The Queen of Springtime

9 To the Nest of Nests

All week long the messages had been coming to Salaman with rising urgency and intensity from the relay stations to the north and to the south.

Thu-Kimnibol was advancing at the head of a vast army from Dawinno. He was close to Yissou now, no more than a few days’ march away, perhaps less. Every relay agent along the road had underscored the awe he felt at the size of that oncoming force. Had Thu-Kimnibol brought everyone of fighting age in Dawinno with him? It almost seemed that way.

On the northern front the army of the king, four hundred strong, had pressed deeper and deeper day by day into the hjjk lands, following the route the little colony of Acknowledgers had taken.

We have found them,came the report finally. All dead.

And then:

We’ve been attacked by hjjks ourselves.

And then:

There are too many of them for us.

And then silence.

“Twice now the insect-folk have attacked our people without provocation,” Salaman told the people of Yissou, speaking from his pavilion atop the wall to a great horde of citizens in the plaza below. “They have slaughtered the innocent settlers whom Zechtior Lukin led into unoccupied territory. And now they have massacred the army we sent forth to rescue Zechtior Lukin’s people. There can be only one policy now.”

“War! War!” came the cry from a thousand throats.

“War, yes,” Salaman replied. “All-out war, by all the People against this implacable enemy. The hjjks have threatened the existence of this city since its earliest days: but now, with the help of our allies from Dawinno, we will bring the fire to their own domain, we will cut them to mincemeat, we will drag forth their loathsome Queen into the light of day and put an end at last to Her unspeakable life!”

“War! War!” came the cry again.

And later that afternoon, when Salaman had returned to the palace and had taken his seat upon the Throne of Harruel, his son Biterulve came to him and said, “Father, I want to go with the army when it sets out into the hjjk country. I ask your permission for this, as I must. But I beg you not to withhold it.”

Salaman felt a hand tightening about his heart. He had never expected anything like this.

“You?” he said, staring amazed at the pale slender boy. “What do you know of warfare, Biterulve?”

“I feared you’d say that. But you know I’ve been riding with my brothers in the lands outside the wall for a long time now. I’ve learned some skills of fighting from them as well. You mustn’t keep me from this war, father.”

“But the danger—”

“Would you make a woman of me, father? Worse than a woman, for I know that there’ll be women in our fighting brigades. Am I to stay home, then, with the old ones and children?”

“You’re no warrior, Biterulve.”

“I am.”

The boy’s quiet insistence carried a force Salaman had never heard from him before. He saw the anger in Biterulve’s eyes, the injured pride. And the king realized that his gentle scholarly son had put him in an impossible situation. Refuse permission and he robbed Biterulve forever of his princeliness. He’d never forgive him for that. Let him go, and he might well fall victim to some thrusting hjjk spear, which Salaman himself could scarcely bear to contemplate.

Impossible. Impossible.

He felt his anger rising. How dare the boy ask him to make a decision like this? But he held himself in check.

Biterulve waited, expectant, unafraid.

He gives me no choice, Salaman thought bitterly.

At length he said, sighing, “I never thought you’d have any appetite for fighting, boy. But I see I’ve misjudged you.” He looked away, and made a brusque gesture of dismissal. “All right. Go. Go, boy. Get yourself ready to march, if that’s what you need to do.”

Biterulve grinned and clapped his hands, and ran from the room.

“Get me Athimin,” the king said to one of his stewards.

When the prince arrived, Salaman said to him dourly, “Biterulve has just told me he plans to go with us to the war.”

Athimin’s eyes brightened in surprise. “Surely you’ll forbid him, father!”

“No. No, I’ve given permission. He said I’d be making a woman of him, if I forced him to stay home. Well, so be it. But you’re going to be his protector and guardian, do you understand? If a finger of his is harmed, I’ll have three of yours. Do you understand me, Athimin? I love all my sons as I love my own self, but I love Biterulve in a way that goes beyond all else. Stay at his side on the battlefield. Constantly.”

“I will, father.”

“And see to it that he comes home from the war in one piece. If he doesn’t, you’d be wise to stay up there yourself in the hjjk wastelands rather than face me again.”

Athimin stared.

“Nothing will harm him, father,” the prince said hoarsely. “I promise you that.”

He went out without another word, nearly colliding as he did with a breathless messenger who had come scampering in.

“What is it?” Salaman barked.

“The army of Dawinno,” the runner said. “They’ve reached the lantern-tree groves. They’ll be in the city in a couple of hours.”

“Look yonder,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “The Great Wall of Yissou.”

