City of Illusions Read Online Free PDF

and always caught up with him by midnight One was of being stealthily pursued in the darkness by a person he could never see. The other was worse. He dreamed that he had forgotten to bring something with him, something important, essential, without which he would be lost. From this dream he woke and knew that it was true: he was lost; it was himself he had forgotten. He would build up his fire then if it was not raining and would crouch beside it, too sleepy and dream-bemused to take up the book he carried, the Old Canon, and seek comfort in the words which declared that when all ways are lost the Way lies clear. A man all alone is a miserable thing. And he knew he was not even a man but at best a kind of half-being, trying to find his wholeness by setting out aimlessly to cross a continent under uninterested stars. The days were all the same, but they were a relief after the nights.
    He was still keeping count of their number, and it was on the eleventh day from the crossroads, the thirteenth of his journey, that he came to the end of the Hirand Road. There had been a clearing, once. He found a way through great tracts of wild bramble and second-growth birch thickets to four crumbling black towers that stuck high up out of the brambles and vines and mummied thistles: the chimneys of a fallen House. Hirand was nothing now, a name. The road ended at the ruin.
    He stayed around the fallen place a couple of hours, kept there simply by the bleak hint of human presence. He turned up a few fragments of rusted machinery, bits of broken pottery which outlive even men's bones, a scrap of rotten cloth which fell to dust in his hands. At last he pulled himself together and looked for a trail leading west out of the clearing. He came across a strange thing, a field a half-mile square covered perfectly level and smooth with some glassy substance, dark violet colored, unflawed. Earth was creeping over its edges and leaves and branches had scurfed it over, but it was unbroken, unscratched. It was as if the great level space had been flooded with melted amethyst. What had it been—a launching-field for some unimaginable vehicle, a mirror with which to signal other worlds, the basis of a force-field? Whatever it was, it had brought doom on Hirand. It had been a greater work than the Shing permitted men to undertake.
    Falk went on past it and entered the forest, following no path now.
    These were clean woods of stately, wide-aisled deciduous trees. He went on at a good pace the rest of that day, and the next morning. The country was growing hilly again, the ridges all running north-south across his way, and around noon, heading for what looked from one ridge like the low point of the next, he became embroiled in a marshy valley full of streams. He searched for fords, floundered in boggy watermeadows, all in a cold heavy rain. Finally as he found a way up out of the gloomy valley the weather began to break up, and as he climbed the ridge the sun came out ahead of him under the clouds and sent a wintry glory raying down among the naked branches, brightening them and the great trunks and the ground with wet gold. That cheered him; he went on sturdily, figuring to walk till day's end before he camped. Everything was bright now and utterly silent except for the drip of rain from twig-ends and the far-off wistful whistle of a chickadee. Then he heard, as in his dream, the steps that followed behind him to his left.
    A fallen oak that had been an obstacle became in one startled moment a defense: he dropped down behind it and with drawn gun spoke aloud: "Come on out!"
    For a long time nothing moved.
    "Come out!" Falk said with the mindspeech, then closed to reception, for he was afraid to receive. He had a sense of strangeness; there was a faint, rank odor on the wind.
    A wild boar walked out of the trees, crossed his tracks, and stopped to snuff the ground. A grotesque, magnificent pig, with powerful shoulders, razor back, trim, quick, filthy legs.