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The sun had gone now and it was getting darker by the minute. The Manmonger’s pale face flashed as he turned from side to side. ‘My pretty,’ he said, shuffling over towards the dark-haired girl. ‘Do you feel better with some food in your belly? With some food inside you?’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Would you like something else inside you?’

She moaned and seemed to be trembling. It was difficult to see in the half-light.

‘You wait a moment’, said the Manmonger, ‘whilst I tie up this boy.’ He came over to Tighe with a thong in his hands. The dark-haired girl was sobbing in a most pitiable manner. ‘We wouldn’t want to be disturbed, now, would we?’

Tighe felt his stomach knot and clench again; although that could have been just the food. His throat was so dry it was painful. He thought he ought to say something, but was not sure what.

The Manmonger tied Tighe’s wrists together tightly and then drew his knife. He turned back to the girl.

‘Now, my pretty!’

As he moved towards her, she gave a little yelp and darted to the side. In the increasingly dense darkness it was hard to see exactly what happened. The Manmonger lurched to the side, his free hand outstretched to grab her, but she ducked and put a burst of speed on, slipping past him. Tighe angled his head to follow, twisting his body to follow. The Manmonger grunted and lurched towards her again, this time holding the knife out.

One moment the dark-haired girl was there, crouched, her pale face just visible in the darkness. Then she was gone. The Manmonger dashed to the edge of the world and crouched down. ‘Are you there?’ he called. ‘Are you there? Where have you fallen to? How far down?’ There followed some words in his own incomprehensible language. He hurried back to Tighe and fixed him to the peg he had driven into the platform earlier, then he left, making his way down and away.

‘She flies, you fool,’ said Tighe, in a quiet voice, speaking at the Manmonger’s retreating back.

He was gone for only a few minutes, but when he returned he was in a foul mood. He ranted in his own tongue for a while, and then said in twisted Imperial, ‘Idiot, stupid girl, how would she think? How would she think that? She is fallen to the bones that litter the base of the wall and good
riddance. Disease, she was; darkness and disease. Her hair was darkness and my Goddess despises darkness, dispels it. Idiot! Idiot!’

Tighe kept himself very quiet, lying still on the platform.

In the morning the Manmonger was still in a bad temper, although he no longer ranted. ‘It is the waste,’ he said, as he untethered Tighe. ‘The waste is the most provoking thing of it. I could have given her to the gatekeeper and had free passage through the tunnel for all my life. But now I have nothing! Not even her body! She has angered me. I should have given her to the gatekeeper.’

He ate some more food from his satchel, although he offered Tighe none. Then he smacked Tighe a few times to get him moving, and together they continued their climb along the crags and ledges of this section of worldwall.

‘We are going to a great city?’ Tighe asked, eventually. He felt strangely numb about the loss of the dark-haired girl, perhaps because it had happened in the night-time and so felt unreal. But then again, so much had felt unreal since the death of Ati.

‘What?’

‘Is it your city? Your home?’

The Manmonger snorted. ‘I come from a long way away from here, my black-skinned possession. But, yes, we are going to the City of the East. This trip has been unprofitable, mostly. I must reclaim what little I can from the situation.’

At ninety, as was his habit, the Manmonger settled down on a broad grassy ledge, overhung about a third, to pray to his goddess. He crossed his legs and made his strange bodily movements, and chanted in his strange tongue. Tighe sat, clutching his own knees, watching him.

After he had finished, the Manmonger came over and fished some food from his pack. Tighe looked dolefully at him as he ate, hoping to prick his conscience into giving him a snack. But the Manmonger was in a snappish mood.

‘No food for you today,’ he said. ‘You ate yesterday, it is enough. You could have had that girl’s food, if I’d known she would throw herself off the wall! What a waste of food. Could she not have left the food, at any rate?
What difference does it make to her bones, bleaching at the foot of the wall, whether she had a full stomach or an empty one when she died?’

He sat for a while in silence. Tighe said nothing more.

After a little while, he spoke again.

‘Great reaches of bones,’ he said. ‘That’s what is at the bottom of the wall.’

Despite himself, his hatred for the Manmonger, and despite his hunger and discomfort, Tighe felt his interest piqued. ‘Have you seen them?’ he asked. ‘Have you been to the bottom of the wall?’

