Hammerfall

by C. J. Cherryh

Go with Ian, the voices said. Believe him. This is the place. This at last is the right place.

  The desire and the voices grew, overwhelming better sense, and heat, and thirst. But limbs grew weary in walking. Feet ached, and rubbed raw in boots. The au’it lagged, carrying her heavy book, and Norit stumbled.

  Still Ian walked at the same pace.

  “If we were to trek all afternoon to get where we’re going, we might have saddled the beasts,” Marak said, vexed, helping Norit.

  Ian turned and confronted him for another lengthy stare, a test of wills, perhaps.

  Or perhaps Ian heard voices of his own. It occurred to Marak at that moment that such might be the case.

  “Not far, now,” Ian said, and led them, at a slower pace, up another rise.

  In the great distance and through the blowing dust a slope-walled spire rose up ahead of them, rising out of the flat desert as the land rose. It was an anomalous thing, and yet familiar, so very familiar it sent chills down Marak’s spine.

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  Hati touched his arm, for a moment stopped still, and half whispered, “The spire.”

  “The tower,” Norit said.

  Closer, the voices whispered. Closer, Marak Trin Tain.

  “Come,” Ian said again.

  They struggled to keep Ian’s pace, and it was hard to ignore the clamor of voices, now, urging Faster, faster, faster.

  Hard, but possible. They were not fools, and he was not a slave to his madness. Marak deliberately slowed his pace, walking at a rate he thought Norit and the au’it could sustain. Hati slowed. So they all fell behind. Ian looked back, displeased, but none of them walked faster, so Ian fell to their pace.

  Slower still, as the tower grew clearer out of the air, and clearer.

  They came close enough to see the stony ground around about it, a strange depression atop a hill of cindery rocks, with bits of glass catching the light.

  Marak paused for rest, to Ian’s great annoyance, as the sun was setting, as those bits of glass were catching the red light.

  It was a tower as great as any in the holy city, and not a structure of air and fire. Its sand-colored walls, casting back the sunset glow in the west, might be stone, but if so, there was no joint of masonry.

  “It has no windows,” Norit said, “nor doors.”

  And what use was it in itself, Marak asked himself, and why had it haunted the mad, and what did it mean to any of them? As a dream it had seemed to mean things on its own, a high place, a landmark to guide the mad.

  If it was a real place it had to have uses, and occupants, and a reason for being there.

  For that reason, too, he sat down where he stood, and Hati and Norit and the au’it settled by him.

  “It’s not that far,” Ian said, standing as if ready to walk again.

  “Why should we trust you?” Marak said. “Why should we go any farther? We’ve seen what it is.”

  “Have you?” Ian asked. “You haven’t seen everything. And you know nothing. Get up.”

  Up, up, up, the voices echoed in Marak’s head. He saw the cave of suns, and now Norit’s figures moving within that cave. Norit and Hati each had his hands, and Norit’s was cold. Hati’s sweated; and the au’it wrote, hunched over to protect her book from the wind.

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  “Stubborn,” Ian said. “Your reputation has reached us. But I won’t stand out here all night. You can sit here as long as you like, and go back and make up lies to tell the rest, for all I care. The au’it may be the only one of you with courage to investigate what this place is. Will you come, au’it?”

  The au’it stopped her writing, and lifted her head, and considered the proposition.

  Marak found the proposition as impossible to ignore. The truth was he could not walk away from it without answers. But he was not inclined to meet a fortified position without looking it over and thinking it through, if nothing more than the evident fact that it had no weak points, and it had no evident communication with the outside, and it gave every evidence of being like the Beykaskh in its defenses.

  The au’it looked at him, however, instead of folding her book.

  Everyone looked at him, as if he should know the risks. He did not, and knew he could only guess what they were venturing into.

  But he got up. “Go back to the others,” he said to Hati. “Take Norit with you.” The au’it was doomed as he was, to carry out the Ila’s orders: in that matter he had no authority over her.

  Hati, however, refused to do as he asked. “I came to see this place,” she said, and brought home to him the simple truth that he was not alone in his obsession and his visions: Hati’s were as strong; and maybe neither of them stronger than Norit’s. She had stood up and moved toward Ian.

  Marak gave an exasperated sigh and stood up, and Hati and the au’it with him, and the three of them walked where Ian led, subtly uphill for a long walk toward the tower’s base. Hot glass, as if from some army of glassworkers, seemed to have fallen on the sand all about, cooling, including grains and holes and bubbles in its convolutions. If they had had to walk over that in the dark, they might have had hard going. But there was a broad walkway of safe, plain sand as the sun sank and lengthened shadows to their greatest extent, even the shadows of bits of glass that studded the sand.

  “I’ve seen this,” Hati said under her breath. “I have seen this kind of glass.”

  So had he, long ago, with the army. “At Oburan,” he said. “At Oburan, when the wind blew clear the western plain.”

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  “There’s nothing like this in the lowlands,” Norit said, clinging to Marak’s hand. “Nothing at all like this in the lowlands.”

