"No more," he heard his own voice saying. "Never any more. I'll stop it. I'll find them and stop them. All of them."
"Boy…" His uncle held him close as if he would warm the smaller body with the living heat of his own. "Come back. Come back…"
For a long moment it was as still as if his uncle was speaking to someone else. But then, in a moment no longer than that of a sigh, the iciness drained out of him. Half-unconscious in the reaction from what he had just been feeling, he fell forward against his uncle's shoulder, and as if in a dream he felt himself lifted up like a tired child in the powerful arms and carried out of the stable…
He woke once more to the cell. For a brief moment, still anesthetized by unconsciousness, he had thought that he was well again; and then an uncontrollable coughing seized him and for a moment he found his breathing completely stopped. Panic, like the shadow of some descending vulture, closed its wings about him and for a long minute he struggled vainly for breath. Then he managed to rid himself of the phlegm he had coughed loose, and momentarily the illusion of being able to breathe more deeply came to him, then was lost in a new awareness of his fever, his violently aching head and his choked lungs.
His sickness had not lessened. But for all that, he felt a difference. A small increase of strength seemed to have been restored to him by the sleep; and he felt a clearheadedness in the midst of the pain and the struggle to breathe that he had not known before. Where he had thought of himself until now as thinking with a fever-fueled overpressure of brilliance and insight such as he had never touched before, he now, like someone recovering from a massive dose of some stimulant drug, discovered a different and stronger order of perception, an awareness of subtle elements in all of what he had so far perceived and remembered - and the connections between them, that he had been blocked off from previously.
Moreover, with this awareness he found himself caught up for the first time in a tremendous sense of excitement - the excitement of a searcher who has at last stepped over the crest that has been blocking his view and for the first time sees his goal undeniably and clearly. He felt himself on the edge of something enormous, that thing he had been in pursuit of all his life - in fact, for longer than his life, an incalculable amount of time.
Sitting upright once more with his back against the cell wall, he probed the difference this new feeling implied. It was as if all the universe beyond his limited view of the cell and the corridor had suddenly taken a gigantic step toward him. He no longer guessed at the vague shapes of possible understandings just beyond his reach; he knew they were there and that his road to them could not be barred.
So thinking, he let himself go, following the inner compass needle of his will; and passed almost without effort into a condition he had never experienced before. Awake - he dreamed, and was conscious that he dreamed. He could see the cell around him; but at the same time, with as much or more clarity, he could see the landscape of his dream.
He was back in his vision of the rubbled plain and the Tower toward which he had been journeying so long and so painfully on foot; while the Tower itself had seemed to move back from him as each footstep brought him closer to it.
For the first time now, all this was changed. He had taken one great step that brought him close in to the Tower. Now he looked at it from relatively close at hand. Only a short distance separated them. But at the same time he saw that he had covered only the easy half of his journey to it. What remained ahead was less in distance, but so much greater in difficulty that he realized only his training and toughening by the long, arduous travel to this point made it possible for him to hope he could cross the final stretch of forbidding ground that lay between them.
Looking back over his shoulder, he discovered now that his journey to this moment had been subtly upslope, so that only now did he stand on a high point from which he could see what lay before him. Slowly the massive rubble before him began to reveal a form. He stood on the broken and crumbled stones of what had once been the outer ramparts of some great defensive structure, so enormous in extent that the historic Krak des Chevaliers of Old Earth could have been dropped into it and lost, among the very shadows of the massive building stones that had formed its inner structures. It was a castle old beyond memory, and time had all but destroyed it. Only the Tower, which had been its keep, its innermost defense, still stood and waited for him.
It would be among that maze of ruined inner walls and outer walls, of fallen baileys and rubble-choked courtyards, chambers and passageways that he must climb and crawl, to make his way at last to the entrance of the Tower. And it was a journey that would have been inconceivable to him, even now, if it had not been for the changes in mind and body that had come upon him over the years, the counterpart of the hardening absorbed in his dream of the long, solitary trek across the rubbled plain. Now older, more skilled and firm of mind, there had grown in him a relentlessness that he had not recognized until now and that not even what lay before him could halt. As someone might enter hell for some strong purpose, he stepped forward and down off the broken ramparts into the rocky and treacherous wilderness before him; and with that step forward his mind was at last committed and at peace.
Going, he left behind that part of him that had carried him through the long earlier parts of his journey and which he no longer needed. Grown and different, he returned to his self that was still in the cell, where he could now begin to see the work that lay before him and the path he must take to its doing.
Chapter Thirty-six
… He woke.
It was not a sudden wakening. He came gradually out of deep slumber to the knowledge that he had been sleeping heavily for some little time. With consciousness the awareness of his fever, his weakness and his struggle to breathe came back to him… but now there was a difference.
He broke into another heavy fit of coughing, almost strangling, as he had strangled before when the matter in his lungs choked and closed completely the airway that brought him the oxygen of life. But this time the panic that had hovered on dark wings above him as he fought to clear his airways did not materialize. Some new fierceness within him, burning more hotly than the fever itself, more inextinguishably than the attack of whatever microscopic entity was working to destroy him, fought back and routed it.
Gasping, he leaned back limply against the wall. It was strange. Nothing was changed, nothing about his physical condition had improved, but internally he felt as if the universe had swung half a cosmic turn about him and settled in some new order that gave strength and the certainty of hope. Triumph lifted its head in him. Death had been pushed back now, and for some reason, he no longer gave it credit for the power to overcome him.
Why? Or rather, if this was so, why had he ever had a fear of it in the first place? He sat, propped up against the wall of the cell in sitting position, with the thin blanket pulled up over him; and the realization came slowly to him that the difference he now recognized was one of mind and will, rather than of body.
When Barbage had named him a hound of Armageddon, and left him to die, a small part of him had acknowledged a rightness in the Militiaman's attitude. Barbage was what he was. His faith, though twisted, was real. He listened to and was used by Bleys, but only because he believed Bleys spoke with the words of Barbage's own personal God; not, like Bleys' other followers, because he either feared or worshipped the man himself.
Unnaturally turned as it was, still the quality of that faith had had the power to touch and weaken Hal. Because of the strength of it, for the first time in his life he had acknowledged the possibility of his own personal death; and in doing that he had, in effect, accepted the possibility of dying. But now, that acceptance was gone from him. In these last hours of fever-vision and dream-memories he had found and confirmed instead a reason why he could not afford death. There were things to be done first, the most urgent of these being the necessity to translate into clear, conscious terms the unconscious reasonings that had given him the necessity to survive. He cast his mind back.