he raised his cudgel to her and struck her such a blow as would have broken a tree in half. I heard the sound of it, and saw her crumple and fall.
I stood rigid for a moment, frozen in my place, unable to move. There was a dead hush on the Summit, with only the rushing sound of the wind sweeping against my ears.
Then I was on my feet and running.
Thrance fled before me like a hawk through the sky; but I followed him like lightning itself. Across the plain I sped, around the rock where Thissa’s bloodied fallen body lay, past the slender starship of the three Irtimen. Thrance was racing toward the older starship, the gaunt dark ruin at the far side of the Summit. I thought I saw shaggy figures lurking about it, the skulking forms of the bestial “gods” of this place. Was he going toward them? What alliance had Thrance concocted with them in the night?
There was a terrible roaring sound all around me. I realized, after a time, that it was coming from my own throat.
Thrance was nearly at the ruined starship now, and the “gods” seemed to be welcoming him to it. It struck me that he must have been to them earlier that evening, and had secretly arranged with them to lead them down upon us and kill us as we slept.
But I was closing the gap quickly between him and me; for, swift as Thrance was, I was running with the fury of the Avenger in my soul and my feet scarcely troubled to touch the ground. Unexpectedly Thrance turned to the left just as he was approaching the wrecked ship, and sprinted around the vessel to its far side. I followed him there, and saw more of the “gods” gathered there, by a place of stacked twigs and painted stones that must have been the altar that the debased Irtimen had constructed. Thrance ran right through the midst of it, scattering “gods” on every side, and up a craggy staircase of rock just beyond.
That was a great mistake on his part, for there was nothing on the other side of that rocky pile but the abyss. He had trapped himself.
He ran up right to the top, where he must surely have been able to look down into the realm of fog and realize that there was only a great emptiness below him. There he halted; and turned; and looked toward me, waiting for me to come to him.