Hammerfall by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page B

“If the machines would work for us,” he said, “I would be very content to sit in this hall.”
    â€œAnd would you do better than I, sitting here?”
    â€œI would not pour water into the desert,” he said. In this mad give-and-take, the memory of such waste still galled him. “I would build a stone cistern, and put it next to the walls, and let whoever wished settle around it and grow fruit.”
    It might be a foolish answer, as the holy city saw it. The Ila listened to him, listened very gravely. “You think we waste it.”
    â€œWhat else is it, when it pours out under the sun? You feed the vermin. They multiply out there.”
    Her lips quirked. It might have been a smile. “You would turn us into a village.”
    â€œIt’s not likely,” he said.
    â€œNot likely that you would ever have taken Oburan? No. Far from likely. It was far from likely when you and your father came up onto the Lakht. Surely you knew that.”
    He shrugged, having no wish to discuss his father’s plans or their misguided strategy, or the failed aim of his thirty years of life. The world might turn again, and, meanwhile, he was alive, and he had eyes, and he had seen the inside of this place. No, it was not likely that he or his father would have sat in this hall, rulers of all the world, but fortunes shifted. If she willed, his were changing; he was not dead yet. He managed not to meet her eyes, and asked himself why he cared for her respect, or what he suddenly had to fear in this debate.
    Did he believe in her proposal? He was not sure, that was the thing. And the voices still cried, screamed, roared, all their words confounded in the depths of his hearing.
    â€œYou have never renounced your ambition,” she said.
    He shrugged, and did look up, discovered, pinned for the moment to the truth. “No,” he said. “But it’s not likely.”
    â€œThe voices have always spoken to you?”
    â€œDoes it matter?”
    â€œYou are to investigate, Marak Trin. You are my eyes and my ears in this matter. I ask, and you’ve promised me answers. How long have the voices spoken to you?”
    â€œSince about my sixth year. Since then.”
    â€œAnd the visions?”
    â€œThey’ve always been there.”
    â€œDid a stranger come to Kais Tain when you were a baby?”
    â€œI have no way to know,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
    â€œIt’s a common part of the story. A mysterious stranger. A visitation. A baby that grows up mad.”
    He found that idea sinister beyond belief. No stranger had touched him that he knew, but his mother had never said, one way or the other.
    â€œIt wouldn’t be easy to come into our household.”
    â€œAmong the lords of Kais Tain? Perhaps not. But very easy, in most peasant houses. Perhaps it’s why mad lords are so rare, and mad farmers are so common. Farmers are generally more hospitable.”
    â€œI’ve no idea.” They sat so easily, so madly companionable. “Who are these strangers? What do they do, and why?”
    â€œI have some ideas. I know, for instance, that the madness that afflicts you is a specific madness, and that all that have it are under thirty years of age. How old are you?”
    â€œThirty.” He thought of the old man, and doubted what she said. But had it been the same madness? Was there more than one kind?
    â€œDo you hear the voices now?”
    â€œI hear a roaring.” What she asked was an intimate confession, one he had never made except to his father and his mother. “I sometimes hear my name.”
    â€œThat seems common,” she said, leaning forward, as if they gossiped together. “What else do you hear?”
    He shook his head. “Nothing.”
    â€œYet you know this thing is in the east.”
    â€œThe world tilts that way.”
    â€œDoes it?”
    â€œTo us it does. It does it morning and evening,