At Winter's End

7 The Sounds of the Storm

The plaza of the three dozen blue towers in Emakkis Boldirinthe never left Hresh’ mind, waking or dreaming. Often he awakened, shivering and sweaty, with that scene of Vengiboneeza alive once more glowing and throbbing in his soul, the crowded marketplace, those beings of the Six Peoples jostling against one another.

But it was many weeks before he would allow himself to return to it. He knew he was not ready. With all his strength he held himself back.

Eagerness and curiosity ate at him like a ravening worm. But he did not go to the towers. It was hard keeping away, but he did not go. He went everywhere else, anywhere, taking new turns and byways through the city. He found a terrace of radiant pools, glimmering and warm. He found an array of tall slender stone obelisks set in a diamond pattern around an onyx-rimmed pit of utter darkness, and when he dropped a rock into the pit it fell and fell and fell, without ever striking bottom. In the district of Dawinno Weiawala he found a somber brooding greenish-black edifice of enormous size that he called the Citadel, unlike any other building in the city, standing alone on a lofty greenswarded hillside and rising above Vengiboneeza like a guardian. Its length was far greater than its height, its walls were without ornament except for ten huge columns running along each of its two long sides to support its steep-vaulted roof, and it had neither doors nor windows, which made it seem blind and unapproachable, an inward-looking structure. Its function was not only unknown but, apparently, unknowable, though plainly it had been a structure of some high significance. Hresh could find no way of entering it, though he tried several times. Such discoveries as these led him nowhere useful.

“Why haven’t you gone back to that vault yet?” asked Taniane, who had heard of it from Haniman.

“I’m not yet ready,” Hresh said. “First I must master the Barak Dayir.” And gave her a look that closed the discussion.

That was the problem: the Barak Dayir. Without it there was no point in returning, for he was convinced that only through the mastery of the Wonderstone could he solve the riddle of that machine of visions in the vault beneath the tower. But the Wonderstone made him uneasy — he, Hresh-full-of-questions! — as did few other things. He had never actually seen it. Like the rest of the People he knew of it by repute, that there was some fabulous instrument that the chronicler kept, made of star-stuff, which had extraordinary properties but which would snuff the life of anyone who used it wrongly. Thaggoran had called it the key to the deepest realms of understanding; but Thaggoran had taken care not to let Hresh see him using it, careless though he sometimes was in guarding the other secrets of his office, and Thaggoran too had spoken of its perils, saying that he did not dare to resort to it often. Since becoming chronicler himself Hresh had not yet been able to bring himself even to look upon it. Unable to find in his books of chronicles any sort of guide to its function or proper use, he left it alone. When it came to the Barak Dayir his natural curiosity gave way to his fear of dying too soon, of dying before he had learned all that he hoped to learn.

Now at last Hresh took the velvet pouch from the casket of the chronicles for the first time, and held it cupped in both his hands. It was small, small enough to fit in the palm of one hand, and it felt faintly warm.

Star-stuff, they said. What did that mean?

He had not known what a star was until the Time of Coming Forth, when he had seen them for the first time in the sky, those magical bright points of light burning in the darkness. Globes of fire is what they are, Thaggoran had said. If they were closer to us they would blaze with the heat of the sun. Was the Wonderstone a piece of a star?

But the stars that gave light, Hresh knew, were not the only stars in the sky. There were the death-stars, too, those dark terrible things that had come crashing down upon the world to bring the Long Winter. They weren’t made of fire at all; they were spheres of ice and rock, so the chronicles said. Hresh hefted the pouch of the Barak Dayir. A piece of a death-star in here? He tried to imagine the furious trajectory of the plummeting star, the thunderous impact with Earth, the clouds of dust and smoke rising to blot out the light of the sun and bring the deadly cold. This? This little thing in his hand, a fragment of that monstrous calamity?

The chronicles also said that the distant stars of heaven had worlds in attendance on them, just as this world where the People dwelled was in attendance on its sun. Those other worlds had peoples of many kinds. Maybe, Hresh thought, the stone had been made on a world of one of those other stars. He touched it through the pouch and let some other world float into his mind, yellow sky, turbulent purple rivers, a red sun smoldering by day, six crystalline moons singing in the heavens by night.

Guesses. All guesses. He was stumbling about in the dark. There was information of all kinds in the chronicles but nothing that could help him with this.

He made the Five Signs. He called on Yissou, and then on Dawinno, who had always shown special favor to him. Then, slowly, fearfully, he took a deep breath and drew the Barak Dayir from its pouch, thinking that he might be taking his death into his hands. He was surprised at how calm he was.

