They were through!

  The door clanged! Quickly she had pulled Touch-brother through. A curious, hollow gasping windshape escaped his lips, now and then, and he lay in the stillness. For now it was perfectly still, as though—

  Yes. There was no wind here at all. The air was still and lifeless.

  (I must be dead,) Darktouch thought. (This must be a dead land, truly.)

  She cast her eyes about her, and they met strangeness. There was a chamber that seemed to have no ending. The floor was featureless metal. It was not designed for humans, obviously—there were none of the crannies and bumps that told your feet where to go. There were no guidewalls to touch, so you could know where you were. A soft undark, warmer than in the cavern of corpses, glowed from the very walls.

  She was hungry and had to relieve herself too. And the windlessness was more frightening than anything else she’d ever known.

  Why did I do this? she signed in the deathly stillness. Why?

  And then she remembered how the imagesongs had moved across the big darkness. She remembered how her whole soul had sung with the Windbringer. It all lived still, deep inside her, a slow burning. I came to find an answer, she signed to herself.

  Eye-images danced inside her: the angels with their pincers outstretched, her father plummeting, fulfilling his pact with the Windbringers, his own life’s dream—

  Music of undark, warming her, stilling the terror.

  The imagesongs haunted her now. Even as the horrors of the flight through the dead land were fading from her memory a little. She stood awhile, waiting. Her eyes became used to the new undark. She could distinguish no distances, for the walls were far and untouchable. There were wild spirals of rock far above and metalfaced machinery that whispered and thrummed in her ears….

  But Boy-before-Naming never moved.

  Brother, brother. …

  There was no answer from him at first. Then faintly he

  scrawled on her arm, Darkness . . . darkness . . • nothing to touch going .. . crazy . . . His body began to twitch like a newborn baby’s. She tried to calm him, touching him all over, covering him with her warm body. He didn’t react.

  (Of course,) she thought. (All he can touch is the ground, and that has nothing to remember. It is quite dark, all of it. He is starved for sensations. Slowly the darkness is driving him mad, and there’s nothing I can do!)

  Please communicate with me, she signed, please… . Sign anything at all, even a children’s fingerchant, just so I know you’re alive, if you won’t you’ll die—

  And then, slowly, he began to drum into her hand the old fingerchant which all children learned in the nursery, that taught the basic shapes for the words without the squiggles of tense and case and the curves of emotion, love, hate, anxiety:

  Jumper, jumper,

  lost his name,

  jumper jumping

  in the wind

  Bringer, bringer,

  run to kiss him

  jumper, nameless,

  bringer, fall,

  Stunner, topple,

  scent of bringer

  jumper jumping

  in the wind

  Bringer come! Bringer go!

  Catch my soul!

  Fly, jump, fly, jump,

  belly, beast, mother, death,

  warm, soul, fly, go.

  Darktouch remembered the words of Stonewise: that this fingerchant had most likely been the gift of the first Windbringer of all, since the shapes had been found, magically chiseled into the walls of the chamber where the knowers knew and the dreamers dreamed their wisdom. Now she signed, encouragingly, Good, little brother.

  Let’s do it over and over now so you’ll get it right, and he was scratching all higgledy-piggledy like a young child learning to sign, and she chanted it with him, in firm strokes, in the big room built for other than humans:

  Jumper jumping in

  the wind

  and she remembered Father falling, falling into the arms of Windbringer, dying in a blaze of glory….

  Bringer corne! Bringer go!

  Catch my soul!

  she signed harder, drawing blood, and Touch-brother’s touch weakened further on her arm, and Father fell over and over….

  Belly, beast, mother, death,

  warm, soul, fly, go….

  and the undark rippling in the huge darkness, and the tingling windshapes, and the nightmare fading into quiet joy, firetouching the distant water below, and the wind-ghosts blazing….

  The tears were streaming, hot, stinging her parched lips. And now her Touch-brother was still.

