Shadow's End (43 page)

“You don't sound sure,” said the king, still in that intent voice.

“I'm not. The whole matter's complicated.” She led them away from the wagon slightly, and when I heard the king ask, “What's a Kachis?” I knew she was telling them about our beliefs.

They talked quietly, then Poracious's voice rose:

“These Kachis must have a lengthy life span if one of them has been around since Bernesohn's time!”

Even Lutha forgot to keep her voice down.

“I have no idea whether there's been one or a succession of different ones. Saluez believed the Kachis cannot die, but we saw dead ones during our trip, which has sorely tried her faith.”

Tried, but not defeated, I said to myself as I fastened Leely's shirt.

“Does this relate in some way to the Ularian problem?” the ex-king asked.

I came out of the wagon, bringing the now clothed Leely to stand beside his mother as the king went on:

“I see no connection. These Kachis may be nasty, but the Ularians are … quite inexpressibly vile!”

I looked at him across my veil, asking, “Have you seen the Ularians?”

“I've seen them. And tasted them. I've heard the sound of the waves on the world where they are now, heard the scream of seabirds and the weeping of the girl who's there watching them.” He shook his head, making a face. “They're … horrible beyond belief.”

“What do they look like?” I asked.

The ex-king gestured. “Big. Big as one of your hives. Shaped, oh, like any old thing at all. A massive middle, rather shapeless, with a lot of appendages or tentacles hanging beneath like a fringe. They float. Or they sit like mountains. Or they build themselves into rancid walls of flesh that can surround an encampment! On one side, their skin is bare, and they are able to show pictures on their skins.”

I felt my eyes widen. It was an unbelievable description. Leely slipped loose and started purposefully toward the fence surrounding us. Lutha caught him just as he was climbing through.

“Dananana,” he cried, struggling to get away from her. “Dananana.”

She pulled him into her arms and asked me to get his harness from the wagon. He hated it, but sometimes it was the only solution. I fetched it and we buckled it behind him, fastening the tether tightly to Lutha's belt.

He looked at the harness, decided he couldn't get out at the moment, then opened his pants, peed onto the dirt, and sat down to make a mud picture on the bottom board of the fence. I saw Lutha flinch, but Poracious Luv watched him with lively interest and no discernible disapprobation.

About this time the three Fastigats concluded their conference. Both Leelson and Trompe spat over the fence and then wiped their mouths. The Procurator said something to them, then calmly let himself out the gate and went off down the hill. The spirit people and songfathers had left an aisle open all the way from the pen to the temple at the bottom. He was confronted almost at once by one of those who had accompanied him up the hill in the firstplace.

“Hah-Rianahm,” Poracious whispered. “Lord high-muck-a-muck among this rabble.”

The Dinadhi's voice was strident. I could hear him clearly, though he spoke from some distance.

“…must return to the pen!” he howled.

“…must take time to experience this record,” shouted the Procurator in stentorian tones, overriding the other, no small achievement considering how the skinny old man was screaming.

“No time! Tahs-uppi!”

“Until Tahs-uppi!”

Gabble and shout, pushing and shoving, the Procurator was thrust back up the hill and through the gate that Leelson opened for him. The three Fastigats exchanged wry looks that said the result of the foray had not been unexpected. Then all three of them began dragging items from the baggage pile, opening sacks and cases, sorting out items of equipment. When they had unpacked and assembled the first half-dozen elements, Lutha said:

“Isn't that a wide-range retriever? The kind entertainers use?”

Lutha was looking questioningly at Poracious, but the large woman was preoccupied with what was going on at the temple. There the circles of kneeling men were completely filled in and various ritual personages with towering headdresses had taken up positions atop the raised semicircular section of floor. As we watched, songfathers manned the entire length of the pull rope, and half a dozen black-clad spirit men were pouring the contents of large jars upon the northeast quadrant of the temple floor—oil, I presumed, to make easier the moving of the great stone lid across this lower stone. When their jars were empty, they departed. One of the hierarchy shouted a command. Though we could not see musicians from where we stood, the sounds of their instruments came to us clearly: drums, gongs, trumpets, panpipes, and several sonorous stringed instruments.