If it killed him, well, then, it would kill him. A voice tolling like a gong in his head told him that he must do this all the same, that he owed it to his tribe and to himself finally to attempt the mysteries of this thing, whatever the risk.

The Barak Dayir was pleasing to look at, but not extraordinary. It was a piece of polished stone longer than it was broad, brown with purple mottlings, tapering to a point. Though it seemed so soft that it could be marred at a finger’s touch, it was in fact hard, terribly hard. Except that it was so ornamental, it could have been a small spearhead. There was a dizzying network of intricately carved lines along its edges, forming a pattern so fine that it was all but impossible for him to make it out, keen as his vision was.

He held it in his left hand for a while, then in his right. It was warm, but not unpleasantly so. There was something almost benign about it. At least it did not appear to be planning to kill him. His fear of it diminished moment by moment, yet he continued to regard it with respect.

What did you do with it? How did you make it obey you?

He put it to his ear, thinking perhaps to hear a voice within it, but there was no sound. He pressed it between both his hands, to no avail, and held it firmly against his breast. He spoke to it, telling it his name and declaring that he was the successor to Thaggoran as chronicler. None of this produced any response. Then at last Hresh did the most obvious thing, the one thing he had held back from doing, and curled his sensing-organ about it and applied his second sight.

This time he heard distant music, strange, unearthly, not from the stone itself but from all about him. The music entered his soul and filled it to its depths, engulfing him, intoxicating him. He felt a hot prickling at the root of his tongue and his fur grew light, floating outward, spreading about him like mist. The sensations were so intense that they were frightening. Hastily Hresh released the Wonderstone and the music stopped. Putting his sensing-organ to it again brought the music back. But once more a moment was all he could stand. Again he broke the contact. All those tales of the power of the Barak Dayir had not been lies. The thing had great strength and magic to it.

Hresh took a deep breath. He felt drained and close to collapse. But he had taken the first step on an immense journey he knew not where. Gratefully he put the Wonderstone back in its pouch. He would continue these researches at another time. But at least he had made a beginning. A beginning, at last.

In a troubled dream Harruel saw himself grasping the towers of Vengiboneeza in his hands and tearing them out by their roots, and smashing them one against another like dry sticks, and hurling their fragments contemptuously aside.

In his dream Koshmar appeared and stood before him, defying him to overthrow her. He ripped a vast stone tower loose and wielded it as a club, swinging it high over Koshmar’s head and smashing it down. She jumped deftly aside. He roared and swung the tower again. And again. And pursued her through the streets of the city, until he had her trapped between two broad black-walled buildings. Calmly she awaited him there, unafraid, a mocking smile on her face.

Bellowing in fury, Harruel grasped the tower under his arm now as though it were a spear. And began to thrust it at the chieftain; but as he started toward her he was seized about the throat and held in check. The tower fell from his hands, crashing to the ground. Who dared to interfere with him this way? Torlyri? Yes. The offering-woman held him with astonishing force, so that he felt his soul being squeezed upward and outward from his chest. Desperately Harruel struggled, and slowly he began to break her grip, but as they fought she shifted shape and became his mate, Minbain, and then that strange boy Hresh who was such a mystery to him, and then a roaring, snarling sapphire-eyes, huge and green and loathsome with blazing blue eyes and a great snapping mouth glistening with many rows of evil teeth.

“Become anything you want!” Harruel shouted. “I’ll kill you anyway!”

He seized the long jaws of the sapphire-eyes and strived to wrench them apart with one hand and hold them apart, while reaching for a tower with the other, so that he might wedge it between and prop the terrible mouth of the creature open. It struck back with fierce raking blows of its clawed hands, but he paid no heed, he forced the jaws to part, he pushed the great head backward—

“Harruel!” it cried. “Please, stop, Harruel — Harruel—”

Its voice was strangely soft, almost a whimper. It was a voice he knew. A woman’s voice, a voice much like that of Minbain, his mate—

“Harruel — no—”

He came swimming up toward consciousness, which lay like a stone pavement above him. When he broke through he found himself close by the side of the room where he and Minbain slept. Minbain was crushed up against the wall, struggling to push him away. His arms were wrapped about her in a frenzied grip and his head was jammed down into the hollow between her shoulder and her throat.

