The Queen of Springtime

8 The Sword of Dawinno

Husathirn Mueri said, “A moment, if I may, Hresh.” The chronicler, who had been about to enter the House of Knowledge, halted on the steps and gave Torlyri’s son an inquiring look. Husathirn Mueri took the steps two at a time and was at Hresh’s side an instant later. He said in a low voice, “Do you know what’s going on in this city, Hresh?”

“In general or in particular?”

A quick smile. “You don’t know, then. Your brother’s out at the stadium this very minute, putting the army through its drills.”

Hresh blinked. It was only three days since the Presidium had voted to ratify the new alliance with the City of Yissou. Taniane and Thu-Kimnibol had spoken strongly in favor and only a few cautious ones like Puit Kjai had objected that the agreement would sooner or later drag Dawinno into war. More likely later than sooner, Hresh had thought then. But things seemed to be moving more quickly than he had expected.

“We have no army,” he said. “Only a city guard.”

“We have an army now. Thu-Kimnibol and his friends have put it together overnight. The Sword of Dawinno, it’s called. Your brother insists that we’re going to be at war with the hjjks any minute, and we have to get ready for it.” Husathirn Mueri made a hoarse sound that Hresh realized, after a moment, was laughter. “Imagine it! Half the city’s sitting in the Kundalimon chapels right now singing the praises of the insect Queen, and the other half’s out by the stadium getting ready to go and kill Her!”

“If there is war,” Hresh said slowly, “then of course we must be prepared to fight. But why does Thu-Kimnibol think—”

“The alliance with Salaman requires us to go to war, if Yissou is attacked.”

“I know what it requires. But the hjjks haven’t made any hostile moves.”

“Not yet.”

“Is there any reason to believe they will?”

Husathirn Mueri looked thoughtfully into the distance. “I have reason to think so.”

“Salaman’s been telling us for years that the hjjks mean to invade him. I gather that wall of his has gotten higher and higher until it looms over his city in the most incredible way. But meanwhile no invasion has ever come. All the supposed hjjk threats against him have been strictly in his mind. Why should things be any different now?”

“I think they are,” Husathirn Mueri said.

“Because Salaman has rejected the Queen’s offer of a peace treaty and we’ve ignored it?”

“That’s part of it. But my guess is that it’s only a small part. I think that there are those among us who are actively engineering a war by provoking the hjjks to take action against us.”

“What are you saying, Husathirn Mueri?”

“I could say it again, if you wish.”

“You’re making a very grave accusation. Do you have any proof?”

Husathirn Mueri stared again into the distance. “I do.”

“The Presidium should have it, then.”

“It involves a person or persons very close to yourself, Hresh. Very close.”

Hresh scowled. “All this ponderous hinting at conspiracies is annoying, Husathirn Mueri. Speak out frankly or let me be.”

Husathirn Mueri looked dismayed. He said in his most ingratiating way, “Perhaps I’ve been too forward. Perhaps I’m leaping to conclusions too swiftly. I hesitate to implicate those who may be innocent, at least at this point. But let me put it another way, shall I? There are certain great forces in the universe that are pushing us to war, is what I believe. It’s inevitable. Sometimes a thing simply is inevitable, the way the coming of the death-stars was inevitable. Do you understand me, Hresh?”

This was maddening, this pious philosophizing out of an unbeliever like Husathirn Mueri. But Hresh saw that he wasn’t going to get anything explicit or even coherent out of him. He was determined to be evasive and elliptical, and no amount of questioning could break through his defenses.

It was always a temptation, when you were talking with Husathirn Mueri, to want to probe him with your second sight, to see what meanings lay concealed behind his words. Hresh resisted it. Surely Husathirn Mueri would be prepared for such a thrust, and would have a counterthrust ready.

With some irritation Hresh said, “Well, may the gods spare us, but if the hjjks do strike against Yissou, then we’re bound to go to Salaman’s defense. That’s done and agreed. As for your talk of conspiracies, I regard that as mere talk until I have reason to think otherwise. But in any event, why be so troubled by Thu-Kimnibol’s army? If a war’s coming, should we go into it unprepared?”

“You miss the point, though you utter it with your own lips. Don’t you see? It’s Thu-Kimnibol’s army. If war’s this close, and I think Thu-Kimnibol’s correct that it is, then the responsibility for organizing an army belongs to the Presidium. There has to be an official mobilization. It can’t simply be a private patriotic venture of one powerful prince. Can’t you see that, Hresh? Or are you so blinded by your love for your half-brother that you’ve forgotten that he’s his father’s son? Do you want another Harruel here? Think about that, Hresh.”

Hresh felt a stab of shock.

In an instant the years dropped away from him, and he was a boy again, and it was the Day of the Breaking Apart. Here stood the folk of Koshmar’s tribe, and there, opposite them, were those who had opted to depart from Vengiboneeza with Harruel. Hresh’s mother Minbain, Harruel’s mate, was among them; but Hresh had just chosen not to go. “There are important things for me still to do here,” Hresh had said.

And Harruel swelled with wrath, and his powerful arm swung in sudden fury.

“Miserable boy! Flea-ridden little cheat!”

The blow was only a glancing one. But it was enough to knock Hresh off his feet and send him flying through the air. He landed in a heap, stunned and trembling. And stayed there until Torlyri went to him and lifted him and held him in her warm embrace.

“Think about it,” said Torlyri’s son now. “Is it your brother Thu-Kimnibol who’s drilling that army on the stadium grounds now? Or is it King Harruel?” Husathirn Mueri gave him a close, searching look. Then he turned and was gone almost at once.

As Hresh entered the vestibule of the House of Knowledge, haunted by all that Husathirn Mueri had told him and deep in thoughts of the anguished past and the foreboding future, Chupitain Stuld stepped out of one of the inner offices and said, “Shall I bring the artifacts from Tangok Seip up to your study now, sir?”

“The artifacts from Tangok Seip?”

“The ones the farmer found in the cave, after the mudslide. You said you’d look at them today.”

“Ah. Yes. Yes. Those tools, you mean.”

He tried to shake off the fog that had engulfed him. His mind was scattered from one end of the world to the other.

That cache of Great World artifacts, yes. Chupitain Stuld had been after him persistently for the past few days to examine those things. She was probably right, he supposed. It was weeks since their discovery and he hadn’t even bothered to look at them. Other preoccupations had distracted him completely. But Plor Killivash had said the find was important. The least he could do, he told himself, was take a look.

Chupitain Stuld was waiting for an answer.

“Bring them upstairs, yes,” he said. “In half an hour, will you? I have a few things to do first.”

He made his way up the spiral ramp and into his private chamber.

Somehow he is outside the building, on the parapet. Then, without even troubling to take the Barak Dayir from its pouch, he feels himself rising, floating off into the upper air, soaring above the city, climbing effortlessly higher and higher, beyond the clustering clouds, into the sky above the sky. Everything up here is black, streaked with scarlet. Streams of cool air rush past him like rivers. Tiny pellets of ice strike his fur. There are crystals of ice on his fingertips. He dances on nothingness.

Looking down, he can see everything, as if through a clear window in the darkness. The entire city lies open to his gaze.

He sees the stadium grounds, and the troops of the Sword of Dawinno marching in formation, while at their head the impressive figure of Thu-Kimnibol struts and prances, gesturing emphatically and barking commands.

He sees Nialli Apuilana walking in a park, moving like one lost in a dream. Mysteries shroud her soul. A bright crimson line of conflict runs through it as though it is splitting apart.

Behind her, a considerable distance behind, lurks Husathirn Mueri. He is a mystery too: obvious enough on the surface, hungry for power and pathetically obsessed with Nialli Apuilana. But what lies beneath? Hresh senses only a void. Can it be, such emptiness in the son of Torlyri and Trei Husathirn? There must be more within him than that. What, though? Where?

