Hammerfall

by C. J. Cherryh

  thinking, and he said nothing.

  All these proceedings, he was sure, readied him to come into the heart of the Beykaskh, and near the Ila. It had fallen dark now, except their lamp. The slaves brought boots for his feet which fit amazingly well . . . so much care they took for his comfort. They must have measured his ruined ones, split seams and all. And where did one find an array of boots simply waiting?

  And would he see the Ila tonight, and have his chance at this late hour? Or must he wait?

  { Marak, Marak, the voices said, damnably ill timed.}

  He shut his eyes, pretending weariness to conceal his distraction.

  But worse than the voices, that swinging sense came over him, the one that could take a man’s balance.

  “Come along,” his guards said.

  { Marak, the voices said. Marak. Get up. Walk.}

  He made a careful, practiced effort against that swinging feeling.

  He gained his balance. Above all things else he wished no restraint, no impediment to the one chance he might have at the Ila, and he had no need, for a moment, to pretend helplessness for his guards’ sake.

  The structures of fire blinded him, and the world swung violently, always toward the east.

  They led him by either arm, the captain and the guard, out that low fountain-court door and into the hallway.

  More guards stood on duty here, men in the gilt-trimmed uni-form of the elite of the Ila’s men. Now it was certain where he was going. Now his palms sweated and his heart beat hard. Be silent! he chided his voices, attempting to govern them, as he rarely could.

  He succeeded. He faced stairs, and he climbed doggedly, at his guards’ orders. He knew how he wished to die.

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  The Ila descended to the Lakht and established the center of the earth. Outside was the wasteland. Until that time there were no villages anywhere and there was no cultivated field.

  The Ila established the Holy City and from it went out appointed authorities to establish other centers throughout the land, to widen the habitable lands, to drive back the vermin, and to enrich the earth with gardens.

  —The Book of Oburan, ch. 1, v. 1.

  HE HOPED FOR SINGLE AUDIENCE. IN HIS WILDEST HOPES

  he wished to come very near the Ila, and to have her guards far away.

  But to his disappointment he was not alone. A group gathered in an upper hall outside a set of massive doors, a motley group of old and young, men and women, all dressed in the ordinary white and brown of the holy city. All the company had a haggard look. Some bore recent wounds. Were they the local harvest of the streets, Marak wondered?

  But among them, along the edge, he saw the wife from Tarsa, the potter, the barber, and the rest that had come with him. Then he knew that he was not alone in this audience, only better dressed.

  They must be all mad, the scourings of the Ila’s search, not only from the villages of the west, but from all the land. There were that many more of them, filling the hallway as far as the corner.

  The metal doors sighed heavily and opened, no hand touching them.

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  Beyond them was a narrow, pillared hall. At the end of the hall was a dais and a high seat, and on that seat was a figure robed in red.

  The Ila. The source of all authority . . . deathless, immortal, so some said. A god on earth, priests maintained, and the Ila did not refuse their worship.

  If she was a god, Marak proposed to find out. Under his brow, head bowed among the herd, he measured the length he must go to reach that figure. He imagined to himself dealing one, just one strong blow to that fragile-seeming neck before they cut him down.

  Orders passed in gestures, the permissive lifting of the Ila’s hand, and the guards brought them forward as a group, for the Ila’s examination.

  Marak’s heart beat fast. He had seen men and beasts run, even shot through the heart. He could perhaps reach her before the guards even organized an objection.

  But until they offered to prevent him from a peaceful, even requested, advance, he made himself as obedient as the rest of the madmen.

  Marak, the voices said suddenly, and the mad twitched and turned and spun for the Ila’s amusement. He restrained himself desperately from moving to that urge: it was his one breach from the rest, the one indignity he had refused all his life.

  There were drawn blades all around them, guards stationed among the pillars. The Ila’s men were justifiably anxious in this viewing of the mad. They waited for the afflicted to do something more extravagant to prove their madness, and now a guard prodded him in the side, curious about his difference.

  Pride would not allow him. He had run into the desert as a boy.

  He had hidden his fits in storerooms, in privacy, in long rides into the waste. He had learned that the fits had had a rhythm: they came at certain hours of the day, at certain times in the night, regular as the calendar, regular as the moons in waxing and waning. He had learned to live with them, to pretend, to conceal the twitches and the urges.

  But lately the fits had gone out of rhythm, out of the ordinary.

  This manifestation now was out of rhythm, as if the Ila’s very presence had provoked it.

  { Marak, the voices said. Turn. Walk. Come. } And quietly, biting his lip until the blood came, he would not.

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  The mad, within the room, became agitated. The Ila sat observing them. An au’it sat nearby, writing, writing. One by one the records went down, as the guards separated each madman from the herd in turn for the au’it to record his name, his origin, his behavior, turning each back when they were done. The Ila seemed bored, impatient.

  Then a signal passed, a motion of the Ila’s hand, and the guards held back the latest madman they had cut out of the herd.

  “Tain’s son,” the Ila said, and the guards, letting go the one, prodded at Marak instead and moved him forward.

