“Ishá ha!” the Inquestor shouted. At once a childsoldier whipped around and lasered the spider. It splintered in a spray of sparklets, sinking into the mush.

  “Move, move!” Davaryush said. He strode forward, the organic slush slowing him down.

  “Look! Above us!” Varuneh said.

  For a second they stood petrified. Dozens of them were descending from the cavern’s height. Their claws snapped and clattered as they swooped downwards.

  At a word from the Inquestor the childsoldiers clicked their varigrav boots and jumped high into the air, streaking the darkness with deadly gold. Now they hovered, a column of whirling, killing light. Angels fell. Metal shards scraped on Davaryush’s face. He moved forward relentlessly, trusting to the childsoldiers to cover him, shouting for the others to follow closely.

  More and more spider-angels were loosed from the ceiling! Wave after wave was torn apart by the madly spinning lightstreaks! And now one or two of the soldiers too were stricken and plummeted into the slush, where the pulping machines rent them apart with their claws. Davaryush looked away, remembering that he had once been as they….

  Now the mush grew deeper. They waded, now knee-deep, now waist-deep, in the soup of pulped corpses, stinking of death and putrefaction. Only Darktouch seemed unaffected by the stench.

  Abruptly the onslaught ceased. Davaryush made out, in the light from the soldiers’ cloaks, a round doorway in a far wall. They made for it, fighting the thick slush.

  A hundred meters from the door, a lone figure stood. A very old man. When they reached him, Davaryush saw that he had no eyes….

  Darktouch watched the distant figure. She had felt no fear when the angels came from the cavern roof; the other time, not knowing what was at the end of the Dark Country, had been much worse, and now she knew that the angels were mortal.

  The Dark Country had not changed. But she had.

  No country will ever be the Dark Country to me again, she thought. The people in the shining cities call the Wind-bringer’s people dark, and the deafblind call the outside dark. But I am of both worlds now….

  When she looked around her, at the slimy walls illuminated by the children’s war cloaks, at the mud that oozed at the ankles, she knew that she was no freak, that the others saw as she did.

  The childsoldiers had alighted on the ground, and Davaryush was giving them their orders: “I don’t want you to come in with us. But if you fly over the top of the Skywall Mountain, you will find a chink in the roof wide enough to admit a single floater. Go there; enter the mountain; monitor our whereabouts. Soon we will be journeying out over the Sunless Sound. Watch over us; be ready to aid us if necessary.”

  One by one the soldiers reared up on their varigrav boots and floated away. Davaryush called over the last half-dozen of them; from these he took the shining cloaks, and he threw one over the shoulders of each of the four travelers remaining; soon the soldiers were distant light-points in the far end of the cavern of death.

  They went further towards the gateway. She could see the stooped figure clearly now. At first she assumed it was simply another corpse, but it moved, its face looked familiar—

  “Stonewise! Stonewise!” she called out. And then she remembered that he could not hear her. … It seemed so long ago, this country of the stifling silence, of the unending darkness, where one could not speak.

  She went up to him then and took his hand. He trembled. He signed the word angel on her hand.

  “It is Stonewise,” she said to the others. “The village knower. This means that he must have decided to die; perhaps he felt himself a burden to the others, being so old.” And then she signed to him: Stonewise. I am a wayward pupil of yours, the one who seemed to touch at a distance. The freak. I am named Darktouch now, and I’m not a freak anymore.

  The old man signed feebly to her.

  She said, “He says that the words in the knowing room have changed of their own accord … that a jumper has been reborn .. . that he has passed on his power to a boy.” What could that mean, a jumper being reborn? A memory came to her: Windstriker falling into the howling wind….

  Old man, she signed, I am Darktouch, who have crossed the Dark Country and have returned. I have found that our world is not the universe, not even a dustspeck of the universe. I have kept my eyes, and yet I have become a woman.

  Dark … touch … came the weak signing.

  “Something has happened,” she said at last to the others. “Something … terrible, perhaps. The words of knowing … do you know what they are?”

