The Queen of Springtime

1 The Emissary

As he came over the knife-edge summit of the bare rock-strewn hill and turned to descend into the warm green valley that was his destination, Kundalimon felt the wind change. For weeks it had been at his back, hard and dry and biting, as he journeyed from the interior of the continent toward its southwestern coast. But it was blowing from the south, now: a sweet soft wind, almost a caress, carrying a host of strange fragrances toward him out of the city of the flesh-folk down below.

He could only guess at what those fragrances were.

One was a smell that he supposed might be like that of the lust of serpents, and another something like the scent of burning feathers, and there was a third that he imagined was the smell of sea-things that have been brought in nets, angrily thrashing, to the land. And then one that might almost have been the smell of the Nest — the flavor of black root-earth from the deepest passageways below the ground.

But he knew he was deceiving himself. Where he was now could not have been farther from the Nest, its familiar odors and textures.

With a hiss and a jab of his heels Kundalimon signaled his vermilion to halt, and paused a moment, breathing deeply, sucking the city’s complex vapors deep down into his lungs in the hope that those strange fragrances would turn him to flesh again. He needed to be flesh, this day. He was hjjk now, in soul if not in body. But today he had to put aside all that was hjjk about himself, and meet these flesh-folk as if he truly were one of them. Which he had been once, long ago.

He would need to speak their language, such few scraps of it as he remembered from his childhood. Eat their foods, however much they nauseated him. And find a way to touch their souls. On him, much depended.

Kundalimon had come here to bring the flesh-folk the gift of Queen-love, the greatest gift he knew. To urge them to open their hearts to Her. Cry out to them to accept Her embrace. Beg them to let Her love flood their souls. Then, only then, could Queen-peace continue in the world. If his mission failed, the peace must end, and there would be warfare at last between flesh-folk and hjjk: strife, waste, needless death, interruption of Nest-plenty.

It was a war that the Queen did not want. War was never an integral and necessary aspect of Nest-plan except as a last resort. But the imperatives of Nest-plan were clear enough. If the flesh-folk refused to embrace the Queen in love, to allow Her joy to bring gladness to their souls, then war would be impossible to avert.

“Onward,” he told the vermilion, and the ponderous scarlet beast went shambling forward, down the steep hillside, into the lushly vegetated valley.

In just a few hours now he would reach the City of Dawinno, the great southern capital, the mother-nest of the flesh-folk. Where that race’s largest swarm — hisrace, once, but no more — had its home.

Kundalimon stared in mingled wonder and disdain at the scene before him. The richness of it all was awesome; and yet something in him scorned this soft place, felt a dark and potent contempt for its superabundance. Wherever he glanced, there was such lavishness as made his head throb. All that foliage, dewy and shining in the morning light! Those golden-green vines, madly profligate, climbing tremendous trees with lunatic energy! From the boughs of squat long-armed shrubs there dangled heavy red fruits that looked as though they could quench your thirst for a month. Thick, sultry bushes with furry blue-tinged leaves sprouted absurdly huge clusters of shimmering lavender berries. The grass, close-packed and succulent with bright scarlet blades, seemed to be offering itself eagerly for the delight of hungry wanderers.

And the gaudy flocks of plump noisy birds, pure white with startling bands of crimson on their huge beaks — the small clamorous big-eyed beasts scrambling in the underbrush — the little winged insects flashing wings of rainbow color—

Too much, Kundalimon thought, too much, too much, much much too much. He missed the austerity of his northern homeland, the dry sparse plains where a patch of withered grass was cause for song, and one met one’s food with proper reverence, knowing how lucky one was to have this pouchful of hard gray seeds, this strip of dried brown meat.

A land like this, where all manner of provender lay everywhere about for the mere taking, seemed undisciplined and overloving. A sloppy easy place that had the look of a paradise: but in the final truth it must surely do harm to its unsuspecting inhabitants in the guise of benefit. Where the nourishment is too easy, soul-injury is the inevitable result. In a place like this, one can starve faster with a full gut than an empty one.

And yet this very valley was the place where he had been born. But it had had little time to place its imprint on him. He had been taken from it too young. This was Kundalimon’s seventeenth summer, and for thirteen of those years he had dwelled among the servants of the Queen in the far north. He was of the Nest now. Nothing was flesh about him except his flesh itself. His thoughts were Nest-thoughts. His soul was a Nest-soul. When he spoke, the sounds that came most readily to his tongue were the harsh clicks and whispers of hjjk speech. Still, much as he would deny it, Kundalimon knew that beneath all that lay the inescapable truth of the flesh. His soul might be of the Nest but his arm was flesh; his heart was flesh; his loins were flesh. And now at last he was returning to this place of flesh where his life had begun.

The flesh-folk city was a maze of white walls and towers, cradled in rounded hills beside an immense ocean, just as Nest-thinker had said. It soared and swooped like some bizarre giant sprawling organism over the high green ridges that flanked the great curving bay.

How strange to live above the ground in that exposed way, in such a dizzying host of separate structures all tangled together. All of them so rigid and hard, so little like the supple corridors of the Nest. And those strange gaping areas of open space between them.

What an alien and repellent place! And yet beautiful, in its fashion. How was that possible, repellent and beautiful both at once? For a moment his courage wavered. He knew himself to be neither flesh nor Nest and he felt suddenly lost, a creature of the indeterminate mid-haze, belonging to neither world.

Only for a moment. His fears passed. Nest-strength reasserted itself in him. He was a true servant of the Queen; how then could he fail?

He threw back his head and filled his lungs with the warm aromatic breeze from the south. Laden as it was with city-smells, with flesh-folk smells, it stirred his body to quick hot response: flesh calling to flesh. That was all right, Kundalimon thought. I am flesh; and yet I am of the Nest.

I am the emissary of the Queen of Queens. I am the speaker of the Nest of Nests. I am the bridge between the worlds.

He made a joyous clicking sound. Calmly he rode forward. After a time he saw tiny figures in the distance, flesh-folk, looking his way, pointing, shouting. Kundalimon nodded and waved to them, and spurred his vermilion onward toward the place called Dawinno.

A day’s ride to the south and east, in the swampy lakelands on the far side of the coastal hills that lay inland of the City of Dawinno, the hunters Sipirod, Kaldo Tikret, and Vyrom moved warily through the fields of luminous yellow moss-flower. A heavy golden mist shimmered in the air. It was the pollen of the male moss-flower, rising in thick gusts to seek the female fields farther to the south. A string of long, narrow phosphorescent lakes, choked with stringy blue algae, stretched before them. The time was early morning. Already the day was stiflingly hot.

Old Hresh the chronicler had sent them out here. He wanted them to bring him a pair of caviandis, the lithe quick fish-hunting creatures that lived in watery districts like this.

Caviandis were harmless, inoffensive animals. But not much else in this region was harmless, and the three hunters moved with extreme caution. You could die quickly in these swamps. Hresh had had to promise a thick wad of exchange-units to get them to take on the task at all.

“Does he want to eat them, do you think?” Kaldo Tikret asked. He was stubby and coarse, a crossbreed, with sparse chocolate fur tinged with the gold of the Beng tribe, and dull amber eyes. “I hear that caviandi is tasty stuff.”

“Oh, he’ll eat them, all right,” said Vyrom. “I can see it from here, the whole picture. He and his lady the chieftain, and their crazy daughter, sitting down at table together in their finest robes, yes. Feasting on roast caviandi, cramming it in with both their hands, swilling down the good wine.” He laughed and made a broad, comfortably obscene gesture, switching his sensing-organ briskly from side to side. Vyrom was gap-toothed and squint-eyed, but his body was long and powerful. He was the son of the sturdy warrior Orbin, who had died the year before. He still wore a red mourning band on his arm. “That’s how they live, those lucky rich ones. Eat and drink, eat and drink, and send poor fools like us out into the lakelands to snare their caviandis for them. We should catch an extra caviandi for ourselves, and roast it on our way back, as long as we’ve come all this way to get some for Hresh.”

“Fools indeed is what you are,” Sipirod said, and spat. Sipirod was Vyrom’s mate, sinuous and quick-eyed, a better hunter than either of the others. She was of the Mortiril tribe, a small one long since swallowed up in the city. “The two of you. Didn’t you hear the chronicler say that he wanted the caviandis for his science? He wants to study them. He wants to talk to them. He wants them to tell him their history.”

Vyrom guffawed. “What kind of history can caviandis have? Animals, that’s all they are.”

“Hush,” said Sipirod harshly. “There are other animals here who’d gladly eat your flesh today. Keep your wits on your work, friend. If we’re smart, we’ll come out of this all right.”

“Smart and lucky,” Vyrom said.

“I suppose. But smart makes lucky happen. Let’s get moving.”

She pointed ahead, into the steamy tropical wilderness. Diamond-eyed khut-flies half the size of a man’s head buzzed through the yellow air, trapping small birds with lightning swoops of their sticky tendrils and sucking the juices from them. Coiling steptors dangled by their tails from the branches of oily-barked trees, harrowing the black waters of the swampy lakes for fish. A long-beaked round creature with mud-colored fur and eyes like green saucers, standing high on naked stalk-like legs like stilts, waded through the shallows, scooping up struggling gray mud-crawlers with clumsy pouncing grabs of surprising efficiency. Far away, something that must have been of terrible size bellowed again and again, an ominous low rumbling sound.

“Where are all these caviandis?” Vyrom asked.

“By fast-flowing streams,” said Sipirod. “Such as feed these filthy sluggish lakes here. We’ll see a few of them on the other side.”

“I’d be glad to be done with this job in an hour,” Kaldo Tikret said, “and get myself back to the city in one piece. What idiocy, risking our lives for a few stinking exchange-units—”

“Not so few,” Vyrom said.

“Even so. It’s not worth it.” On the way out, they had talked of their chances of running into something ugly here. Did it make sense, dying for a few exchange-units? Of course not. But that was how it was: you liked to eat regularly, you went hunting where they told you to hunt, and you caught what they wanted you to catch. That was how it was. They tell us, we do. “Let’s get it over with,” Kaldo Tikret said.