Hresh’s gaze moves on.

Here is his garden of captive animals, now. The furry enigmatic blue stinchitoles, the gentle thekmurs, the stanimanders. The twittering sisichils frisk as though they know he’s watching them. The stumbains — the diswils — the catagraks — all the multitudinous horde of wondrous creatures that Dawinno the Transformer has tumbled forth upon the face of the thawing Earth, and which Hresh’s hunters have brought together for him here.

The caviandis. There they are beside their stream, the two slender gentle creatures. How lovely the sleekness of their purple fur, the brightness of their thick yellow manes. They look up and see him in the sky far above, and they smile.

He feels the warmth of their spirits radiating toward him. She-Kanzi, He-Lokim: his friends, his friends. His caviandi friends.

Their wordless greeting comes floating up to him, and his wordless reply descends. They speak again, and he replies; and then he asks, and they answer. Without words, without concepts, even. A simple, silent communion of being, an ongoing exchange of spirit that could not possibly be expressed other than as itself.

— -

— -

— -

— -

— -

He knows by now they have no use for words as he understands words, just as “He-Lokim” and “She-Kanzi” are not names as he understands names. They live outside the need of such things, just as they and all their kind live outside the need for the building of cities, or the fabrication of objects, or any other such “civilized” thing. The otherness of them is the central fact of their nature: their strangeness, their non-Peopleness.

Their souls flood into his, and he into theirs, and suddenly there comes to him a vision within the vision he is having. He sees a second Great World upon the Earth, different from the first but no less glorious, a world not of six races but of dozens, of hundreds, of People and caviandis and stinchitoles and thekmurs, of sisichils and stanimanders and catagraks, of all the creatures that lived — united, locked in perpetual understanding sharing in everything, a world deeper and richer in its fullness than even the old Great World had been, a world that embraced everything that lived upon the Earth—

A sudden discordant voice within him asks:

Even the hjjks?

And he answers at once, without pausing to think:

Yes. Even the hjjks. Of course, the hjjks.

But then, considering it, he asks himself if the hjjks would in fact join any such new confederation of races. They had, after all, been part of the earlier one. And the Transformer has had all the hundreds of centuries since the time of the Great World to alter and elevate them. It might be that they have moved so far beyond the other races of the Earth now that they are incapable of joining them as equals in anything.

Was that so? Hresh wonders. Have they become gods? Is She a god, the great Queen of the hjjks?

In that instant, but only for an instant, his dreaming mind flashes northward into the bleakness of the cold lands, where the horizon is lit by a brilliant incandescent glow. And he beholds there the vast secret Queen, lying motionless in Her hidden chamber while She directs the destinies of all the millions of insect-folk, and, for all Hresh can tell, of the rest of the world as well. He feels the force and power of that immense mind, and of that great living machine, the Nest over which She rules. He observes the meshing of the parts, the weaving of gleaming pistons, the spinning of the web of life.

Then it is gone and he hovers again in the indeterminate void; but the tolling echo of that immensity lingers in him.

A god? Ruling over a race of gods?

No, he thinks. Not gods.

The Five Heavenly Ones, they are gods: Dawinno, Emakkis, Mueri, Friit, Yissou — the Transformer and Destroyer, the Provider, the Comforter, the Healer, the Protector.

And Nakhaba of the Bengs: he is a god. The Interceder, he who stands between the People and the humans, and speaks with them on our behalf. So old Noum om Beng had taught him, when he was a boy in Vengiboneeza.

And therefore it must be so, Hresh tells himself, that the humans also are gods, for we know that they are higher even than Nakhaba, and older than the Great World.

Perhaps they are the ones who brought the other five races of the Great World into being, the hjjks and the sea-lords, the mechanicals and vegetals, the sapphire eyes. Could it be? That they had grown weary of living alone on the Earth, the humans, and had created the others to join with them in a new great civilization, which would flourish for many years, and then perish as all civilizations perished?

Where are they, then, if they are gods?

Dead, like the sapphire-eyes and the vegetals and the mechanicals and the sea-lords?

No, Hresh thinks. For how can gods die? They have simply withdrawn from the world. Perhaps their own Creator has summoned them elsewhere, and they are building a new Earth for Him far away.

Or else they are still with us, nearby but invisible, biding their time, keeping themselves aloof while they await the working-out of their great plan, whatever that may be. And the hjjks, awesome though they are, are simply an aspect of that plan, not the designers and custodians of it.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

And if there is to be a new Great World, the hjjks must be part of it. We must turn to them as fellow humans, as Nialli Apuilana once had said. But now instead we are about to go to war with them. What sense does that make? What sense, what sense, what sense?

He can’t say. Nor can he sustain himself aloft any longer. His soul comes spiraling downward through the darkness, crashing toward the ground. As he falls from the skies Hresh looks toward the city that rises to meet him, and catches one final glimpse of his brother Thu-Kimnibol, proudly parading before his troops on the stadium grounds. Then he passes through some zone of incomprehensible strangeness; and when he is conscious again, he finds himself at his own desk, dazed, stunned.

His mind is in a whirl. Things are as they always have been for him. Too many questions, not enough answers.

The voice of Chupitain Stuld cut through his confusion. “Sir? Sir, I’ve brought the Tangok Seip artifacts. Sir? Sir, are you all right?”

“I — it — that is—”

She came rushing into the room and hovered before him, eyes wide with anxiety. Hresh scrambled to pull himself together. Fragments of dream circled and spun in the bedlam of his soul.

“Sir?”

He summoned all the serenity he could muster.

“A moment of reverie, is all — deep in thought—”

“You looked so strange, sir!”

“Nothing’s wrong. A moment of reverie, Chupitain Stuld. The wandering mind, very far away.”

“I could come back another time, if you—”

“No. No. Stay.” He pointed to the box she was holding. “You have them in there? Let me see. Inexcusable, that I’ve let them wait this long. Plor Killivash’s already studied them, you say?”

For some reason that produced a flurry of turmoil in her. He wondered why.

She began to lay the objects out on his desk.

There were seven of them, more or less spherical, each one small enough to be held with one hand. By their elegance of design and richness of texture Hresh knew them at once to be Great World work, each of them fashioned of the imperishable colored metals characteristic of the extraordinary craftsmen of that vanished era. The vaults of Vengiboneeza had yielded hundreds of devices like these. Some of them no one had ever learned how to operate; a few had produced one single startling effect and then had never functioned again; still others he had managed to master and use effectively for years.

Things like these were unearthed only rarely, now. This new cache was a remarkable find. It was a measure of the turmoil in his own soul that he’d left them to his assistants for so long, without bothering to examine them himself.

He looked at the seven objects but didn’t touch any of them. He knew the dangers of picking such things up without knowing which of the various protrusions on them would activate them.

“Does anybody have any idea what they do?”

“This one — it dissolves matter. If I touched this knob on the side, a beam of light would come out and dissolve everything between here and the wall. This one casts a cloak of darkness over things, a kind of veil that’s impossible to see through, so you could walk through the city and no one would notice you. And this one, it cuts like a knife, and its beam is so powerful we couldn’t measure the depths of the hole it cut.” Chupitain Stuld gave him a wary look, as if unsure that he was paying attention. She picked up another of the things. “Now, this one, sir—”

“Wait a moment,” said Hresh. “I see only seven instruments here.”

She looked troubled again. “Seven. That’s right, sir.”

“Where are the others?”

“The — others?”

“I seem to recall being told that there were eleven of these things, the day they were brought in. A couple of months ago, it was — during the rainy time, I remember — eleven Great World artifacts, that’s what you said, I’m sure of it, or perhaps it was Io Sangrais who told me—”

“I was the one, sir,” said Chupitain Stuld in a very small voice.