  Davaryush said, “Yes. They are the inscriptions that the thinkhives made, intended as inviolate truths that would form the basis of your myths, your fantasies.”

  “Did you command that they be changed?” Kelver said.

  “I cannot do that.”

  “Then,” said Darktouch, “some power greater than you has commanded it.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE BOY WHO DANCED BACK THE WINDBRINGERS

  As they walked toward the circular portal, bronze-shiny with the light from their cloaks, Kelver said, ‘The old man! We can’t leave him behind, can we?”

  Davaryush looked at Stonewise, who had waded out farther into the lake of human slush; he seemed to have found peace. “What would it be like for him,” he told the boy, “if we did take him back to the city, revived him, perhaps even gave back his sight and hearing? He would be living in a madness of alien sensations. … I do not know what would be the more compassionate.”

  “But I’ve learnt to survive in new, hostile places … and so has she,” he said, pointing to Darktouch.

  “You are young. Would you strip away all this man has left to believe in?”

  The boy was silent as they made their way to the gateway. Davaryush knew that he was debating in his mind … he thought of his plan for him, and knew that it was good. He wished he’d been like this boy, stuck in a village dreaming of glory, never having to look that glory in the face and know the horror behind it. He thought: I must have condemned a billion such to their deaths in an idle stroke of makrúgh . And Davaryush was sick at heart, sick of all that he stood for. But he said nothing.

  At the gateway Kelver said, “It’s difficult to be an In-questor, isn’t it? I used to think it would be easy. All that power.” He spoke the lowspeech, not using any of the forms of reverence; but Davaryush did not care to correct the boy. “Oh, Inquestor, I would not like to be in your place.”

  “You don’t want to sit on a hoverthrone overlooking a dozen worlds? You don’t want to utter a word and shatter a world? To send your childsoldiers to waste a wayward planet like a swarm of locusts?”

  “No.”

  Seeing his dismay, Davaryush said kindly, “Don’t even think of it, Kevi. I am not an Inquestor now; and the Lady Varuneh has not been one for hundreds of years. We are all equal.” He took a last look at the old man’s torso, half buried in the mud now, waiting for death.

  “I envy you, Stonewise,” he said very softly, for Varuneh alone. Only she could possibly understand the supreme loneliness of faithlessness. She only smiled at him. Since leaving the city, she seemed to have grown more beautiful, as though the increasing bleakness of the landscape as it went from expanses of deathcold to this claustrophobic cavern of flesh-renders had brought out some compensatory, inner beauty of hers. “Do you envy him too?”

  “No, Daavye. I feel nothing at all, nothing, nothing. Remember Saryodha, the Queen of Ghosts? She saw what we are about to see, and she has died for it.”

  “We must see. We are Inquestors. Until they strip our names from us … as I know they will do.” And he pressed the stud, irising open the door to the Dark Country.

  I see! I see! Darktouch thought. Ahead of them, the corridor forked and forked again. The passageways were barely manhigh; she saw that the others stumbled and sometimes hit their heads. The cloaks cast only tiny patches of light; but she did not need light here. She was the seeing one, and they were the blind. Lightly she stretched her toes out, seeking familiar landmarks. Once or twice she was fooled by a tricky footing or by some shifted pattern in the rockfloor; but not for long.

  They passed larger chambers carved from the rock. Her eyes dwelt long on everything. For the first time she didn’t feel ashamed of touching with her eyes. Windshapes whistled in the corridors and she knew them for sounds.

  ‘‘Darktouch!” shouted Kelver. “We can’t keep up!”

  She slowed, but it was irritating that she could not run through the tunnels as in the days of her childhood. Her old Touch-brother must have felt as these outsiders did

  when he reached the first chamber beyond the angel’s feeding place.

  Davaryush whispered behind her: “Is there a nursery here, a creche, a communal place where the babies are kept?”

  “Yes. You don’t have to whisper; no one will know we’re here if you do exactly as I do. Speak as loud as you like.”