“Right,” said Sipirod. “But first we have to cross the swamp.”

She led the way, tiptoeing as if she expected the spongy earth to swallow her if she gave it her full weight. The pollen became thicker as they moved southward toward the nearest of the lakes. It clung to their fur and blocked their nostrils. The air seemed tangible. The heat was oppressive. Even during the bleak days of the Long Winter this must have been a land of mild weather, and here, as the New Springtime surged yearly toward greater warmth, the lake country lay in the grip of an almost unbearable sultriness.

“You see any caviandis yet?” Vyrom asked.

Sipirod shook her head. “Not here. By the streams. The streams.”

They went onward. The distant rumbling bellow grew louder.

“A gorynth, sounds like,” Kaldo Tikret said moodily. “Maybe we ought to head in some other direction.”

“There are caviandis here,” said Sipirod.

Kaldo Tikret said, scowling, “And we’re risking our lives so the chronicler will have his caviandis to study. By the Five, it must be their coupling he wants to study, don’t you think?”

“Not him,” said Vyrom, with a laugh. “I’ll bet he doesn’t care a hjjk’s turd for coupling, that one.”

“He must have, at least once,” Kaldo Tikret said. “There’s Nialli Apuilana, after all.”

“That wild daughter of his, yes.”

“On the other hand, did he have anything to do with the making of her? If you ask me, Nialli Apuilana sprouted in Taniane’s womb without any help from Hresh. There’s nothing about her that’s his. They look like sisters, that pair, not mother and daughter.”

“Be quiet,” Sipirod said, giving the two men a louring look. “All this chatter does us no good here.”

Kaldo Tikret said, “But they say Hresh is too deep in his studies and his spells to spare any time for coupling. What a waste! I tell you, if I could have either one in my bed for an hour, the mother or the daughter—”

“Enough,” said Sipirod more sharply. “If you don’t have any respect for the chieftain or her daughter, at least show some for your own neck. Those are treasonous words. And we have work to do. See, there?”

“Is that a caviandi?” Vyrom murmured.

She nodded. A hundred paces ahead, where a swift narrow stream flowed into the stagnant algae-fouled lake, a creature the size of a half-grown child crouched by the water’s edge, trolling for fish with quick sweeps of its large hands. Its purple body was slender, with a stiff mane of yellow hair standing up along its neck and spine. Sipirod beckoned to the men to be still and began to creep up silently behind it. At the last moment the caviandi, taken altogether by surprise, looked around. It made a soft sighing sound and huddled frozen where it was.

Then, rising on its haunches, the creature held up its hands in what might have been a gesture of submission. The caviandi’s arms were short and plump, and its outstretched fingers seemed not very different from those of the hunters. Its eyes were violet-hued and had an unexpected gleam of intelligence in them.

No one moved.

After a long moment the caviandi bolted suddenly and attempted to run for it. But it made the mistake of trying to enter the forest behind it instead of going into the lake, and Sipirod was too quick. She rushed forward, diving and sliding along the muddy ground, leaving a track behind her. Catching the animal by the throat and midsection, she swung it upward, holding it aloft. It squealed and kicked in anguish until Vyrom came up behind her and popped it into a sack. Kaldo Tikret tied the sack shut.

“That’s one,” said Sipirod with satisfaction. “Female.”

“You stay here and guard it,” Vyrom said to Kaldo Tikret. “We’ll go find us another one. Then we can get out of this place.”

Kaldo Tikret wiped a clot of yellow moss-pollen from his shaggy muzzle. “Be quick about it. I don’t like standing here by myself.”

“No,” said Vyrom, jeering. “Some hjjks might sneak up on you and carry you away.”

“Hjjks? You think I’m worried about hjjks?” Kaldo Tikret laughed. In quick bold hand-movements he drew the stark outline of one of the insect-men in the air, the towering elongated body, the sharp constrictions between head and thorax, thorax and abdomen, the long narrow head, the jutting beak, the jointed limbs. “I’d tear the legs right off any hjjk who tried to give me trouble,” he said, acting it out in fierce pantomime, “and stuff them into its bunghole. What would hjjks be doing in country this hot, though? But there are dangers enough. Make it quick, will you?”

“Quick as we can,” said Sipirod.

But their luck had changed. An hour and a half she and Vyrom trudged futilely through the swamps, until their fur was miserably soggy and stained a bright yellow everywhere. The moss-flowers, tirelessly pumping forth their pollen, turned the sky dark with it, and everything that was phosphorescent or luminescent in the jungle began to glow and pulsate. Some lantern-trees lit up like beacons and the moss itself gleamed brightly and somber bluish radiance came from the lakes. Of other caviandis they found none at all.

After a time they turned back. As they neared the place where they had left Kaldo Tikret, they heard a sudden hoarse cry for help, strange and strangled-sounding.

“Hurry!” Vyrom cried. “He’s in trouble.”

Sipirod caught her mate by the wrist. “Wait.”

“Wait?”

“If something’s wrong, no sense both of us plunging into it together. Let me go up ahead and see what’s happening.”

She slipped through the underbrush and stepped out into the clearing. Out of the lake rose a gorynth’s black shining neck, perhaps that of the same monster they had heard hooting earlier. The huge creature’s body lay submerged. Only its curving upper surface was visible, like a row of sunken barrels; but its neck, five times the length of a man and ornamented by triple rows of blunt black spines, arched up and outward and down again, and at the end of it was Kaldo Tikret, caught in its powerful jaws. He was still calling for help, but more feebly, now. In another moment he would be under the water.

“Vyrom!” she shouted.

He came running, brandishing his spear. But where to hurl it? What little of the gorynth’s body could be seen was heavily armored with thick overlapping scales that would send his spear bouncing aside. The long neck was more vulnerable, but a difficult target. Then even that disappeared, and Kaldo Tikret with it, down into the dark turbid water. Black bubbles came upward.

The water churned for a time. They watched in silence, uneasily grooming their fur.

Abruptly Sipirod said, “Look. Another caviandi, over there by the sack. Probably trying to free its mate.”

“Aren’t we going to try to do anything for Kaldo Tikret?”

She made a chopping gesture. “What? Jump in after him? He’s done for. Don’t you understand that? Forget him. We have caviandis to catch. That’s what we’re paid for. Faster we find the second one, faster we can start getting ourselves out of this wretched place and back to Dawinno.” The black surface of the lake began just then to grow still. “Done for, yes. Just as you said before: smart and lucky, that’s what you have to be.”

Vyrom shivered. “Kaldo Tikret wasn’t lucky.”

“Not very smart, either. Now, if I slip around to the side, while you come up behind me with the other sack—”

In central Dawinno, the official sector, a workroom on the second sublevel of the House of Knowledge: bright lights, cluttered laboratory benches, fragments of ancient civilizations scattered around everywhere. Plor Killivash delicately presses the firing-stud on the small cutting tool in his hand. A beam of pale light descends and bathes the foul-smelling, misshapen lump of he-knew-not-what, big as a bushel and tapered like an egg, that he has been brooding over all week. He focuses it and makes a quick shallow cut, and another, and another, slicing a fine line in its outer surface.

A fisherman had brought the thing in the week before, insisting that it was a Great World relic, a treasure-chest of the ancient sea-lord folk. Anything that might be sea-lord material was Plor Killivash’s responsibility. Its surface was slimy with a thick accretion of sponges and coral and soft pink algae, and sour dirty sea-water dripped constantly from its interior. When he rapped it with a wrench it gave off a hollow thudding sound. He had no hope for it at all.

Perhaps if Hresh had been around he might have felt less disheartened. But the chronicler was away from the House of Knowledge this day, calling at the villa of his half-brother Thu-Kimnibol. Thu-Kimnibol’s mate, the lady Naarinta, was seriously ill; and Plor Killivash, who was one of three assistant chroniclers, was as usual finding it hard to take his work seriously in Hresh’s absence. Somehow when he was on the premises Hresh managed to infuse everyone’s labors with a sense of important purpose. But the moment he left the building, all this pushing about of the sad shards and scraps of history became a mere absurdity, an empty pointless grubbing in the rubble of a deservedly forgotten antiquity. The study of the ancient days began to seem a meaningless pastime, a miserable airless quest into sealed vaults containing nothing but the stink of death.

Plor Killivash was a sturdy burly man of Koshmar descent. He had been to the University, and was very proud of that. Once he had had some hope of becoming head chronicler himself some day. He was sure he had the inside track, because he was the only Koshmar among the assistants. Io Sangrais was Beng, and Chupitain Stuld belonged to the little Stadrain tribe.

They were University people too, of course; but there were good political reasons for keeping the chroniclership away from a Beng, and nobody imagined that it would ever go to anyone from so trifling a group as the Stadrains. But far as Plor Killivash cared these days, they could have it, either one of them. Let someone else be head chronicler after Hresh, that was how Plor Killivash felt nowadays. Let someone else supervise the task of hacking through these millennia-thick accumulations of rubble.

Once, like Hresh before him, he had felt himself possessed by an almost uncontrollable passion for penetrating and comprehending the mysteries of the vast pedestal of Earthly history atop which this newborn civilization that the People had created sat, like a pea atop a pyramid. Had longed to mine deep, digging beyond the icy barrenness of the Long Winter period into the luxurious wonder of the Great World. Or even — why set limits? why any limits at all? — even into the deepest layers of all, into those wholly unknown empires of the almost infinitely remote era of the humans, who had ruled the Earth before the Great World itself had arisen. Surely there must be human ruins left down there, somewhere far below the debris of the civilizations that had followed theirs.

It had seemed so wonderfully appealing. To live billions of lives extending across millions of years. To stand upon old Earth and feel that you had been present when it was the crossroads of the stars. Flood your mind with strange sights, strange languages, the thoughts of other minds of unspeakable brilliance. Absorb and comprehend everything that had ever been, on this great planet that had seen so very much in its long span, realm piled upon realm back to the dawn of history.

