Hammerfall by C. J. Cherryh Page B

mad, when they suffered small wounds, healed without a scar, and they all suffered brief, sometimes quite high, fever when they did so.
    Ontori, a stonemason, said he had broken both legs falling as a boy. He walked demonstrably without a limp.
    Hati showed him her hand at their next setting-forth. “I cut this badly when I was a child. Across the palm. I was trimming gola root and the knife slipped. There is no scar.”
    He had taken sword cuts, too, one egregious one, which his father had dealt him in practice. He has good skin, his mother had said defensively, when all trace of it vanished in a month. He always heals, his mother had said, and said it fiercely: she knew it was not right.
    He had healed of everything but the clan mark, which was dye. High fever had followed the tattooing, however, and a great deal of swelling had ensued. It had healed and come out faded within the month, as if it were decades old. Some men had always thought him older than he was because of it. His mother had said maybe the fever had broken up the color. His father thought the dye had been weak, and blamed the artist.
    â€œSome say we can’t die,” Hati said. “But I know we can. Three in my group died on the march. I’m sure those who left us the first night both died.”
    â€œWe die,” Marak said, with no doubt at all. “Some died on our march. Of accident. Of age, maybe. There was a boy, too. He wasn’t the same as us, I never thought so. But he was a good boy.” He wished he could have asked the boy if his vision, too, was different. He thought of the old man who had died. His vision had seemed different. He had not twitched when the rest of them did.
    The Ila had begun the questions. All under thirty, she said. He himself was as old as the oldest of the most of the madmen. Only the old man who had died, whose madness had seemed different, too—the old man and the boy had not moved when the mad moved, had never seemed to feel the pitch eastward.
    The affliction itself wove a web that had tied the true madmen all together: he had never known how much so, until he asked himself what the Ila had asked.
    But more, the mad themselves were amazed to hear such accurate questions from one like them, and began to ask and answer questions they had hidden all their lives. Yes, yes, and yes, the answers were. It is like that. I see that, too.
    It brought a strange elation. Even delighted laughter.
    But it brought anxiousness, too. There was one question none of them could answer, and that was why the east, and why the madness should exist at all.
    â€œThe gods are leading us,” the stonemason said, without a doubt in the world.
    Marak wished he had that simple faith. He disliked thinking about the tower. He had no notion why.
    Voices whispered quietly, the while he thought about it, Marak, Marak, Marak.
    These seemed to warned him of danger, as sometimes the voices did.
    But he could not tell where it was.
    In Hati? He thought not.
    East, the voices whispered to him, and the skin tightened on his arms.
    East, east, east. Go faster.

7
    No man may foul a well. The defiler of a well shall be cast out with no provision and no tent, and no tribe and no village may shelter him.
    â€”The Book of Priests
    THE NIGHT OF that day came hazy and hot as a furnace, the stars shimmering in the heavens. The beshti, water-short, were ill-tempered. One slave had an arm bitten for no worse offense than walking past a pack beast in the dark. The caravan master took great pains to attend the wound, and to cover the bite with salves to keep away insects, and worse. It was not only the act of a reasonable master. Wind carried the smell of blood into the desert, and blood drew vermin.
    West, west, west, the voices said, contrary, but with a smell of danger, not allure.
    â€œThe wind is coming,” Hati said, with a twitch of her shoulders, and at last Marak put a name to what had been prickling at his senses all