“Where are the other four?”

Distress had turned to fright in her, now. She moved quickly back and forth in front of the desk, moistening her lips, frantically grooming herself.

Hresh gave her just a minute jab of second sight. And felt the roiling fear within her, the shame, the contrition.

“Where are they, girl?” he asked gently. “Tell me the truth.”

“Out — on — loan—” she whispered.

“On loan? To whom?”

She stared at the floor.

“To Prince Thu-Kimnibol, sir.”

“My brother? Since when is he interested in ancient artifacts? What in the name of Nakhaba does he want with them, I wonder? How would he even have known they were here?” Hresh shook his head. “We don’t loan things, Chupitain Stuld. Especially new acquisitions that haven’t been properly studied. Even to someone like Prince Thu-Kimnibol. You know that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you authorize this loan?”

“It was Plor Killivash, sir.” A pause. “But I knew about it.”

“And didn’t tell me.”

“I thought it was all right. Considering that Prince Thu-Kimnibol is your brother, and—”

Hresh waved her into silence. “He has them now?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Why did he want them, do you know?”

She was trembling. She tried to speak, but no words would come.

Through Hresh’s mind ran Chupitain Stuld’s description of the artifacts that remained, the ones that Thu-Kimnibol hadn’t bothered to take. This one dissolves matter … This one casts a cloak of darkness … This one cuts like a knife, and its beam goes so deep we couldn’t measure it …

Gods! These were the devices that Thu-Kimnibol had chosen to leave behind. What sort of destruction were the other ones capable of working?

At this moment, he knew, Thu-Kimnibol was out drilling his army on the stadium grounds, getting ready for his war against the hjjks. It had taken him only a few days to assemble his troops.

And now he had his weapons, too.

Taniane said, “It’s not Thu-Kimnibol’s army, Hresh. It’s our army. The army of the City of Dawinno.”

“But Husathirn Mueri—”

“The gods confound Husathirn Mueri! He’s going to oppose us every step of the way, that’s obvious. But war is coming, beyond any question. And therefore I authorized Thu-Kimnibol to begin organizing an armed force.”

“Wait a minute,” Hresh said. He looked at Taniane as though she were some stranger, and not his mate of forty years. “ Youauthorized him? Not the Presidium?”

“I’m the chieftain, Hresh. We’re facing a crisis. It’s no time for long-winded debate.”

“I see.” He stared at her, scarcely believing what he heard. “And this war? Why are you so sure it’s on the way? You and Thu-Kimnibol and Husathirn Mueri too, for that matter. Is it all agreed? Has some kind of secret resolution to start a war been passed?”

Taniane was slow to reply. Hresh, waiting, sensed the same evasiveness coming from her that had emanated earlier from Husathirn Mueri, and even from Chupitain Stuld. They were all trying to hide things from him. A web of deception had been woven here while he slept, and they were desperately eager to keep him from penetrating it now.

She said finally, “Thu-Kimnibol obtained proof, while he was in Yissou, that the hjjks intend to launch an attack against King Salaman in the very near future.”

“Proof? What sort of proof?”

The evasiveness deepened. “He said something about having gone riding out into hjjk territory with Salaman, and coming upon a party of hjjks, and forcing them to surrender secret military plans. Or something like that.”

“Which they were conveniently carrying in little baskets around their necks. Personally signed by the Queen, with the royal hjjk seal stamped on them.”

“Please, Hresh.”

“You believe this? That the invasion of Yissou that Salaman’s been fretting about since the beginning of time is actually going to happen the day after tomorrow?”

“I do, yes.”

“What proof is there?”

“Thu-Kimnibol knows what it is.”

“Ah. I see. All right, let’s say the hjjks finally are going to invade. How timely for Salaman that this is going to happen right after he and my brother have concluded a treaty of mutual defense between Dawinno and Yissou, eh?”

“You sound so angry, Hresh! I’ve never heard you this way.”

“And I’ve never heard you this way, either. Dancing around my questions, talking about proof but not producing any, letting Thu-Kimnibol set up an army right here in the city without taking the trouble even to discuss it in the Presidium—”

Now she was staring at him as if he were a stranger. Her eyes were hooded, her expression was cold.

He couldn’t bear it, this wall of suspicion that had arisen between them suddenly, rearing as high as Salaman’s lunatic rampart. The urge came to him to ask her to twine with him, to join him in the communion that admits of no suspicion, of no mistrust. Then all would be made known between them; then once again they would be Hresh and Taniane, Taniane and Hresh, and not the strangers they had become to each other.

But he knew that she’d refuse. She’d plead weariness, or an urgent meeting an hour from now, or some other such thing. For if she twined with him she would have no secrets from him; and Hresh saw that she was full of secrets that she was determined not to share with him. He felt a great sadness. He could always find out everything he wanted to know by taking recourse to the Barak Dayir, he knew. The powers of the Wonderstone would carry him anywhere, even into the guarded recesses of Taniane’s mind. But the idea was repugnant to him. Spy on my own mate? he thought. No. No, I’ll let the city be destroyed and everyone in it, before I do that.

After a long silence Taniane said, “I’ve taken such actions as I deem necessary for the security of the city, Hresh. If you disagree, you have the right to state your objections in the Presidium. All right?” Her stony glare was awful to behold. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“Do you know, Taniane, that Thu-Kimnibol has gone behind my back to remove newly discovered Great World artifacts from the House of Knowledge for use as weapons?”

“If there’s a war, Hresh, weapons will be necessary. And there’s going to be a war.”

“But to take them from the House of Knowledge, without even telling—”

“I authorized Thu-Kimnibol to see to it that the army was properly equipped.”

“You authorized him to steal Great World things from the House of Knowledge?”

She eyed him steadily and unflinchingly. “I seem to remember that you used Great World weapons against the hjjks at the battle of Yissou.”

“But that was different! That was—”

“Different, Hresh?” Taniane laughed. “Was it? How?”

For Salaman it was a bad day atop the wall. Everything was unclear. A hash of harsh chattering nonsense clogged the channels of his mind. Vague cloudy images drifted to him now and then. A lofty tower which might signify Thu-Kimnibol. A flash of luminescent flame which perhaps stood for Hresh. A tough weatherbeaten tree, whipping about in a storm, which he thought might represent Taniane. And some other image, that of someone or something serpentine and slippery, impossible for Salaman to interpret at all. Things were happening in Dawinno today. But what? What? Nothing that he was picking up made sense. He tuned his second sight as keenly as he could. But either his perceptions were weak today or the transmissions from his spies were muddled beyond his ability to decode them.

He was in his pavilion, sweeping his sensing-organ from side to side in broad arcs. Casting his mind outward along it into the great empty spaces that surrounded Yissou, he trawled southward for news. On the far side of the wall, the whole city’s width away, stood his son Biterulve, seeking word from the north.

The new communications network was finally in place. It had taken all the winter to build it: finding the volunteers, training them, sending them out to establish the outposts that would masquerade as farms. But now he had his agents strung like beads along a line stretching southward nearly to the City of Dawinno, and north toward hjjk territory as far as seemed safe to intrude.

From all sides came the buzz and crackle of second-sight visions flooding toward him, relayed station by station along the line. The king concentrated the full force of his powerful mind on them. He came here every day at dawn now, to listen, to wait.

It wasn’t easy to achieve, this mind-transmission. The messages were always blurred and difficult to interpret, and often ambiguous. But what other way was there, short of having couriers ride constantly back and forth? At best the news they brought would be weeks late. That was unthinkable, now. Events were moving too quickly. If he had a Wonderstone as Hresh did, perhaps he could let his spirit rove hither and yon as he wished, peering into anything and everything. But there was only one Wonderstone, and Hresh had it.