  Now, Marak thought, anticipating the next few moments, and became steady as any hunter. Hate fueled his patience. Desire kept his head down and held his gait to an ordinary shamble, all to come as close as he could.

  They stopped him just short of the distance inside which he might move and not be stopped. The guards brought chains and put them on his hands. He bore that meekly, too: the chains were a weapon, brass chains, solid and capable of shielding a fist, of looping a throat, of cracking a skull. Then they put a spear backwards through the ring attached, and two men held it, but that was not enough. The spear, too, was a weapon within his reach.

  With those precautions they moved him to the very foot of the Ila’s seat.

  A great calm came on him, even a sense of leisure in which he could satisfy his curiosity before he used his last chance. He looked up at the Ila, the tyrant, the ruler of all the world, as if he owned her.

  “Marak Trin,” the captain said, and the au’it wrote.

  Then the traitor voices started in his skull, dinning: Marak Trin.

  Marak Trin. Marak Trin, a foolish, mindless echo, hindering him from clear thought.

  In the desert, on the wide plains of the Lakht, in constant company with the mad, aware of the rest, the voices had grown louder and more insistent. He fought them down. He looked up at the red robes, the blood red robes, up to the Ila’s face, and found it very aptly time to die, before the voices were all he heard. But he had never seen the like of her.

  White, white skin, and gloved hands, and booted feet. On the Lakht, they valued white skin, skin the sun had not touched. They whitened the skins of brides and grooms with creams. They valued 6710.01 5/31/01 11:52 AM Page 27

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  slender bodies that clearly had never lifted burdens or carried water, or scratched a living from the desert.

  All these marks of beauty the Ila had. She wore a close cap of red
silk, and inner robes of silk shaded like flame. She exuded wealth, and power, and, some said, holiness.

  Yet she seemed frail, in size and strength so like his young sister, he was dismayed.

  “Are you truly mad?” she asked him directly, as his sister might have asked, a question, an entangling snare of question that caught his mind and his heart. He had killed enemies. He had never killed a girl.

  But he had never failed an intended target, either. He would; he would not; and in desperation he leapt at the steps. He dragged his guards with him. He hauled at the chains and had three men stumbling at his feet. He seized the spear and lifted his hands, aiming it at that slight figure.

  A thunderbolt struck him, sizzled through bone and nerve and flung him back in a sliding course down the steps. The guards smothered him with their bodies, wrenched at the chains, and hit him, but that impact of bone on flesh was nothing, nothing to the thunderbolt.

  “No, no, no,” the Ila said, a light voice, like chimes. “Don’t harm him. You knew Tain’s son would have tried it.”

  Marak could not get his breath past his tongue or move his chest beneath the living weight of the guards pressing down on him. He lay half-buried, on the hard edge of the steps, the object of every eye, and had time to realize the failure of his ambition, the shame of his father, and to know he had once and for all lost his mother’s life.

  The gods struck down the hand that touched the Ila. Had he not heard that warning all his life? He had no gods, and the Tain had none . . . but he had incontrovertibly met a wall of force, and it had stolen all his breath, shaken his heart in his chest, made his limbs twitch. To make it even worse, the voices roared wildly in his ears, a deafening rush like the sound of waters.

  The guards raised him up to his knees. He could not even manage to hold that position, once released, and slumped down onto his face on the floor, under the curious stares of the mad, in the spite of the Ila’s men.

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  “Marak Trin,” the Ila said.

  He could lift his head, that much, enough to stare up at her. He moved an arm and, discovering that unthought movement under his command, attempted to draw it beneath him. It moved. He drew one and then the other knee across the cold, polished stone and heaved himself up, laughably like the beasts, rump first, then the forearms.

  The hands still would not move. He felt nothing but a tingling in his feet.

  “Marak Trin Tain.”

  The roaring in his ears went on, a torment in itself, making her voice distant. He had succeeded only in kneeling at this tyrant’s feet.

  There were deaths and deaths in the holy city. Men were impaled on hooks and flung from the walls or hung alive for the vermin of the air. He wondered which death was his, or if the lightning of her fingers would suffice, and burn him to a crisp.

  “Are you mad?” the Ila asked. The room spun like the direction of the voices. The pain gathered in his bones and seemed to have found a home there, and in his silence an angry guard brought a length of chain down across his back. “Are you mad?” the Ila asked again, in that soft voice. “Or is this one of your father’s tricks?”

  “As mad as they are,” he said. He was dismayed to discover sudden cowardice in himself, that he feared another of those blows, and he despised himself that his mouth found it better to answer. He no longer knew for what he hoped. He told himself that his hope was to get to his feet again, and to try again, but his limbs would not, could not, and his heart had discovered a fear to equal fear of his father.

  “Mad as all the rest,” he mumbled.

  “And your father gave you up.”

  He failed to answer. The chain came down across his back.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And when did you know you had the madness?”

  “Years,” he said. “For years.”

  “As a boy?”