But he had been a boy then. Those were a boy’s thoughts, unfettered by practical considerations. Now Plor Killivash was twenty and he knew just how difficult it was to make the lost and buried past come alive. Under the harsh pressures of reality, that fiery passion to uncover ancient secrets was slipping from him, just as you could see it going even from Hresh himself, year by year. Hresh, though, had had the help of miraculous Great World devices, now no longer usable, to give him visions of the worlds that had existed before this world. For one who had never had the advantage of such wondrous things, the work of a chronicler was coming to seem nothing but doleful dreary slogging, carrying with it much frustration, precious little reward.

Somber thoughts on a somber day. And somberly Plor Killivash made ready to cut open the artifact from the sea.

The slim figure of Chupitain Stuld appeared in the doorway. She was smiling, and her dark violet eyes were merry.

“Still drilling? I was sure you’d be inside that thing by now.”

“Just another little bit to go. Stick around for the great revelation.”

He tried to sound lighthearted about it. It wouldn’t do to let his gloom show through.

She had her own frustrations, he knew. She too felt increasingly adrift amidst the mounded-up fragments of crumbled and eroded antiquity that the House of Knowledge contained.

Glancing at her, he said, “What’s happening with those artifacts you’ve been playing with? The ones the farmers found in Senufit Gorge.”

Chupitain Stuld laughed darkly. “That box of junk? It’s all so much sand and rust.”

“I thought you said it was from a pre-Great World level seven or eight million years old.”

“Then it’s sand and rust seven or eight million years old. I was hoping you were having better luck.”

“Some chance.”

“You never can tell,” Chupitain Stuld said. She came up beside the workbench. “Can I help?”

“Sure. Those tractor clamps over there: bring them into position. I’ve just about sawed through the last of it now, and then we can lift the top half.”

Chupitain Stuld swung the clamps downward and fastened them. Plor Killivash made the final intensity adjustment on his cutter. His fingers felt thick and coarse and clumsy. He found himself wishing Chupitain Stuld had stayed in her own work area. She was lovely to behold, small and delicate and extremely beautiful, with the soft lime-green fur that was common in her tribe. Today she wore a yellow sash and a mantle of royal blue, very elegant. They had been coupling-partners for some months now and even had twined once or twice. But all the same he didn’t want her here now. He was convinced that he was going to bungle things as he made the last incision and he hated the idea that she’d be watching as he did.

Well. No more stalling, he tells himself. Checks his calibrations one last time. Draws his breath in sharply. At last forces himself to press the trigger. The beam licks out, bites into the artifact’s shell-like wall. One quick nibble. He cuts the beam off. A dark line of severance has appeared. The upper half of the object moves minutely away from the lower half.

“You want me to pull up on the tractor harness?” Chupitain Stuld asked.

“Yes. Just a little.”

“It’s giving, Plor Killivash! It’s going to lift!”

“Easy, now — easy—”

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this thing’s full of sea-lord amulets and jewels! And maybe a book of history of the Great World. Written on imperishable plates of golden metal.”

Plor Killivash chuckled. “Why not a sea-lord himself, fast asleep, waiting to be awakened so he can tell us all about himself? Eh?”

The halves were separating. The weighty upper one rose a finger’s-breadth’s distance, another, another. A burst of sea-water came cascading out as the last inner seal broke.

For an instant Plor Killivash felt a flicker of the excitement he had felt when he was new here, five or six years before, and it had seemed every day that they were making wondrous new inroads into the mysteries of the past. But the odds were that this thing was worthless. There was very little of the Great World left to find, seven thousand centuries after its downfall. The glaciers grinding back and forth across the face of the land had done their work all too well.

“Can you see?” Chupitain Stuld asked, trying to peer over the top of the opened container.

“It’s full of amulets and jewels, all right. And a whole bunch of fantastic machines in perfect preservation.”

“Oh, stop it!”

He sighed. “All right. Here — look.”

He scooped her up to perch on his arm, and they looked in together.

Inside were nine leathery-looking translucent purplish globes, each the size of a man’s head, glued to the wall of the container by taut bands of a rubbery integument. Dim shapes were visible within them. Organs of some kind, looking shrunken and decayed. A fierce stench of rot came forth. Otherwise nothing. Nothing but a coating of moist white sand along the sides of the container, and a shallow layer of opaque water at the bottom.

“Not sea-lord artifacts, I’m afraid,” Plor Killivash said.

“No.”

“The fisherman thought he saw the broken stone columns of a ruined city sticking out of the sand at the bottom of the bay in the place where he dredged this thing up. He must have had a little too much wine with his lunch that day.”

Chupitain Stuld stared into the opened container and shuddered. “What are they? Some kind of eggs?”

Plot Killivash shrugged.

“This whole thing was probably one gigantic egg, and I’d hate to meet the creature that laid it. Those things in there are little sea-monster embryos, I suppose. Dead ones. I’d better make a record of this and get them out of here. They’ll begin to reek pretty soon.”

There was a sound behind him. Io Sangrais peered in from the hallway. His brilliant red Beng eyes were glittering with amusement. Io Sangrais was sly and playful, a quick easy-spirited young man. Even the tribal helmet that he wore was playful, a close-fitting cap of dark blue metal with three absurd corkscrew spirals of lacquered red reed-stems rising wildly from it.

“Hola! Finally got it open, I see.”

“Yes, and it’s a wonderful treasure-house, just as I was expecting,” Plor Killivash said dourly. “A lot of rotten little unhatched sea-monsters. One more great triumph for the bold investigators of the past. You come to gloat?”

“Why would I want to do that?” Io Sangrais asked. His voice was ripe with mock innocence. “No, I came down here to tell you about the great triumph I’ve just pulled off.”

“Ah. Yes. You’ve finally finished translating that old Beng chronicle of yours, and it’s full of spells and enchantments that turn water into wine, or wine into water, whichever you happen to prefer at the moment. Right?”

“Save your sarcasm. It turns out not to be a Beng chronicle, just one from some ninth-rate little tribe that the Bengs swallowed long ago. And what it is is a full and thorough descriptive catalogue of the tribe’s collection of sacred pebbles. The pebbles themselves vanished ten thousand years ago, you understand.”

Chupitain Stuld giggled. “Much rejoicing in the land. The unraveling of the mysteries of the past by the skilled operatives of the House of Knowledge goes on and on at the customary stupendous pace.”

In the Basilica that afternoon it was Husathirn Mueri’s turn to have throne-duty under the great central cupola, a task he shared in daily rotation with the princes Thu-Kimnibol and Puit Kjai. He was wearily hearing the petitions of two vociferous grain-merchants seeking redress from a third, who perhaps had cheated them and perhaps had not, when word came to him of the strange visitor who had arrived in the city.

No less a person than the captain of the city guard, Curabayn Bangkea, brought the news: a man of hearty stature and swaggering style, who generally affected a colossal gleaming golden helmet half again the size of his head, bristling with preposterous horns and blades. He was wearing it today. Husathirn Mueri found it both amusing and irritating.

There was nothing wrong with Curabayn Bangkea’s wearing a helmet, of course. Most citizens wore them nowadays, whether or not they traced their descent from the old helmet-wearing Beng tribe. And Curabayn Bangkea was pure Beng. But it seemed to Husathirn Mueri, who was Beng himself on his father’s side, though his mother had been of the Koshmars, that the captain of the guards carried the concept a little too far.

He wasn’t one to put much stock in high formality. It was a trait he owed, perhaps, to his mother, a gentle and easygoing woman. Nor was he greatly impressed by men like the guardsman, who strutted boisterously through life making a way for themselves by virtue of their size and bluster. He himself was lightly built, with a narrow waist and sloping shoulders. His fur was black and dense, striped a startling white in places and nearly as sleek as a woman’s. But his slightness was deceptive: he was quick and agile, with tricky whip-like strength in his body, and in his soul as well.

“Nakhaba favor you,” Curabayn Bangkea declared grandly, dipping his head in respect as he approached the throne. For good measure he made the signs of Yissou the Protector and Dawinno the Destroyer. A couple of the Koshmar gods: always useful when dealing with crossbreeds.

Husathirn Mueri, who privately thought that too much of everyone’s time was taken up by these benedictions and gesticulations, replied with a perfunctory sign of Yissou and said, “What is it, Curabayn Bangkea? I’ve got these angry bean-peddlers to deal with, and I’m not looking for more nuisances this afternoon.”

“Your pardon, throne-grace. There’s a stranger been taken, just outside the city walls.”

“A stranger? What kind of stranger?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Curabayn Bangkea, shrugging so broadly he nearly sent his vast helmet clattering to the ground. “A very strange stranger, is what he is. A boy, sixteen, seventeen, skinny as a rail. Looks like he’s been starved all his life. Came riding down out of the north on top of the biggest vermilion you ever saw. Some farmers found him crashing around in their fields, out by Emakkis Valley.”

“Just now, you say?”

“Two days ago, or thereabouts. Two and a half, actually.”

“And he was riding a vermilion?”

“A vermilion the size of a house and a half,” Curabayn Bangkea said, stretching his arms wide. “But wait. It gets better. The vermilion’s got a hjjk banner around its neck and hjjk emblems stitched to its ears. And the boy sits upon them and makes noises at you just like a hjjk.” Curabayn Bangkea put both his hands to his throat and uttered dry, throttled rattling sounds: “ Khkhkh. Sjsjsjssss. Ggggggggjjjjjk.You know what kind of ghastly sounds they make. We’ve been interrogating him ever since the farmers brought him in, and that’s about all that comes out of him. Now and then he says a word we can more or less understand. ‘Peace,’ he says. ‘Love,’ he says. ‘The Queen,’ he says.”

Husathirn Mueri frowned. “What about his sash? Any tribe we know?”

“He doesn’t wear a sash. Or a helmet. Or anything that might indicate he’s from the City of Yissou, either. Of course, he might have come from one of the eastern cities, but I doubt that very much. I think it’s pretty obvious what he is, sir.”

“And what is that?”

“A runaway from the hjjks.”