First a blaring fanfare, then a
whomp, whomp, whomp
of drums and deep-toned plucked strings, then a shouted
command, and those along the rope took up the slack. They began to tug, grunting with each pull. The arrangement of the rope allowed a one-quarter turn of the semicircular stone, and I held my breath, awaiting what this displacement would reveal.

At first it was only a darkness. A darkness within darkness. A circular blackness. A pit, perhaps. A pit smeared with cloudy concentric lines to represent a … I struggled to find a word. A vortex.

A blotch spun past, appearing at the edge farther from us, disappearing behind the edge nearest us. Well then, it wasn't a representation of a vortex, it
was
a vortex. A … maelstrom. Though it didn't look like water.

“Not water,” said the ex-king doubtfully. “It doesn't look like water.”

Leelson cursed briefly behind me. He had dropped some part of the device and now knelt to attach it once more. The loose parts were almost all attached; I assumed they were finished with it. Trompe knelt beside Leelson and they thrust a record file through a narrow slot.

Poracious followed my glance.

“A record from Perdur Alas,” she murmured. “Un-filtered, if I don't miss my guess!”

I only half heard her, for the ex-king made a muffled exclamation, drawing my attention back toward the temple where the steadily grunting line,
ungh-ah, ungh-ah, ungh-ah
, had moved the floor the entire quarter turn the tackle permitted. Now the whirling darkness was fully disclosed. The music stopped. We heard a shouted command. Then trumpets again, and a quicker tempo from the drums. The rope went slack. The ritual personages unshackled it from the eye, hauled it in, and carried thick coils of it away eastward to the accompaniment of panpipes and gongs. The members of the orchestra marched onto the northeast quadrant of the great stone lid and fettered themselves, facing north, while over their left
shoulders the vortex whirled with hypnotic force. The musicians' hair whipped in the rising wind.

“Look away,” demanded Poracious. “Don't let your eyes get sucked in. Observe—the musicians are wearing blinkers, and none of the people are looking at it.”

As indeed they were not. The temple stood on a slight rise; almost all of the observers were on lower levels, where they couldn't see the vortex; if any were higher than we, they would see only the temple roof or the processions of spirit people and songfathers who were marching hither and yon, waving banners and censers while drums pounded, gongs sounded, trumpets brayed, and panpipes tweedled breathily. When the music stopped, no one looked toward the temple. All eyes were searching the far canyon edges, where they opened into the valley.

“The beautiful people are coming,” I cried, hearing both the pain and the joy in my words. “Oh, they are coming. They will see us one more time before they go to heaven! Perhaps …perhaps …”

Oh, perhaps. The crowd stirred. At first I did not see what they saw, then I detected the pale movement at the canyon entrances, like a flow of milk. It did not come closer. Not then.

At the same time Leelson said something in a self-satisfied tone, there was a click, and I was elsewhere.

Before me, observed from some distance, through a twiggy growth, Diagonal Red and Four Green Spot floated over an abandoned camp. I heard the sea, at some distance behind me. A twig was jammed between my teeth to keep my mouth open as I drooled filthily. From the south, enormous shapes bobbed toward me, and my throat formed the words, Blue Lines, Big Gray Blob, and Speckled Purple. In the middle distance, a dozen more shaggy Ularians moved in a slow procession.

I was tasting …what was it I tasted? Soapy, rancid, bitter, nasty …Over the sound of the sea I heard
retching; through the view of the moorland, as through a transparent picture, I saw the valley of the omphalos, filled with people who bent and twisted as they tried to get rid of that filthy taste. Abruptly, the effect lessened somewhat, becoming no less nasty but less overwhelming.

I heard Leelson's voice. “I've put in a partial filter.” Whatever he had done, it did not prevent the experience continuing …

… showing pictures on their bodies! Each newly pictured thing coalesced on the body of one single being. “Ularian,” my throat said. The picture moved on to another Ularian, and more detail was added. Each Ularian augmented or complicated the picture created by the previous ones, and the event continued rotating….

I shut my eyes, held my breath, refused to smell or taste anything. No good. It was not an experience one could evade.

The woman fleeing. Fleeing. The monstrous beings coming after her.