  Come on! she signed, forcing gaiety from her fingertips. Come on, kid: Fly, jump, fly, jump. … Then she clasped him, trying to drive all the warmth of her into his body. But he was cold, and growing colder.

  (I’m alone,) she thought. She covered her eyes, yearning for ignorance; but even in the self-made darkness the Windbringer’s song haunted her memory.

  Touch-brother was dead. He could not cope with the sensory vacuum of the enormous chamber, the metal floor, after the nightmare of the flight through the Dark Country. He had died rather than face the new world.

  The angels did not come for him. There seemed to be none here. At least he would not be mangled and turned into soup for the strange moving water, she thought More in hope than certainty.

  Then she turned her back on the body and the door that led back to the country she had known all her life, and began to walk steadily towards the unknown.

  Kelver was in trouble, as usual, and for dreaming too much, as usual … and so he came to the secret cavern again. He usually came every day now. Sometimes he would just sit there and make the vast chamber into an imaginary helm of a starship or a Lordling’s hall of audience. Other times—when he felt braver—he would go to the door into the Dark Country, and carefully touch the stud (as gingerly as though it were a dormant al’ksigark in the desert) and feel the strange-scented wind oh him. Sometimes it would bring odors of putrefaction, other times bittersweet fragrances that stirred him and shook him and made him uncomfortable. But he always came back.

  And now a girl was walking towards him out of the Dark Country.

  He watched her for a while, stunned and unmoving. The girl did not walk like people. Her eyes stared straight ahead as though she were blind, and yet she seemed to be using them. She walked stiffly, her feet reaching, toeing the metal floor very carefully to test for strange objects. She didn’t look down. He held his breath, waiting….

  She stood still, about twenty meters away from him. She was whiter than the chalksands of Zhnefftikak. As though the suns had never touched her at all. Kelver marveled at that. She wore nothing but a loinshield of some indeterminate skin, and her hair fell, black as the Skywall Mountain, all the way down to her waist. He saw that she was looking at him. He saw her lip quiver a little. He didn’t know if it was fear or some other emotion. Her face showed nothing at all. It was almost as though she did not know how to show emotion with her face; it was a mask, lineless, perfectly composed.

  “Who are you?” he said, wondering.

  She showed no reaction. Around them the secret world hummed. Lights twinkleflashing, whorls of metal shimmering … the girl. “Why are you here?” he cried out. And then he felt a strange kinship with her.

  Something flashed in her eyes: guilt, laughter, recognition, he couldn’t tell. “You’ve never been in the sun, have you?” he said. “You’re from the Dark Country. You’ve run away …” Like me, his mind finished. They were both misfits, escapers.

  First I saw the tachyon bubbles. Then I found the spoor of the al'ksigark. I’m a finder, aren’t I? Now this. This is so much more important! This is something … the In-quest has to know.

  He thought of the Inquest. Then of his father’s corpse, a distant memory, hazy as mist on a chilled crystal goblet, and cold. Then, vividly, his father’s smile flashing, then the stone-dead face— I wish you were here! his mind cried out. “Can’t you talk?”

  Suddenly she rushed towards him and—

  —seized the strange boy’s hand and signed to him, the signs rushing thick and quick from her fingernails: Oh please please person from the end of the world, I've run away out of the whole world and I've touched the songs of the Windbringers with my eyes and ears and everything has fallen apart, and I need answers, I have to know why they’ve all lied to us and why they’ve denied us the power to perceive the Windbringers* songs—

  There was no answer. Instead a stream of windshapes issued from his mouth. They seemed almost purposeful, almost meaningful, very alien compared to the involuntary windshapes of babies or of those in anguish. He didn’t even understand her signings!

  Give me an answer! she signed with her last strength. Give me—

  He held the girl to him, even as she was raking contorted scratchings into his arms. He knew somehow that she did not mean to hurt him by it. But exhaustion took her and her finger movements became feeble. He had blood on both arms. He held her tight, soothing her like a wild animal.

