Darktouch began translating quickly. Kelver saw the source of the words: it was a young boy, about his own age, who sat on a boulder in the center of the chamber; his fingers were flying as they signed his words on the projecting board. His hair was long and black like Darktouch’s, his skin frost-white. He was very thin, as though he had been fasting. Blood streamed from his eyes; Kelver winced at it. “I am Stonewise, returned to you from the dead. Listen, listen … the unchanging knowledge on the walls of the hall of knowing has changed. Here a shifted word, there whole sentences corroded away. Once Old Stonewise told me that all things, even the universe, were transient. That one day even the eternal truth would become a lie. But why now? Stonewise sang to me of a dance that would allay the ending..

  Kelver saw them all as he raised up the cloak and its dazzlestuff sent out slow ripples of white light, moving their hands in unison, a slow circular motion. Then clasping and unclasping. Then tapping the rocks, the walls, each other’s hands. ‘They are dancing,” Darktouch said. Their unseeing eyes stared hollowly ahead. They did not crane their necks to catch odd sounds, the way people normally do. They just sat, like servocorpses, wiggling their hands this way and that, in perfect unison. It was eerie.

  “He says that only the dancing can quell the madness into which the universe has fallen,” said Darktouch. ‘That the Windbringer is angry, and they must dance him back out of the whirling windworld—”

  And now, still hands linked, the people rose. They began pounding the ground with their feet, a dull sound quickly swallowed in the wind’s relentless wailing. They clapped their hands, let go of each other’s arms, and waved them wildly before reaching out to grasp them again. They drummed the walls with their fingers.

  Darktouch’s voice rose as she translated the boy’s words: “We must dance till the Windbringer comes; then we must go out and find him and bring him home, we must end his bitter loneliness as he breasts the wind of his creation—” The dancing went on now, and some of the children were missing their footing and were stumbling; one was trampled on, and a strangled whistle escaped her as a man trod on her face and sprawled onto the rock and rose again with his face all bloody….

  “It’s senseless!” Kelver shouted. “You must stop, you must stop!” He saw another child fall. He raced into the crowd to pull him out, but Davaryush was beside him, whispering harshly, “No, boy, no! Upset the balance and you wreak utter havoc, you must let the child fall—”

  “I can’t let it—” Tears sprang to his eyes. And the In-questor enfolded the boy in his own shimmercloak, which blushed brightly; and for a moment Kelver felt the shimmercloak’s warmth as it bonded to his body, and its power flowed into his nerves—

  The dance continued. Peering from Davaryush’s shimmercloak, he saw it all: it had risen to a maenad frenzy now. Flesh slapped against flesh; bodies thudded onto the rock. Arms swung wildly. And the glove-amp’s scratchings grew frantic, seemed to scald his hand.

  “Life we wrest from the bosom of darkness!” Darktouch screamed, translating. Light flashed on Young Stonewise’s face: Kelver saw it, unmoved as a death mask, while his fingers darted crazily before him. And then his hands began to move on the projection board in swift, angular, rhythmic motions, and Darktouch began to cry out in a singsong voice:

  “Belly, beast, mother, death,

  belly burst, jumper strike,

  striker striking

  back to life—”

  Why was she shaking so much? He couldn’t bear it any longer. He wrenched loose from the shimmercloak’s warmth. “Stop it!” he shouted above the windroar and the tramping of naked feet. “You don’t have to listen to them!” She turned to him, her cheeks tearstained, she buried her face in his arms, she threw the glove-amp aside.

  “My father,” she said, “my father—”

  “It’s all right, he’s gone, he’ll never return—”

  “But the writing on the walls—striker, striking—my father’s name—who is there who would return from the dead, would leave a message like this? Oh, Kevi, Kevi—”

  They’re driving her crazy, he thought. And he clasped her tightly while she sobbed out her heart. “He’ll never come back. It’s a dream, a terrible dream.” He wanted everything back the way it was. He wanted the dream of the stars, not the terrible truth of the Inquest’s cankered compassion.

  He felt hands shaking him by the shoulders. “We must go on,” Davaryush was saying. “We have no time now.” For the dancing had stopped abruptly, and the people, hands linked, were rapidly filing out of the ceremonial chamber.