“A runaway,” Husathirn Mueri said, musing. “An escaped captive? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Why, it stands to reason, sir! There’s hjjk all over him! Not just the sounds he makes. He’s got a bracelet on that looks like it’s made of polished hjjk-shell — bright yellow, it is, one black stripe — and a breastplate of the same stuff. That’s all he’s wearing, just these pieces of hjjk-shell. What else can he be, your grace, if not a runaway?”

Husathirn Mueri narrowed his eyes, which were amber, a sign of his mixed ancestry, and very keen.

Now and then a wandering band of hjjks came upon some child who had strayed into a place where he should not have gone, and ran off with him, no one knew why. It was a parent’s greatest fear, to have a child taken by the hjjks. Most of these children were never seen again, but from time to time one did manage to escape and return, after an absence of days or weeks or even months. When they did come back they seemed profoundly shaken, and changed in some indescribable way, as though their time in captivity had been a horror beyond contemplation. None of them had ever been willing to speak so much as a word about their experiences among the insect-folk. It was considered an unkindness to ask.

To Husathirn Mueri the very thought of hjjks was distasteful. To be forced to live among them was the most miserable torture he could imagine.

He had seen them only once in his life, when he was a small boy growing up among the Bengs in Vengiboneeza, the ancient capital of the sapphire-eyes folk where some tribes of the People had taken up residence at the end of the Long Winter. But that one time had been enough. He would never forget them: gaunt towering insect-creatures larger than any man, strange, frightful, repulsive. Such great swarms of them had come to infest Vengiboneeza that the whole Beng tribe, which had settled there amid the ruined Great World buildings after years of wandering, finally had had to flee. Under great difficulties in a wet and stormy time they had crossed the endless coastal plains and valleys. Eventually they reached Dawinno, the great new city far to the south that the Koshmar tribe had built under Hresh’s leadership after making its own exodus from Vengiboneeza; and there they found refuge.

That hard journey still blazed in his memory. He had been five, then, and his sister Catiriil a year younger.

“Why do we have to leave Vengiboneeza?” he had asked, over and over. And from his patient gentle mother Torlyri had come the same answer each time:

“Because the hjjks have decided that they want it for themselves.”

He would turn then to his father in fury. “Why don’t you and your friends kill them, then?”

And Trei Husathirn would reply: “We would if we could, boy. But there are ten hjjks in Vengiboneeza for every hair on your head. And plenty more where those came from, in the north.”

During the interminable weeks of the journey south to Dawinno, Husathirn Mueri had awakened every night from terrible dreams of hjjk encroachment. He saw them standing over him in the dark as he slept, their bristly claws moving, their great beaks clacking, their huge gleaming eyes aglow with malevolence.

That had been twenty-five years ago. Sometimes he dreamed of them even now.

They were an ancient race — the only one of the Six Peoples that had inhabited the world in the blissful days before the Long Winter which had managed to survive that harrowing eon of darkness and cold. Their seniority offended him, coming as he did from so young a stock, from a people whose ancestors had been mere simple animals in the time of the Great World. It reminded him how fragile was the claim to supremacy that the People had attempted to assert; it reminded him that the People held their present territories by mere default, simply because the hjjks appeared to have no use for those places and the other elder peoples of the Great World — the sapphire-eyes, the sea-lords, the vegetals, the mechanicals, the humans — were long gone from the scene.

The hjjks, who had not let the Long Winter of the death-stars displace them, still had possession of most of the world. The entire northland was theirs, and maybe much of the east as well, though tribes of the People had built at least five cities there, places known only by name and rumor to those who lived in Dawinno. Those cities — Gharb, Ghajnsielem, Cignoi, Bornigrayal, Thisthissima — were so far away that contact with them was all but impossible. The hjjks held everything else. They were the chief barrier to the People’s further expansion in these constantly warming days of the New Springtime. To Husathirn Mueri they were the enemy, and always would be. He would, if he could, wipe them all from the face of the Earth.

But he knew, as his father Trei Husathirn had known, that that was impossible. The best that the People could hope for against the hjjks was to hold their own with them: to maintain the security and integrity of the territories they already held, to keep the hjjks from encroaching in any way. Perhaps the People might even be able to push them back a little gradually and reach outward a short distance into some of the hjjk-controlled regions that were suitable for their own use. To think the hjjks could be altogether defeated, though — as certain other princes of the city were known to believe — was nothing but folly, Husathirn Mueri realized. They were an invincible enemy. They never would be anything else.

“There’s one other possibility,” Curabayn Bangkea said.

“And what would that be?”

“That this boy is no simple runaway, but in fact some kind of emissary from the hjjks.”

“A what?”

“Only a guess, throne-grace. There’s no evidence, you understand. But something about him — the way he holds himself, so polite and quiet and, well, solemn, and the way he tries to tell us things, the way he comes out once in a while with a word like ‘peace,’ or ‘love,’ or ‘queen’ — well, sir, he doesn’t seem like your ordinary kind of runaway to me. It came to me all at once that this could be some sort of ambassador, like, sent to us by the wonderful Queen of the bug-folk to bring us some kind of special message. Or so I think, throne-grace. If you pardon me for my presumption.”

“An ambassador?” Husathirn Mueri said, shaking his head. “Why in the name of all the gods would they be sending us an ambassador?”

Curabayn Bangkea gazed blandly at him, offering no answer.

Glowering, Husathirn Mueri rose from the justiciary throne and walked to and fro with a sliding gait before it, hands clasped behind his back.

Curabayn Bangkea was no fool; his judgment, however tentatively put forth, was something to respect. And if the hjjks had sent an emissary, someone of People birth, one who had dwelled among the bugs so long that he had forgotten his own speech and spoke only in harsh grinding hjjk-clatter—

As he paced, one of the merchants, coming up beside him, tugged at his sash of office and begged his attention. Husathirn Mueri, eyes flashing furiously, raised his arm as if to strike the man. The merchant looked at him in astonishment.

At the last moment he checked himself. “Your suit is remanded for further study,” he told the merchant. “Return to this court when I am next sitting the throne.”

“And when will that be, lordship?”

“Do I know, fool? Watch the boards! Watch the boards!” Husathirn Mueri’s fingers trembled. He was losing his poise, and was troubled by that. “It’ll be next week, on Friit or Dawinno, I think,” he said, more temperately. “Go. Go!”

The merchants fled. Husathirn Mueri turned to the guard-captain. “Where is this hjjk ambassador now?”

“Throne-grace, it was only a guess, calling him an ambassador. I can’t say for sure that that’s what he really is.”

“Be that as it may, where is he?”

“Just outside, in the holding chamber.”

“Bring him in.”

He resumed his post on the throne. He felt irritated and perplexed and impatient. Some moments went by.

Husathirn Mueri did what he could to regain control of himself, making a calmness at the core of his spirit as his mother Torlyri had taught him to do. Rashness led only to miscalculation and error. She herself — the gods rest her soul, that warm and tender woman! — had not been nearly this high-strung. But Husathirn Mueri was a crossbreed, with a crossbreed’s vigor and intensity and a crossbreed’s drawbacks of disposition. In his birth he had foreshadowed the eventual union of the two tribes. Torlyri had been the Koshmar tribe’s offering-woman and the indomitable Beng warrior Trei Husathirn had swept the Koshmar priestess up into unexpected love and an unlikely mating, long ago, when the Beng people and the Koshmars still dwelled uneasily side by side in Vengiboneeza.

He sat waiting, more calmly now. At length the shadow of Curabayn Bangkea’s immense helmet entered the cupola, and then Curabayn Bangkea himself, leading the stranger at the end of a leash of plaited larret-withes. At the sight of him Husathirn Mueri sat to attention, hands tightly grasping the claw-and-ball armrests of the throne.

This was a very strange stranger indeed.

He was young, in late boyhood or early manhood, and painfully slender, with thin hunched shoulders and arms so frail they looked like dried stems. The ornaments he wore, the bracelet and the shining breastplate, did indeed seem to be polished fragments of a hjjk’s hard carapace, a grisly touch. His fur was black, but not a deep, rich black, like that of Husathirn Mueri: there was a dull grayish tinge to it, and it was pitiful scruffy fur, thin in places, almost worn through. This young man has been poorly fed all his life, Husathirn Mueri realized. He has suffered.

And his eyes! Those pale, icy, unwavering eyes! They seemed to stare toward the judicial throne across a gulf many worlds wide. Frightful remorseless eyes, an enemy’s eyes; but then, as Husathirn Mueri continued to study them, he began to see them more as sad compassionate eyes, the eyes of a prophet and healer.

How could that be? The contradiction bewildered him.

At any rate, whoever and whatever this boy might be, there seemed no reason to keep him tethered this way. “Unleash him,” Husathirn Mueri ordered.

“But if he flees, throne-grace — !”

“He came here with a purpose. Fleeing won’t serve it. Unleash him.”

Curabayn Bangkea undid the knot. The stranger seemed to stand taller, but otherwise did not move.

Husathirn Mueri said, “I am the holder of throne-duty in this court for today. Husathirn Mueri is my name. Who are you, and why have you come to the City of Dawinno?”

The boy gestured, quick tense flutterings of his fingers, and made hoarse chittering hjjk-noises deep down in his chest, as if he meant to spit at Husathirn Mueri’s feet.

Husathirn Mueri shivered and drew back. This was the nearest thing to having an actual hjjk here in the throne-room. He felt rising revulsion.

“I speak no hjjk,” he said icily.

“ Shhhtkkkk,” the boy said, or something like it. “Gggk thhhhhsp shtgggk.” And then he said, wresting the word from his throat as though it were some spiny thing within him that he must expel, “Peace.”

“Peace.”

The boy nodded. “Peace. Love.”

“Love,” said Husathirn Mueri, and shook his head slowly.

“It was like this when I interrogated him, too,” Curabayn Bangkea murmured.

“Be still.” To the boy Husathirn Mueri said, speaking very clearly and loudly, as though that would make any difference, “I ask you again: What is your name?”

