him lie dead with the people—his people. They had never learned to trust him. They had never had the chance.
Eventually, he tired of looking at the dead, and he went into one of the untouched houses to change his clothes. The Ahrima had smashed up what they could, but their assault had been cursory—there was no real reward, material or emotional, in destroying inert objects—and he had no difficulty in finding what he needed, and then in preparing himself a meal. What the Ahrima had left was sufficient—in fact, the stripping of the village was more the work of the women than the invaders. The women had taken all that they could carry. Too much. Too much in the way of baubles and cloth. Along with the working tools and the books, the irresistible trivia would make too heavy a burden. The fleeing women might find themselves betrayed by their fondnesses. The road to Lehr would be strewn with things which, after all, had to be thrown away. Would the greed and the delight in possession deliver them into the hands of the Ahrima? Would sound common sense or sheer blind panic have delivered them? There was no way of knowing.
Even when he was rested and fed, clothed and armed, he still hesitated. He went back to wandering amid the dead, finding it impossible to believe that there was no life at all in Stalhelm. But by now there was. The starlings and the crabs were invading in force. Camlak began to kill, shattering the crabs with a stone axe. Against the starlings, he could do nothing. Eventually, he threw away the axe, because there were too many crabs. No matter how many he killed, it would make no difference. They would keep coming until the village could hold no more. No matter how many crabs were killed the Underworld was always as full of them as it could be. It made no sense. Killing them only made him feel worse.
In the end, he had to leave Stalhelm to the scavengers. It was theirs now, and if he stayed he would be one of them. The only question in his mind was the matter of which way to go. Where and why? There was a road to Lehr, a road which might run with blood, and which might take him to his death. For no real reason. On the other hand, there was the Swithering Waste. No road was there, but perhaps some kind of destination. Nita had gone that way, with the man who had no face. Beyond the Waste was the metal wall, and beyond that...if there was a beyond. But that way was clouded with doubt no less than the road to Lehr. Whatever choice he made, there would only be more choices, until he was interrupted by death. There was no known way, now that Stalhelm was gone.
Camlak felt the loneliness eating him from within.
He went to find the map which had hung on the wall in the long house. It had been torn down and slashed into three pieces by a sword. He put the pieces together on the long table and adjusted the edges.
Nita would have taken the man without a face and the girl Huldi over the hills called Anarek and Stiver, across the rocks at Scarmoon, and then into the Swithering Waste toward the Great Wall. Camlak tried to form an estimate of how far they would have gone, but the calculation defeated him. He had no way of measuring the time inside his head. If he could catch up with them while they were crossing Scarmoon, it would be easy enough to find them, but in the Waste it would need a miracle. The Waste was hundreds of miles across, and to the west it stretched to the dead cities and the very borders of the darklands—a vast expanse of poisoned shallows and jagged rock, completely overgrown and teeming with vermin—and worse. A death trap. No place to be wandering in search of other travelers. Once Nita was beyond Scarmoon, he would have virtually no chance of meeting her until the Wall. If that were so, then time now was not really of the essence.
In the emotional battle between the father of the child and the Old Man of Stalhelm, the father really had little chance. That was the way love worked in the Underworld, at least in Shairn. Camlak needed to know what had happened to the people. He could not turn his back on the leadership which he had fought so hard to win. He had to know what happened on the road to Lehr, and he had to know by seeing. There was no other way.
From the vantage on top of the skull-gate he could see as far as the canal ridge out toward Walgo but only as far as the hilltops in the southwest. The forested slopes cut off his view of Dossal Bog. The Ahrima and the rogue Truemen were well out of sight by now.
As he went through the skull-gate and turned toward Lehr he reflected that Stalhelm had stood a long time in the farthest reaches of Shairn. By the tally of the gate the people had done well. But he knew that the dead get no credit in the tally of survival, and the contribution of the knitted skulls to the future of the Children of the Voice was purely negative. It was a symbol, not a magical guarantee. Yami’s head-taking ways had not, in the end. preserved Stalhelm forever, even if Yami had not lived to see its fall. Yami, as a good leader, had even known precisely when to die. If anyone remembered Stalhelm at all, they would remember Yami, and the brief hour in which Camlak had reigned would be forgotten as the blackest time in the town’s history. So much for three times lucky.
Camlak left his home for the first and last time, and went into the Underworld.
CHAPTER 3
The history of the Overworld began, according to the Euchronian Movement, at the close of the second dark age (which they also called the age of psychosis). Naturally enough, there was no one to disagree with them. In point of fact, however, an unbiased observer—Sisyr, perhaps—might have traced the Overworld mentality much further back than that. At least a thousand years, and probably two. A devout Euchronian might shrug his shoulders, and point out that an odd millennium or two was little enough compared with the eleven thousand years of the Euchronian Plan (let alone the half a million years the Euchronians were prepared to spend if that were necessary), but a historian would have recognized the flaw in such a comparison of duration. The velocity of history is not uniform. “Progress” (a mythical concept dating back to prehistoric time) is not constant.
However, it was certainly during the second dark age that the Movement was formed and the Plan was born. According to Euchronia, the Movement and the Plan saved the world. No one would disagree with that, either. By Euchronian standards, Euchronia had saved the world. It had discarded the old world and built a new one, on a platform which was mounted over every convenient acre of the old world’s land surface.
In the beginning, the Plan had been ludicrous. The Euchronians had accepted that in those days (they denied it now), but they had pointed out with some justice that if ludicrous ambitions were all that were left, they were the only recourse of hope.
Work on the Plan had been underway for several centuries when Sisyr’s starship arrived in the solar system. The Euchronians never actually found out why Sisyr came to Earth, although they did discover that his arrival at precisely the time when they needed him most was purely fortuitous. Whatever the reason, Sisyr was ready and willing to set it aside in order to provide Euchronia with the technical expertise and the scientific knowledge which they lacked. The margin between failure and success was undoubtedly filled by Sisyr. Without his intervention time would most definitely have run out for the dying Earth. As it was, the assistance of the alien and his home world, though slow to be provided (starships took centuries to cross the interstellar gulf between the two worlds) turned the tide.
Euchronia was suitably grateful to Sisyr, but it also found it very convenient to forget him. The Movement had its pride, and it needed the credit more than he did. Sisyr went into quiet retirement somewhere on Earth, atop one of the mountains which projected its peak into the Overworld. He asked nothing other than a home and a quiet life. The Euchronians presumed that he would die one day and could then be obliterated entirely from the history of the Earth. They were wrong. While thousands of years rolled by, Sisyr showed not the slightest sign of dying. Earthly memories, however, were short, and Sisyr’s active contribution to the Plan ended long before the platform was complete and the world rebuilt upon it. The only real reminder of his existence was the fact that two or three times a century a star-ship would land, but the aliens were discreet, and they bothered no one except Sisyr.
The platform was completed in six thousand years. The world in which the Euchronians were destined