I heard indrawn breaths. Not from the vision; from reality. There were murmurs of denial in the valley of the omphalos. Shouts of anger. I shut my eyes and made myself listen for sounds from Dinadh. What were the spirit people doing while this went on? The music had stopped. What were they thinking?

Huge, those beings. Great shaggy walls. Shapeless, amorphous, threatening, with dangling tentacles. Now the huge bodies began a new sequence of pictures, a detailed sequence playing over and over and over again:

A place near the ocean. A strangely shaped stone. A twisted tree. The hammered sea sparkling under the sun … A note of … anticipation? And then, all at once, an explosion of shapes from the face of the cliff, like puffs of thick smoke that separated into individual things, a horde of shaggy little floaters, miniature likenesses of the huge Ulari-ans, countless numbers of them, spewing out of crevasses, out of caves, pouring into the sky …

The huge ones sit, unmoving, bands of bright color dancing upon their skins as the little ones fling themselves outward, pursuing the seabirds, catching them, gulping them down! Oh, they are hungry, so hungry!

And the experience stopped, all at once, like waking from dream. Leelson had shut down the machine. Before me, Poracious Luv wiped her mouth and spat across the fence. Beside me, Lutha and the ex-king did the same. At our feet, Leely, unbothered, still painted upon the fence. He, too, had seen what we had seen. His painting was of them, the little shaggy things that had come pouring from the cliff wall. He had seen but he hadn't tasted.

Across the pen from me, the three Fastigats stared down toward the temple, waiting. Everywhere in the valley people stood up, shaking, wiping their mouths. Afar, at the openings of the canyons, movement began again, a milky flow made of countless white forms floating from the canyon mouths, streams of them, coming through the tall grasses, converging upon the omphalos.

From somewhere below, a shaky command. Then again, louder, more vehement.

I am lost in anticipation! A drum pulses, trembling. Voices shout. Music resumes, unsteadily, out of tune, out of tempo. The milky streams come nearer.

Kachis! Floating wide-eyed, arms and legs spread wide, only their wings moving them, rivulets of them, becoming rivers, becoming pools, becoming a surrounding, foaming sea! Oh, our people. Oh, our ancestors. Oh, our loved ones. So many! Could there be so many in only one hundred years? And how would I find
her
in such a mob! Millions of Kachis swirling in creamy eddies, nearing the omphalos, twirling more and more rapidly as they are caught at the edges of the vortex, as their wings …

As their wings rip away! Glassy fragments flying! A sigh from the songfathers assembled, from the spirit people. Was this expected? Was this the way of things? Would they not need their wings in heaven?

Perhaps not, for the Kachis are changing. There is a stripe of darkness up their fronts, from groin to chin. A widening stripe of darkness. At first I don't understand, then I see what it is. The pale delicate skins have split. Whatever is inside shows dark against the pale integument, thrusting outward, fighting its way out of the tight white casing in which it has been trapped. Arms split from wrist to shoulder, legs split from toe to thigh. Translucent pearly coverings curl away, and what is inside heaves out.

New forms. Different forms. Forms we had just seen, as recorded upon another world, shaggy ravenous hordes of creatures, miniature Ularians …

I hear my own voice howling, no, no, no.

Trompe screams. Why is Trompe screaming? I turn. He is lying beside the fence, blood-covered. Leelson is down behind him, and above them bright ruby lines cut the air into deadly polygons of cross fire, pulses of force coming from downhill, southwest and northeast. Someone is firing at them, at us!

I hear the ex-King of Kamir, shouting. “Mitigan. Stop! Don't! Chur Durwen, no!”

At the bottom of the hill shaggy, fringed shapes pour into the omphalos like a foaming tide. The air is full of Kachis ghosts, split-skin phantoms, half faces, single wings, shed skins whirling on the wind, clattering softly against one another like fallen leaves.

Leelson runs toward Lutha, seizes her up, tied as she is to Leely, who grabs my arm and holds me in a grip of iron, so I must run alongside. The ex-king pursues us, trying to shield us from the weapons fire. We five are fleeing down the aisle while the spirit people rage around us. Faces, I see, mouths, I see, wide mouths, shouting, furious faces. They are tied down. They cannot stop us, for they are belted to eyelets set in the stone, tied down against this dreadful wind!