  Darktouch didn’t move at first. Then she started to shriek: “They’re going on a great hunt! We’ve got to stop them before they kill another Windbringer—”

  “How? Just us, against all of them?” said Kelver.

  “Come, my father’s airskiff may still be moored at the edge of the big wind, only I know the way and I’ve inherited the right—”

  She turned and began to run from the room, finding her way easily in near darkness. “Wait, we can’t see!” Kelver shouted as she left the chamber and began to scramble down a steep tunnel of a passageway….

  Run! Run! Will we ever be able to stop running now? Darktouch was thinking as she led the group further into the village, through tunnels that twisted like a serpent’s innards, to the rooms that were once her father’s, that must now belong to her.

  Here they were now. Windstriker’s manly smell still clung to the rockwalls. In the shifting cloaklight she saw her father’s things: an old stungun he had taken apart, to see how it worked; cured Windbringer leather, smoothened into a baby-skin-soft mattress, her mother’s work. They had not touched his room at all, to honor him because he had fallen into Windbringer’s arms, had died the deathleap of the brave. Even the little loinshield she had made for him, a piece of sailsac she had begged from Stonewise and stitched together with her own hair, was lying in a depression in the rockfloor.

  “What is this place?” said Davaryush.

  “Nothing. My father’s place.” And she remembered how he had dared embrace her, even when she lay sweating in the preparation rooms, waiting for a vision to come. Then came the words of the new song they were singing, scratching themselves over and over on her mind’s arm: Striker, striking back to life—

  “He’s out there! I know it, I know it.” They had to go out over the Sunless Sound. They had to stop the slaughter somehow. She wanted to stay here and smell the fragrance of the past, and touch her childhood things, but this was no longer a time for tears. For the lightsongs of the Wind-bringers had been more vivid even than her memories of Windstriker. “Follow me, quick, down to the mooring place.”

  She felt along the wall until she found a secret pathway that only she and Windstriker had known of. Impatiently she pulled Kelver along behind her, not waiting for the others. Behind, the baby squalled again, but the wind, grown nearer, soon drowned out his voice.

  There was more light now: globes of cold light, placed there by the builders of the Dark Country, who had no intention of becoming blind themselves, stood at intervals dong a floor of metal, chilly to the feet. The wind roared, sometimes overpowering, sometimes masked by extra thickness of stone, sometimes wuthering like the tuneless cacophony of a flutechoir tuning up. Davaryush ran after the girl, not thinking of the sweat that drenched the life from his shimmercloak or the ache that gnawed at his thighs and calves.

  Without warning, an abrupt twist of the passageway and—

  Wind, whipping the shimmercloak in his face! Wind, wresting Varuneh’s lightcloak from her hands and sending it whirling like a fluorescent flitterling in the night! Wind, pushing young Kelver hard against the ledgewalls! And ahead, a darkness so huge that Davaryush could not gauge its height or depth. It could have been infinite. Just over the ledge, sheltered by an overhang of rock, a little airskiff bobbed in the wind. It was much lighter than a floater, and its railings could not possibly keep a man from tumbling out.

  Just then, an acrid stench blasted his nostrils. He recoiled from it; the girl seemed unmoved.

  “The hunt!” she was yelling. “They’re starting out!”

  From somewhere else, somewhere far above, there came a faint tang of lemon … nearby, a sweet-smelling attar blended into a heady zul … from far below, a stench of vinegar … and the wind, blurring the scents together into a kaleidolon of fragrances—

  ‘They’re separating now,” Darktouch screamed—Davaryush saw now how much better the touch-speech could be here, when the wind shattered your half-formed words and blew them away—“they splash scent on the boats for identifiers—they’re going outward, that way—”

  She pointed overhead.

  He saw airskiffs, a dozen or more, glinting globules that swooped across his vision and were swallowed up in the great darkness. More of them below now, circling, swarming, buzzing.

  Kelver was shouting, “What can we do against all of them?”

  But Darktouch had already leapt into the skiff, even as it lurched in a windgust, straining against the chains. Kelver impetuously jumped, blindly following; he lost his balance, hung precariously over the side until she pulled him in. Cautiously Varuneh followed, still clutching the baby. And then Davaryush.