  “The creche. Saryodha mentioned the young children—”

  “Yes,” Darktouch said. She felt along the wall until her fingers touched three notches in the rock, all pointing leftward; and then she eased through an opening to where a ledge overlooked a dank cleft. The smells were stronger now: the ever-present gall of Windbringers, the background perfume of intermingling airskiff scents. “My hand, hold my hand,” she said urgently to Kelver. The four of them linked hands and inched along the ledge while her free hand explored the half-remembered ridges along the rockwall. Puddles of light sifted from the cloaks as they rustled in the wind. The wind hardly came to this section of the village, sheltered as it was for the babies’ sake; even so she had forgotten its power, its sick-sweet odor.

  “She’s not looking at all,” said Kelver.

  No time, her fingers danced on his hand; and then she translated quickly, remembering that he knew only wind-shapes.

  Swiftly they passed the openings to chambers large and small, mostly empty, some with people clustered together, signing intently to each other. “Faster, don’t dawdle!” she said. For she knew that when they crossed an open doorway the wind would be stilled for a brief instant; this was what her people called a shadow-windshape. And someone, touching the suddenly dark wind, might notice how oddly the group was moving, might suspect something.

  A larger hall now: a displacement plate stood in the middle of it, and the foodgatherers were there in a circle around it; their fingers were busy as they prayed to the Windbringer for food. The others could not help watching. Kelver especially stared as meat and grain materialized and the gatherers began to grope on the mirror metal for the food. “It’s true then,” he was saying. “We did have a purpose, we weren’t just throwing away the food we grew.”

  “All things,” Davaryush said, “are linked, Kelver. Sometimes even a game of shtezhnat can destroy a world.”

  Darktouch saw Kelver gazing still at them, not coming away. A young man with a basket of fruit had come quite close, one arm outstretched to feel along the wall. In a second he would touch Kelver’s face, but Kelver could not move; he stared, transfixed, at the gaping eye-sockets framed with scabs and matted blood. The boy-man must have come straight from his eye-gouging ceremony—

  “Hurry, hurry!” Darktouch could not budge Kelver for a moment; when he came, reluctantly, he was still looking back into the hall of the foodgatherers, and he was shaking.

  In a while they emerged into a low-ceilinged room. Davaryush saw that there were heat-emitters here, globes of red light placed here and there among die rocks; the think-hives had provided well for the prisoners of the Dark Country.

  In niches in the rockfloor, lined with a brushed leathery substance that Davaryush surmised to be the cured sail-sacs of the delphinoids, were die babies, some two dozen of them; most of them were asleep. There were no labels, no rock-etchings, to show any names or other distinctions. A nurse, an old crone whose skin folds flapped over her empty eye-sockets, groped around on the floor, feeding one or the other from a bowl of mush.

  “Are they brought here immediately, at birth?” Davaryush said.

  “Yes. Until they are adults they have no names; they are merely Girl-before-Naming, Boy-before-Naming. But the parents can always tell; they are bound to them by scent and touch.”

  “And the parents visit the children? Play with them, nurture them?”

  Darktouch’s face seemed clouded for a moment, and she seemed to be translating something to herself by scratching on her arms. ‘To be a parent is the most precious of things. A parent hardly dares speak to his offspring, because it is the most sacred of all bonds, the deepest of all loves.… My father and I rarely touched; I think perhaps we touched at all only because of my mother’s death.”

  “It is a desolate childhood, then.”

  “No!” she answered, too quickly. “The children are happy, they play, they hear old Stonewise telling them of the great hunts and of the creation of the universe. And they dream of becoming hunters themselves, and of bringing the Windbringer home, of getting a little piece of his hide for a loinshield or a bedrug; they play at ball and at stalking each other down the corridors. It’s a good life, simple, hopeful.”

  “But you were not happy…

  “My eyes. My ears. They called me Dark-toucher, and they cursed me, scarring my arms with the spitefulness of their taunts.”

  Davaryush knelt now and picked up one of the young ones. It struggled, opened its eyes… . “It sees me!” he whispered. “There, there….”