“Yissou!” he muttered, and released her, and rolled away. The dank biting stink of his own curdled sweat filled the room, sickening him. The upper muscles of his arms were jerking and popping as though they were trying to break free of his body and there was a ridge of flame running along his shoulders and neck. He wiped shining flecks of saliva from the coarse fur of his jaws. Great racking shivers ran through his body.

She said into the silence in an uncertain voice, “Harruel?”

“A dream,” he said thickly. “My soul was gone from me, and I was in strange realms. Did I hurt you?”

“You frightened me,” Minbain said. Her eyes, dark and solemn, stared into his. “You were like something wild — you made awful sounds, choking, gagging, and you thrashed around — and then you caught hold of me, and I thought — I thought you would—”

“I would not injure you.”

“I was frightened. You were so strange.”

“It frightens me also.” He shook his head. “Have I ever done such a thing before, Minbain? This wildness, this fury?”

“Not like this. Dark dreams, yes. Stirrings, groanings, moanings, words in your sleep, curses, even sometimes slapping your hands against the floor as if you were trying to kill creatures moving around beside you. But this time — I was so frightened, Harruel! It was as if a demon had entered you.”

“Indeed a demon has entered me,” he said bleakly. He rose and went to the window. The night seemed less than half spent. A heavy darkness lay like a smothering veil over everything. The hideous scarred face of the moon blazed icily high overhead, and behind it, hanging in thick swirling bands at the zenith of the sky, were the stars, those dazzling malign white fires that gave no warmth. “I’m going outside, Minbain.”

“No, stay here, Harruel. I’m afraid to be alone now.”

“What harm can come to you? The only danger around here is me. And I will go out.”

“Stay.”

“I need to go off by myself for a time,” he said. He looked back at her. In the darkness, by cool shimmering moonlight and starlight, there appeared to be a beauty to Minbain that Harruel knew she did not in fact possess. Her face, rounded and delicate, seemed to have shed the years: she was new and tender, a girl again. His heart flooded with love for her. It was difficult for him to express that love in words; but he went to her and crouched down beside her, and let his hands rove tenderly over her throat where he had hurt her, and her breasts, and her soft warm belly. It seemed to him that he could feel new life starting inside her there. It was too early to tell, but he thought that his fingers detected a quickening, a gathering of life-force, which would become the son of Harruel. As softly as he could he said, “I did not mean to hurt you, Minbain. A demon was with me in my sleep. It was not me. I would never injure you.”

“I know that, Harruel. You are kind, behind your gruffness.”

“Do you think so?”

“I know it,” Minbain said.

He held his hand outspread across her belly for a time. He was calmer now, though his dark dream still oppressed him. Waves of deep love for her were coursing through his soul.

She was three years older than he was, and when he was growing up, not thinking at all about mates — for he was of the warrior class and in those days warriors had not mated — she had seemed to be more of his mother’s generation than his own; but when the new matings had been allowed, Minbain was the one he had chosen. A younger woman would have had more beauty, but beauty goes quickly, and Minbain had virtues that would remain all her life. She was warm and kind, somewhat like Torlyri in that regard. Torlyri was not a woman for men; but Minbain was, and Harruel had reached for her quickly. It made no difference to him that she was older, or that she had had a child. If anything it was a favorable thing that she had had a child, since that child was Hresh, who at so supernaturally early an age had come to have such power in the tribe. Harruel saw many uses for Hresh; and perhaps one way to reach Hresh was through his mother. Not that that was his main reason for having chosen Minbain. But it had been a factor. It had definitely been a factor.

“Let me go now,” Harruel said.

“Come back soon.”

“Soon,” he promised. “Yes.”

Minbain watched him go, a huge hulking shadow moving with exaggerated care across the room and out the door. She touched her throat. He had hurt her more than she had wanted him to know. In his madness he had struck her with a flailing elbow, he had seized her by both shoulders and slammed her against the wall, and when he had burrowed down against her throat like that he had nearly choked her with the pressure of his heavy head. But that had been the madness, the demon. It had not been Harruel. Minbain understood that in his rough way he cared for her.

She was carrying his child. That she knew for a certainty, and, from the way he had touched her body just now, he must know it too. They would have to go to Torlyri soon to have the first words said over her.

Hresh would have a brother. She would have a second son. She was sure of it, that it was a son; Harruel’s seed could bear nothing but sons, that much seemed obvious to her. She would be the first woman in thousands of years to bear two sons. Would the new one be anything like Hresh, she wondered?

No. There could never be anyone else like Hresh. Hresh was unique.