  The skiff rocked. Darktouch was at the controls. The instrument panels made no sense to Davaryush; they could be read only by touch.

  More skiffs plowed past; one almost grazed them.

  Davaryush hoped the childsoldiers had reached the roof of the Skywall, that they were monitoring him… . Then came another symphony of melded fragrances, one of them so intoxicating that he had visions for a moment, saw the Lady Ynyoldeh laughing at him, saw the burst flesh snaking its way down her face—

  Ahead, for a moment, there flashed a monstrous grid of light, a power net, each nexus of it an airboat. … He gasped. The net must be ten klomets wide if those things were really airskiffs! There were hundreds of them, flying in perfect formation, while above them he could see, in die power net’s white-hot light, convoys of skiffs that circled and soared like vultures—

  The light-grid dimmed, faded. Perhaps they had been testing it … only the scents remained. With a clang, chains clattered and came loose. The skiff shook, hummed, spurted forward into the wind. Darktouch was standing up, her hair streaming behind. Far away the light-grid flashed again, graphpapering the blackness for an instant.

  “We were fools!” Varuneh shouted. He could barely hear her. “How could we possibly have dreamt of fighting all this, of standing singlehanded against the inertia of twenty thousand years?”

  She spoke more, but he no longer heard her. For he was caught up in the movement of the airskiff on the air currents, in the dissonance of warring fragrances, in the slow music of the wind.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE LAUGHING UNIVERSE

  In a while the wind seemed quieter, but not for long; soon they were caught in another storm. The airskiff plunged steadily through the pitch-dark; Kelver watched Darktouch, her left palm clasped against the sensor boards, her right hand constantly working the controls.

  “If they find out we are following them,” he shouted, “what will they do?”

  “I did not douse the skiff with our identifying scent… they won’t be able to tell we’re behind them … their instruments may pick us up, but it will show only an airskiff, not whose airskiff it is!” Darktouch was screaming over the windblast. How can she keep her balance? he thought, huddled into a corner of the skiff. Davaryush and Varuneh, clutching the child, crouched together in the opposite comer, with their shimmercloaks drawn tightly about them. They had only three of the dazzlecloaks between them now, but they were useless in any case; the darkness was far too vast.

  And then the boat veered sharply upward, climbing against a pocket of swirling air. Hawklike it glided on the windtides, skimming, soaring, swooping, all in the utter blackness. “My stomach—” Kelver was gasping now, groping for the side of the airskiff. As he poked his head out to vomit the wind surged, blowing it back in his face. He shook with shame and terror. But Davaryush had seen him, had gotten up, steadied himself, was inching towards him.

  “No, Inquestor, no, I’m so embarrassed—” The heroic conqueror turned puking baby!

  The Inquestor gently pried the boy’s hands away from his stained face. He wrapped the boy’s face in his own shimmercloak, which took on a new glow, brilliant pink, turning the skiff into a phosphorfly for a moment; and his face was cleansed. “Inquestor—your own shimmer-cloak—” It was as if he had been touched by a god.

  “Kevi, they thrive on our organic wastes … they are semisentients, our shimmercloaks, bonded to humans from the moment the shimmeregg is cracked … think nothing of it.” In the pale-pink light, Kelver saw the Inquestor smile at him. In that moment he worshiped the old man with a fierceness that was like pain. For the Inquestor had given up more than any other ordinary man … he had given up godhead itself … for the sake of men, for the sake of a crazy hope.

  Below them the light-grids flashed again, and the odors wafted in from all sides. I will overcome my fear! he thought. He sprang up, tottered for a moment, then steadied himself. The wind battered the tattered firefur of his garment. At first he fought it, shoving himself against it. He could barely see Darktouch, her black hair blending with the darkness. He struggled with the wind, trying to reach her—

  The wind screamed! I can’t fight it, I can’t! he thought wildly.

  And then he realized that he must not fight the wind. He must give in to it, become its creature … he did not try to wrench free of it now. It swept over him; he waited for the tide to turn his way and then sprang into it, aiming for where Darktouch was. As the current carried him exhilaration flushed him.