  Varuneh came up to him with another child. “Look at this one.”

  Its eyes were clouded now; when he waved the cloak of dazzlestuff over its head it did not notice. “It’s a disease, then, a hereditary disease,” Davaryush said.

  “Perhaps so.”

  “And you were a rare throwback,” he said to Darktouch, “you are immune. And there may be others… . That is why you must all lose your eyes at puberty….”

  “It’s terrible!” Kelver cried, raging; and then he held the girl close.

  Then Davaryush said, “We must take the child with us. That’s what Saryodha meant! We have to find a cure.” He waved his hand over the child’s face. The child—a boy-child, he saw now—giggled a little, then fretted. Davaryush did not know how to comfort it; its crying echoed in the cavern, but the nurse, who still crawled around in some other comer of the room, did not notice.

  “No, no, Daavye,” the Lady Varuneh said. She took the baby from him and held it in her thin arms, draping a fold of the lightcloak around it. “A living token of our visit. Perhaps, at the city, we’ll be able to determine why they go blind—”

  In his mind’s eye Davaryush saw the gift of Lady Ynyoldeh for an instant, the grisly tables made from undead children. He shuddered. “Let’s go on,” he said, “quickly, quickly.”

  “Stay back,” said Darktouch, pushing the others against the wall. They had left the nursery, Varuneh still clutching the little child, and were in a complex honeycomb of passages. A man was approaching them, half crouching to feel the floor and the lower walls. She knew that he had touched their shadow on the wind, because he was slowing down and moving his hand randomly in the emptiness in the hope of contacting the shadow’s source. The wind was stronger here, firming their outlines against the windshape, making it hard to hide. Darktouch put out her hand, making it seem to collide with the man’s by accident.

  Greeting, she signed. Where are you going so hurriedly?

  Don’t you know? Haven’t they told you? I don’t recognize you….

  Subtly she altered her signing, trying to form the crude ungrammatical scrawlings of a child. I Girl-before-Naming. No one but a parent would bother to differentiate one child from another.

  Join the others then! Stonewise has called us to a meeting!

  Yes, older one. But—

  “What’s happening?” said Kelver.

  She exchanged some more signings with the man, and then said, “There’s a big meeting, a sort of investiture of the new Stonewise. It’s only a boy, fresh from eye-gouging . .. but he has announced a new revelation in the walls of knowledge—something that has never happened before. It’s scary. There’ll be a big hunt, maybe, to placate the Windbringers.”

  “Placate them?” Davaryush said ironically.

  “We should follow him,” Darktouch said. She signed, 7 and my friends will follow you.

  What friends? You are late!

  Don’t concern yourself, Elder, It's just more of us children-before-Naming.

  Let me touch and identify.

  No need, no need; we must hurry, mustn’t we?

  Very well, very well, but come swiftly.

  He led them up a steep passageway; and the crying of the wind grew louder.

  Dank, Kelver thought, dank and cold.

  They were following the man now with his slouching, groping gait; sometimes he would turn around to sign something to Darktouch, and Kelver would see the eye-sockets.

  They did this to these people! he thought, looking at the Inquestors. They, the omniscient, the compassionate.

  The corridor widened into a room. There were a hundred people, perhaps more, men, women, children; dressed in loinshields of grayish leather, their bodies slicked with delphinoid oil. The people were squatting, backs to the wall of the circular chamber; their hands were all linked, they wore gray leather gloves filigreed with wires, and they were clasping and unclasping their hands in unison. In the thin light Kelver could only see a few of the people clearly; the others were wraiths of darkness. Darktouch took a glove from a heap of them at the entrance. “It’s an amplifier,” she said.

  Kelver put one on too; immediately he felt a tingling on the back of his hand, as though a colony of insects were crawling on it, making patterns. Sometimes he would half recognize a word in the touch-language that Darktouch had taught him; but they went by so fast, they were so fraught with squiggles of nuance and notches of emotion. …