Nor had she ever known anyone rise like Harruel. She loved him and she feared him, and some days it was the love that was stronger, and some days the fear, and there were times like this when both were mixed in equal measure. He was so strange. The gods had given her a strange child for her son and now a strange man for her mate: why was that? Harruel was so huge, so powerful, so far beyond all the others in strength — he was unusual in his strength, yes. He had the force of a falling mountain. But there was something else. He had a darkness in his soul. He had an anger. Minbain had never really seen that when they all lived in the cocoon, but once they had begun the trek it had become obvious. Some turbulent force roiled his soul day and night. He yearned for something — but what? What?

Harruel walked down one street and up another, not knowing where he was going and scarcely caring. He felt the cold sharp moonlight upon him like a scourge, driving him onward. He had promised Minbain he would return, and so he would. But not before dawn. There was no sleep in him.

The city was a prison for him. He had borne cocoon life easily enough, never imagining there was an alternative to it. But now that they were free of the cocoon and he had come to know what it was like to walk boldly under the open sky, it galled him to live penned up in this sleek dead place, which in his mind reeked with the stench of the extinct sapphire-eyes folk. And it galled him also, it stung him like a firebur against his skin, that he would live under the commands of the woman Koshmar to the end of his days.

This was the time to end the rule of women. This was the time to restore the power of kings.

But it seemed to Harruel that Koshmar would be his chieftain until he was old and bent and white of fur. For there were no more death-days. Koshmar was older than he was, but she was healthy and strong. She would live a long time. Nothing would ever rid him of her, unless he did it himself; and there Harruel drew the line. To kill a chieftain was beyond him. It was almost beyond his comprehension. But he could not bear living under her rule much longer.

Of late he had taken to roaming the city frequently, going off alone on long wanderings, seeking to come to know it. The city was his enemy, and he believed that it is important to know your enemy. But this was the first time he had gone forth by night.

Everything looked altered. The towers seemed taller, the lesser buildings seemed more squat. Streets hooked away at strange angles. There was menace in every shadow. Harruel walked on and on. He had his spear. He was unafraid.

Some of the streets were paved with immaculate flagstones, as if the city had been abandoned by the sapphire-eyes only the day before yesterday. Others were cracked and rutted, with coarse grass rising through the paving-blocks, and still others had lost their pavements entirely and were mere muddy tracks bordered by crumbling buildings. This city made no sense to him. He detested it. It sickened him to think that his son would be born in it, in this hateful alien place, this place that had nothing human about it.

There were ghosts here. As he walked he kept watch for them.

Harruel was certain that ghosts hovered everywhere about. They were the ones who were making the repairs. It happened by night, though not when anyone could see it. Randomly, so it seemed, buildings that had fallen were shored up, given new facades, cleansed of debris. He saw the changes afterward. Some of the others had noticed it too — Konya, Staip, Hresh. Who was responsible?

He was wary, too, of creeping, crawling, stinging creatures of the night. Most of the pests that afflicted Vengiboneeza vanished with the coming of the darkness, except the ones that lived inside the buildings. But that did not mean that he could regard himself as altogether safe from them.

Early one evening not long before, wandering restlessly as he was tonight, Harruel had found himself at the edge of the warm sea that lapped the city on its western flank, and he had watched an invading army of ugly gray lizard-things come crawling up out of the water. They were evil little creatures with slim tubular bodies the length of his forearm and thick fleshy legs and wrinkled green wings folded back behind their necks, and they had a sinister glint in their bright yellow eyes. From them came a low growling hum of a sound, menacing and nasty, as if they were threatening him by name: “Harruel! Harruel! Harruel! We’ll make a meal of you tonight!”

Jaws snapping, they advanced like a horde of insects in tight formation until they were no more than thirty paces from him, and he began to look around for something to defend himself with. Backing away, he scooped up handfuls of pebbles and pelted them with those, without halting them. But when they reached a row of square-hewn blocks of green stone, set into the seawall just below where he was standing, that had tiny mysterious faces carved into them, they pulled up short as if they had hit an invisible barrier. Then they turned, baffled, glum, and headed back toward the water. Perhaps they had picked up the scent of a swarm of some even nastier beast on the far side of those shattered columns, he thought. Or maybe they just didn’t like my smell. Whichever it was, he knew he had been lucky to get off so easily.