‘Yes,’ returned the Manmonger. ‘Or, if not, then at least I have spoken to men who have been down that far. There’s nothing there, nothing on the lower portions of the wall, I can tell you. And the bones are scattered as far as the eye can see. It is like a giant ledge, all busy with bleached bones and rubbish. Everything that falls from the wall ends up there; it is death. Every day my mistress, my Goddess,’ he pointed at the sun, ‘leaves such death. That is why the morning is death, it is the death of night. And She leaves death and climbs to life. Life is on top of the wall.’

There was a pause. Tighe said timidly, ‘I never met somebody who worshipped the Sun before.’

‘It is the true religion, my boy,’ said the Manmonger heartily.

Tighe tried looking at the sun, but his eyelids closed automatically at the glare. ‘It hurts my eyes,’ he said.

‘She does,’ said the Manmonger, and laughed to himself. ‘Not all can bear her beauty. But I can!’ He stood up and flung his arms wide, facing directly into the bright midday sun. I can! Her heat! Her light! Shall I tell you what I pray for?’ he said, turning back to Tighe.

‘Pray for,’ echoed Tighe.

‘I pray for the end times. This is how it will be: when the end comes, She will approach the wall more closely. She will come close a
flame
and burn all the liars. Only the pure will be able to bear Her beauty up close! There is a door in the sun and I shall step through it.’

‘A door in the sun,’ said Tighe. ‘A door?’

‘Through that door is light, is life.’

‘There is a door in the wall, too,’ said Tighe.

The Manmonger looked at him. ‘A door in the wall,’ he said. ‘I have heard those stories, but I never saw such a thing.’ He laughed, turning back to the sky. ‘I pray,’ he said loudly, ‘I pray that You will come soon, my Goddess!’

Then he gasped in pure astonishment. Tighe, winking and blinking and shielding his eyes with the flat of his hand, looked out at the sky.

A blob of bright light was dropping from the base of the sun; like hot white wax melting and dribbling down.

‘There!’ screeched the Manmonger in an immediate ecstasy of excitement. ‘My mistress! There!’

The blob hung for a moment, like a radiant teardrop, and then detached itself from the circle of the sun. Tighe clenched his eyes, letting his eyelashes act as a crude filter, trying to see what was happening. This second miniature sun, like a particularly bright star, dribbled slowly down the wall of the sky. Tighe felt his own heart struggle rapidly in his chest. There was a tremendous sense of expansion inside his head, as if the epiphany were here. The sun!

‘My mistress!’ howled the delighted Manmonger. He began a peculiar nimble-footed dance, hopping from foot to foot. He gabbled something in his own tongue and then hurried over to Tighe, gripping him by the shoulders. ‘As I said, no? We have travelled through the darkness, we have lost the dark girl, and now we are in the light, and my Goddess rewards us! As I said! The door in the sun has opened and a being of light has come through. Look there – !’ He stretched his arm out with manic energy, his finger trembling with excitement. ‘Look where it comes towards us.’

The blob of light did seem to be growing, as if it were flying through the air towards them.

‘Coming straight for us!’ announced the Manmonger. He let go of Tighe and resumed his odd dancing, chanting in his own tongue as he did so. When balanced on his right foot he twitched his left through a bizarre pattern; then he shifted his weight on to his left foot and waggled his right one in the air. He hopped back and forth with enormous gusto.

Tighe was hypnotised by the growing fragment of light. It wobbled a little, dropped. Then it rose. By the time it had grown to the size of a hand’s span, Tighe could see what it was.

It was a floating calabash of some sort; bright shiny silver, curiously shaped, an elongated cylinder. It might have been made out of metal; three spindly pincers protruded from its underbelly; but its hourglass-shaped body possessed no marks or windows except for a band around its waist and what seemed to be three small portholes immediately underneath this. It floated, sweeping up through the sky.

Tighe recognised it: it was the same silver calabash he had seen during the battle on the Imperial ledge, the thing out of which the booming noise had issued that he had interpreted as his own name. The memory was sharp as lemon-taste in his mind; he could remember everything about that last encounter – Ati tugging his shirt from below him on the stair, urging him to keep his head low: the crack and volley of rifle fire up above and the stench of burnt mushroom powder.