Nothing was working for him today, though. The messages that were coming in were worthless, murk and mist, darkness and fog, no clarity at all. A waste of time and energy.

Well, so be it. Salaman let his weary sensing-organ go limp. A better day tomorrow, perhaps. He moved toward the stairs.

Then, like an agitated voice calling to him out of the sky, the presence of his son came to him.

— Father! Father!

— Biterulve?

— Father, can you hear me? It’s Biterulve!

— I hear you, yes.

— Father?

— Tell me, boy. Tell me!

There was silence then. Salaman felt fury rising. Plainly the boy had something important to tell him; but just as plainly, Biterulve’s messages and his own replies weren’t in coordination.

Salaman swung around and inclined his sensing-organ toward the direction Biterulve’s output was coming from. It was maddening: so inexact, so imprecise, mere approximations of meaning, images and sensations rather than words, which must be deciphered, which must be interpreted. But certainly there was news from the north. Salaman had no doubt of that. He could feel the boy’s unmistakable excitement.

— Biterulve?

— Father! Father!

— I hear you. Tell me what it is.

He sensed the boy struggling. Biterulve had great sensitivity, but it was of an odd kind, more keen over long distances than close at hand. Salaman hammered his fists against the brick walkway of the wall. He raised his sensing-organ until it could go no higher, and stroked the air with his outspread arms as though that way he could pull the message more clearly from his son.

Then came an image unquestionable in its clarity.

Bloodied bodies lying on a plain between two streams. Hundreds of them. Zechtior Lukin’s people.

Gaunt shadowy figures stalking among them, stooping now and then as though taking trophies.

Hjjks.

— They’re dead, father. The Acknowledgers. Every one of them. Can you hear me?

— I hear you, boy.

— Father? Father? It came through so clearly, through the northern relay posts. They’ve all been killed, in the hjjk country, in a place where rivers fork. All the Acknowledgers, completely wiped out.

Salaman nodded, as though Biterulve were standing right beside him. With a fierce burst of mental strength he hurled toward the boy a message so vehement that he was certain it would get through, to say that he had received and comprehended the news; and after a moment came confirmation from Biterulve, and the boy’s relief that he had managed to make himself understood.

At last, Salaman thought.

Now the wheels begin to turn.

The Acknowledgers had found the martyrdom they wanted. Time now to send the second force, the army of vengeance, which would probably meet martyrdom too, though far less calmly. And then to make ready for the all-out war that was sure to follow.

The king swung about again toward the south. For a moment he stood resting, breathing easily, gathering force. There could be no ambiguities or mysteries this time. The message had to travel along the relay chain with no distortion whatever, and get through to Thu-Kimnibol in distant Dawinno untainted by error.

He summoned the images. The bodies by the riverbank. The dark angular shapes moving among them. The new army, setting out from Yissou, bravely marching into the territory of the enemy to avenge the murder of Zechtior Lukin and his people. The violent collision of forces that was sure to come. The hjjks, aroused, issuing threats.

And then the gates of Dawinno opening, and an immense force of warriors emerging, with Thu-Kimnibol at their head.

Salaman smiled. He raised his sensing-organ and held it rigid. Power throbbed in it from the base of his spine and traveled to the tip. He closed his eyes and let the word burst forth from him. It soared southward from station to station in a bright blaze of energy, like a thunderbolt leaping across the vast spaces between the two cities.

— I invoke the terms of our alliance. We are at war.

Something is wrong. Nialli Apuilana, alone in her room in the House of Nakhaba, feels a sudden tremor, a heaving and a wrenching, as if the world has been pulled free of its base and is plummeting wildly through the heavens. She goes to the window. Everything seems quiet in the streets. But her second sight shows her the sun, suddenly huge, hanging just above her in the air with rivers of blood dripping down from it. In the blackness of the sky the icy green tails of comets whirl and spin.

She trembles and looks away and covers her eyes with her arms. After a time she prays, first to the Five, and then to the spirit of Kundalimon. And then, without knowing why, she thinks to reach out to the Queen as well.

Taking the hjjk star from its place on the wall, Nialli Apuilana holds it before her face, gripping it lightly by its sides. She peers into the open place at its center, narrowing the focus of her vision down until that small open place is the only thing she can see.

It is dark in there. Perhaps some sort of image lurks in the deepest part of the darkness, but she isn’t at all sure it is there, and, if it is, it is blurred and faded and unclear, a mere ghost of a ghost. Once the star had been able to show her the Nest, or so she had thought. But now—

Nothing. Only dark hazy shadows that elude her gaze, try as she might to penetrate them. Of the Nest there is no trace.

Where has it gone? she wonders.

Was it ever there at all?

— Do you want to see?a voice within her asks.

— Yes.

— What you see may change you.

— I’ve been changed so many times already. What harm can one more do?

— Very well. See, then, what is there to be seen.

It seems to her then that the shadows are lifting, that the darkness at the core of the star is brightening, that once more she can look through the place at the center of the star into the familiar subterranean corridors that had for a time been her home. Figures are moving about. She grips the star more tightly, stares more intently.

Figures, yes—

She sees them all too clearly now.

Monstrous. Weird. Distorted, heads like hatchets, arms like swords. Huge cold burning eyes like mirrors of black glass that throw back a thousand malevolent refractory images at once. Glistening beaks that snap and clack and thrust themselves like daggers at her through the opening in the star. Nialli Apuilana hears the harsh hissing sound of their mocking laughter. The star itself, that simple thing of plaited grass, is covered with sharp black bristles now. Its center is a dark hairy mouth, gleaming, gaping, a wet and slippery hole that makes soft insinuating sucking noises at her.

Something is pulling at her, trying to draw her down into the heart of the little plaited star.

The temptation to yield is powerful. Return to the Nest, yes, allow the bond to be rebuilt, sit at the feet of Nest-thinker, absorb his wisdom. Be taken before the Queen to experience Her touch. Wasn’t that what she wanted? Wasn’t it what she has always wanted? And Kundalimon. The greatest temptation of all. They’d give Kundalimon back to her. Come to us and Kundalimon will be yours again. Was it so? How tempting it sounds. How easy it would be to surrender. How good to return to the nest … how comforting … how safe.

No. No. How can it be, any of it?

Nialli Apuilana resists with all the strength of her soul.

Still she is drawn inward. But then gradually, as she continues to struggle, the force of the pull recedes. Shuddering, she throws the star aside and watches it skitter into a far corner of the room, where it comes to rest against the wall, tipped up on end. But even from there it calls to her. Come to us. Come. Come.

The nightmare images refuse to leave her. The beaks and claws, the bristling mouth, the myriad cold gleaming eyes. They blaze in her mind no matter how she tries to drive them from her. She thought she had fought and won this battle already, weeks ago. But no, no, the Queen’s grip is not yet fully broken.

She fights for breath. Her heart races. Her skin breaks out in cold fiery pricklings.

Her head swims with mysteries.

The walls of her little room seem to be closing in on her. Streams of blood flow across the floor. Severed limbs arise and dance wildly about her. A baleful green light comes pulsing up from the star that lies beside the wall. Thin bristly arms reach out through its center, groping for her. Harsh whispering voices, distant but seductive, call to her.

“No,” she says. “I’m not yours any more.”

She edges backward, keeping her eyes on the star as she moves slowly toward the door, fumbling behind herself to open it, then slipping hurriedly out into the hallway. She slams the door and holds it shut, leaning against it, drawing air deep into her lungs, waiting for the dizziness to go from her, for the pounding in her chest to subside.

Free. Free.

What next, though?

There is only one person in the city she can turn to.

I’ll go to my father, she thinks.

“They want to destroy the Queen, if they can,” Husathirn Mueri said. “You have my word on it.”