Under a sky of purple and gold a massive band of the deepest black stretched along the horizon for an impossible distance, curving away finally at the sides to disappear in the obscurities beyond. It might have been a dark strip of low-lying cloud; but no, for its bulk and solidity were so oppressive that it was hard to understand how the ground could hold firm beneath its impossible weight.

“Can it be real?” Nialli Apuilana asked finally. “Or just some illusion, some trick that Salaman makes our minds play upon ourselves?”

Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “If it’s a trick, it’s one that Salaman has played on himself. The wall’s real enough, Nialli. For twice as many years as you’ve been alive, or something close to that, he’s poured all the resources of his city into constructing that thing. While we’ve built bridges and towers and roads and parks, Salaman’s built a wall. A wall of walls, one to stand throughout the ages. When this place is as old as Vengiboneeza, and twice as dead, that wall will still be there.”

“Is he crazy, do you think?”

“Very likely. But shrewd and strong, for all his craziness. It’s a mistake ever to underestimate him. There’s no one in this world as strong and determined as Salaman. Or as mad.”

“A crazy ally. That makes me uneasy.”

“Better a crazy ally than a crazy enemy,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

He turned and signaled to those in the wagons just behind him. They had halted when he had. Now they began to move forward again, up the sloping tableland toward the high ground where that incredible wall lay athwart the sky. Nialli Apuilana could see small figures atop the wall, warriors whose spears stood out like black bristles against the darkening air. For a moment she imagined that they were hjjks, somehow in possession of the city. The strangeness of this place inspired fantasy. She found herself thinking also that the wall, colossal as it was, was merely poised and lightly balanced on its great base, that it would take only a breeze to send it falling forward upon her, that already it had begun slowly to topple in her direction as the wagon rolled onward. Nialli Apuilana smiled. This is foolishness, she thought. But anything seemed possible in the City of Yissou. That black wall was like a thing of dreams, and not cheerful dreams.

Thu-Kimnibol said, “It was only a wooden palisade when I was a boy here. Not even a very sturdy one, at that. When the hjjks came, they’d have swarmed over it in a moment, if we hadn’t found a way of turning them back. Gods! How we fought, that day!”

He fell into silence. He seemed to lose himself in it.

Nialli Apuilana leaned against his comforting bulk and tried to imagine how it had been, that day when the hjjks came to Yissou. She saw the boy Samnibolon, who would call himself Thu-Kimnibol afterward, at the battle of Yissou: already tall and strong, never tiring, holding his weapons like a man, striking at the hordes of hjjks in the bloody dusk as the shadows lengthened. Yes, she could see him easily, a boy of heroic size, as now he was a man of heroic size. Fighting unrelentingly against the invaders who threatened his father’s young city. And something in her quivered with excitement at the thought of him hot with battle.

The warlike boy Samnibolon, who had become this warlike man Thu-Kimnibol: they were the utter opposite of the gentle Kundalimon, that shy and strange bearer of the Queen’s love and the Queen’s peace. Nialli Apuilana had loved Kundalimon beyond any doubt. In some way she still did. And yet — and yet — when she looked at this fierce Thu-Kimnibol she found herself swept by irresistible love and desire. It had come over her for the first time at the drill-field, to her astonishment and joy. It had come over her a hundred times since. Here beneath the terrible walls of Salaman’s city it seemed stronger than ever. She had known him since she was a child; and yet she realized now she had not actually known him at all, not until these past few weeks had brought them so strangely together.

All his life, she thought, he has waited for a chance to fight again; and now he will. And suddenly she realized that what she loved him for was that strength, that oneness of character, that had defined him since his earliest boyhood, when this city’s wall had been nothing more than a palisade of wood.

Her love for Kundalimon glowed imperishably within her: she was certain of that. And yet this other man, Kundalimon’s opposite in all things, now filled her soul so thoroughly that there seemed no room for anyone else.

Hresh had never touched such perfection before. He had not ever imagined it was possible. Truly the Nest functioned as smoothly as any machine.

He knew this was only a minor hjjk outpost, certainly not the great Nest of Nests; and yet it was so huge and complex that even after many days within it he had no clear idea of its plan. Its tunnels, warm and sweet-smelling and dimly lit by some pink glow that emanated from the walls, radiated in bewildering patterns, running this way and that, crossing and recrossing. Yet all those who traversed these corridors moved swiftly and unhesitatingly in obvious clear knowledge of the route.

