Yet life as Miklan Forb had been good for nine months of peace. With his small savings he bought a ticket downslope to Amblemorn, where he became Degrail Gilalin, and earned ten crowns a week as a bird-limer on the estate of a local prince. He had five months of freedom from torment, until the night when sleep brought him the crackle of silence and the fury of limitless light and the vision of an arch of disembodied eyes strung like a bridge across the universe, all those eyes watching only him. He journeyed along the River Glayge to Makroprosopos, where he lived a month unscathed as Ogvorn Brill before the coming of a dream of crystals of fiery metal multiplying like hair in his throat. Overland through the arid inlands he went as part of a caravan to the market city of Sisivondal, which was a journey of eleven weeks. The King of Dreams found him in the seventh of those and sent him out screaming at night to roll about in a thicket of whipstaff plants, and that was no dream, for he was bleeding and swollen when he finally broke free from the plants, and had to be carried to the next village for medicines. Those with whom he traveled knew that he was one who had sendings of the King, and they left him behind; but eventually he found his way to Sisivondal, a drab and monochromatic place so different from the splendid cities of Castle Mount that he wept each morning at the sight of it. But all the same he stayed there six months without incident. Then the dreams came back and drove him westward, a month here and six weeks there, through nine cities and as many identities, until at last to Alaisor on the coast, where he had a year of tranquillity under the name of Badril Maganorn, gutting fish in a dockside market. Despite his forebodings he allowed himself to begin believing that the King was at last done with him, and he speculated on the possibility of returning to his old life in Stee, from which he had now been absent almost four years. Was four years of punishment not enough for an unpremeditated, almost accidental, crime?
Evidently not. Early in his second year at Alaisor he felt the familiar ominous buzz of a sending throbbing behind the wall of his skull, and there came upon him a dream that made all the previous ones seem like children's holiday theatricals. It began in the bleak wastelands of Suvrael, where he stood on a jagged peak looking across a dry and blasted valley at a forest of sigupa trees, that gave off an emanation fatal to all life that came within ten miles, even unwary birds and insects that flew above the thick drooping branches. His wife and children could be seen in the valley, marching steadily toward the deadly trees; he ran toward them, in sand that clung like molasses, and the trees stirred and beckoned, and his loved ones were swallowed up in their dark radiance and fell and vanished entirely. But he continued onward until he was within the grim perimeter. He prayed for death, but he alone was immune to the trees. He came among them, each isolated and remote from the others, and nothing growing about them, no shrubs nor vines nor ground-covers, merely a long array of ugly leafless trees standing like palisades in the midst of nowhere. That was all there was to the dream, but it carried a burden of frightfulness far beyond all the grotesqueries of image that he had endured before, and it went on and on, Haligome wandering forlorn and solitary among those barren trees as though in an airless void, and when he awakened his face was withered and his eyes were quivering as if he had aged a dozen years between night and dawn.
He was defeated utterly. Running was useless; hiding was futile, He belonged to the King of Dreams forever.
No longer did he have the strength to keep creating new lives and identities for himself in these temporary refuges. When daybreak cleared the terror of the forest dream from his spirit he staggered to the temple of the Lady on Alaisor Heights, and asked to be allowed to make the pilgrimage to the Isle of Sleep. He gave his name as Sigmar Haligome. What had he left to conceal?
He was accepted, as everyone is, and in time he boarded a pilgrim-ship bound for Numinor on the northeastern flank of the Isle. Occasional sendings harassed him during the sea-crossing, some of them merely irritating, a few of terrible impact, but when he woke and trembled and wept there were other pilgrims to comfort him, and somehow now that he had surrendered his life to the Lady the dreams, even the worst of them, mattered little. The chief pain of the sendings, he knew, is the disruption they bring to one's daily life: the haunting, the strangeness. But now he had no life of his own to be disrupted, so what did it matter that he opened his eyes to a morning of trembling? He was no longer a jobber of precision instruments or a digger of wireweed sprouts or a limer of birds; he was nothing, he was no one, he had no self to defend against the incursions of his foe. In the midst of a flurry of sendings a strange kind of peace came over him.
In Numinor he was received into the Terrace of Assessment, the outer rim of the Isle, where for all he knew he would spend the rest of his life. The Lady called her pilgrims inward step by step, according to the pace of their invisible inner progress, and one whose soul was stained by murder might remain forever in some menial role on the edge of the holy domain. That was all right. He wanted only to escape the sendings of the King, and he hoped that sooner or later he would come under the protection of the Lady and be forgotten by Suvrael.
In soft pilgrim-robes he toiled as a gardener in the outermost terrace for six years. His hair was white, his hack was stooped; he learned to tell weed-seedlings from blossom-seedlings; he suffered from sendings every month or two at first, and then less frequently, and though they never left him entirely he found them increasingly unimportant, like the twinges of some ancient wound. Occasionally he thought of his family, who doubtless thought him dead. He thought also of Gleim, eternally frozen in astonishment, hanging in midair before he fell to his death. Had there ever been such a person, and had Haligome truly killed him? It seemed unreal now; it was so terribly long ago. Haligome felt no guilt for a crime whose very existence he was coming to doubt. But he remembered a business quarrel, and an arrogant refusal by the other merchants to see his frightening dilemma, and a moment of blind rage in which he had struck out at his enemy. Yes, yes, it had all happened; and, thought Haligome, Gleim and I both lost our lives in that moment of fury.
Haligome performed his tasks faithfully, did his meditation, visited dream-speakers — it was required here, but they never offered comments or interpretations — and took holy instruction. In the spring of his seventh year he was summoned inward to the next stage on the pilgrimage, the Terrace of Inception, and there he remained month after month, while other pilgrims moved through and past to the Terrace of Mirrors beyond. He said little to anyone, made no friends, and accepted in resignation the sendings that still came to him at widely spaced intervals.
In his third year at the Terrace of Inception he noticed a man of middle years staring at him in the dining-hall, a short and frail man with an oddly familiar look. For two weeks this newcomer kept Haligome under close surveillance, until at last Haligome's curiosity was too strong to control; he made inquiries and was told that the man's name was Goviran Gleim.
Of course. Haligome went to him during an hour of free time and said, "Will you answer a question?"
"If I can."
"Are you a native of the city of Gimkandale on Castle Mount?"
"I am," said Goviran Gleim. "And you, are you a man of Stee?"
"Yes," said Haligome.
They were silent for some time. Then at last Haligome said, "So you have been pursuing me all these years?"