  “It’s all right, there’s nothing to fear, nothing to fear….”

  He walked her a few steps, toward the entrance of the secret cavern.

  The girl made a strange noise in the back of her throat—

  ‘There’s nothing to fear….”

  “Fear.” It was a distinct word.

  “Oh, so you can talk,” he said. They had reached the entrance and he showed her how to crawl through into the natural part of the cave. She was more at ease as soon as they reached the smaller rooms with their pocked floors. He didn’t have to hold her now; she followed him, her hand resting lightly on his back, not looking to right or left. Just like a blind person.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Uncle will take care of you; he’s a good man, even if he’s too tired to really pay me much attention, too wrapped up—”

  “Fear.” The word re-echoed.

  “Don’t keep saying … oh, it’s all you can say, isn’t it? Did you just copy that from what I was saying? Don’t they speak the Inquestral tongue in your country? Or it’s a different dialect, I guess, like the ghost people from Zhneff-tikak…

  They reached the cave-mouth. It was broad daylight. Kelver stepped out of the cave. Ahead, the Cold River stretched on its pylons, angling down to ground level for about fifty meters and then running on to infinity. Above them the mountain loomed. The suns were one behind the other, unbearably brilliant, and the rocks burned even Reiver’s callused feet. The girl stood in the cave-mouth’s shadow and for the first time she moved her head from side to side, and fear seemed to fleck her eyes. She darted back into the cavern, he ran in to seize her and bring her out again, and they stood there, he clasping her tightly and the girl shielding her eyes with her hands. Carefully Kelver pried them away, and then pointed ahead to the bright porcelain cubes in the mid-distance that were the village, and she shook her head wildly and then looked out, finally, and then she murmured, “Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear.”

  And he knew now that she did not know what it meant but had just managed to mimic one of his words; but then he thought of the implications of what had just happened —how he, a mere boy from a back village in a backwater planet in a backward solar system, had stumbled on something that no one in his whole cosmos knew existed, something so important that perhaps even the Inquest itself would be dragged in— When he thought about all this he felt fear, too.

  “First things first,” he whispered. “We’ll go back to the village and we’ll teach you to talk our language, and find out why you’re here … then we’ll see if we must tell the Inquest….”

  But he already knew that he was at the beginning of a journey to unknown places and among people of power. Kelver was different from the other people of his village, after all. He could see beyond. He could imagine starships streaking through space, in the black emptiness that was Skywall. But seeing did not make him any less afraid.

  “Fear! Fear!” the girl cried out.

  There was much that Kelver could not yet see. How, half a continent away, the planet’s thinkhive was buzzing, activating dormant robot drones from the heart of the Dark Country, breathing life into never-used circuitry, issuing commands to secret machines of death. The girl should already have been dead; but a vast instrument of death that had not wakened in twenty thousand years could not be bestirred in a few seconds. There was still time: how much time, not even the planetary thinkhive knew for certain.

  Book Two

  Out of the Burning Wasteland

  mi’ brendéh aíros

  chom z’hartnen Zhénveren

  min verdens aíroten

  chom z’hartnen a ombrel ayán

  Love burns me like the wasteland of Zhnefftikak

  Love freezes me like wasteland under the shadow

  —Galléndaran love song

  ELEVEN

  WINDSTRIKER

  Falling open-armed, into the embrace of death—

  He felt the Sound pulling him. Fragrances of different airskiffs kaleidoscoped in his nostrils. All was as it should be, the grand moment, the Windbringer calling, and now only the empty air, almost dark to the touch, even the memory of the wayward daughter fading like the smell of lovemaking after a long sleep….