The hjjks had fabricated their huge subterranean city in the simplest way, digging the tunnels with their bare claws — Hresh had watched them at work, for they never ceased expanding the Nest — and lining the walls with a pulp made of soft wood, which they chewed themselves and spat out into great soggy mounds that could be scooped up and pressed into place. Wooden beams served to prop the tunnel roof at regular intervals. He had expected something more complex from them. This was not very different except in size from the sort of nests the ants and termites of the forest built for themselves.

And, like those small insects of the forest floor, they had evolved an elaborate system of castes and professions. The biggest ones — females, they were, though apparently not fertile — were the Militaries. They were ordinarily the only ones who ventured into the world beyond the Nest. It was Militaries who had brought Hresh here.

A parallel caste of sterile males, the Workers, had charge of constructing and expanding the Nest, and of maintaining the intricate systems of ventilation and heating that kept it livable. They were thick-bodied and short, with little of the eerie grace that the slender Militaries displayed.

Then there were the reproductive cadres, the Egg-makers and Life-kindlers: smaller, stockier even than the Workers, with short limbs and blunt, rounded heads. When they were mature, they were taken before the Queen, who brought them to full fertility by penetrating them in some way and flooding them with a substance She herself secreted: this was known as Queen-touch. Life-kindlers and Egg-makers mated, then, and brought forth eggs that hatched into small pale larvae. A caste known as Nourishment-givers reared and nurtured these in outlying caverns. It was they who determined which caste the new hjjks would belong to, in accordance with the orders of the Queen, and shaped them for it by the manner of food they provided. The number of each caste’s members never changed: as the life of each hjjk Military or Worker or Egg-maker or Life-kindler neared its appointed end, its replacement was already being reared in the caverns of the Nourishment-givers.

Hresh learned all these things from the members of a different caste yet, one with which he felt a great personal kinship of spirit: the Nest-thinkers, the philosophers and teachers of the insect-folk.

Whether these were male or female, he couldn’t tell. They were as tall as Militaries, which argued that they were female, but they had the blocky frame of Workers, barely narrowing at all at the places where one segment of their bodies gave way to the next, as though they might be male. In any event they were unconcerned with sexual matters. They sat all day in dark sealed chambers, to which the young came for instruction. Hresh went to them too, and listened solemnly as they explained the workings of the Nest to him. He was never sure if he ever spoke twice with the same Nest-thinker. They seemed indistinguishable. After a while he fell into the habit of regarding them all as one, a single individual — Nest-thinker.

Nest-thinker it was who opened the mysteries of the Nest to him, Nest-thinker who showed him how every aspect of the life of the Nest was coordinated perfectly with every other aspect, Nest-thinker who instructed him in Nest-truth, who taught him the intricacies of Egg-plan and Queen-love, who offered him the comfort of Nest-bond.

It was Nest-thinker, ultimately, who brought him before the Queen.

That was the deepest mystery of all: the city’s giant immobile monarch, hidden in a chamber sunken far beneath the other levels, guarded by the elite caste of Queen-attendants — warriors of immense size and indomitable valor who encircled Her place of repose in an impenetrable legion.

“The Queen can never die,” Nest-thinker told Hresh. “She was born when the world was young and will live to its final age.” Was he supposed to take that literally? Surely the Queen’s life-span was great. Perhaps She lived so long that to the others She seemed immortal. But immortal?

Hresh had no idea how long he had been in the Nest before they took him to the Queen. Time had little meaning here: his days often passed in a dreamy haze of contemplation. He had slipped into a strange peaceful otherness. The storms of the outer world, the turmoil and bustle of the City of Dawinno, seemed to him now like phantasms out of some other life. But ultimately a day arrived when Nest-thinker said to him, “You are for the Queen today. Follow me.”

Together they descended a narrow, spiraling ramp, its earthen floor worn to a high polish by the passage of generations of feet. Hresh wondered if any of those feet had been feet like his. He doubted it. Very likely only the hard bristly claws of hjjks had traveled this way before today.

Down and down and downward still they went. The shaft was like an auger boring its way backward through the depths of time. Crisp unknown odors floated up toward him. A pulsing black glow was the only illumination.

The deeper they went, the faster they moved. The long-legged Nest-thinker set an unrelenting pace. Hresh came close to growing dizzy as the shaft wound on and on. But some unknown force steadied his soul: perhaps from Nest-thinker, perhaps from the Queen Herself.

Then at last they reached the holy of holies.

It was a long oval chamber with a high, rounded ceiling. Instead of roof-beams there was a vaulting of hexagonal plates overhead, fitted one against the other in a way that looked invulnerable even to the mightiest tremor of the Earth. At one end of the chamber — the end where Nest-thinker and Hresh had entered — was a platform where the Queen-attendants stood packed close together, their weapons pointing outward. The Queen filled all the rest of the room, end to end, wall to wall.

