It was then that he realized that, although this energy was static and passive, there was nothing to prevent him from absorbing it, exactly as a fish absorbs plankton. As soon as he began to do this, the nature of the energy ceased to be neutral, and became active and positive. This filled him with vitality and made it hard to maintain the relaxation. After a few moments, he gave up the unequal struggle, and lost touch with the source of power.
As he sat among the chameleon men, seething with an almost uncomfortable degree of energy, Niall decided to try an experiment. He went down the hill and removed his clothes by the lake. He could feel the astonishment of the chameleon men, who thought he must be mad to want to enter the polluted water.
He waded in slowly, becoming aware that the little white organisms were attracted to the vitality he exuded like sharks to the smell of blood. They soon covered his body in a thick layer, which had a texture like grease. Mastering his revulsion, he stood there, allowing the layer to increase, aware that these parasites were intent on dissolving his flesh away, and that if he did nothing to stop them, they could eat his body in less than a quarter of an hour. Then, at the thought of a million tiny mouths nibbling his flesh, he turned the thought mirror, and concentrated his will.
Suddenly, the layer of grease dissolved into a cloud of frantic activity like a swarm of gnats, or a million piranhas feeding. They were so crowded together that they must have found it virtually impossible to move. As he continued to concentrate, he felt their activity reach a frenzy that quickly culminated in death.
The water around him was the color of milk, and of an almost gluey consistency; it would clear slowly as the dead organisms sank to the bottom. Niall was tempted to wait there until this happened, and more of the parasites moved in to feed off the dead. He felt that he possessed the energy to destroy every parasite in the lake. But it would be pointless, since they came from some other source, and would simply be replaced.
As he waded ashore, he noticed that his skin had turned a red color, like sunburn. This was the effect of millions of parasites trying to eat his flesh and suck his vitality.
He turned the thought mirror as soon as he stepped ashore, sensing that the chameleon men were uncomfortable with it.
The leader stood up as he approached and said: “We must return.”
It took Niall several seconds to realize that the leader had not spoken in words. He had simply conveyed the meaning directly from his own mind to Niall’s. When he recollected the difficulty of his first attempts to communicate with them, Niall understood that, in a certain sense, he had now become a chameleon himself.
During the time they had been at the lake — Niall estimated about an hour — the troll had been standing at the top of the hill, apparently unmoving; he obviously possessed the same kind of patience as the chameleon men and the spiders. As they approached he turned and led the way back without any form of acknowledgment.
Niall asked the leader what lay above them. If he had been using human language, he would have had to point above his head, and explain that he meant what kind of landscape lay above the ground; as it was, his meaning was communicated instantly and unambiguously. This kind of directness of communication was something that had developed since they had sat in communion by the sacred lake.
In reply, he was shown a green mountain, the highest of a range of hills that lay to the northeast of the spider city. He had noticed it when Asmak, the chief of the aerial survey, had taken him on a mental voyage to the mountains of the north. But since Niall had been seeking information on the land of the Magician, he had paid very little attention.
Niall knew there would be no point in asking what lay to the northwest of the mountain — in the direction of the stream that carried the parasites; this was beyond the territory of the chameleon men, and they knew nothing of it.
This was not, Niall now realized, out of indifference. The chameleon men regarded the Earth in a completely different way from humans. Men move on the surface of the Earth, and are aware of its contours, which have to be followed by roads, which in turn are punctuated by towns and villages. The chameleon men had a completely different kind of awareness. In a sense, they were more like spirits. Their ability to blend into their surroundings meant that they were aware of hidden forces in their surroundings. Men, for example, are aware of the gravity that pulls them toward the center of the Earth. But when chameleon men came close to a hill or mountain, they were aware of other forces that compete with gravity and tugged at them like magnets. When the moon was full, its force affected them just as it affects the tides. And all through the day, the sun exerts different forces that distinguish each passing hour. For the chameleon man, the hour of sunrise was as different from midafternoon as a mountain differs from a valley.
Like trees and plants, the chameleon men were as aware of the forces of the earth below their feet as they were of the seasons. And since these forces also respond to the planets in the sky, the chameleon men were living in an altogether more rich and complex world than the flat world of human beings.
This was why they knew little of the world that lay more than a few miles beyond their home. It would simply have overstrained their powers of memory. As it was, their world was immensely more rich and real than that of humans.
All this Niall learned as he walked back across the land of gray, velvety moss. It was no longer necessary to ask questions; he could simply explore their communal memory.
As they approached the bridge spanning the abyss, his thoughts turned to the disgusting creatures who had attacked them. He learned, as he had suspected, that they were vampire spirits, known in some human mythologies as ghouls, who inhabited the corpses of the dead. Ancient students of occult lore classified them among a group known as the half-dead.
In recent months there had been an increase in their activity, due to the increased availability of corpses. Before some event (which Niall guessed to be his own accession to power) there had been few corpses, for they were all eaten by the spiders. Now corpses were easily available, for the slaves were too lazy to bury their dead, and simply threw them into the river, to be swept out to sea. Many ended on the mudflats of the marshes, and the ghouls, alerted by the cries of hungry birds, quickly took possession of the bodies. Sometimes a dozen birds were pecking at a corpse — they were particularly fond of the eyes — when it came to life, and they flew, squawking indignantly, into the air. To seize a corpse that possessed at least one eye was regarded by the vampires as a remarkable achievement.
How these spirits took possession of a body was not clear. But it seemed certain that they were able to enter it and use it as a kind of glove puppet. Such spirits lived normally in a ghostly world of unreality; but once they were wearing flesh, the world around them became more real. They enjoyed it most as the flesh decayed, for they were truly necrophiles, or lovers of the dead, and to animate a corpse gave them a gruesome and perverse pleasure.
When they could, these entities attacked human beings and sucked their life force; this was easiest if they could render them unconscious, either from terror, which could deprive them of their senses, or with some sinister hypnotic force that paralyzed their victims. From the activities of these unpleasant creatures came legends of vampires.
Oddly enough, the chameleon men regarded them without fear, indeed with contempt. To begin with, they were disgusted with their morbid obsession with death. But the main reason was that the decayed state of the bodies also meant that they had little muscular power — Niall had noticed how easy it was to repel their attack. A newly dead corpse was more formidable, its hands still being capable of strangulation, but it soon putrefied.
The trolls loathed them. This was because, unlike the half-dead, trolls drew their powers from nature, particularly from trees and certain nonsymmetrical crystalline rocks like quartz. In spite of their size, trolls could become virtually invisible in a forest or rocky mountain landscape. Their energy was of the same nature as lightning — a troll who had been struck by lightning was regarded as a kind of god among his own kind. Their contempt for the half-dead arose from their abhorrence of energy-thieves, the lowest kind of vermin.