Robert Silverberg - Kingdoms of the Wall

Of course Traiben went to the ancient ship that night anyway, once it was too dark for anyone to see him slipping away. I might have expected that of him. Kilarion was on sentry duty in that part of the plain, and somehow Traiben got past him unnoticed, and went sprinting off into the darkness.

The first I knew of it came when I heard voices somewhere nearby me, a muffled cry, the sound of a scuffle, a yelp of pain. “Let go of me, you idiot!” someone said Traiben’s voice.

I opened an eye. I was lying by myself, neither sound asleep nor fully awake, near the outer edge of our group, huddled down miserably in my bedroll trying to fend off the cold. There was no woman with me. Since Hendy’s transformation, she and I had neither slept in the same place nor made Changes together, nor had I been with anyone else.

Focusing my awareness as quickly as I could, I looked up and saw, outlined by moonlight against the dark, Traiben wriggling in the grasp of someone much larger who had caught him around the neck in the crook of his arm. Talbol, I realized. He was the sentry on duty in this section of the sleeping-area.

In a sharp whisper I said, “What’s going on? What are you two doing?”

“Make him let go of me,” Traiben cried, in a strangled voice.

“Quiet! You’ll wake the whole camp!”

I trotted over to them and slapped Talbol’s forearm to get him to let go. Traiben backed away a few steps, glaring sullenly.

Talbol looked just as sullen. “He comes creeping into camp in the middle of the night without saying a word. How am I supposed to know he isn’t one of those apes coming to attack us?”

“Do I look like an ape?” Traiben demanded.

“I wouldn’t want to say what you—” Talbol began.

I waved him into silence and sent him off to resume his patrol of the perimeter. Traiben rubbed his throat with his hand. I was angry and amused all at once, but more angry than amused.

“Well?” I asked, after a moment.

“I went there.”

“Yes. Against my direct order. How absolutely amazing, Traiben.”

“I had to see it.”

“Yes. Of course. Well?”

Instead of answering he thrust something toward me, a dark shapeless thing that he had been holding in his left hand. “Here. Look. It’s a god-thing. The ship is full of stuff like this, Poilar!”

I took it from him. It was a corroded metal plaque, maybe three fingers long and four fingers wide. I held it up into the faint moonlight cast by Tibios and was able to make out, just barely, some sort of inscription on it in lettering unlike anything I had ever seen.

“It’s Irtiman writing,” Traiben said. “I found it lying half buried on the floor of the ship.”

“Do you know what it says?”

“How would I know that? I can’t read Irtiman writing. But look, look, Poilar, there’s a whole treasure-house of god-things in there. Of course everything’s broken and rusted and useless, but you just have to glance inside to know how ancient they are. The original Irtimen must have used those things! The ones whom we worship as Kreshe and Thig and—”

“Stop saying that,” I told him irritably. “The Irtimen were teachers, not gods. The gods are beings of a higher plane than Irtimen or us.”

“Whatever you like,” said Traiben, with a shrug. “Will you come with me in the morning, so we can explore the ship together, Poilar?”

“Perhaps.”

“We’d all better go. The Irtimen might make a little trouble. The ones from the caves, I mean. I saw a couple of them lurking around the ship while I was there. It’s a kind of shrine for them, I think. They’ve got a sort of altar on the far side, with twigs and painted stones piled up around it, and when I went around to look at it I saw that they were burning little wisps of dead grass and chanting something.”

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.