  Ian, meanwhile, walked steadily before them. The open sand was a tablet slowly erased, revised every time the wind blew, but the walkway through the plain of glass showed the passage of feet both coming and going: Marak did not miss it, and he had not, as they entered that pathway and added their prints to the rest, the fact there had been a traffic going around the depression of glass, and beyond the dune.

  He doubted that Hati had missed that fact, either, but he said nothing, only stored it up as an indication there might be more than one destination hereabouts, perhaps another one beyond the hill that obscured their vision of all the land beyond, and perhaps more to this place than the tower. The prints he saw went around the scattered glass, and up on the other side, and out of sight, as the land either stretched on in a broad flat or fell away in a depression. There was no place round about higher than the base of the tower.

  At this range it filled all their vision, and those footprints went confidently toward a bare wall at its base, where a subtle jointing showed where a door might be.

  So there were mundane accommodations like doorways, Marak said to himself. Ian did not walk through walls, or expect it of them.

  That seam cracked before they reached it, and let out a warm bright light, welcoming rather than threatening: as a door, like the Ila’s doors, a large square dropped back and slid to one side, rapidly, and with no hand to move it.

  Inside, a series of lighted globes marched along the ceiling of a long, long hall.

  It was the cave of suns. Marak recognized it, and his heart skipped a beat. They were within the vision. Hati and Norit must realize it.

  Ian walked ahead of them, booted feet echoing sharply on a floor like glass, under blinding suns that now assumed a mortal scale, floating globes of brilliant, fireless light.

  “This is the place,” Norit whispered as she walked. Her voice trembled. “This is what I always see.”

  Marak pressed her hand, and Hati’s, and the au’it hovered close by. He trembled. He was ashamed to acknowledge it to himself and twice ashamed to have Hati and Norit know it, but he trembled. He 6710.01 5/31/01 11:52
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  was here, within his lifelong vision, and he could not but think of all the hours of misery, all the days and nights he had fled his father’s house, trying not to be discovered in his madness; of nights on the Lakht, on campaign, trying to conceal from the men he led that he heard voices and saw this place, over and over and over again.

  All these things . . . all the years, all the losses of self and pride . . .

  came to this hallway, and proved, not madness, but prophecy. And for what, he asked himself angrily. For what?

  He freed his hand of Hati’s and pulled down the lap of his aifad to have a better look, to breathe the cold, strange air of this place. The air smelled faintly of water and herbs and things like asphalt.

  There were doors, countless doors in this hall of light, if those seams meant anything; and there were doors at the end of the hall.

  “Ian,” someone said, behind them.

  Marak stopped; they all stopped, and turned.

  A woman stood behind them, in the same sand-colored robes.

  “Is this Marak?” she asked, and an unanticipated flood of heat rushed through Marak’s head, filling his face, his neck, his whole body with fever warmth. His pulse hammered in his temples, for no reason, none. The heat came from inside him, but what caused it was here, this place, this woman.

  Marak, the voices said, echoed in his head, Marak Trin Tain, Hati Makri an’i Keran, Norit Tath, and a nameless au’it belonging to the Ila.

  The words went round and round and echoed from up above the suns.

  All at once the hall went blank. The hard glass floor meet Marak’s right knee. Norit and then Hati tumbled past his arms, and he tried to save them from the hard floor. They tumbled through his hands.

  Numb, he reached for his knife—toppled, simply toppled, hit the cold glassy floor with his shoulder and then with his head.

  This was foolish, he thought in dismay. He had fallen over like a child that had forgotten how to walk. There was no cause for this weakness. Nothing had happened to him. There was no pain. He should not have fallen.

  Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said. Visions poured through his head. Voices numbed his ears with nonsense, roaring like the storm wind.

  Of course he had weapons. Following Ian, coming in here, he had had at least that confidence.

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  But he knew now he had carried his defeat inside him, the same enslavement that had drawn him across the desert.

  His father won this argument. Worthless, his father had said, and the suns burned and blinded his eyes, each with a curious white-hot pattern at its heart.

  “Marak,” Ian said, and reached down a hand. He could no longer move. In jagged red lines the visions built towers, then letters beneath them, but he could make no sense of them. The letters streamed into the dark of the towers, and down twisting corridors, deep, and deeper and deeper by the moment.

  “Fool,” his father said.

  He had fallen at practice, in the dust of the courtyard. If he did not get up, his father would hit him. He tried. He kept trying.

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  10

  All metal belongs to the Ila. When it is broken its reshaping must be written down and its weight accounted, whether it be iron or silver or gold or copper. All metal the Ila gives for the good of villages. The earth will not grow it. It will not spring up like water.

  If a village or a tribe finds any metal, they must make it known to a priest. If it is traded, an au’it must write it. If it is sold, an au’it must write it. If it is lost in a well, that well must be drained. So also if it is lost in sand or carried off by a beast, an au’it must write it, and it must be hunted out.