“Peace. Love. Ddddkdd ftshhh. ”

“Your name, ” Husathirn Mueri repeated. He tapped his chest, where the white swirling streaks that he had inherited from his mother cut diagonally across the deep black fur. “I am Husathirn Mueri. Husathirn Mueri is my name. My name. His name” — pointing — “is Curabayn Bangkea. Curabayn Bangkea. And your name—”

“Shthhhjjk. Vtstsssth. Njnnnk!” The boy seemed to be struggling in a terrible way to articulate something. Muscles writhed in his sunken cheeks; his eyes rolled; he clenched his fists and dug his elbows into his hollow sides. Suddenly a complete understandable sentence burst from him: “I come in peace and love, from the Queen.”

“An emissary, do you see?” cried Curabayn Bangkea, grinning triumphantly.

Husathirn Mueri nodded. Curabayn Bangkea began to say something else, but Husathirn Mueri waved him impatiently to silence.

This must indeed be some child the hjjks had stolen in infancy, he thought. Who has lived among them ever since, in their impenetrable northland empire. And has been sent back now to the city of his birth, bearing Yissou only knew what demand from the insect queen.

The purposes of the hjjks were beyond all fathoming. Everyone knew that. But the message that this boy was trying so agonizingly to communicate might portend the opening of some new phase in the uneasy relationship between the People and the insect-folk. Husathirn Mueri, who was only one of several princes of the city and had reached that point in manhood when it was essential to begin thinking of rising to higher things, took it as a lucky omen that the stranger had arrived on a day when he happened to be holding the magistracy. There must be some good use to which all this could be put. First, though, he needed to figure out what the envoy was trying to say.

An obvious interpreter came to his mind. The most celebrated of all the returned captives of the city, the only high-born girl ever to be taken: Nialli Apuilana, daughter of Taniane and Hresh. She’d know some hjjk, if anyone did. Three months in captivity among them, a few years back. Grabbed just outside the city, she was, setting off a vast uproar, and why not, the only child of the chieftain and the chronicler stolen by the bugs! Loud lamentations, much frenzy. Tremendous search of the outlying territory. All to no avail. Then, months later, the girl suddenly reappearing as if she had dropped down from the sky. Looking dazed, but no visible signs of harm. Like all who returned from the hjjks she refused to speak of her captivity; like the others also, she had undergone some alteration of personality, far more moody and remote than she had been before. And she’d been moody enough before.

Was it safe to draw Nialli Apuilana into this? She was self-willed, unpredictable, a dangerous ally. From her powerful mother and mysterious visionary father had come a heritage of many volatile traits. No one could control her. She was some months past the age of sixteen, now, and ran wild in the city, free as a river: so far as Husathirn Mueri knew she had never let anyone couple with her, nor had she been known to twine, either, except of course on her twining-day, with the offering-woman Boldirinthe, but that was just the ritual to mark her coming into womanhood, when she turned thirteen. Everyone had to do that. The hjjks had taken her the very next day. Some people said she hadn’t been taken at all, that she had simply run away, because she had found her first twining so upsetting. But Husathirn Mueri suspected not. She had come back too weird; she must really have been among the hjjks.

One other factor figured in Husathirn Mueri’s considerations, which was that he desired Nialli Apuilana with a dark fervor that burned at his core like the fires at the heart of the world. He saw her as his key to power in the city, if only she would become his mate. He hadn’t yet dared to say anything about that to her, or anyone. But perhaps drawing her into this event today would help him forge the bond that was his keenest hope.

He looked toward Curabayn Bangkea and said, “Tell one of those useless bailiffs lounging in the hallway to go and bring Nialli Apuilana here.”

The House of Nakhaba was where Nialli Apuilana lived, in one of the small chambers on the uppermost floor of the north wing of that enormous, sprawling building of spires, towers, and intricately connected hallways. That it was a dormitory for priests and priestesses meant nothing to her. That they were priests and priestesses dedicated to a Beng god, whereas she was of the Koshmar tribe’s blood, meant even less. Those old tribal distinctions were breaking down very fast.

When she first chose the House of Nakhaba as her lodging-place, Prince Thu-Kimnibol had wanted to know if she had done it simply as a way of shocking everyone. Smiling in his good-natured way to take the sting out of the question, yes. But it stung all the same.

“Why, are you shocked?” Nialli Apuilana had replied.

Thu-Kimnibol was her father’s half-brother, as different from her father as the sun is from the moon. Both the huge, hulking, warlike Thu-Kimnibol and the frail, scholarly, retiring Hresh were the sons of the same mother, Minbain by name. Hresh had been born to her in the cocoon days, when a certain Samnibolon, long dead and forgotten now, had been her mate. Thu-Kimnibol was her child by a different mate of later years, the grim, violent, and quarrelsome warrior Harruel. He had inherited his father’s size and strength and some of his intensity of ambition; but not, so Nialli Apuilana had been told, his brooding, troubled soul.

“Nothing you do shocks us,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “Not since you came back from the hjjks. But why live with the Beng priests?”

Her eyes flashed with amusement and annoyance. “Kinsman, I live alone!”

“On the top floor of a huge building swarming with Beng acolytes who bow down to Nakhaba.”

“I have to live somewhere. I’m a grown woman. There’s privacy in the House of Nakhaba. The acolytes pray and chant all day long and half the night, but they leave me to myself.”

“It must disturb your sleep.”

“I sleep very well,” she said. “The singing lulls me. As for their bowing down to Nakhaba, well, what affair is that of mine? Or that they’re Bengs. Aren’t we all Bengs these days? Look, kinsman, you wear a helmet yourself. And the language we speak — what is it, if it isn’t Beng?”

“The language of the People is what it is.”

“And is it the same language we spoke when we lived in the cocoon, during the Long Winter?”

Thu-Kimnibol tugged uneasily at the thick red fur, almost like a beard, that grew along his heavy cheeks. “I never lived in the cocoon,” he said. “I was born after the Coming Forth.”

“You know what I mean. What we speak is as much Beng as it is Koshmar, or more so. We pray to Yissou and we pray to Nakhaba, and there’s no difference to us any more, the Koshmar god or the Beng god. A god is a god. Only a handful of the older people still remember that we were two tribes, originally. Or care. Another thirty years and only the chronicler will know. I like where I live, kinsman. I’m not trying to shock anyone, and you know it. I simply want to be off by myself.”

That had been more than a year ago, almost two. And after that no one in her family had bothered her about her choice of a place to live. She was of age, after all: past sixteen, old enough to twine and to mate, even if she didn’t choose to twine, and certainly not to mate. She could do as she pleased. Everyone accepted that.

But in fact Thu-Kimnibol had been close to the truth. Her going to the House of Nakhaba had been a protest of some sort: against what, she wasn’t sure. Ever since her return from the hjjks there had been a great restlessness in her, an impatience with all the established ways of the city. It seemed to Nialli Apuilana that the People had wandered from the true path. Machines were what they loved now, and comfort, and this new idea called exchange-units, which allowed the rich to buy the poor. Things were wrong here, so she had begun to think; and, since she had no power to change the ways of the city, she often found herself making strange silent rebellions against them. Others thought she was willful and unruly. What they might think was unimportant to her. Her stay among the hjjks had transformed her soul in ways that no one else could comprehend, in ways that she herself was only now beginning to come to terms with.

There was a knock at the door. Nialli Apuilana opened it to a plump, panting official of the Court of Justice, who had obviously found the climb to the top of the House of Nakhaba on this warm afternoon a profound challenge. He was running with sweat. His fur was sticking together in thick bunches, and his nostrils flickered as he struggled to catch his breath. His sashes and badges of rank were soggy and askew.

“Nialli Apuilana?”

“You know that’s who I am. What do you want with me?”

A gasp. A wheeze. “Summons to the Basilica.” Another gasp. An attempt to smooth the sodden fur. A huff and a puff. “By request of Husathirn Mueri, court-captain of the day.”

“To the Basilica? Why, have I done something wrong, then? Is that what his lordship Husathirn Mueri believes? Am I going to be put on trial?”

The bailiff didn’t reply. He was peering open-mouthed past her shoulder into her room. Stark as a prisoner’s cell: scarcely any furniture at all, just a tiny cot, a little stack of books on the floor, and a single ornament, a star-shaped amulet of woven grass that Nialli Apuilana had brought back from the hjjks, hanging on the whitewashed wall directly opposite the door like a conquest-sign placed there by the insect-folk themselves.

“I said, have I done something wrong?”

“Nothing, lady. Nothing.”

“Then why am I summoned?”

“Because — because—”

“What are you staring at? Haven’t you ever seen a hjjk star before?”

The bailiff looked guiltily away. He began to groom himself with quick uneasy strokes. “His lordship the court-captain wishes your help, that’s all,” he blurted. “As a translator. A stranger has been brought to the Basilica — a young man, who seems to speak only the language of the hjjks—”

There was a sudden roaring in Nialli Apuilana’s soul. Her heart raced painfully, frighteningly.

So stupid. Waiting this long to let her know.

She seized the bailiff by a sash. “Why didn’t you say so right away?”

“I had no chance, lady. You—”

“He must be a returning captive. You should have told me.”

Images rose from the depths of her mind. Powerful memories, visions of that shattering day that had changed her life.

She saw her younger self, already long-legged and woman-sleek but with her breasts only barely sprouting yet, innocently gathering blue chilly-flowers in the hills beyond the city walls on the day after her first twining. Black-and-yellow six-limbed figures, weird and terrifying, taller than any man of the city, taller even than Thu-Kimnibol, emerging without warning from a deep cleft in the tawny rock. Terror. Disbelief. A sense of the world she had known for thirteen years crumbling to fragments about her. Monstrous sharp-beaked heads, huge many-faceted eyes, jointed arms tipped with horrid claws. The chittering noises of them, the clickings and buzzings. This is not happening to me, she tells herself. Not to me. Do you know whose daughter I am? The words won’t leave her lips. They probably do know, anyway. All the better, getting someone like her. The pack of them surrounding her, seizing her, touching her. Then the terror unexpectedly disappearing. An eerie dreamlike calmness somehow taking possession of her soul. The hjjks carrying her away, then. A long march, an endless march, through unknown country. And then — the moist hot darkness of the Nest — the strangeness of that other life, which was like some different world, though it was right here on Earth — the power of the Queen impinging, surrounding, engulfing, transforming—

And ever since, the loneliness, the bitter sense that there was no one else at all like her anywhere in the world. But now, at last, another who had experienced what she had experienced. At last. Another who knew.