She was a colossal tubular vessel of flesh, soft and pink, not remotely hjjk-like in any way, without eyes, without beak, without limbs, without features of any sort. But he felt himself to be in the presence of an extraordinary being, of such power and force that it was all he could do to keep himself from falling to his knees before Her.

And yet this was only a minor Queen, Hresh knew. This was just a subordinate of the great Queen of Queens.

The only sound in the chamber was that of his own breathing. He pressed his hands to his sides, digging them deep into his fur to stop them from trembling. Queen-attendants came up close against him, surrounding him on all sides, their hard shells and bristly limbs pressing tight. Their blades lightly pricked his flesh. If he made so much as the slightest unexpected move those blades would plunge deep.

A voice that was like the tolling of an awesome bell spoke in his mind.

“You have the contact focus with you?”

He understood somehow that the Queen meant the Barak Dayir.

“Yes.”

“Use it.”

He drew the Wonderstone from its pouch. It felt fiery in his hand. A profound chill of fear coursed through him, but it was met at once by a neutralizing warmth that seemed to come from the Queen.

He took a deep breath and entered into union with the stone.

At once there is a sound like a crack of thunder, or perhaps the world splitting apart on its hinges. His mind goes soaring across a vast abyss. As if he has dissolved, as if he is traveling on the wind. Impossible for him to comprehend where he is or what is happening; he has a sense only of an immensity containing an immensity, and, somewhere deep within it, a heart of fire burning with the power of ten thousand suns.

He is no longer aware of Nest-thinker’s presence, of the Queen-attendants, even of his own body. There is only that immensity surrounding him.

“What are you?” he asks.

“You know Me as the Queen of Queens.”

He understands. He is within the Queen, and not the minor one of the Nest he knows. All Nests are linked; all Queens are aspects of the one Queen. And that greatest of hjjks who lies in the realm of mysteries in the north has a Wonderstone too: holds it embedded within Her vast flesh, indeed, and it is that Wonderstone now that speaks to his. The union of the Wonderstones joins him to the Queen of Queens. He is engulfed in that gigantic mass of alien flesh.

Hresh remembers now his mentor Noum om Beng saying, so very long ago, “We had what you call a Barak Dayir also. But our Wonderstone was taken by the hjjks.” Yes, and swallowed by their Queen; and this was it, the other contact focus, the Wonderstone that the Bengs had had and lost, the twin to the ancient magical thing he holds clutched in his sensing-organ.

“Now you will see,” says the Queen.

The heavens split wide. The years roll away, back and back and back, and the Barak Dayir traces a narrow flaming line across the centuries into the distant past. The Queen wishes to show him the vastness of Her race’s heritage.

He sees the world buried in the ice of the Long Winter: he sees tongues of frost creeping down into lands that had never known cold, and green tenderness blackening under the onslaught. Creatures to which he could not give names searching desperately for refuge, and folk of his own kind fleeing pitifully hither and yon. The tall pale tailless creatures whom he knew as humans move among them, saying, Come, come, here is the cocoon, you will be saved.

And also he sees legions of hjjks, leaning unperturbed on their spears as the black wind whips swirling snowflakes past them.

Onward, then, back, back, into the time before the cold, into the glory of the Great World, even. Huge slow-bodied quick-witted crocodilian sapphire-eyes folk on the porticoes of their marble villas; sea-lords in their carriages, vegetals, mechanicals, all the strange and wondrous beings of that glorious era. Humans, again. And hjjks, always hjjks, myriads of them, perfectly organized, clear-minded and cold-eyed, living ever in accordance with the vast millennia-spanning scheme that was Egg-plan, moving among the other races, often spending years at a time in the Great World cities before returning to the Nest from which they came.

Will She take him backward even to the time before the Great World?

No. No, the voyage has reached its end. Hresh feels himself drawn forward again with dizzying speed, the images leaping past, everything in rapid motion, comet-tails in the sky, death-stars crashing down, the air turning black, the first snow-storms, the withered leaves, the world entombed in ice, the stoic patience of the doomed sapphire-eyes, the panicky flight of the desperate beasts, and the hjjks again, always the hjjks, moving calmly outward to take possession of the frozen world even as the other races abandoned it.

There was a great stillness in the royal chamber.

They were in the Nest again. A sense of the age-old grandeur and perfection of the hjjk world resonated like the swelling sounds of an immense symphony in Hresh’s soul.

The Queen said, “Now you see us as we are. Why, then, do you make yourselves our enemies?”