  —The Book of Oburan

  FEVER BURNED IN MARAK’S SKIN, RAN IN VEINS OF FIRE

  through his body. His bones ached. Strange smells assaulted his nostrils. The place reeked like the lye pits, or a tanner’s vat at noonday.

  He lay in a bed of sorts, unable to move his arms. “Hati,” he said, and then, scrupulously, dutifully, to be fair: “Norit?”

  He had no sense of living presence near him. He wondered where they were.

  He wondered where he was.

  Very faintly and remote from his immediate concern, too, he thought of the au’it, and the rest of the madmen the Ila had sent with him, at his word.

  He thought of Tofi, who had lost everything on this journey. Of Malin and Kassan and Foragi, the fools who had walked into the desert.

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  greater fool to walk into the tower. He had thought so much of following the vision at the last he had forgotten good sense.

  Mad, Tain had said. Not my son. Not my blood. Living in my house, taking my food.

  When he failed Tain’s expectations Tain had had no love for him.

  But when he exceeded them he had Tain’s bitter jealousy. The army had cheered for him, and Tain had sulked in his tent, full of resentment.

  Was there nowhere any right course?

  He saw his sister sitting in the dust, his mother falling behind, left sonless.

  He saw the faces of his father’s men, all staring, all grim and betraying nothing while Tain accused him. Not my son.

  After an interval he heard footsteps moving around him. He smelled strange, pungent things. The roaring in his ears built and built to a sickening headache.

  Perhaps he was dying. The possibility failed to alarm him. There was no particular pain, except the headache, and he had had no few of those in his life.

  But if he was dying, it was without answers, and that was not fair.

  If he was dying, he had led Hati and Norit here, and they needed him awake, not lying here half-witted. Their absence was a grievance and a worry, and when he thought of them, that worry increased and the headache became less.

  “Hati,” he said aloud, and tried to move.

  Voices spoke to him, or around him. He felt small, vexing pains.

  He grew ill with the smells, and he grew angrier and angrier at his helplessness. If he fought, he could open his eyes. If he fought, he could think. If he fought, he could remember why he was here and where Hati had gone.

  The voices went away. There was utter quiet for a time. It was hard to maintain the struggle. It slipped away from him, just slipped away.

  And with no sense of connection to that dark place, he simply waked up, in a brown, smooth-walled room.

  He lay under a light cover, on a bed that stank of lye or some such thing, under a glowing sun that lit the whole room, and he had not a stitch on.

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  as clean to look at, though it stank. He was clean, he was shaven, his hair was washed and reeked of alcohol and lye. The sunburn on his hands and the new blisters on his feet had diminished to a little peeling skin, and that told him, given the way he healed, that it had been more than a few hours he had lain here, and that the dark dream might be no dream at all.

  He swung his legs off the bed.

  Sand-colored clothing lay on a shining metal chair at the foot of the bed. It made him remember Ian and the guidance that had brought him here.

  “Ian!” he shouted out, damning him for his betrayal. “Ian!”

  He expected no response. He doubted Ian would want to be near him at the moment.

  But if the clothes were here, they were surely for him, who had none, and they were cleaner than the rest, smelling at least of nothing worse than herbs.

  He put on the breeches and shirt and belt, sat down to put on the boots . . . in every particular like the boots he had come in, but ne
w, as if they had been re-created down to the last stitch.

  He hesitated at the gauzy robe, robes indicating tribe and tribe indicating allegiance; but he was not accustomed to go about in half undress, either; and when he picked it up, he saw how a shoulder stitch of strong twill bound the layers into a garment that could be shrugged on with its folds in place.

  The aifad, too, was doubled gauze. He had no doubt how to put it up and wrap it if he chose. Clever, he thought, more than clever. He let the aifad lie on his shoulders, seeing no need of its protection in this sterile place.

  Fine cloth, strange smells, burning lights . . . it was not sun that shone through the ceiling. It had several sources behind the translucent panels. This windowless smooth box of a room was beyond doubt a part of the cave of suns, within the tower. He was not far from where he had fallen and not far, he hoped, from Hati and Norit . . . not forgetting the au’it, either, who was little suited to indignities like this.

  The door was shut, a plain brown panel, showing no more feature than the wall and no means to open it. It was cold like iron. He thought of the Ila’s metal doors, the power of them, and refused to be daunted. He had met this riddle before, and looked for a plate to touch.

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  “Ian!” he shouted at the door, and struck it with his hand.

  The door opened. But it was Norit who appeared, Norit, dressed as he was, in the sand-colored gauze.

  She simply stood there.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. Her silence, her lack of joy, sent a chill through him. He embraced her as a man ought to greet his wife, and she acted as if he had never touched her before. Then she pushed away and went and sat down on the rumpled bed.

  He found nothing right. His ears suddenly roared. His balance went uncertain, and Norit for a moment looked like an utter stranger to him.

  The door was still open. He looked outside, down a metal hall like the vision of the cave.

  But it was not the same hall: in small points, the number of suns and the number of doors, it was different than where they had been.