“Where is he?” she demanded. “I have to see him! Quick! Quick!”

“He is at the Basilica, lady. In the throne-chamber, with his lordship Husathirn Mueri.”

“Quick, then! Let’s go!”

She rushed from her room, not even bothering with her sash. Her nakedness mattered nothing to her. Let them stare, she thought. The bailiff came running along desperately behind her, huffing and wheezing, as she raced down the stairs of the House of Nakhaba. Astonished acolytes in priestly helmets, scattering before her onslaught, turned to glare and mutter, but she paid no attention to them.

On this day in late spring the sun was still high in the western sky, though the afternoon was well consumed. Soft tropic warmth wrapped the city like a cloak. The bailiff had a wagon waiting outside, with two docile gray xlendis in the harness. Nialli Apuilana jumped in beside him, and the placid beasts started down the winding streets toward the Basilica at a steady, unhurried trot.

“Can’t you make them go faster?” she asked.

The bailiff shrugged and laid on the whip. It did no good: one of the xlendis twisted its long neck about and looked back over its shoulder with great solemn golden eyes, as if puzzled that anyone would expect more speed of it than it was providing. Nialli Apuilana forced herself to hold her impatience in check. The returnee, the escaper, whatever he was, the one who had come from the Nest, wasn’t going anywhere. He would wait for her.

“Lady, we are here,” the bailiff announced.

The wagon halted. The Basilica stood before them now, the high-vaulted five-domed court building on the east side of the city’s central plaza. The westering sun lit the green-and-gold mosaics of its facade and kindled them to brilliant flame.

Within the building flickering glowglobes gleamed in dark metal sconces. Court functionaries stood stiffly in the hallway, performing no apparent function except to bow and nod as they went by.

The stranger was the first person whom Nialli Apuilana saw, sharply outlined in a cone of light entering through a triangular window far up near the summit of the lofty central cupola. He stood in a downcast way, shoulders slumped and eyes averted.

There was a Nest-bracelet on his wrist. There was a Nest-guardian hanging from a lanyard on his chest.

Nialli Apuilana’s heart went out to him. If she had been alone, she would have run to him and embraced him, and tears of joy would have flowed from her eyes.

But she held herself back. She looked toward the judge’s ornate throne under the network of interlaced bronze struts that formed the cupola, where Husathirn Mueri sat, and allowed herself to meet his keen, brooding stare.

Husathirn Mueri seemed rigid and tense. A perceptible odor, something like that of burning wood, came from him. The language of his body was explicit and not at all difficult to decode.

There was hunger for her in his gleaming amber eyes.

That was the only word she could find for it. Not lust, though no doubt lust was there; not the desire for her friendship, though he might well feel that; not anything tender that could readily be called love, either. No, it was hunger. Simple but not at all pure, and not so simple, either. He seemed to want to fall upon her and devour her and make her flesh a part of his own. Every time he saw her, which was no more often than she could manage, it was the same thing. Now, as he gazed at her across the vast space of the courtroom, it was almost as though Husathirn Mueri had his face between her thighs, gnawing, consuming. What a strange man! And yet quite appealing physically: slim, elegant, graceful, even beautiful, if a man could be called beautiful. And intelligent, and gentle in his way. But strange. Nialli Apuilana had no liking for him at all.

To the right of the throne stood the great brawny guard-captain, Curabayn Bangkea, half entombed within his gigantic helmet. He was looking at her in a pretty lascivious way also, but she knew it was something much less complex that was on his mind. Nialli Apuilana was accustomed to being stared at by men of all sorts. She realized that she was attractive: everyone said that she was the image of her mother Taniane when Taniane was young, with glossy, silken red-brown fur and long slender legs; and her mother had been the most beautiful woman of her day. Even now she still was splendid. So I am beautiful too, and so they stare at me. An automatic thing, for them. She had some notion also that the air of absolute unapproachability in which she usually wrapped herself might add to her appeal, for some.

Unctuously Husathirn Mueri said, “Dawinno guide you, Nialli Apuilana. Nakhaba preserve and cherish you.”

“Spare me these hypocrisies,” she said sharply. “You want my help as a translator, your bailiff says. Translating what?”

He indicated the stranger. “The guards have just brought him in. All he speaks is hjjk, and a few stray words of ours. I thought you might remember enough of the language of the bug-folk to tell me what he’s trying to say.”

She gave Husathirn Mueri a cool, hostile stare. “The language of the bug-folk ?”

“Ah. Sorry. The hjjks, I should have said.”

“I find the other term offensive.”

“Your pardon, lady. I mean that. I used the term too lightly. I won’t use it again.” Husathirn Mueri seemed to squirm. He looked genuinely dismayed. “Will you speak with him, now? And see if you can learn why he’s here.”

“If I can,” Nialli Apuilana said icily.

She went to the stranger, taking up a position facing him, so close that she too stood in the cone of light and the tips of her breasts came nearly within touching-distance of the Nest-guardian that dangled on his chest. He raised his eyes and looked into hers.

He was older than she had first thought. At a distance he seemed like no more than a boy, but that was because he was so flimsily built; in fact he must be at least her age, or even a year or two older. But there was no fat on him at all, and precious little muscle.

A diet of seeds and dried meat will do that to you, Nialli Apuilana knew. She had experienced it herself.

Very likely this stranger had lived among the hjjks for years. Long enough for his body to be shaped by the sparseness of their rations, at any rate. He even held himself in a hjjk’s stiff, brittle way, as if the fur and flesh that he wore were only a cloak concealing the gaunt insect beneath.

“Go on. Speak with him.”

“A moment. Give me a moment!”

She tried to collect herself. The sight of the hjjk talismans on his wrist and breast had stirred deep feelings in her. In her excitement she found herself unable to summon a single syllable of the hjjk language, what little of it she had learned years ago.

Hjjks communicated in many ways. They had a spoken language, the clicks and buzzes and hisses from which the People had coined a name for them. But also they were able to speak with each other — and with such of the People as they encountered — in a silent language of the mind, as if speaking by second sight. And then too they had an elaborate system of communicating by means of chemical secretions, a code of scented signals.

While in the Nest Nialli Apuilana had dealt with the hjjks mainly through the mental language. When they used that, they were able to make themselves perfectly understood to her, and also to understand what she said. She had managed to learn a few hundred words of their spoken language as well. But she had forgotten most of that by now. The language of the chemical secretions had always been altogether a closed book to her.

To break the interminable silence she raised her hand and lightly touched the stranger’s Nest-guardian, leaning forward and smiling warmly at him as she did.

He seemed almost to flinch. But he managed to hold his ground, and said something to her in harsh hjjk tones. His face was solemn. It didn’t seem capable of changing expression. It was like something carved of wood.

She touched his Nest-guardian again, and then her own breast.

Some words of hjjk sprang into her mind, then, and she spoke them, shaping them with some difficulty in her throat, as if she were gargling. They were the words for Nest, and Queen, and Nest-plenty.

He drew back his lips in a grimace that was almost a smile. Or perhaps it was a smile that could not help becoming a grimace.

“Love,” he said, in the language of the People. “Peace.”

A start, at least.

From somewhere more hjjk words came to her, the ones for Nest-strength, for Queen-touch, for Thinker-thoughts.

He brightened.

“Love,” he said again. “Queen — love.”

He lifted his clenched fists, as if straining to find other words of People-speech long lost in the deeper reaches of his mind. There was anguish on his narrow face.

At length he brought out another hjjk word, which Nialli Apuilana recognized as the one that could be translated as “flesh-folk.” It was the term the hjjks used for the People.

“What are you two saying?” Husathirn Mueri asked.

“Nothing very significant. Just making preliminary contact.”

“Has he told you his name yet?”

Nialli Apuilana gave Husathirn Mueri a scornful look. “The hjjk language doesn’t have a word for name. They don’t have names themselves.”

“Can you ask him why he’s here, then?”

“I’m trying,” she said. “Can’t you see that?”

But it was hopeless. For ten minutes she worked in a steady dogged way at breaking through, without getting anywhere.

She had expected so much of this meeting. She was desperately eager to relive with this stranger her time in the Nest. To speak with him of Queen-love and Egg-plan and Nest-strength and all those other things that she had barely had a chance to experience during her too-brief captivity: things which had shaped her soul as surely as the austere food of the hjjks had shaped this stranger’s lean body. But the barriers between them were a maddening obstacle.

There seemed no way to breach them. All they could do was stammer random words at each other, and fragments of ideas. Sometimes they seemed close to a meeting of minds, and the stranger’s eyes would grow bright and the ghost of a smile, even, appeared on his face; but then they reached the limits of their understanding, and the walls descended between them once again.

“Are you getting anywhere?” Husathirn Mueri asked, after a while.

“Nowhere. Nowhere at all.”

“You can’t even guess at what he’s saying? Or why he’s here?”

“He’s here as some sort of an ambassador. That much seems certain.”

“Do you have anything to go by, or are you just guessing?”

“You see those pieces of hjjk shell he’s wearing? They’re tokens of high authority,” she said. “The thing on his chest is called a Nest-guardian, and it’s made out of the shell of a dead hjjk warrior. They wouldn’t have let him take it out of the Nest except as a sign that he’s on a special mission. It’s something like a chieftain’s mask would be among us. The other one, the bracelet, was probably a gift from his Nest-thinker, to help him focus his thoughts. Poor lost soul, it hasn’t done him much good, has it?”

“Nest-thinker?”

“His mentor. His teacher. Don’t ask me to explain it all now. They’re only bug-folk to you, anyway.”

“I told you that I regretted—”

“Yes,” Nialli Apuilana said. “You told me that you regretted. Anyway, he’s surely here with some special message, not just the usual hazy stuff that returnees tell us, if they say anything at all. But he can’t speak. He must have lived in the Nest since he was three or four years old, and he can barely remember a word of our language.”

