Hammerfall by C. J. Cherryh Page A

Sleep.”
    The woman eased back to her rest.
    In the evening when they waked, Hati took the au’it and went about from one man to the other, asking the same question.
    The au’it wrote in her book until dark made it too hard, and when the sun rose again, Hati moved her beast about among the company, taking the au’it with her. The au’it, bracing her book on the saddlebow, holding her ink-cake in one hand, wrote and wrote, at every encounter, as happy as Marak had ever seen that thin, sober face. Despite the sun, despite the heat, despite the wind that riffled the pages, the au’it listened and wrote, and satisfied her reason for going with them.
    The demons brought the tower vision to the surface so easily now. There was the tower, there was the star, there was the cave of suns, always in the east. He felt that pitch toward it, morning and evening, always the same sense that the world had tipped precariously.
    But the voices that called his name evidently called others. Clearly they called Hati’s.
    There had been a time he had believed in the god, believing the god spoke to him, in those years when the young so readily formed belief; and in one small part of his heart he found he resented discovering the voices were not his alone. He knew now that he was not the center and focus of their desire, and he began to know that his severance from his father was no greater a calamity than the potter’s, say, or Hati’s. A common potter had lost his family and trade to the same visions, the same urging.
    So the potter was found out in his difference, and either he turned himself in to the Ila’s men or his community had done it. Was that not worth as much regret, as much bitterness? Was it not as great a betrayal, one’s lifelong neighbors and customers, against an honest craftsman?
    He waited to hear what Hati would find out, and yet he guessed the answer. Had not the mad all moved together, all twitched at once, when they were gathered together?
    One wished one’s life-changing affliction to be unique. And after Hati reported to him, all of them knew it was not.
    Of common visions there was the high place, so Hati reported and so the au’it wrote. There was the light, the sun, the star, multiple moons aloft and in a row. These were all the second vision. There was the cave, the hall, the hollow place, that was the third, though for Marak the cave had always held the lights. He did not have that vision independently, but combined with another common theme.
    Of forty-some madmen, regarding most of the visions, they all agreed.
    They agreed that the pitch when it came was always to the east, though some had thought it was toward the rising sun.
    And the voices indeed called them each by name, from childhood.
    From childhood they had had the lines of fire building structures in their vision, as if lines were engraved on their eyes like patterns on a pot: the same lines repeated and repeated, sometimes enlivened with fire, sometimes not. And the vision when it came was in red.
    From childhood they had heard a noise in their ears, and that noise sooner or later had become a voice calling their names.
    So it was not their madness that made them unique. In fact, their affliction was a leveler, and it made them much the same.
    Sometimes, they confessed, their hands and bodies moved involuntarily, in small twitches. In some it had affected their trade or their craft. One, the farmwife, Maol, had learned to draw strange symbols, the same that he saw behind his eyelids.
    Marak had had the twitching affliction, to some minor degree, when he was resting; he had labored from boyhood to conceal it, tucking his arms tightly as he slept, blaming it on nightmares.
    Sometimes his head ached; that was so for the lot of them. His had ached fiercely in his early years, blinding headaches, but so did his mother’s.
    Was she mad? He had never thought so.
    There was a gift, too, to being mad. All the