  “Darktouch! Darktouch! I’m here now, I’ve learnt to move with the wind!”

  She didn’t answer him. He moved closer to her, put his arms around her from behind, but she was intent on her steering. Abruptly she seized his hand and pushed it against the sensor panel.

  “Let me know where they’re coming from,” she said.

  “But I can’t—”

  He felt them then, little pinpricks that were ships. Somewhere in the darkness overhead was a wedge of airskiffs with harpoons of shatterstuff poised for attack. Below, the nets flashed regularly now, and in the seconds of light he could see the inside of Skywall, lobes of igneous rock rounded by relentless winds … and monstrous menhirs of black rock poking up from a cloud of swirling vapors below. … Pain stabbed at his hand. “A crag!” he yelled, and Darktouch made the airskiff jump. Here in the blind land it was easy to slip into their way of perceiving, to feel everything in his hands—

  Then his hand touched, on the sensors, in the far distance, faint blips … something shadowy. Vast “Darktouch …”

  “I know. I smell him on the wind.”

  “Windbringer?”

  “He is here.” And then Kelver sensed it too … a different fragrance filtering through the background odors of the hunters’ skiffs. A heady odor … like wine, like old leather … like a lover, like a burning village … a smell he could not place, but which seemed so familiar. • •.

  “Powers of powers,” he whispered, as the boat careened once more, almost grazing a monolith that reared up from the light-streaked mist.

  In the distance there were clouds of momentary brightness, like far lightning. Kelver could see a herd of dolphinoids, their sailsacs billowing like vast leather capes behind quivering moist masses of brain tissue … they drifted blindly on the wind, their sailsacs rippled with a strange leviathan grace … and then he saw the lightnet tighten beneath them, and the airskiffs swarming above like locusts. . . .

  Darktouch was weeping now. “I can’t let them kill the Windbringers!” she said. “I can’t, I can’t—”

  Davaryush was saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do, nothing—” But she seemed not to hear him. She slammed her fingers down on the controls, and the skiff edged steeply upward, shoving the Inquestors violently against the skiff-walls.

  “You’re not—” Kelver exclaimed.

  “I can’t bear it!” Darktouch made the skiff shoot upward now, and Kelver could see that she meant to ram right into the herd of airskiffs above—

  “Leave them be!” Davaryush shouted over the windroar. “We cannot stop them yet!” The wind muffled his words. The harpooners were diving now; Kelver could see lances of shatterstuff being readied—

  “No!” he screamed, as the skiff dodged a sliver of brilliant deathlight and dashed hard into another skiff. In a blinding instant he saw the man fall, his hair was burning, a fleshy sizzlesmell burst through the fragrance of vinegar and roses, for a second he stared into the hollow eyes and saw a spurt of boiling blood—

  He grabbed Darktouch, tried to wrest the controls from her. The skiff lurched, tumbled, turned, twisted into the side of another airskiff—

  “The childsoldiers!” Kelver said to Davaryush. “You’ve got to call them! She’s going crazy—”

  And Davaryush closed his eyes, subvocalizing some command to the childsoldiers who waited, nestled in the roof of the Dark Country… . Kelver jerked his head upward, scanning the impenetrable blackness. Was there a dot of topaz there, in the vague height? It grew steadily. He seized Darktouch’s hand and held it tight. The skiff darted on the wind. They slammed into more skiffs, and Kelver saw the hunters groping, clasping their sensors.

  The yellow light overhead divided, subdivided; soon they were like meteors, squirting lightstreaks behind them as they plummeted towards the airskiffs—

  Laserlight swaths now, slicing the darkness! Airskiffs splitting in two, shards raining down. Childsoldiers, their cloaks kindled, whirling, their citrine eyes blazing—

  “Why are you killing these people?” Davaryush was screaming. Now the childsoldiers were jumping from the floaters, buoyed up in the storm by their varigrav boots … now the harpoon guns of the hunters were firing in all directions, a skewered child crashed down behind Kelver, rocking the skiff … Kelver knelt to help the child, the child died in his arms with his eyes still spurting splinters of laserlight as he twitched into stillness … airskiffs were plunging downward, flaming as they hit the forcenets below.