Husathirn Mueri moodily stroked his cheek-fur.

“Can you suggest anything?” he asked, after a time.

“Only the obvious. Send for my father.”

“Ah,” Husathirn Mueri said. “Of course!”

“Does the chronicler speak hjjk?” Curabayn Bangkea asked.

“The chronicler has the Wonderstone, idiot,” said Husathirn Mueri. “The Barak Dayir, the Barak Dayir! Of course! One touch of it and all mysteries are solved!”

He clapped his hands. The fat bailiff appeared.

“Find Hresh. Summon him here.” He looked around. “Adjourned until Hresh comes.”

The chronicler just then was in his garden of natural history, in the western quadrant of the city, supervising the arrival of his caviandis.

Many years earlier, Hresh in a vision of the Vengiboneeza of Great World times had entered a place called the Tree of Life. Here the sapphire-eyes folk had gathered all sorts of wild creatures and placed them in chambers that duplicated their natural surroundings. The dreaming Hresh, to his terrible shame and chagrin, had even found his own ancestors among the animals housed there; and so he had learned beyond question that day that his People, who once had thought of themselves as humans, were no such lofty thing, and in the days of the Great World had been regarded as nothing more than beasts fit for collecting and keeping in cages.

Most of the creatures Hresh had seen on that day of wandering in the remote past had perished in the Long Winter, and their kind was forever gone from the Earth. The Tree of Life itself had long ago crumbled to dust. But Hresh had built a Tree of Life of his own in the City of Dawinno, overlooking the tranquil bay: a maze-like garden where creatures from all parts of the continent had been assembled for him to study. He had water-striders there, and drum-bellies, and dancer-horns, and hosts of the other creatures whom the People had encountered in their migrations across the face of the land since leaving the ancestral cocoon. He had blue-furred long-legged stinchitoles, whose minds were linked in a way he had not begun to fathom. He had bevies of plump-legged red scantrins. He had the pink ropy long-fanged worms, longer than a man was tall, who lived in the steaming mud of the lakelands. He had the kmurs, and crispalls, and stanimanders. He had gabools. He had steptors. He had a band of the mocking green monkey-like tree-dwelling beasts who had pelted the People raucously with wads of dung when first they entered Vengiboneeza.

And now too he had a pair of caviandis, newly brought to him from the lakelands.

He would make a comfortable habitat for them along the stream that ran through the garden, and the stream would be stocked with the fish they most preferred, and they would have room to dig the burrows in which they liked to live. And once they had grown accustomed to life in captivity he would try to reach their minds through second sight, through use of the Wonderstone if necessary. He would touch their souls, if souls they had, and see what depths were to be found in them.

The caviandis, trembling, sat side by side in their carrier, giving him a saucer-eyed look of misery and fear.

Hresh returned that sorry stare with a deep look of curiosity and fascination. They were graceful, elegant beasts, unquestionably intelligent. Just how intelligent was what he meant to find out. The lesson of the ancient Tree of Life, of the Great World itself, was that intelligence was to be found in creatures of many sorts.

There were those among the People, Hresh knew, who hunted caviandis for their flesh. They were said to be tasty things. But that would have to stop, if the brightness of the caviandis’ eyes turned out to be matched by a corresponding richness of intellect. Some sort of protective legislation, maybe — unpopular, but necessary—

He was tempted to take a quick peek into their minds now. A bit of preliminary probing. Just to get some general idea.

He smiled at the trembling animals, and lifted his sensing-organ, thinking to summon his second sight, only for a moment, only for a quick look.

“Lordship? Lord chronicler?”

The interruption was as jarring as a blow in the small of the back. Hresh whirled and saw one of his deputies behind him, and a coarse-looking man with him in the sash of a bailiff of the court of justice.

“What is it?”

The bailiff stumbled forward. “Your pardon, lord chronicler, but I bring a message from the court, from Husathirn Mueri, who sits in judgment today at the Basilica. A stranger has been found, a young man who appears to be returned from captivity among the hjjks, and who speaks no language except the noises of the bug-folk. And Prince Husathirn Mueri respectfully requests — if you could assist him — if you could come to the Basilica to aid in the interrogation—”

They had sent her off to wait in a holding chamber during the adjournment, a sweaty little room, nothing very much different from the cells where criminals were kept while awaiting the attention of the justiciary prince; and they had put the hjjk emissary in a different room of the same sort on the far side of the cupola. Nialli Apuilana had thought it might have been useful for them both to wait for Hresh in the same room, so that they could try to make some further attempts at communication, but no, no, take her to this room, take him to that one. She realized with some surprise that Husathirn Mueri must not trust the two of them together in any unsupervised situation. It was one more illustration of the pettiness and fretful suspiciousness of his soul, the small mean ignobility of it.

Can he possibly sense that there is Nest-bond between us? she wondered. Is he afraid that we’ll flange up some sort of treacherous conspiracy, if he gives us a chance to spend an hour or so in the same cell? Or is what he’s afraid of simply that we might pass the time with a little sweaty coupling? That was an odd idea. The stranger, all skin and bones, taking advantage of a bit of spare time to jump on her. She wasn’t attracted by him at all. But she didn’t put it past Husathirn Mueri to suspect such a thing. What does he think I am? she asked herself.

Furiously she paced the little wedge-shaped room until she had counted its measurements out fifty times over. Then she took a seat on a bench of black stone beneath a niche containing an ikon of Dawinno the Transformer, and leaned back, folding her arms across her breasts. A bit more tranquil now. Summoning a little patience. They might have a long wait coming before the bailiff managed to track her father down.

As she grew calmer she felt herself growing dreamy. Something strange arising within her, now. Visions come drifting into her mind. The Nest, is it? Yes. Yes. Increasing in clarity moment by moment, as if layers of filmy cloth are being stripped away. Old memories awaken now, after lying dormant so long. What has stirred them? The sight of those amulets on his wrist and chest, was it? The aura of the Nest that he carried about him, visible only to her?

She hears a rushing, a roaring, in her mind. And then she is there. That other world where she had passed the strangest three months of her life comes vividly to life for her.

They are all around her in the narrow tunnel, welcoming her back after her long absence, rubbing their claws gently against her fur by way of greeting: half a dozen Queen-attendants, and a pair of Egg-makers, and a Nest-thinker, and a couple of Militaries. The dry crisp scent of them tingles in her nostrils. The air is warm and close; the light is a dim pink glow, the familiar lovely Nest-light, faint but sufficient. She embraces them one by one, savoring the feel of their smooth two-toned carapaces and their black-bristled forearms. It is good to be back, she tells them. I have longed for this moment ever since I left here.

There is a commotion just then at the far end of the long passageway: a procession of young males, it is, jostling and crowding each other. They are on their way to the royal chamber to be aroused into fertility by Queen-touch. It is the last stage in their maturity. They will be allowed to mate, finally, once the Queen has done whatever it is that is done to bring the young to fertility. Nialli Apuilana envies them for that.

But she is ripe herself. Ready for mating, ready for life to be kindled within her, ready to play her proper part in Egg-plan. The Queen must know that. The Queen knows everything. Soon, she thinks, one of these days quite soon, it will be my turn to come before the Queen, and Her love will descend upon me, and my loins will be quickened to life by Her touch, and at long last I too will be—

I too will be—

“Lady, the court is reassembling,” came a voice that cut through her like a dull rusty blade.

She opened her eyes. A bailiff stood before her, a different one from before. She glared at him in such rage that it was a wonder it didn’t strip the fur from his skin. But he simply stood gaping like a clod. “Lady, they request that you return to—”

“Yes. Yes! Don’t you think I heard you?”

Hresh did not appear to have arrived yet. Everything was as it had been before, more or less. The stranger stood in the absolute center of the room, wholly motionless, like a statue of himself. He seemed scarcely even to breathe. A hjjk trick, that was. They weren’t ones for wasting energy. When they had no reason to be in motion, they didn’t move at all.

Husathirn Mueri, though, was in constant motion. He crossed and uncrossed his legs; he shifted about uneasily as if the throne were growing icy cold beneath him, or fiery; he flicked his sensing-organ about, now curling it against his shins, now letting it arch upward behind him until the tip of it peered over his shoulder. His intense amber gaze flickered everywhere around the great room except in Nialli Apuilana’s direction; but then suddenly she caught him staring at her again in that hungry fashion of his. As soon as their eyes met, he looked away.

She felt sorry for him, in an odd way. That he was so driven, so edgy. They said that his mother Torlyri had been a saintly loving person, and his father the most valiant of warriors. But Husathirn Mueri seemed not at all saintly, and Nialli Apuilana doubted that he would be of much use on a battlefield, either. Hardly a credit to his forebears. Perhaps it’s true, she thought, the thing that the older people like to say, that in this modern era of city life we’ve become a race of confused, troubled folk, no clear sense of direction in our lives at all. Weaklings, in fact. Decadents.

But, she wondered, is it so? That we’ve gone from primitivism to decadence and weakness in a single generation? All that time pent up in the cocoon, scarcely changing in any way, and then we erupt and build ourselves a tremendous city, and practically overnight all the old virtues are lost, our godliness, our honor?

Husathirn Mueri may be a decadent, she thought. And probably so am I. But is he really a weakling? Am I?

“The chronicler! Hresh-of-the-answers! All rise for the chronicler Hresh!” came the braying voice of the bailiff who had gone to fetch him.

She looked about and saw her father entering the throne-room.

How long it had been since she had last seen him, she wasn’t sure: weeks, certainly, or possibly months. There had never been any formal estrangement between them; but her path and his simply tended rarely to cross, these days. He had his unending research into the world of the past to absorb him, while she, living her isolated and somehow suspended life in the upper reaches of the House of Nakhaba, felt little reason to come down into the central districts of the city.

The moment he entered the room Hresh turned to her, holding out his arms, as if she were the only person there. And Nialli Apuilana went quickly, eagerly to him.