  But then … there was no ending, no cessation of being. He floated in the darkness, no glimmer of touching on his fingertips. Slowly he came to the realization that—

  Somewhere beneath, beyond touching, -a thing worked furiously to sustain him in the thick air. And when he reached something tangible finally, it was cushion-soft, moist, redolent of Windbringer, and it moved ponderously in the windstream. Windbringer! his fingers worked the warm surface; the surface creased about his fingers, and an oily ooze squirted from it. He couldn’t believe it. Windbringer had broken his fall. He was not dead. Upon the air he signed an anguish-song, making the words in jagged strokes that left no trace.

  And finally, a deep shudder of a touching seemed to stir in his mind. But no hand signed against his hand. Only in his head, the beginnings of alien thoughts, as though something were seeking to learn his language.

  Mindtouch? He had heard of power men who had claimed to touch the very thoughts of Windbringers, but he had always dismissed them.

  I am Windstriker, he signed finally, tentatively.

  And the ghost touching signed, feathersoft, Help—me—

  And Windstriker was awed by this. Help you? he signed on the leathery surface. I’m only—

  The killing—end—not what it seems—a wrongness—a wrongness—

  Haven’t 1 returned to you, haven’t 1 fulfilled my oath? he signed humbly.

  For a moment the ghost-touches swarmed, indecipherable. He drifted between life and death, wondering what purpose Windbringer had had in mind, breaking his fall, obstructing the natural cycle of birth and death.

  Out of the ghost-touching crystallized more words: Change the order—you not—understand yet— The spectral hands groped in his brain, searching out memories. Your daughter—your daughter—has touched the—truth—

  Windstriker felt the slap of the sailsac vibrate through his weak body. (What kind of crazy dream is this? he thought. My daughter—how could Windbringer know of my daughter?) And then he signed, What is it that my daughter’s eyes have touched?

  As she to you—so we to her—we touch beyond even time and space—as she touches—the undark—you not understand?—we not gods, we—a wrongness here a wrong-ness—help, prevent—killing—

  And Windstriker knew that he had come to the end of being Windstriker, that he had truly fulfilled his vow. He had broken through to a new world, where the rules were not the same. He felt ravenous suddenly.

  Eat—my flesh— came the signing! He dug out a small piece of the Windbringer; it was succulent brain meat. He had eaten of the living Windbringer now. Truly he must be invincible.

  Let me know how I can help you! he signed vigorously.

  Stay with us—become one with us—mindlink with us— came the reply. A faint joy stirred in him; somehow a nerve in his brain was being goaded to pleasure. Then Windbringer signed, You are the first—we have caught—let us understand you—let us read your soul—we do not understand the wrongness—you will teach us—

  How can l… ?

  Then came other sensations, scents that could not exist, impossible textures that tantalized his fingertips, tastes that mingled gall with sweetness, and then … confusion swept through him as he sensed silky smells and touched sour tastes and touched signings without meanings, and he thought, This must be death at last, the Windbringer’s final vision….

  Yes! he signed through the welter of sensation. I will help you, Windbringer, if I can, and then tiredness came over him and he touched a darkness tinged with warmth and found it welcome.

  The sailsacs filled quickly. With stunning grace the Windbringer plunged into an air current and soared aloft, bisecting the heavy air, looking for a place too far for the hunters.

  TWELVE

  WINDSHAPES

  There was a room where the floor was almost liquid; it flowed around you, comfortable and yet disquieting because it couldn’t be remembered like a real floor. There were circles of undark in the sky your eyes couldn’t even bear to touch. Most of all, there was a hugeness—the air and the rooms and the floors went on and on and people never even noticed that the world was not walled into easy segments. She had been in the strange world for two sleeps now, yet she understood nothing at all. So she had abandoned herself to the world, drinking it in moment by moment, not questioning it. It was a good world; people were kind to her, feeding her and always uttering the windshapes that she now knew must be somehow full of meaning. For one thing she had noticed, almost from the start: they were not a touching people. They communicated some other way: perhaps by the endless variety of ear-touches they could make with their mouths, perhaps even with their minds. She was sure they were not a cold people, that they did not stand so distant from each other out of hatred or unease. It was puzzling.