Another time he saw clouds of flying creatures crossing overhead, so thick a flock that they darkened the sky at midday. It seemed to him that they were the fierce white-eyed things that were called bloodbirds, which had plagued the tribe far back when they had crossed the plains. He stood poised, ready to run to the settlement and give the alarm. But though they circled and circled far above the city, the birds never descended below the tops of the highest towers.

He was near the green stone pillars now where the three sapphire-eyes guardians sat. A short distance before him was the avenue that fronted the jungle.

Without any clear purpose in mind he began to walk toward the southern gate. But after a minute or two he halted abruptly. He heard a faint sound behind him: someone breathing, someone moving about. He grasped his spear. Had Minbain followed him? Or was this one of the ghosts that patrolled the city in the secrecy of the night? He whirled and peered into the shadows.

“Who’s there?”

Silence.

“I heard you. Come out where I can see you.”

“Harruel?” A man’s voice, low and steady, familiar.

“Who else do you think it would be? Is that you, Konya?”

Laughter came from the darkness. “You have a good ear, Harruel.”

Konya emerged and walked slowly forward. He was a tall man, though only shoulder-height to Harruel; but because he was so deep through his chest and back he did not seem as tall as he actually was. By the tribe he was regarded as the second-ranking warrior, generally deemed to be Harruel’s rival, a man smoldering with envy for Harruel’s preeminence. Only the two of them knew how untrue that was. Konya was strong enough to realize that it was all right not to be strongest. His nature was a calm, remote, quiet one. What he felt for Harruel was a respect growing out of the natural order of things, not envy; and what Harruel felt for him was an equal respect, though he knew Konya was not an equal.

“So you’re out wandering tonight too,” Harruel said.

“Sleep wouldn’t come. The moon was too bright in my eyes as I lay in bed.”

“In the cocoon that wasn’t a problem.”

“No,” Konya said, with a little laugh. “The moon’s brightness couldn’t trouble us, when we dwelled in the cocoon.”

They walked together in silence for a while. This was a street of shattered buildings whose golden-hued facades, perversely, were in perfect condition. Empty windowframes still bore their elegantly worked shutters of thin-cut white stone. Elaborate doors stood ajar, revealing rubble and emptiness behind them. Then they came to one building that was of the opposite condition: its facade was gone, so that each of its many floors was revealed along one side, but the interior was intact. Wordlessly Harruel entered it and began to ascend, not knowing what he was looking for. Konya went with him unquestioningly.

With difficulty they ascended a staircase that had been built for sapphire-eyes, with wide flat risers so low that it was more of a ramp than a stair. After a time Harruel developed the knack of taking the steps two and even three at a time in loping bounds, and the ascent became easier. Along the walls, all the way up, were carvings that troubled the eye. Seen from the side they seemed to show the figures of living creatures, sapphire-eyes and hjjks and other things that must have lived in the time of the Great World, but when you looked at them straight on they dissolved into jumbles of meaningless lines. The rooms of the building were empty. There was not even dust in them.

Eventually the staircase narrowed to a spiral passage that coiled upward for half a dozen bends and delivered them to the building’s flat roof of dark tile. Here they were high above the surrounding district. The city lay behind them, to the north. Looking southward over the edge of the roof they saw the closely arrayed trees of the jungle glowing eerily in the harsh bright moonlight.

There were stirrings in the treetops, little snicking sounds.

“Monkeys, there,” Konya said.

Harruel nodded. They were swinging through the treetops no more than a good stone’s throw away, those shrieking stinking chattering things of the jungle. How he loathed them! He felt a rushing in his ears. If he could, he would march through the jungle from tree to tree, spearing them all and piling their repellent little bodies in heaps for the snuffling scavenger-beasts to devour.

“Filthy creatures,” said Harruel. “I’d like to kill them all. A good thing that they keep out of the city, mostly.”

“I see them sometimes. Not many.”

“Just a few, yes, once in a while. It’s not hard for them to get in. They just have to swing right over that open space there and they’re inside. Good thing for us that it’s usually only one or two at a time. Yissou, I detest them! Foul filthy things!”

“They’re just wild animals, Harruel.”

“Animals? They’re vermin. You saw them yourself, right up close. They have no souls. They have no minds.”

“The sapphire-eyes who guard the gate said that they are our cousins.”

Harruel spat. “Dawinno! Do you believe that foolishness?”

“They look a little like us.”

“Anything with two arms and two legs and a tail would look a little like us, if it walked on its hind legs. We are humans, Konya, and they are beasts.”