“Father—”

“Nialli — my little Nialli—”

He had aged enormously in just these few months since they last had been together, as though each week had been a year for him. Of course he was at a point in his life when time galloped by. Some years past fifty now: old, as People life-spans went. His fur had long since grayed. Nialli Apuilana, his one child, born to him very late, could not remember a time when it had been any other color. His slender shoulders were bowed, his chest was hollow. Only his huge dark scarlet-flecked eyes, blazing like beacons beneath his wide forehead, still radiated the vitality that must have been his in those long-ago days when, still no more than a boy, he had led the People from the ancestral cocoon across the plains into Vengiboneeza.

They embraced quietly, almost solemnly. Then she stepped back from him and for a moment their eyes met.

Hresh-of-the-answers, the bailiff had called him. Well, that was his full formal name, yes. He had once told her that he had chosen it himself upon reaching his naming-day. Before that, when he was a boy, he had been called Hresh-full-of-questions. They were both good names for him. There was no mind like his anywhere, always probing, always seeking. Truly he must be the wisest man in the world, Nialli Apuilana thought. Everyone said so.

She felt herself drawn in, swallowed up, by those astonishing eyes of his, eyes that had looked upon such miracles and wonders as she could barely comprehend. Hresh had seen the Great World alive: he had held a device in his hand that brought it all back in visions, and showed him the mighty sapphire-eyes people and the sea-lords and the mechanicals and all the rest of those dead races — even the humans, whom the People had called by the name of Dream-Dreamers in the days when they lived in the cocoon — the baffling enigmatic humans, who had been masters of the Earth long before any of the others had come into being, so long ago that the mind was numbed merely to think of it.

Hresh seemed so mild, so ordinary, until you looked into his eyes. And then he became frightening. He had seen so much. He had achieved so much. Everything that the People had become since the Long Winter’s end, they were because Hresh had shaped them that way.

He smiled. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Nialli.”

“Husathirn Mueri sent for me. He thought I still knew the language of the hjjks. But of course it’s all gone from me now, all but a few words.”

Hresh nodded. “You shouldn’t be expected to remember. It’s been two years, hasn’t it?”

“Three, father. Almost four.”

“Almost four. Of course.” He chuckled indulgently at his own absentmindedness. “And who could blame you for blocking it from your mind? A nightmare like that.”

She looked away from him. He had never understood the truth of her stay among the hjjks. No one had. Perhaps no one ever would. Except this silent stranger here, and she was unable to communicate in any useful way with him.

Husathirn Mueri, descending from the throne, led the stranger to Hresh’s side. “He was found at midday, in Emakkis Valley, riding a vermilion. He makes hjjk-sounds, and speaks a few words of our language also. Nialli Apuilana says that these are hjjk-amulets on his wrist and breast.”

“He looks half starved,” Hresh said. “More than half. He’s like a walking skeleton.”

“Do you remember what I looked like, father, when I came back from the hjjks?” Nialli Apuilana asked. “They eat very little, the hjjks. Sparseness is what they prefer, in eating, in everything. That’s their way. I was hungry all the time, when I was with them.”

“And looked it when you returned,” said Hresh. “I do remember. Well, perhaps we can find some way to talk with this boy. And then he ought to be given something to eat. Eh, Husathirn Mueri? Something to put a little meat on his bones. But let’s see what we can do, first.”

“Will you use the Wonderstone?” Husathirn Mueri asked.

“The Wonderstone, yes. The Barak Dayir.” Hresh drew a worn velvet pouch from a pocket of his sash and tugged at its drawstring. Into the palm of his hand tumbled a tapered bit of polished stone, like a finely made spearhead. It was a mottled purple and brown in color, with a pattern of intricate fine lines inscribed along its edges. “No one must come near me,” he said.

Nialli Apuilana trembled. She had seen the Wonderstone no more than five or six times in her life, and not in many years. It was the People’s single most prized possession. No one, not even Hresh, knew what it was. They said it was made of star-stuff, whatever that meant. They said it was older even than the Great World, that it was a human-thing, an instrument out of that remote unknown world that had existed before the sapphire-eyes folk began to rule the Earth. Perhaps so. The only thing that was certain was that Hresh had learned how to work miracles with it.

He took it now in the curve of his sensing-organ, grasping it firmly. His expression grew distant and strange. He was summoning his second sight, now, unleashing all the formidable powers of his mind and focusing them through the strange device that was called the Barak Dayir.

The stranger, motionless, stood with his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Hresh. They were unusual eyes, a clear pale green, like the water in the shallows of Dawinno Bay, but much colder. The stranger too seemed to be locked in deep concentration; and once again that odd almost-smile had appeared on his face.

Hresh’s eyes were closed. He appeared not even to be breathing. He was lost in his own spell, his mind given up entirely into the power of the Barak Dayir. But after an eternity he could be seen to return. The room was very still.

“His name is Kundalimon,” Hresh said.

“Kundalimon,” Husathirn Mueri repeated gravely, as though the name had some deep significance.

“At least, that’s what he thinks it is. He isn’t entirely sure. He isn’t entirely sure even of what a name is. He doesn’t have one among the hjjks. But the traces of the name Kundalimon are still in his mind, like the traces of ancient foundations in a ruined city. He knows that he was born here, seventeen years ago.”

Husathirn Mueri said quietly to the bailiff, “Go to the House of Knowledge. See if there’s any record of a lost child named Kundalimon.”

Hresh shook his head. “No. Let it be. I’ll take care of that myself, afterward.” He turned to the stranger. “We have to teach you your own name. Everyone in this city has a name, a name that belongs only to himself.” And in a clear high tone he said, pointing to the boy, “Kundalimon.”

“Kundalimon,” the stranger repeated, nodding, tapping his chest, smiling something that was close to being an actual smile.

Hresh touched his own breast. “Hresh.”

“Hresh,” said the stranger. “Hresh.”

He looked toward Nialli Apuilana.

“He wants to know your name too,” Hresh said. “Go on. Tell him.”

Nialli Apuilana nodded. But to her horror her voice wasn’t there when she called upon it. Nothing would come from her throat but a cough and a tight hoarse rasping that could almost have been a hjjk-sound. Dismayed, embarrassed, she clapped her hand over her mouth.

“Tell him your name,” said Hresh again.

Silently Nialli Apuilana tapped her throat with her fingers and shook her head.

Hresh seemed to understand. He nodded to Kundalimon and pointed to her. “Nialli Apuilana,” he said, in the same clear high tone as before.

“Nialli — Apuilana,” Kundalimon repeated carefully, staring at her. The supple vowels and liquid consonants did not seem to rise easily to his lips. “Nialli — Apuilana—”

She looked away, as if scalded by his gaze.

Hresh took the Barak Dayir and closed his eyes again, and disappeared once more into his trance. Kundalimon stood statue-still before him. There was utter silence in the room.

Shortly Hresh seemed to return, and after a time he said, “How strange his mind is! He’s been with the hjjks since he was four. Living in the great main Nest, the Nest of Nests, far in the north.”

The Nest of Nests! In the presence of the Queen of Queens Herself! Nialli Apuilana felt a surge of envy.

She found her voice and said softly, “And do you know why he’s come here, father?”

In a curious muffled tone Hresh said, “The Queen wants to make a treaty with us.”

“A treaty?” Husathirn Mueri said.

“A treaty, yes. A treaty of perpetual peace.”

Husathirn Mueri looked stunned. “What are the terms? Do you know?”

“They want to draw a line across the continent, somewhere just north of the City of Yissou. Everything north of the line is to be considered hjjk, and everything south of it will remain the territory of the People. No one of either race will be allowed to enter territory belonging to the other.”

“A treaty,” Husathirn Mueri said again in wonder. “The Queen wants a treaty with us! I can’t believe it.”

“Nor can I,” said Hresh. “Almost too good to be true, isn’t it? Hard and fast boundaries. A no-trespass agreement. Everything clear, everything straightforward. In one stroke, an end to the fear of war with them that’s been dangling over us all our lives.”

“If we can trust them.”

“If we can trust them, yes.”

“Have they sent an emissary to the City of Yissou also, do you know?” Husathirn Mueri said.

“Yes. They’ve sent them to each of the Seven Cities, so it appears.”

Husathirn Mueri laughed. “I’d like to see King Salaman’s face. Out of nowhere, peace breaks out! Perpetual peace with the great insect enemy! What then becomes of the holy war of extermination that he’s been aching to launch against them for the past ten or twenty years?”

“Do you think Salaman was ever serious about a war with the hjjks?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

Husathirn Mueri looked at her. “What?”

“It’s all politics, isn’t it? So he can go on building his great wall higher and higher and higher. He keeps saying the hjjks are about to invade his city, but in fact the last time they did was before most of us were born. When Harruel was king up there, and Yissou had just been founded.”

He turned to Hresh. “She has a point. Despite all of Salaman’s fretting, there haven’t been any real hostilities between the hjjks and the People in years. They have their lands, and we have ours, and nothing worse than a few border skirmishes ever takes place. If all the treaty does is ratify the status quo, what meaning does it have? Or is it some kind of trap?”

“There are other conditions besides the one I spoke of,” Hresh said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“That had best be saved for discussion in the Presidium, I think,” said Hresh. “Meanwhile we have a weary stranger here. Give the boy a place to stay, Husathirn Mueri. See if you can find something for him that he’s willing to eat. And make sure that his vermilion is cared for, also. He’s very worried about his vermilion.”

Husathirn Mueri signaled to one of the bailiffs, who came lumbering forward.

“No,” Nialli Apuilana said. Her voice was a harsh croak again, but she managed to make herself heard. “Not you.” She held out her hand to the stranger. “I’ll take charge of getting him his food. I know what kinds of things he eats, better than anyone else here. Don’t forget I’ve been in the Nest myself.” She glanced defiantly around the room. “Well? Any objections?” But no one spoke.

“Come,” she said to Kundalimon. “I’ll look after you.”

As it should be, she thought.

How could I let anyone else? What do they know, any of them? But we are both of the Nest, you and I. We are both of the Nest.