He was in the chapel of Kundalimon in the alleyway just off Fishmonger Street. It wasn’t one of the regular days of communion. Only Tikharein Tourb and Chhia Kreun were with him now: the boy-priest, the girl-priestess.

Somewhat to his own surprise, Husathirn Mueri had become a regular communicant of the new creed. What had begun as spying had become — was it faith? Or spying still? He was unsure. The chapel, that dingy place reeking of dried fish where sweaty lower-class folk came four times a week to cry forth their love of the Queen, had become his special refuge in the storm that was sweeping Dawinno. To Chevkija Aim he maintained that he was still conducting an investigation. Inwardly he wasn’t so clear that that was what he was doing.

The boy said, “But are they capable of such a thing? Is anyone? It seems hard to believe.”

“That the Queen can be destroyed?”

“That they would be so evil as to attempt it.”

“They’ll kill her,” said Husathirn Mueri, “as they killed Kundalimon. There are no limits to their hatred of Nest-truth.”

“Then it was Thu-Kimnibol who killed Kundalimon?” the girl said, amazed.

Husathirn Mueri turned to her. “Surely you knew that. It was done at his orders by the guard-captain, Curabayn Bangkea. Who then was murdered also, to keep him silent.”

“You know this to be true?” asked Tikharein Tourb.

“It’s true, all right. By all the gods, it’s true!” said Husathirn Mueri.

Tikharein Tourb stared at him a long while, as if weighing and judging him. The boy’s narrowed green eyes were cold as the ice that lies at the heart of the world. Only once before had Husathirn Mueri seen eyes like those: the bleak pale ones of the emissary Kundalimon. And even Kundalimon’s gaze at its most remorseless had held some hint of compassion. These eyes were wholly icy, wholly terrifying.

The fierce roaring silence went on and on. Tikharein Tourb and the girl stood silent, statue-still. After a time Husathirn Mueri saw the boy’s sensing-organ quiver and grow rigid and steal toward the side, until its tip was touching the tip of Chhia Kreun’s. They might almost have been entering into communion right before him. Perhaps they were.

Then the boy said, “Swear to me by your love of the Queen that it was Thu-Kimnibol who had Kundalimon murdered.”

“I swear it,” said Husathirn Mueri unhesitatingly.

“And that the purpose of this war that Thu-Kimnibol has stirred up is to bring about the destruction of the Nest and the death of Her who is our comfort and our joy.”

“That’s its purpose. I swear it.”

Again Tikharein Tourb stared. What a frightening child he is, Husathirn Mueri thought. And the girl also.

“Then he will die,” said the boy finally.

Hresh was in his garden of animals, sitting with small brightly colored beasts all about him. The two purple-and-yellow ones, the caviandis, were by his side, and he was gently stroking them. He glanced up as Nialli Apuilana came rushing in.

“Father—” she cried at once. “Father, I’ve had something strange happen — something so very strange—”

He looked at her in a bland incurious way, as though she had not said anything at all. His eyes were remote and his expression was milder even than usual. There was a great sadness about him that she had never seen before: he seemed bowed down under it, a beaten man, very old and frail.

That frightened her. Her own chaotic fears and confusions receded into the background. She had come here in terror and in need; but his need, she saw, was even greater than hers.

“Is something wrong, father?”

Hresh made a little shrugging gesture and slowly moved his head from side to side like some wounded beast. He seemed terribly far away. After a time he said, “It’s certain now. There’s going to be war.”

“How do you know?”

“I felt the signal just now, coming from the north. Perhaps you felt it too. There’ll be no holding it back. Everything is in place and the word has been given to begin.”

She stared at him blankly. “I’m not sure what you mean, father.”

“You don’t know about the alliance Thu-Kimnibol brought back with him from Yissou?”

She shook her head.

“We’ve agreed to help defend Salaman if he’s ever attacked by the hjjks. Which is about to happen — an attack provoked by Salaman himself, I suspect. Perhaps with some help from my brother. Once Yissou is invaded, our army will go north, and there’ll be all-out war.”

“Which is precisely what those two have always wanted.”

Hresh nodded. Tonelessly he said, “Much blood will flow, ours and theirs. Great sins will be committed. Hjjk armies will march through our cities putting them to the torch, or we’ll destroy the Nest, or perhaps both will happen. It makes no difference what happens in the end. Whether we win or lose, everything we’ve achieved will be destroyed.”

He looked forlorn and bereft. Nialli Apuilana wanted to hold him, to comfort him.

She said softly, “You mustn’t worry yourself like this, father. Salaman is dreaming. The hjjks won’t attack Yissou and there isn’t going to be any all-out war.”

“They invaded Yissou once,” Hresh said.

“That was different. Yissou was right on the path of a hjjk swarming-drive.”

“A what?”

“A swarming-drive. The Nest, great as it is, can hold only so many. A time arrives when the population has to divide. And then they come bursting out, thousands of them, millions sometimes, carrying a young Queen with them. And they march. For a thousand leagues if they have to, or sometimes more, until they reach the place where they mean to go. The gods only know how they decide where that place is. But they let nothing stop them until they’re there. And then they build a new Nest.”

Hresh looked up, his eyes alive for an instant with sudden interest in the old Hresh manner.

“And is this what was happening when they attacked Harruel’s settlement?”

“Yes. They probably didn’t have any specific intention of harming the settlement. But when they swarm they go marching blindly straight ahead, and nothing will turn them. Nothing.”

“Well, and if they swarm in the same direction again?”

“It won’t happen. They never swarm twice in the same direction. I know how eager Thu-Kimnibol is to have a war, and Salaman too. But they’ll be disappointed.”

“Let’s pray that they are.”

“Unless a war with the hjjks is something that the Five intend for us to have,” Nialli Apuilana said. “In which case, may Dawinno help us all. I tell you, though, father, that there’ll be no war.”

He stared at her, smiling in that strange new sad way of his. The caviandis turned also to look at her. There was a curious bright glow of — what? Sadness also? Compassion? — in their big gleaming violet eyes.

Hresh said, in a voice so soft she could barely hear him, “Despite all you say, I feel the war rushing toward us like a great storm, Nialli. Who can stop a storm?”

“I’ve lived in the Nest, father. I know the hjjks won’t ever arbitrarily launch a war against us. That isn’t their way.”

“And if we begin the war? We have an army now, do you know that?”

She caught her breath. “Since when?”

“It’s brand-new. Thu-Kimnibol organized it. They’re at the stadium right now, marching and drilling. Once armies exist, wars are easy to bring about.”

“Does Taniane know about this?”

“Yes. And approves of it.” Hresh smiled ruefully. “They have Great World weapons, taken from the House of Knowledge without my awareness or consent. Taniane finds that acceptable also.”

“She wants war?”

“She expects it, at least. Is resigned to it. Will give her wholehearted support to it.”

Nialli Apuilana stared at Hresh, horrified.

She could see the People’s armies streaming northward into the land of the hjjks, and hordes of hjjk Militaries coming forth to meet them.

A terrible clash, frightful carnage. Thu-Kimnibol unleashing his purloined Great World weapons and working great devastation. Whole legions of Militaries blown into vapor at the touch of a button. The hjjk forces, vast though they were, driven back, ever back, the invaders advancing triumphantly into the dark northern territories. Swarm after swarm of Militaries sent to meet them, called in from every Nest of the north, each in turn destroyed by the inexorable drive of the attackers.

The Nest in danger! The Queen!

Yes, the Nest of Nests besieged. Everything in confusion there, Nest-plenty lost, Nest-truth denied, Egg-plan set awry, the wise Nest-thinkers scurrying to take cover in the dust, Egg-makers and Life-kindlers trying to flee and hacked down as they ran, and at last, the most terrible assault of all, even the Queen of Queens Herself rooted out of Her deep chamber and put to death—

Unthinkable. For the second time that day the world swayed and reeled about Nialli Apuilana.