He had thought this strange apparition had called his name; and now
here it was again and this time the Manmonger seemed certain it had come specifically in answer to his prayers. ‘It has come, it has come!’ he cried aloud, singing the words. ‘As I prayed! It has come to me!’

The silver calabash came through the air, unerringly, until it was close against the wall at the lip of the ledge on which the Manmonger and Tighe were standing; it hovered, and settled so that most of its shape was below them and they could see the top of it. Up close it was even more startling than it was when seen floating in the middle distance. Unlike calabashes, which displayed the stitching and the leather panels that constituted their skin, this structure was utterly smooth and clear, pure unsullied silver all over. Now that it was nestling against the wall Tighe could see that it was the size of a small house.

The Manmonger was running up and down the ledge in little spurts of excited activity, gabbling something. Tighe stood motionless.

There was a slight popping noise and a swirl of air directly over the smooth crown of the machine, a dilating spot of dark, and a figure emerged, elevated from within until it stood on the top of the device. A man, it seemed, dressed in a black cloak; or perhaps a boy, because it was a small figure.

This person ran down the gentle slope of the device and hopped over on to the ledge. He hurried up to stand next to Tighe.

He was a strange individual; almost as short as Tighe himself and much smaller than the Manmonger. His head was bald and his skin was very dark brown. He was much darker than Ati had been, although not as deeply coloured as Tighe himself, but the strangest thing was that his skin had something uncanny, even unpleasant about it. It creased in a fatter way than normal skin at his neck and it moved far less over his face than ordinary skin would. It appeared to be more of a mask and of a strange, inhuman consistency. The man’s face was wrinkle-free, although there were patches of vague discoloration at the corners of his mouth and eyes. His nose had a shrunken, mummified look to it. Only his eyes looked fully human; lively, brown eyes that darted back and forth, checking Tighe over.

Although there was this odd, inhuman look to him, Tighe had the strangest sense that he had met this short, dummy-like individual before. There was something familiar about him.

The Manmonger hurried up to Tighe and the newcomer and stopped, uncertain what to do. ‘You have come!’

The man looked over at him briefly and then turned his gaze back to Tighe. ‘Evidently,’ he said. His voice was queerly high-pitched, almost like a child’s.

‘How should I call you? You have come from the Sun!’

‘The sun?’ repeated the man, not removing his stare from Tighe. ‘No, just the sky. Just out of the sky. Here!’ He reached out and grabbed Tighe’s chin between two fingers; his skin felt very peculiar against Tighe’s own, leathery and dry. The man moved Tighe’s head to the left, to the right.

‘Should I call you Master?’ asked the Manmonger. ‘Should I call you Wizard?’

‘Wizard,’ repeated the man, in a distracted voice. It was not clear whether he was answering the Manmonger, or just echoing him without thinking, but the Manmonger assumed the first.

‘Wizard! You are so brown! Your skin!’

The newcomer looked over at the Manmonger again. ‘Eh?’

‘You are an emissary from the Sun, O Wizard! Your skin is brown because it has been burnt brown by Her magnificence! Burnt brown and leathery by the Sun!’

The Wizard grinned briefly, his face creasing into thick, unnatural-looking lines. When he stopped grinning the lines vanished. ‘What are you saying?’

‘You have come with a message for me?’ panted the Manmonger.

‘You? No, no. No!’ This last word was almost a shout, almost a laugh. ‘Not you, but this boy. I have come for this boy.’

The Manmonger looked nonplussed. ‘I don’t understand.’

The Wizard turned his attention back to Tighe, reaching out with his oddly wizened-looking hands and grabbing Tighe’s arm. ‘Under-eating, I think,’ he said. ‘Hungry, are you boy?’

‘The boy?’ asked the Manmonger. The expression on his face shifted as he reappraised the situation. ‘You come in a curious craft, Mister the Wizard.’

‘Curious,’ repeated the Wizard, apparently caught up in the business of scrutinising Tighe closely.

‘You are a man, though,’ said the Manmonger, scratching his own head. ‘A man like any other, perhaps. Your skin is strange.’

‘Strange,’ agreed the Wizard, absently.

‘Still,’ said the Manmonger with sudden decision, ‘if you are interested in the boy, he is for sale. Do you hear, you strange fellow? The boy is for sale.’