“I am not Your enemy.”

“Your people refuse to live in peace with us. Your people even now prepare to attack us.”

“What they do is wrong,” Hresh said. “I ask Your forgiveness for it. I ask You to tell me if there is any way for Your people and mine to live peacefully together.”

There was silence again, a very long one.

“I offered a treaty,” the Queen said.

“Is that the only way? To pen us up in the parts of the world that we already hold, and prevent us from going forth to explore the rest?”

“What value is it, this exploring? One piece of land is much like another. There are not so many of you that you need the entire world.”

“But to give up all hope of reaching outward into the unknown places—”

“Reaching outward! Reaching outward!” That huge pealing voice rang with royal contempt. “That is all you want, you little furry ones! Why not be content with what you have?”

“Is Egg-plan not a constant reaching-out?” Hresh asked boldly.

The Queen responded with a kind of enormous chuckle, as though answering a child so impudent that he was charming. “Egg-plan is the realization and fulfillment of that which has existed since before the beginning of time. It is not the creation of anything new, but only the final actualization of what has always been. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Hresh. “Yes, I think I do.”

“Your kind, boiling out of its hiding places when the time of cold ended, spreading like a disease over the land, multiplying your numbers unchecked, covering the Earth with cities of stone, fouling the land, darkening the air, staining the rivers as you turn them to your own use, pushing yourselves onward into places where you were never meant to be — you are the foe of Nest-truth. You are the enemy of Egg-plan. You are a wild force upon the orderly world. You are a plague, and must be contained. To eradicate you is impossible; but you must be contained. Do you understand Me, child of questions? Do you understand?”

“Yes. I understand, now.”

His sensing-organ tightened on the Barak Dayir. His entire body shivered with the force of the revelations sweeping through it.

He understood, beyond any doubt. And he knew that what he had come to see was more than the Queen had realized She was telling him.

The hjjks of the New Springtime were mere shadows of those who had lived during the time of the Great World. Those ancient hjjks had been venturers, voyagers, a race of bold merchants and explorers. They had journeyed the length and breadth of this and perhaps many other worlds as well in pursuit of their aims, lacing a bright red line of accomplishment through the rich fabric of the Great World.

But the Great World was long gone.

What were these hjjks who had survived? Still a great race, yes. But a fallen one, which had lost all of its technical skills and all of its outward thrust. They had become a profoundly conservative people, clinging to the fragments of their ancient glory and permitting nothing new to emerge.

What was it they most wanted, after all? Nothing more than to dig holes in the ground and live in the dark, performing eternal repetitive cycles of birth and reproduction and death, and once in a while sending their overflow population forth to dig a new hole somewhere else and start the cycle going there. They believed that the world could only be sustained by proper maintenance of the unvarying patterns of life. And they would do anything to assure the continued stability of those patterns.

This is great folly, Hresh thought.

The hjjks fear change because they’ve lived through so great a fall, and they dread some further descent. But change comes anyway. It was precisely because the Great World had done so well at insulating itself from change, Hresh told himself, that the gods had sent the death-stars upon them. The Great World had attained a kind of perfection, and perfection is something the gods cannot abide.

What the hjjks who had survived the catastrophe of the Long Winter still refused to comprehend was that Dawinno would inevitably have his way with them, whether they liked it or not. The Transformer always did. No living thing was exempt from change, no matter how deep in the earth it tried to hide, no matter how desperately it clung to its rituals of life. One had to respect the hjjks for what they had made out of the shards and splinters of their former existence. It was rigid, and therefore doomed, but in its own way it was awesomely perfect.

Building a different kind of static society wasn’t the answer. And for the first time in a long while Hresh saw hope for his own erratic, turbulent, unpredictable folk. Perhaps the world will be ours after all, he thought. Simply because we are so uncertain in our ways.

He had no idea how much time had passed. An hour, a day, perhaps a year. He knew that he had been lost in the strangest of dreams. There was absolute silence in the royal chamber. The Queen-attendants stood still as statues beside him.

Once more Hresh heard the tolling of the Queen’s great voice in his mind:

“Is there anything else you wish to know, child of questions?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I thank You for sharing Your wisdom with me, great Queen.”

With quick fierce strokes of his spearpoint Salaman sketched a map in the dark, moist earth.

“This is the City of Yissou” — a tight circle, unbroken and unbreakable — “and this is where we are now, three days’ march to the northeast. Here is where the land begins to rise, the long wooded ridge that leads to Vengiboneeza. You remember, Thu-Kimnibol, we rode out that way together once.”

Thu-Kimnibol, peering intently at the sketch, grunted his assent.

