Afsan made a contemptuous motion with his hand. "You don’t understand. You’re just like the rest of them. No one seems to understand." He turned his head so that his blind eyes faced her. "I have never hunted. Not really. Not like a true hunter. Mokleb, the time I really needed to hunt in order to save myself, I failed miserably. As a child, I was lost in a forest. I couldn’t catch a single thing to eat. I was reduced to trying to eat plants. Plants!" He snorted. "Me, a hunter? I’m nothing of the kind."
"But your kills…?"
"Those weren’t examples of hunting prowess. I honestly believe I have little of that. Don’t you see? They were intances in which I solved problems. That’s all I’ve ever done. That’s the only thing I’m good at." He paused. "Consider the thunderbeast hunt — my first ritual hunt. The other members of the pack were taking bites out of the thing’s legs and sides." He shook his head, remembering. "That’s how you kill a small animal, not a living mountain. No, it was obvious to me that the thunderbeast’s vulnerable spot was the same as yours or mine — the underside of the throat. So I shimmied up the thing’s neck and bit it there. Anyone could have done that; I just happened to be the first to think of it."
"And Kal-ta-goot?"
"A great hunt? Please. Even Det-Bleen, the Dasheter’s blow-hard priest, had reservations about that one. He wouldn’t consecrate the meal at first. Mokleb, I used tools for that kill. I wasn’t interested in ritual hunting at all. I realized that the animal had to breathe, just as we do, so I wrapped the anchor chain around its neck, constricting its flow of air. Again, that had nothing to do with athletic skill or hunting prowess or stealthful tracking. It was the application of the tools at hand to a specific problem."
"Ah, but what about the fangjaw? That animal is rarely killed by any hunter, yet you felled one on your first attempt."
Afsan spread his arms. "That’s the most obvious example of all. Pahs-Drawo and I stalked the fangjaw on the backs of runningbeasts. It was the runners that gave us the edge, not any skill of our own. And when it came time to actually attack, Drawo and I leapt off the runningbeasts, aiming for the fangjaw’s back. Drawo missed, landing in the dirt. I succeeded. Don’t you see? That kill wasn’t a result of hunting skill. Rather it was because I was able to calculate the trajectory properly to leap from one moving body onto another. Mathematics, that’s all that was. Mathematics and problem-solving. The same as my other hunts."
"But other Quintaglios would have failed in your place. Isn’t it the results that matter?"
"Oh, possibly. But the real point is simply that I kept my head during those hunts, that I was thinking, always thinking, while the others were letting their instincts guide them. Rationality is the key. No matter what’s going on around you, you have to keep your logic at the fore."
"That’s something our people aren’t very good at, I guess," said Mokleb.
"No," said Afsan, his voice heavy. "No, they’re not."
"Still," said Mokleb after a moment, "prophecy is a metaphorical game. It does sound to me as though you’ve fulfilled most of the requirements of being The One."
"Nonsense," said Afsan, annoyed. "Words mean what they mean. ’The One will defeat demons of the land and of the water,’ Lubal said. Maybe, just maybe, the death of Det-Yenalb could be construed as having defeated a demon of the land. But demons of the water? No such things exist, and, even if they did, I’m hardly likely to ever come into contact with them, let alone be the one who defeats them."
Novato’s lifeboat continued its long ascent up the tower.
She’d been traveling for almost five days now. That meant she was some six thousand kilopaces above the surface. By coincidence, six thousand kilopaces was the radius of her world; she was as far away from the surface of Land now as she would have been if she’d burrowed all the way to the center of her moon.
The gravity continued to diminish. Things fell in leisurely slowness, as though settling gently through thick liquid. If Novato tucked her legs under her body, it was several beats before her knees gently touched the transparent floor. She guessed that the apparent gravity was only one-sixth of what it had been on the ground.
Novato thought about the reduction in gravity. There were three forces involved: two pulling her down and one trying to push her up. The moon’s gravity and the gravity from the Face behind it were both drawing her down. But the tower itself was rigid, swinging through a vast arc once per day. It was as if she were a weight at the end of a six-thousand-kilopace rope being swung in a circle. The centrifugal force would be flinging her upward. Although the gravity from the Face and the moon would have lessened somewhat because of her travel away from them, she would have weighed substantially more if it hadn’t been for the centrifugal force.
The lightness was wonderful, but Novato was anxious nonetheless.
Five days.
Five days locked in here.
She needed to get outside, to run, to hunt! She couldn’t stand the thought of another meal of dried meat and salted fish. Yet she was still less than halfway to the tower’s summit.
Clear walls pressed down on her, invisible yet claustrophobic.
Five days.
Novato sighed.
Still, in that time she’d seen a lot of wonderful sights. While looking down, she’d seen a streak through the night sky, over the vast body of water. She realized it must have been a large meteor, seen from above. And, with the aid of the far-seer, she was able to make out the crimson points of erupting volcanoes in Edz’toolar — something Toroca had said was long overdue. She even saw an eclipse from in the middle, as another moon, the Big One, passed directly overhead at noon, its circular black shadow moving rapidly across Land.
She looked down again.
Her blood ran cold.
The tower, this marvelous tower to the stars, now appeared to be bowing out as if it were about to fold over and break in half. She’d thought at first that it was an optical illusion: the curving horizon line made it difficult to tell by sight if the tower was truly straight, but as the bowing became more pronounced, there could be no mistake.
She’d known what her daughter Karshirl had said: the tower was unstable. There was no way for something so tall and so narrow to stand without buckling, and yet she’d been fool enough to think that whatever magic had held it against its own weight so far would continue to keep it erect for the duration of her voyage.
Her first thought was that she was going to die, plummeting back to the ground at a dizzying speed. Her second thought was that hundreds of people would die when giant pieces of the tower fell out of the sky.
She felt herself slowly being pushed up toward the ceiling. She saw now that the tower was bowing the other way farther down, as if it were a great blue snake, undulating its way to the stars. After a time, she began drifting toward the floor again.
And then Novato realized what was happening.
Erupting volcanoes in Edz’toolar, the province next to Fra’toolar, where the tower was anchored.
Landquake.
What she was seeing was the rippling of the landquake being transferred up the structure of the tower. The first wave had yet to reach her. She could see another huge wave rolling up behind it, the tower bowing first to the east then to the west like a string plucked by a giant’s hand. In addition, the tower was moving up and down in longitudinal compression waves.
But something else was happening. White gas was shooting out of the copper cones that projected from every fifth strut up the tower’s length. She’d seen little puffs shoot out from time to time during her ascent, but these were massive exhalations, geysers against the night.