Konya was silent a while. “You think that’s so, Harruel? What about the thing the sapphire-eyes said, that we aren’t human at all, that the humans were a different race altogether, that we’re nothing but monkeys with a high opinion of themselves?”

“We are human, Konya. What else could we be? Do you feel like a relative of those things swinging from their tails out there?”

“The sapphire-eyes said—”

“Dawinno take the sapphire-eyes! They’re dead lying things. They only want to make trouble for us!” Harruel turned toward Konya, glaring coldly. “Look: we think, we talk, we have books, we know the gods. Therefore we are human. I know it. I have no doubt of it. Regardless of what the sapphire-eyes may say. Besides, they let us enter the city, didn’t they? The city is reserved for the humans who will come here at winter’s end: that’s what the prophecy said. And the winter is over, and we are here, by permission of the three guardians. Therefore we are the ones who were supposed to come here. The humans, that is.”

“Koshmar made them let us in.”

“ Madethem? When they have magic in their hands? No, Konya, it wasn’t Koshmar’s doing. She could have talked at them all day, and if they truly felt we weren’t human beings they never would have accepted us. They let us in because it was our destiny to come in here, our right to come in here, and they knew it. They were only testing us with their idiotic lies, to see if we had the strength of spirit to claim our rights. If Koshmar hadn’t spoken out, I would have done so, and they would have yielded. And if they hadn’t yielded I would have slain the three sapphire-eyes to win admission here.”

After another silence Konya said, “You would have slain them? When they have magic in their hands?”

“There’s magic in this spear, Konya.”

“But how can you slay what isn’t alive? The boy Hresh says they’re just artificials in the guise of sapphire-eyes, and not sapphire-eyes themselves.”

Harruel nodded distantly. He had lost interest in this debate. Narrowing his eyes against the moonlight, he stared at the frolicking monkeys, thinking thoughts of slaughter.

After a time he said, “This city is full of mysteries. I find it a troublesome place.”

“I find it hateful,” said Konya, with sudden surprising vehemence. “I hate it the way you hate the monkeys of the jungle.”

Harruel turned to him, eyes widening. “Do you?”

“It is a dead place. It has no soul.”

“No, it lives,” Harruel said. “It’s dead, I agree, but somehow it lives. I hate it as much as you, but not because it is dead. It has a strange kind of life that is not our kind of life. It has a soul that is not a soul like ours. And it’s for that that I hate it.”

“Dead or alive, I’d be glad to leave it tomorrow, Harruel. I would have been glad never to have seen it at all. We shouldn’t have come here in the first place.” Something in Konya’s tone made it seem as though he were seeking Harruel’s approval.

But Harruel shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not so, Konya. It was right to come. This city holds things that are important for us. You know what the chronicles say. In Vengiboneeza we will find ancient things of the sapphire-eyes that will help us to rule the world.”

“We’ve been here many months, and we’ve found nothing.”

With a shrug Harruel said, “Koshmar’s too timid. She lets only Hresh search, and no one else. A vast city, one small boy — no, we should all be out there every day, everyone seeking in the hidden places. The things are here. Sooner or later we’ll find them. And then we must take them and get out of this place. That’s the important thing, to leave once we have achieved what we came here to achieve.”

Konya said, “It seems to me that Koshmar is thinking of staying here forever.”

“Let her stay, then.”

“No. I mean she would have us all stay here. The city is becoming a new cocoon for her. She has no thought of leaving.”

“We must leave,” Harruel said. “The whole world is awaiting us. We are the new masters.”

“Even so, I think Koshmar—”

“Koshmar doesn’t matter any longer.”

Sudden amazement gleamed in Konya’s eyes. “What are you saying, Harruel?”

“What I’m saying is that we’ve come to this city for a purpose, which is to learn how to rule the world in the New Springtime, and we must strive with all our might to achieve that purpose. And then we must go forth so that we may continue to fulfill our destiny elsewhere. You hate this place. So do I. If Koshmar doesn’t, she can make it her home forever. When the time comes — and it must come soon — I will lead the way out of here.”

“And I will follow you,” Konya said.

“I know that you will.”

“Will you take all the others?”

“Only those who want to go,” said Harruel. “Only the strong and the bold. The others can stay here to the end of their days, for all I care.”

“So you will make yourself chieftain, then?”

Harruel shook his head. “Chieftain is a title out of the cocoon life. That life is ended. And chieftains are women. Koshmar can remain chieftain, if she likes, though she’ll have precious little tribe to be chieftain over. I will call myself by another name, Konya.”

“And what name will that be?”