“This,” said Salaman, drawing a triangle to the right of what he had already inscribed in the ground, “is Vengiboneeza, utterly infested with hjjks. Here” — he poked the ground viciously, some distance beyond the triangle — “is a lesser Nest, where the hjjks dwell who slaughtered our Acknowledgers. Here, here, and here” — three more angry jabs — “are other small Nests. Then there’s a great open nothingness, unless we’re greatly mistaken. And here” — he strode five paces upward, and gouged a ragged crater there — “is the thing we seek, the Nest of Nests itself.”

He turned and looked up at Thu-Kimnibol, who seemed immense to him this morning, mountainous, twice his true size. And his true size had been more than big enough.

Last night Salaman’s spy Gardinak Cheysz had come to him to confirm what the king already suspected: that the friendship between Thu-Kimnibol and his kinswoman was more than a friendship, that in fact they were coupling-partners now. Perhaps twining-partners as well. Was that something recent? Apparently so, Gardinak Cheysz thought. At least the two of them had never been linked in gossip in the past.

An end to all hope of mating him with Weiawala, then. A pity, that. It would have been useful linking him to the royal house of Yissou. Now Thu-Kimnibol’s unexpected romance with the daughter of Taniane made it all the more likely that he’d emerge as the master of the City of Dawinno when Taniane was gone. A king there, instead of a chieftain? Salaman wondered what that would mean for himself and for his city. Perhaps it was for the best. But very possibly not.

Thu-Kimnibol said, “And what plan do you propose, now?”

Salaman tapped the ground with his spear. “Vengiboneeza is the immediate problem. Yissou only knows how many hjjks are swarming in there, but it has to be a million or more. We need to neutralize them all before we can proceed northward, or otherwise there’ll be a tremendous hjjk fortress at our backs, cutting us off, as we make our way toward the great Nest.”

“Agreed.”

“Do you know much about the layout of Vengiboneeza?”

“The place is unknown to me,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

“Mountains here, to the north and east. A bay here. The city between them, protected by walls. Thick jungle down here. We came through that jungle, on the migration from the cocoon, before you were born. It’s a hard city to attack, but it can be done. What I suggest is a two-pronged assault, using those Great World weapons of yours. You come in from the waterfront side, with the Loop and the Line of Fire, and create a distraction. Meanwhile I descend out of the hills with the Earth-Eater and the Bubble Tube and blow the city to bits. If we strike swiftly and well, they’ll never know what hit them. Eh?”

He sensed trouble even before Thu-Kimnibol spoke.

“A good plan,” said the bigger man slowly. “But the Great World weapons have to stay in my possession.”

“What?”

“I can’t share them with you. They’re mine only on loan, and I’m responsible for their safety. They can’t be offered to anyone else. Not even you, my friend.”

Salaman felt a burst of hot fury like molten rock flooding his veins. Bands of fire were tightening around his forehead. He wanted to bring his spear up in a single heedless gesture and bury it in Thu-Kimnibol’s gut; and it took all the strength within him to restrain himself.

Trembling with the effort to seem calm, he said, “This comes as a great surprise, cousin.”

“Does it? Why, then, I’m sorry, cousin.”

“We are allies. I thought there would be a sharing of the weapons.”

“I understand. But I’m obliged to protect them.”

“Surely you know I’d treat them with care.”

“Beyond any doubt you would,” said Thu-Kimnibol smoothly. “But if they were taken from you somehow — if the hjjks of Vengiboneeza managed to ambush you, let’s say, and the weapons were lost — the shame, the blame, all that would fall upon me for having let them out of my hands. No, cousin, it’s impossible. You create the seaside distraction, we’ll destroy Vengiboneeza from above. And then we will go on together, in all brotherhood, to the Nest.”

Salaman moistened his lips. He forced himself to stay calm.

“As you wish, cousin,” he said finally. “We approach the city by the water. You descend through the hills, with your weapons. Here: I give you my hand on it.”

Thu-Kimnibol grinned broadly. “So be it, then, cousin!”

Salaman stood for a time, watching as the hulking figure of the prince dwindled in the distance. The king shivered with rage. From the back, Thu-Kimnibol looked just like his father Harruel. And, Salaman thought, he was just as obstinate as Harruel had been. Just as vainglorious, just as dangerous.

Biterulve approached and said, “Trouble, father?”

“Trouble? What trouble, boy?”

“I can see it in the air around you.”

Salaman shrugged. “We’re not to have any of the Great World weapons, that’s all. Thu-Kimnibol must keep them for himself.”