This war must not be, she thought.

She wanted to cry out, to rage and scream her defiance of the war-makers, to send warning to the Nest of the treachery of her people, send it by dreams or second sight or Barak Dayir or any other means she could find. And more. To throw herself in the path of the forces of Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman as they set forth into the sacred territories of the Queen, and by her own will and strength hold them back from this unlawful strife. She would prevent it if it cost her her own life.

She clenched her fists fiercely. She would do anything to defend the Queen and the Nest. She would—

She would—

She would do—

What?

Nothing.

Nothing.

It was all gone. She felt only a void where, a moment before, there had been white-hot wrath.

In one bewildering instant all her fury, all her indignation, had died away, leaving her in a strange suspended state, empty, baffled. Why should she care what happened to the Nest? Why was she so eager to sacrifice her life for the sake of the Queen?

And then, stunned, she realized that all those fierce and desperate thoughts that had come welling up so spontaneously out of her soul had had no substance behind them.

They were shams. Mere automatic responses, empty of true feeling. The last flicker of the old loyalty to the Queen that once had burned within her. But these were her people, here. This was her city.

Across her mind now, like a red line of fire, came the recollection of the horrors she had seen this morning when she had stared into the star of grass, the things that had sent her fleeing in chaos to her father for solace. The claws, the clicking beaks, the mocking alien eyes. She heard the hissing laughter, the whispers of seduction. And she knew now what that terrible vision had been telling her.

Once more she summoned the image of the disruption of the Nest by the triumphant armies of the People, the ruination of Nest-plenty, the savaging of Nest-truth, the thwarting of Egg-plan, the terrible destruction even of the Queen of Queens. She confronted it all, even that, bringing it to vivid life in her thoughts.

And to her astonishment, none of it mattered to her at all. She was unable to find that fiery indignation which the same images had kindled in her just a moment before. She was free. Today she had finished the task of breaking the spell at last.

What is it to me, if the Nest is destroyed? If the Five have willed our path and the path of the hjjks to collide, why, then it must happen, and so be it. So be it. And if the collision comes, my loyalty must be with my own.

Everything was clear to her now.

The thing she must mourn, if the war did come, was not the fate of the insect-folk whose advocate she had been so long, but rather the loss of the young men and women of the People — her People — who would perish in the campaign, dead long before their time, a tragic pointless waste. There was the real horror: the thought of their blood staining the bleak wastelands of the north for leagues in every direction.

“Nialli?”

Hresh’s voice, cutting through her thoughts like a voice from another world.

She made no response. Her mind churned with unaskable questions and inconceivable answers.

Who are these hjjks whom I have claimed to love?

Why, they are the creatures who stole me from my mother and father, and took me to a strange place, and transformed me into that which I was never meant to be.

Why did I want to defend them against my own kind?

Because they magicked my soul, and won me to their cause.

And Kundalimon, whom you loved? What about him?

I still love him. But they had done to him what they did to me, so that they could use him; and they would have used me through him, if he had lived.

“Nialli? Nialli?” Hresh again, calling her from the far side of the sky.

As though in trance she said, “Yes, father?”

“What’s happening to you, Nialli?”

She opened her eyes. “An awakening,” she said. “From a very long dream.”

The caviandis were close by her sides, warm and soft, nuzzling her. Gently she stroked them.

Hresh said, “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?”

“Yes. Yes. I’m fine.” She smiled. “Don’t be sad, father. The gods are still watching over us. They’re still guiding us.” Taking his hand in hers, she said, “I think I’ll go now, if that’s all right with you. I want to talk to Thu-Kimnibol.”

The warriors of the Sword of Dawinno were everywhere on the stadium field, running, jumping hurdles, dueling with blunt wooden swords. Thu-Kimnibol knew he had little time left to toughen them up. Any day now, the army that Salaman had sent into hjjk territory to avenge the death of his Acknowledgers would be set upon by the defenders of the Nest. Then the period of feinting would be at an end and the war would begin in earnest. Long before news came south of the destruction of Salaman’s expeditionary force, Thu-Kimnibol knew, his own army would have to begin marching north to rendezvous with the king at Yissou.

“Jump higher, you sleepy bastards!” That was Maju Samlor. Most of Thu-Kimnibol’s drillmasters were city guardsmen. “You run like pregnant women!” came another guardsman’s voice from the far side of the stadium. “Put some wind into it!” And in another corner a huge Beng decked out in an immense seven-horned helmet laughed so loudly he could be heard clear across the field, and sent three men whirling with one great sweep of his quarterstaff.

Thu-Kimnibol rose and applauded. The warriors needed encouragement. It was just as Esperasagiot had said of his xlendis, long ago when they were first setting out for Yissou: they were city-bred, with no experience of the long haul. Even the strongest of them needed to be hardened for the battle ahead.

There was irony in that. Thu-Kimnibol remembered his father telling him that in the long sleepy days of the cocoon the warriors had had machines to work out on, to keep their muscles from rusting. All day long they grunted and toiled over devices with names like the Wheel of Dawinno, the Loom of Emakkis, the Five Gods: and yet the thousands of years of cocoon life went by and there was never an enemy to face, sealed away in the mountainside as they were. Now the People lived out in the open, where enemies abounded everywhere. But even so city life was too comfortable. It had led them to grow soft.

“Jump!” Maju Samlor called again. “Higher! Stretch those legs! Keep your sensing-organ out of the way, you idiot!”

Thu-Kimnibol laughed. Then he looked up and saw Chevkija Aim approaching him down the rows of seats. The guard-captain saluted and said, “Dumanka’s here, lordship. And Esperasagiot and his brother.”

“Good. Bring them to me.”

The three men emerged from the passageway under the stands, Dumanka first, then the two Bengs. They offered gestures of respect. Esperasagiot said, “You know my brother, prince? A good man with a xlendi, he is. His name’s Thihaliminion.”

Thu-Kimnibol looked him over. Thihaliminion was a hair taller than Esperasagiot, with pure Beng fur of the brightest gold. He seemed two or three years younger than his brother. “High praise, if Esperasagiot thinks you know how to handle xlendis. This is the first time I’ve ever heard him admit that he isn’t the only man in the world who understands those beasts.”

“Prince!” Esperasagiot cried.

Thihaliminion inclined his head. “What I know, I know from him. He has been my teacher in xlendis. Just as Dumanka here has been my teacher in obedience to the gods.”

“Acknowledgers, are you? All three?”

“All three, prince,” Dumanka said. The quartermaster slapped his hands together gleefully. “And what peace and joy it is, the faith we hold! I’ll show you our little book, sir. Which I got in Yissou, from a certain meat-cutter, Zechtior Lukin by name. When you read it you’ll attain understanding of the great truth of the world, which is that all is as it is meant to be, that there’s no use railing against fortune, because it’s the gods who send us our fortune, and what point is there—”

“Enough, good friend,” said Thu-Kimnibol, holding up a hand. “Convert me another time. We have an army to train just now. For which you’ll be very useful.”

“Whatever your lordship asks,” said Dumanka.

“I heard something of your Zechtior Lukin when we were in Yissou,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “Or of his teachings, at any rate. It was Salaman the king who told me. Death isn’t anything to lament or regret, that’s the idea. For it’s part of the divine plan of the gods. And so we have to accept it unquestioningly, no matter what form it comes to us in. Do I have it right?”

“In a nutshell, you do,” said Esperasagiot.

“Good. Good. How many are there in Dawinno now who follow these Acknowledger teachings now, would you say?”

“Some two hundred, prince, and more of us all the time.” The wagonmaster glanced over his shoulder. “I see some of our people on this field right now.”

“And you three are the chief teachers?”