“I will be called king,” said Harruel.

The mild weather that the tribe had enjoyed since first coming to Vengiboneeza ended abruptly, and there were three days of heavy winds out of the north and cold, sweeping rains. The sky turned black and stayed that way. Creatures of the sky were seen beating raggedly against the wind, vainly trying to journey to the westward and constantly being driven far to the south.

“A new death-star has struck the earth,” said Kalide to Delim. “The Long Winter is returning.”

Delim, carrying this to Cheysz, said that the rain, so she had heard, would soon turn to snow.

“We will all freeze,” said Cheysz to Minbain. “We need to seal things up the way the cocoon was sealed, or we will die when the Long Winter comes again.”

And Minbain, summoning Hresh, asked him what he knew of these things. “Has this been nothing but a false spring?” she demanded. “Shouldn’t we be storing food in the caverns beneath Vengiboneeza to tide us through the time of freezing?” Life in Vengiboneeza had been too easy, she said, a trap laid by the gods: now the sun would be blotted out for months or even years and they would all perish if they failed to take immediate steps. There was no way to return to the old cocoon; Vengiboneeza would have to be their refuge now. Even Vengiboneeza, grand though it was, might not be a fitting hiding place if the Long Winter were to fall upon the world once more. The sapphire-eyes folk had been unable to survive here; would the tribe fare any better?

Hresh smiled. “You worry too much, Mother. There’s no danger of freezing. The weather has changed for the worse just now, and after a little while it will change for the better again.”

But the rumor had traveled even to Koshmar, growing more ominous along the way. She too sent for Hresh. “Is this truly the coming of the Long Winter again?” she asked him, looking somber, grim, head drawn in close against her shoulders, eyes hooded and hard. “Is it true that the sun will not shine again for a thousand years?”

“It is only a bad storm, I think.”

“If it’s like this in sheltered Vengiboneeza, it must be much worse elsewhere.”

“Perhaps. But in a few days it’ll be warm here again, Koshmar. So I do believe.”

“You believe! You believe! Can you be sure, though? There must be some way of finding out.”

He gave her an uneasy look. Koshmar had built a fine nest for herself and Torlyri in this solid little building in the shadow of the great tower. There were fragrant hangings of woven rushes on the walls, and thick carpets of skins, and dried flowers everywhere. And yet the bitter wind now came whipping against the windows and down the air vents and brought a chill into the room. From the first, Koshmar had insisted that the Long Winter was over. She had invested all her soul in the abandonment of the cocoon and the making of the great trek to Vengiboneeza. It occurred to Hresh that something might crack within Koshmar if it turned out that she was wrong.

She wanted reassurance from him, her chronicler, her staff of wisdom. What could he tell her? He knew no more of winds and storms than anyone else. He had grown up in the cocoon, where no winds blew. Thaggoran, perhaps, might have read the portents and given Koshmar the truth of the situation. Thaggoran, steeped in the lore of the chronicles, had been equal to almost any situation. But Thaggoran had been old and wise. Hresh was young and clever, which was not at all the same.

There must be some way of finding out, Koshmar had said.

There was. The Barak Dayir might tell him; but in the weeks since he first had found the courage to pull the shining stone from its pouch and touch his sensing-organ to it, he had proceeded with unusual caution, extending his mastery over it in minute stages. He had learned how to bring it to life, and how to liberate the potent sweep of its music, and how to let its force approach the borders of his mind. But that was as far as he had dared to go. It was easy to see how the Wonderstone might engulf him, how it might submerge his mind entirely within the torrent of its incomprehensible power. Once he let himself be lost in that torrent there might be no returning. And so he had forced himself to resist the irresistible. He kept his mind alert, agile, defensive: he leaped back quickly whenever the song of the Barak Dayir became too guileful and tempting. Though he went a little deeper into it each time he drew forth the stone, he took care not to let it possess his spirit as he thought it was capable of doing; and therefore he knew that he was still far from attaining command of the mysterious instrument.

This storm is the punishment of the gods upon us for my sloth and my cowardice, he thought. And if the storm causes Koshmar to become angry in her panic, the gods will guide her to direct her anger against me. Therefore I must act.

He said, “I’ll consult the Wonderstone, Koshmar. And it will tell me the meaning of this storm.”

“Yes. That’s what I hoped you would do.”

He hurried into the six-sided tower that was now the holy temple, and into the chamber where he kept the casket of the chronicles, and where he now slept much of the time, for he felt out of place in the dormitory where the other unmated young people lived. Unhesitatingly he drew the Wonderstone from its pouch. Thunder cracked terrifyingly overhead.