“None for us? Not even one?”

“He says he doesn’t dare let them out of his hands.” Salaman spat. “Gods, I could have killed him where he stood! He wants all the glory of killing the enemy and winning the war — while sending us naked into the field against the hjjks.”

“Father, the weapons are his,” said Biterulve softly. “If we’d been the ones who found them, would we have offered to share them with him?”

“Of course we would! Are we animals, boy?”

Biterulve made no reply. But the king knew from the look in the boy’s gentle eyes that he was skeptical of what Salaman had said; and Salaman very much doubted that he believed it either.

Father and son regarded each other steadily for a moment.

Then Salaman, softening, put his arm over Biterulve’s thin shoulders and said, “It makes no difference. Let him keep his toys to himself. We’ll manage well enough by ourselves. But I tell you this, boy, and I vow it before all the gods as well: that it’ll be the army of Yissou, and not that of Dawinno, that’ll be first into the Nest, if it costs me everything I have. And I’ll kill the Queen myself. Before Thu-Kimnibol so much as sets eyes on Her.”

And, the king added silently, I’ll see to it that I square things with my cousin Thu-Kimnibol when the war is over. But for the time being we are allies and friends.

It was Husathirn Mueri’s turn once more this day for judiciary throne-duty in the Basilica. With Thu-Kimnibol gone from the city again, he shared the task day by day with Puit Kjai. Not that there was much in the way of litigation for any of them to handle, with the city virtually deserted except for the very young and the very old.

Still, he sat obligingly under the great cupola, ready to dispense justice if anyone required it of him. In the idle hours his mind roved to the north, where even at this moment the war that he despised was being fought. What was happening up there? Had the hjjks overwhelmed Thu-Kimnibol yet? It gave Husathirn Mueri some pleasure to imagine that scene, the hordes of shrieking clacking bug-folk streaming down from the northern hills in implacable torrents, hurling themselves upon the invaders, cutting them to pieces, Thu-Kimnibol going down beneath the onslaught of their spears and perishing just as his father before him had—

“Throne-grace?”

Chevkija Aim had entered the Basilica while Husathirn Mueri sat dreaming. The guard-captain had chosen a helmet today of black iron plates, with two shining golden claws rising to a great height from its sides.

“Are there petitioners?” Husathirn Mueri asked.

“None so far, throne-grace. But a bit of news. Old Boldirinthe’s taken to her bed, and they say it’ll be for the last time. The chieftain has gone to her. Your sister Catiriil’s there also. She’s the one who sent me to tell you.”

“Should I go also? Yes, yes, I suppose I should: but not until my hours are done in the Basilica. Whether there are litigants or not, my duty is here.” Husathirn Mueri smiled. “Poor old Boldirinthe. Well, her hour was long overdue, in truth. What do you say, Chevkija Aim? Will it take ten strong men to carry her to her grave, do you think? Fifteen?”

The guard-captain seemed not to be amused.

“She’s the offering-woman of the Koshmar folk, sir. It’s a high office, they tell me. And she was a kind woman. I’d carry her myself, if I were asked.”

Husathirn Mueri looked away. “My mother was offering-woman before her, did you know that? Torlyri. It was in the old days, in Vengiboneeza. Who’ll be offering-woman now, I wonder? Will there even be a new one? Does anyone still know the rituals and the talismans?”

“These are strange days, sir.”

“Strange indeed.”

They fell silent.

“How quiet the city is,” Husathirn Mueri said. “Everyone gone to fight the war except you and me. Or so it seems.”

“Our duties prevented us, sir,” said Chevkija Aim tactfully. “Even in wartime, there has to be a justiciary, there have to be guardsmen in the city.”

“You know I oppose the war, Chevkija Aim.”

“Then it’s best that your duties here kept you from having to go. You wouldn’t have been able to fight well, feeling as you do.”

“And would you have gone, if you could?”

“I attend the chapels now, sir. You know that. I share your hatred of the war. I yearn only for the coming of Queen-peace to bring love to our troubled world.”

Husathirn Mueri’s eyes widened. “Do you? Yes, you do: I forgot. You follow Kundalimon’s teachings now too. Everyone does, I suppose, who’s still here. The warriors have gone to war and the peace-lovers stay behind. As it should be. Where will it all end, do you think?”

“In Queen-peace, sir. In Queen-love for all.”

“I surely hope so.”