  It admitted a time of helplessness. It opened the door to his father’s house, his mother’s shame, his father’s disowning him after all these years. He said nothing, and knew the blow of the chain would come. Damn them, he thought, and then discovered the limit of his fear, right at the boundary of stubborn, foolish pride.

  The chain crashed across his back.

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  But the lift of a gloved hand had prevented its full force and forestalled another blow.

  “Tain knew?” the Ila asked. “Or is Tain Trin Tain mad, too?”

  “No,” he said, and caught a breath. “No to both.”

  “How many others are mad in your household?”

  “None that I know.” It was the question she had asked the others.

  They were into the safe litany of the others’ questions, and he could let go his breath and cease to expect the blows. He could gather his strength.

  “How did it come?”

  “As lights. As voices.” The red-robed au’it wrote each answer, sitting on the steps by the Ila’s feet, her book on her lap and her pen moving busily between ink-cake and page.

  “And Tain did not at any time know.”

  “No,” he said. “Not until the last. I kept it secret.”

  “And what betrayed you?” The Ila moved, a whisper of silk like the creeping of a serpent as she leaned her pale chin on a red-gloved, jeweled fist. “Did you fall in a fit?”

  “I did,” he said. Shame heated his face. He had fallen at his father’s feet, in front of all the chiefs. He spared himself confessing that part, that moment, all the shocked faces.

  “What did your father do?”

  “He asked me the truth, and I stopped lying.” The silence hung there, filled with only that. He wanted to move on. “He had heard your men were gathering up the mad. He sent for them.”

  “He was glad to let you go.”

  “If glad is true,” he said. His father’s life was blunted, now, turned sharply back on itself: no heir, no wife, and now a diminished reputation, either in laughter or in pity. Was that gladness in Tain Trin Tain? Was Tain in any wise relieved to have signed that armistice with the Ila?

  He thought not. But he thought little else. The pain in his body diminished, but the roaring in his ears reached a numbing pitch, and persisted, as if all the voices were bottled up in him, trying to find expression. Death began again to seem friendly. He asked himself how much more before his brain scrambled, before he had to scream. He bit his lip, bit it bloody.

  “Do you see lights and hear voices?” the Ila asked.

  “Yes.”

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  “And what do these voices say?”

  “Nothing of sense.” Could it be worse? He doubted he could keep his feet if he could gain them.

  “And the pictures? The images? The visions?”

  He fixed his sight on the Ila’s face, one stable point in a swinging world. It spun, and tilted, and stopped, over and over again. “Buildings,” he said. “Buildings. A tower.”

  “This tower? The Beykaskh?”

  He shook his head to clear it. She might take that headshake for no, and it was the truth. He focused on her, only on her. Past the whiteness, she had a classic Lakhtanin face, thin and bow-nosed. Her lids were black-rimmed. The iris was dark. The eyes became pits into which sense could fall, and, no, she was not a child: the eyes alone said she was not a child.

  A gloved finger raised, forbidding, then curled itself across the lips, convenient resting place. “The son of my enemy. The one who burns my towns, steals from my treasury, robs my caravans, despoils my priests. What shall I make of you?”

  The pain had spread out of the joints and migrated to soft places.

  The noise in his ears roared and made her voice distant.

  “Tain has given his son away,” the Ila mocked him, “so I take him.

  What shall I make of you, Marak Trin Tain? What sha
ll I name you instead?”

  Mockery he would not endure. “General of your armies,” he said, courting their violence. “Captain of your guard.”

  She leaned back, lifted a hand, perhaps to forestall her officers.

  The au’it, who had written it all, ceased writing, poised the pen above the page of her book.

  The Ila’s hand described a circle in the air. The au’it shut the book and put down her pen.

  “Now without record,” the Ila said, “I ask you . . . where is this madness?”

  “In the east,” he said without thinking, and astonished himself. It was in the east. Everything was in the east. It had no reason to be, but he knew it was, and it disturbed him to the heart.

  “You wish to be a captain of my guard,” the Ila said. “I have a one that suffices. But a captain of explorers, perhaps, as there used to be, before there were the tribes. So you are. I name you to ride out for me 6710.01 5/31/01 11:52 AM Page 31

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  and find the source of the madness. I name you to go where the mad go when they wander out, and find out why they turn to the east. I name you to return to me and to report whatever you learn. And if you return to me and report the truth, I will give you a gift. You will rule Kais Tain.”

  A stir of utter dismay went through the captains.

  He himself did not believe it.

  “I have set my seal on Kais Tain,” the Ila said, “and have all persons therein under that seal. Write it!” she said, and the au’it wet her pen and wrote. “They live or they die as you please me, and after you do my will, they live or they die as they please you. What other reward do you wish for your service?”

  Was he not to die? He searched all the crevices of that utterance, looking for the reason in what he heard.

  Was he not to die? And did the Ila make a barbed joke, and had the au’it written it in the book as if it were the truth, and the law?

  The pain made it difficult to think. The roaring made it difficult to hear anything sensible.

  “Is that enough?” the Ila asked him, as if she bargained in a market. “Do you agree to my terms?”