He put his sensing-organ to the stone and quickly brought his second sight to bear on it. Delay could bring only failure now. From it, at once, came the strange intense music that he had experienced on a dozen or more other occasions. But this time, because he knew he dared not falter, he opened himself to it in a way that was new to him. He let the music possess him; he let himself become the music.

He was a column of pure sound, rising without resistance to the roof of the world.

He climbed above the storm. He towered over Vengiboneeza like a god. The city seemed a toy model of itself. The lofty mountain ranges that sheltered the city looked to him now like mere low ridges. The great sea west of the city was no more than a leaden wind-tossed puddle, half hidden by swirls of black cloud that clustered at his ankles. He saw land on the far side of it, and an even mightier sea beyond, a gleaming sea that stretched so grandly around the curve of the world that even he, colossal though he now was, could not make out its farther shore.

He saw the sun. He saw the sky, blue and radiant above the storm. He looked to the east, where the great river was and their old cocoon, and saw that the air was clear there and the warmth of the New Spring-time still prevailed.

There was nothing to fear. The Barak Dayir had told him what he needed to know. He could descend now and bear the good tidings to Koshmar.

But he remained longer than was needful. The splendor of this ascent was not something he could relinquish easily. The music that was his new self crashed in majesty across the world, falling upon sea and upon land, upon mountains and upon valleys, with terrible grandeur. He looked toward the moon and reached a tendril of sound toward it as easily as in his old life he might have reached toward a ripe fruit hanging on a low branch. It would be simple, he knew, to encircle the moon with music and move it in its course, or bring it closer to the earth, or shatter it altogether. Or he could bypass it entirely, and send himself surging out into the depths of the void, and swim among the stars. He had never imagined such power. The stone could make you a god.

Then he understood why old Thaggoran had feared the Wonderstone, and why he had said it was dangerous. It was not that the stone would do any sort of harm to its user; but so great was its force that it could destroy all judgment, and the user, in the blindness of his borrowed godliness, might well do harm to himself. Overreaching was the danger.

With an effort that was greater than any he had made before in his life, Hresh hauled himself in. He descended to his body; he relinquished his godhead. He shrank down into himself until he lay limp and sweat-soaked on the stone floor of the chamber, quivering, stunned.

After a time he picked himself up and restored the stone to its pouch and hid it away where it belonged, and locked the casket with more than ordinary care. Rain was still falling heavily outside, perhaps even more heavily than before, although it seemed to him that it was less turbulent now, an obstinate hammering downpour but one with little wildness about it. The sky still was dark but he thought he saw a thinning of the darkness in places.

Heedless of the rain, he trotted back across to Koshmar’s house. Torlyri was there now, and the two of them were huddling together like frightened beasts. Hresh had never seen either of them like that, eyes wide, teeth chattering, fur standing on end. When he came in they made an attempt at regaining some self-possession, but their terror still was manifest.

In a hushed voice Koshmar said, “Is this the end of the world?”

Hresh stared. “What do you mean?”

“I thought the sky would split open. I thought the lightning would set the mountain on fire.”

“And the thunder,” said Torlyri. “It was like a great drum. I thought it would deafen me.”

“I heard nothing,” Hresh said. “I saw nothing. I was busy in the temple, seeking the answers you required of me.”

“You didn’t hear anything?” Torlyri asked. “Not a thing?” They were still shivering. It must have been truly cataclysmic. They couldn’t understand how he had failed to notice what was taking place.

“Perhaps the stone shielded me from the sounds of the storm,” he said.

But he knew that that was only a part of the truth, and a small part at that. Whatever tremendous uproar had just happened had been of his own making. It was he who had brought the great thunder and the terrible lightning, while he was using — and perhaps somewhat misusing — the Wonderstone. Of course he had not heard the sounds of the storm at its height. He had been the sounds of the storm at its height.

It would not be good for them to know that, though.

He said simply, “I have the assurance you seek, Koshmar. The Wonderstone has shown me the boundaries of the storm. All is clear to the east and to the west, and the neighboring lands still are fair and mild. This is not the return of the Long Winter, nor has any new death-star fallen. It’s only a storm, Koshmar, a very bad storm but not one that will endure much longer. There’s nothing to fear.”

And, indeed, within hours the winds were dying down, the rain was slackening, patches of blue were showing through the blackness overhead.