“I was the one that learned the creed in Yissou,” Dumanka said, “and taught it to Esperasagiot and Thihaliminion. They’ve been spreading it fast as they can.”

“Spread it even faster. I’ll be counting on you. I want all my men to be Acknowledgers by the time we march north. I want soldiers about me who have no fear of dying.”

He dismissed them.

The dull clangor of the wooden training-swords resounded like merry music on the drill-field. A bright vision sprang into Thu-Kimnibol’s mind: the Nest ablaze, hjjks strewn dying on the ground by the thousands, their beaks clacking impotently, the Queen writhing in Her death-throes—

“Sir?” Chevkija Aim again. “Nialli Apuilana’s here to see you.”

“Nialli? Why in the name of all the gods would she—” He grinned. “Ah. Yes. To lecture me about the evils of the war, I suppose. Tell her to come some other time, Chevkija Aim. Next week. Next year.”

“Very good, lordship.”

But Nialli Apuilana had come up right behind him. Chevkija Aim’s golden fur flared in irritation.

“The Lord Prince Thu-Kimnibol is busy now with—”

“He’ll see me.”

“He instructs me to tell you—”

“And I instruct you to tell him that his kinswoman the chieftain’s daughter has urgent business with him.”

“Lady, it’s impossible for you to—”

This squabble could go on all day. “It’s all right, Chevkija Aim,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “I’ll speak with her.”

“Thank you, kinsman,” Nialli Apuilana said, not particularly graciously.

It was so long since Thu-Kimnibol had seen her — not since his departure for Yissou — that she seemed almost a stranger to him. He was astonished by how much she had changed: not so much in the way she looked as in the aura, the vibration, that surrounded her. She seemed stronger, deeper, purged of the last of her girlishness. She radiated strength and passion, and a new maturity. Her soul burned with an unmistakable luminous glow. And there was a formidable regality about her now. It enfolded her like a glittering mantle. It gave her a fiery beauty. He had never seen that in her before. It amazed him now. He felt as though he were seeing her for the first time.

They confronted each other in silence for a long moment.

He said finally, “Well, Nialli? If you’re here to do battle with me, let’s get on with it. These are busy days for me.”

“You think I’m your enemy?”

“I know you are.”

“Why is that?”

He laughed. “How could you be anything other? We have troops here, preparing for war. The enemy we’ll march against is the Nest. Surely you know that. And you’re the one who stood up in the Presidium and told us all how wonderful and wise and noble the hjjks are.”

“That was a long time ago, kinsman.”

“You said that making war on them was unthinkable, because they’re such great civilized beings.”

“Yes. I said that. And in some ways it’s true.”

“In some ways?”

“Some, yes. Not all. I put it all too simply that day at the Presidium. I was very young then.”

“Ah. Ah, yes, of course.”

“Don’t smile at me in that patronizing way, Thu-Kimnibol. You make me feel like a child.”

“I don’t mean to do that. You hardly seem like a child to me, believe me. But I don’t have to be as wise as Hresh to realize that you’ve come here today — at the urging, I suspect, of Puit Kjai and Simthala Honginda and other such peace-loving types — to denounce me and the war that I’m about to launch against your beloved hjjks. All right. Denounce me, then. And then let me get on with what I have to do.”

Her eyes sparkled defiantly. “You don’t understand me at all, do you, Thu-Kimnibol? I’ve come to you today to offer my support and help.”

“Your what?”

“I want to join you. I want to go north with you.”

“To spy on us for the Queen?”

She shot him a blazing look, and he could see her choking back some hot angry retort. Then she said, in a frosty tone, “You don’t know a thing about the beings you’re going out there to fight. I’ve experienced them at the closest possible range. I can guide you. I can explain things to you as you approach the Nest. I can help you ward off dangers you can’t even begin to imagine.”

“You give me very little credit if you think I’m such a fool, Nialli.”

“And you give me very little, if you think I’d act as traitor to my own blood.”

“Do I have any reason to think you’d be anything else?”

Her gaze was icy. Her nostrils flared and her fur rose, and he saw her biting down on her lower lip.

Then, to his complete amazement, she extended her sensing-organ toward him.

In a deadly calm voice she said, “If you doubt my loyalty, Thu-Kimnibol, I invite you to twine with me here and now. And then you can decide for yourself whether I’m a traitor or not.”

This was strange country out here, five days’ journey to the north of Dawinno and then some days more inland. Hresh had never seen it before, and he doubted that many others had, either. There were no farming settlements on this side of the interior hills, and the main road from Dawinno to Yissou passed well to the west.

It was broken land, cut by canyons and gullies. Dry cool winds blew from the center of the continent. Earthquakes had shattered this region many times, and the passage of ancient glaciers had ground it to ruin again and again, so that the bones of the world lay exposed here, great dark stripes cutting through the soft reddish rock of the hillsides.

A single xlendi drew his wagon. It might have been wiser to take two; but he knew so little about handling xlendis that he had decided not to risk the difficulties he’d encounter if the pair turned out to be ill-matched. He let the xlendi amble at its own pace, resting when it felt like it.

He had taken just a little with him in the way of provisions, enough to see him through the first few days. After that he would depend on the countryside for whatever he needed.

Nor had he brought anything from the House of Knowledge, any of his books or charts or ancient artifacts. Those things no longer mattered. He wanted to leave everything behind: everything. This was to be the final adventure of his life, this pilgrimage. Best not to be impeded by baggage out of the past.

With one exception: the Barak Dayir, in its little velvet pouch, tied about his waist beneath his sash. At the very last, he hadn’t been willing to abandon that.

Day after day he rode calmly onward, allowing his path to choose itself. Constantly he scanned the horizon, hoping to catch sight of roving parties of hjjks.

Where are you, children of the Queen? Here is Hresh-full-of-questions, come to talk with you!

But he saw no hjjks.

He was, he supposed, somewhere close by the lesser Nest where Nialli Apuilana had been taken by her captors years ago. But if there were hjjks hereabouts, they were keeping themselves out of sight; or else they were so sparse in these parts that he hadn’t passed near their encampment.

No matter. Eventually he’d find hjjks, or they would find him, in good and proper time. Meanwhile he was content to wander on, this way and that, across the broken land.

This cool windy region seemed fertile, in its way. There were great trees with thick black trunks and wide-spreading crowns of yellow leaves, each spaced far from the next as if it would tolerate no competition, choking off any of its own kind that tried to sprout within its zone of dominance. Sprawling shrubs with white woolly leaves clung to the ground like a dense coating of fur. Other plants, basket-shaped ones with tightly interwoven branches, rolled and tumbled freely as though they were beasts of the field.

But if there were plants that looked like animals here, so also did Hresh see animals that might well have been plants. A whole grove of snaky green creatures stood on their tails in holes in the ground. They might well have been rooted where they stood. He watched them rising up suddenly to snap some hapless bird or insect from the air and coiling back down again, and never once saw one come all the way out of its den. Then there were others that were no more than huge mouths with vestigial bodies, propped immobile against rocks and uttering booming seductive cries that brought their prey to them as if in trance. He remembered having encountered some such creatures when he was a boy, on the journey from the cocoon to Vengiboneeza. They had almost lured him then; but now he was invulnerable to their sinister music.

Hresh had told no one that he was leaving Dawinno. He had gone around to speak one last time with those he cared for most, Thu-Kimnibol, Boldirinthe, Staip, Chupitain Stuld, and, of course, Nialli Apuilana and Taniane. But he had told none of them, not even Taniane, that what he was actually doing was saying farewell.

That had been hard, hiding the truth that way. Especially from Taniane. He had suffered for it. But Hresh knew that they’d try to stop him from going, if they were aware of what he had in mind. So he had simply slipped out of the city in the mists of dawn. Now, with Dawinno far behind him, he felt no regrets at all. A long phase of his life had ended, a new phase was beginning.

