“Thrance,” I muttered. “Thrance, you bastard!”
He was smiling.
To the end, nothing mattered to him. Or maybe one thing did: perhaps he had come up here with us because he had wanted his death to find him in this most sacred of places. Well, I would give it to him. I jumped up alongside him and he was ready for me, balanced and braced like the wrestler he was, and he grinned right into my face. Then we seized each other in a grip from which only one could emerge alive.
He was strong. He always had been, an athlete of athletes; and I felt the power of him still, the old Thrance within this twisted hideous thing, the Thrance who had excelled in every game, who had hurled the javelin farther than anyone in memory, who had vaulted the tall hurdles as though he had wings. And for a moment I was the wide-eyed boy of long ago who in such awe had watched the great hero at his games. That moment of remembering weakened me; and Thrance was able to twist me and turn me so that I was leaning outward and my face was turned into the abyss and I saw the white fog below me glistening in the moonlight. It seemed to me that I could almost make out the great clefts and spires of the distant slopes beneath the fog. Smiling still, he forced me backward—backward—
But I had not forgotten the sight of Thrance striking down the slender delicate Thissa atop that rock; and the thought of that vile crime brought back my strength. I planted myself firmly, wedging my good foot tightly into a crevice in the rock and pressing the crooked one against an upraised slab behind me, so that Thrance was unable to push me further toward the edge. We were stalemated for a time, gripping each other, neither capable of budging the other.
Then I began to turn him.
I swung him around and with both my arms around his hips lifted him so that his normal leg was off the ground and only the deformed, grotesquely extended one was still in contact with it. As I held him above me he looked down at me, grinning even now, defying me to do my worst. Shifting my grip so that my arms were around his chest, I pulled him up higher.
He still had his longer leg dug into a crack in the rock to anchor him. I kicked at it with my good foot, putting all the force I had into it, and knocked it free. Then, pivoting off my crooked leg, I threw him from the mountain. A single sound came from him as I lifted him and flung him, but whether he was laughing or crying out in rage or fear, I could not say. He seemed to hover in midair an instant or two, his eyes staring right into mine, and it seemed to me that he looked more amused than afraid, and then I saw him begin to fall. Down he dropped like a falling star, plummeting through the fog. A kind of brightness sprang up about him, so that I could see him descending the first journey of the way, striking the rock face here and there, two or three times or more, and rebounding from it. Then the layers of fog closed around him and I lost sight of him for good as he fell through the misty depths far below. I imagined him falling all day, from dawn to noon to eve, dropping down the entire height of the Wall, bursting into flames as he dropped, until at last the final cinder of him came to rest at its base, at Roshten milepost, at the boundary of our village itself. And I crouched there by the edge of the Wall’s highest point, looking out over it as though I could see Thrance falling, falling, falling all the way.
At length I rose and looked around, breathless, half dazed, astounded by what I had done.
Three or four of the stumbling animal things that I still somehow thought of as “gods” were visible nearby in the rising light of dawn. They were coming slowly toward me, though it was impossible for me to make out their purpose, whether it was to do harm to me or simply to see what sort of creature I was.
And as I stood there looking at them, at those whom I had hoped were my gods, I knew that I had profaned the holiest of all places, that I had committed an act of murder at the Summit itself. No matter that Thrance had merited death for his crime against Thissa: it had not been my right to impose it on him.
A haze of shock and bewilderment swept across my mind as that thought came to me, and for a moment or two I lost all awareness of who I was or why I was here. I knew only that I was guilty of the most monstrous of crimes and must be fittingly punished; and the gods were coming toward me to accept my atonement and mete out my retribution.
I waited gladly for them. I readied myself to kneel before them. Despite everything I knew of them, I would kneel.
But then they were only a few paces from me, and I stared at their coarse faces and drooling lips and looked straight into their dull empty eyes and I knew beyond all question that what the she-Irtiman had told us was true, that these were no gods, but only the fallen children of gods, the dreadful hollow nightmare semblances of gods. I owed these creatures no obeisance and certainly not my death; and this place where they dwelled was far from holy, whatever I may have believed at the beginning of my Pilgrimage. It had been holy once, perhaps, but certainly holy no longer. So I had nothing for which to atone.
I saw what I had to do now. But I hesitated a moment. In that moment Hendy came up from somewhere and moved toward me.
I turned to her, and she saw in my face the thing that I was going to do. And she nodded.
“Yes, Poilar! Go on! Yes! Do it!”
Yes, she had said. Do it. It was all I needed.
I felt a moment’s surge of pity for them, these sad shambling things that were the relics of the great ones who had taught us the ways of civilization. But the pity melted in an instant into loathing and contempt. They were abominations. They were monstrosities. They disgraced this place by their very presence here. I rushed forward then, and plunged furiously into their midst. And seized one and held him aloft as though he had no weight at all while he babbled and dribbled and snuffled, until after a moment I flung him away from me, out into the void. Then I took each of the others, one by one while they milled about me in consternation, and likewise I hurled them over the edge of the cliff, down into the abyss, down the side of the Wall to follow Thrance into death. And stood in silence by the edge, breathing hard, looking at nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing. Nothing. After a time Hendy touched me, very gently. I was grateful to her for that.
And that was how my Pilgrimage ended, with the slaughter at my own hands of the gods that I had come here to worship.
By now the two suns had risen, both of them at once from opposite sides of the sky, and by the mingling pink light I saw my comrades running toward Hendy and me, Kilarion and Galli in the lead, and then Talbol and Kath, and behind them all the others, Grycindil and Narril and Naxa and the rest. They had seen me slay the “gods”; and as they gathered around me I told them what had occurred between me and Thrance.
Then we saw the rest of the “gods” emerging from their caves and coming toward us across the plain. They were fewer than we had imagined, no more than fifteen or twenty of them, and some females and children. Why they came to us at that moment I could not say: whether it was to slay us or to worship us, it was impossible to tell. Their dim eyes and slack faces told us nothing. We fell upon them as they neared us and carried them to the edge and pushed them over, every last one of them, just as once long ago we had killed the winged gods of the Melted Ones when we were on the lower plateau. Now we were killing our own. The Summit needed purification. It had once been a holy place and then it had been befouled; and until our coming, no one had had the courage or the wit or the strength to do what needed to be done. But we did. They screamed and whimpered and fluttered about in fright, helpless before our wrath.