If he regretted anything, it was that he had built the city so well. It seemed to him now that he had led the People down the wrong path, that it had been a mistake to build the City of Dawinno in the image of magnificent Vengiboneeza, to try to recreate the Great World here in the New Springtime. The gods had cleansed the Great World from the Earth because it had run its course. The Great World had developed as far as it could. It had reached a stand-still point. If the death-stars had not come to shatter it, its perfection would have given way imperceptibly to decay. For a civilization, unlike a machine, is a living thing, which must either grow or decay, and there is no third alternative.

He had wanted the People to attain the grandeur of the Great World, which had been hundreds of thousands of years in the making, in one sudden leap. But they hadn’t been ready for that. They were, after all, only a single generation away from the cocoon. Under the pressures of that leap they had passed from that primitive simplicity into their own corruption and decay, with scarcely a pause for ripening into real humanity.

This evil war, for example—

A crime against the gods, against the laws of the city, against the essence of civilization itself. But he knew that nothing he could do would stop it.

And so he understood that he had failed. In the time that remained to him he would do what he could to atone for that. But he refused to mourn the errors that he had made, or those that others were about to make; for he had done his best. That was the one great consolation. He had always done his best.

“I remember the day you were born,” Thu-Kimnibol said in wonderment. “Hresh and I stayed up all night together, the night before, and—”

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t talk about what you remember. Don’t talk about when I was young.”

He laughed. “But am I just supposed to pretend, Nialli, that I’m not—”

“Yes. Pretend, if that’s what you have to do. Just don’t remind me that you were already grown up when I was born. All right? All right, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“But — Nialli—”

Then he laughed.

“Come here,” she said.

She pulled him close. He enveloped her in his arms. He was all over her, hands, lips, sensing-organ, touching, stroking, nibbling, murmuring her name. He was like a great river, sweeping over her, carrying her away. And she was letting herself be carried away. She had never expected anything like this. Nor had he, she guessed.

She wondered if she’d ever get used to the immensity of him. He was so huge, so powerful, so very different from Kundalimon. How strange that was, to be swallowed up in him this way. But also very pleasing. I think I can get used to it, given a little time. Yes, she thought, as she felt him trembling against her, and began to tremble herself. Yes, I definitely can get used to it.

The shape of the land was beginning to change. For the past few days he had had a ridge of low hills to his left and another to his right, with what seemed like an endless plain stretching between them. But now the two ridges were converging to form a narrow enclosed valley with no exit at its far end. Hresh halted beside a stream bordered with thick gray rushes to consider what he should do. It seemed pointless to proceed into that apparent cul-de-sac. Best to fall back, perhaps, and look for some way across the hills to the east.

“No,” came a voice that was not a voice, speaking words that were not words. “You will do better to go forward.”

“In truth, yes. It is the only way.” A second voice, addressing him in the silent speech of the mind.

Startled, Hresh looked around. After these days of unbroken solitude the voices had the impact of sudden thunder.

At first he saw nothing. But then he detected a flash of purple in the depths of the streamside rushes. The slender tapering snout of a caviandi, and then another, rose into view. Coming now from their hiding places, the lithe little fish-hunting creatures walked toward him unafraid, holding up their hands with delicate fingers outspread.

“I am She-Thikil,” said one.

“I am He-Kanto,” the other declared.

“Hresh is my name.”

“Yes. We know that.” She-Thikil made a soft small sound of friendship and put her hand into his. Her fingers were thin and hard, quick fish-catching fingers. He-Kanto took his other hand. And from them both came the invitation to communion of the sort that he had had in his own garden with the other pair, his captives, He-Lokim, She-Kanzi.

“Yes,” Hresh said.

Their souls came rushing toward his, and a surge of warmth and friendship leaped from them to him.

So kindness to one caviandi was kindness to all. When he had opened himself in communion to the two caviandis in his garden he had unknowingly enrolled himself in league with the entire caviandi race. These two had followed his wagon for days, secretly prodding the xlendi along the right path, the one that led to the Nest. Steering him away from places where perils lay hidden, guiding him toward grazing-grounds where beast and master could find fresh water and provender. His journey, Hresh realized, had been far less random than he had thought.

And now he knew he must not turn aside. The true path was ahead of him, into the narrowing valley.

Gravely he thanked the caviandis for their help. He had one last glimpse of their great dark shining eyes, gleaming at him from the tops of the rushes. Then the sleek little creatures sank down into that dense thicket of reeds and disappeared.

He returned to the wagon. He nudged the xlendi forward with a quick touch of second sight.

As the canyon narrowed, the stream that ran down its center grew swifter, grew wild and fierce, until by twilight it was sweeping along beside Hresh with a steady pounding roar. Looking ahead, he saw that the canyon was indeed open at the far end, but the opening was a mere slit through which the stream must be hurtling with cataract force.

Had the caviandis betrayed him? It seemed impossible. But how could he pass through that crack of an opening with his wagon?

He went onward, all the same.

Clearly now Hresh heard the thousand echoing and answering voices of the cataract. Overhead a great blue star had appeared in the sharp cool air and its reflection glittered in the stream. The path was so narrow now that there barely was room for the wagon beside the turbulent water. Here the ground trended slightly upward, which must mean that the bed of the stream cut ever deeper as it approached the opening ahead.

“Here he is at last,” said a dry voice that was like a whitening bone, a silent voice, a mind-voice. “The inquisitive one. The child of questions.”

Hresh looked up. Outlined against the deepening darkness of the sky was the angular figure of a hjjk, standing motionless and erect, holding in one of its many hands the shaft of a spear longer even than itself.

“Child?” Hresh said, and laughed. “A child, am I? No, friend. No. I’m an old man. A very weary old man. Touch my mind more carefully, if you doubt me, and you’ll see.”

“The child denies that he is a child,” said a second hjjk, appearing on the opposite side of the cliff that loomed above him. “But the child is a child all the same. Whatever he may think.”

“As you wish. I am a child.”

And indeed he was: for suddenly time fell inward on itself, and he was little wiry Hresh-full-of-questions again, scrambling hither and yon around the cocoon, plaguing everyone with his need to know, driving Koshmar and Torlyri to distraction, vexing his mother Minbain, irritating his playmates. All the weariness of the latter days dropped away from him. He was alive with his old furious energy and fearlessness, Hresh the chatterer, Hresh the seeker, Hresh the smallest and most eager for knowledge of all the tribe, who had hovered again and again by the hatch of the cocoon, dreaming of darting through one day into the unknown wonderful world that lay outside.

The hjjks began to descend the cliff, picking their way toward him over the jagged rock. He waited serenely for them, admiring the agility with which they moved and the way the light of the great blue star, which he realized now was only the Moon, glinted on their rigid, shining yellow-and-black shells. Five, six, seven of them came scrambling down. Not since his childhood had he seen a hjjk. He had thought them fearsome and ugly then; but now he saw the strange beauty of their lean, tapered forms.

The xlendi stood quite still, as if lost in xlendi dreams. One of the hjjks touched it lightly along its long jaw with a bristly forearm, and it turned at once and began to go forward. There was a dark cavern here, a mere crevice that Hresh had not noticed, which led through the heart of the cliff. Starlight was visible ahead. Hresh could hear the distant roar of the cataract as the xlendi plodded onward.

After a time they emerged onto a ledge on the cliff’s outer face. To Hresh’s right the stream, a milky torrent now, erupted through the crack in the rock and went plunging outward into space to land in a foaming basin far below. To his left a winding path led down the side of the cliff into a broad open prairie in which, in the darkness, nothing of consequence could be seen.

“The Queen has been expecting you,” a dry silent hjjk-voice said, as the wagon began its descent into that dark realm beyond.