But do I? Husathirn Mueri wondered. His surrender to the new faith, if surrender was what it really was, still mystified him. He went regularly to the chapel; he chanted in rote, repeating the scriptures that Tikharein Tourb and Chhia Kreun recited; and it seemed to him that he felt something close to a religious exaltation as he did. That was an experience entirely new to him. But he had never been sure of his own sincerity. It was only one of the many strangenesses of these days, that he should find himself kneeling to chant the praises of the Queen of Queens, that he should be praying to the monstrous hjjks to deliver the world from its anguish.

He looked toward the hall, as if hopeful that some gaggle of angry merchants would burst in, waving a clutch of legal papers and crying curses at each other. But the Basilica was quiet.

“An empty city,” he said, as much to himself as to the guard-captain. “The young men gone. The old dying off. Taniane wanders about like her own ghost. The Presidium never meets. Hresh is gone, who knows where? Hunting for mysteries in the swamps, I suppose. Or flying off on his Wonderstone to the Nest to have a chat with the Queen. That would be like him, something like that. The House of Knowledge empty except for the one girl who hasn’t gone off to the war. Even Nialli Apuilana’s gone to the war.” Husathirn Mueri felt a pang of sadness at that thought. He had watched her ride away, the day the troops departed, standing proudly beside Thu-Kimnibol, waving excitedly. The girl was mad, no doubt of that. First telling everyone what wondrous godlike beings the hjjks were, and involving herself in that affair with the envoy Kundalimon after rejecting every logical mate the city had to offer, and then joining the army and going off to fight against the Queen: it made no sense. Nothing that Nialli Apuilana had done had ever made sense.

Just as well, Husathirn Mueri thought, that she and I never became lovers. She might have pulled me down into her madness with her.

But it still made him ache to think of her, mad or not.

Chevkija Aim said, “I think we could close the Basilica, sir. No one came yesterday when Puit Kjai was here, and I think no one will come today. And you’d be able to pay your respects to Boldirinthe before it’s too late.”

“Boldirinthe,” Husathirn Mueri said. “Yes. I ought go to her.” He rose from the justiciary throne. “Very well. The court is adjourned, Chevkija Aim.”

Ascending the spiral path from the Queen-chamber should have been more taxing than the descent; but to his surprise Hresh found himself oddly vigorous, almost buoyant, and he strode briskly along behind Nest-thinker, easily keeping pace step for step as they rose from that deep well of mysteries toward the by now familiar domain of the upper Nest.

Strange exaltation lingered in him after his meeting with the Queen of Queens.

A formidable creature, yes. That pallid gigantic thing, that quivering continent of monstrously ancient flesh. Hundreds of years old, was She? Thousands? He couldn’t begin to guess. That She had survived from the time of the Great World he doubted, though it was possible. Anything was possible here. He saw now more deeply than ever before how alien the hjjks were, how little like his own kind in nearly every respect.

And yet they were “human,” he thought, human in that peculiar special sense that he had long ago conceived: they maintained a sense of past and future, they understood life as a process, an unfolding, they were capable of the conscious transmission of historical tradition from generation to generation. The little flitting garaboons gibbering in the forest added nothing to nothing, and ended with nothing. That was true of all the beasts below the human level, the gorynths wallowing in their oozy swamps, the angry chattering samarangs, the jewel-eyed khut-flies, and the rest. They might as well be stones. To be human, Hresh thought, is to be aware of time and seasons, to gather and store knowledge and to transmit it, above all to build and to maintain. In that sense the People were human; even the caviandis were human; and in that sense the hjjks were human too. Human didn’t simply mean one who belonged to that mysterious ancient race of pale tailless creatures. It was something broader, something far more universal. And it included the hjjks.

To Nest-thinker he said, “That was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I thank the gods I could live long enough to reach this day.”

The hjjk made no reply.

“Will I be summoned to Her again, do you think?” Hresh asked.

“You will be if you are,” said Nest-thinker. “That is when you will know.”

There seemed to be a surliness to Nest-thinker’s tone. Hresh wondered if the hjjk envied the depth of the communion he had achieved with the Queen. But there was danger in attributing People emotions to things that hjjks might say.

They were near the upper level now. Hresh recognized certain artifacts set in niches in the wall, a smooth white stone that looked almost like a huge egg, and a plaited star like the one Nialli had had, but much larger, and a small red jewel that burned with a brilliant inner flame. He had noticed them when he began his descent. Holy hjjk talismans, perhaps. Or perhaps mere decorations.

Since coming to the Nest Hresh had lived in an austere cubicle in an outlying corridor, structure — a kind of isolation ward, perhaps, for strangers from outside. It was a round chamber with a low flat ceiling and a thin scatter of dried reeds on its hard-packed earthen floor to serve him as a bed; but it was comfortable enough for his undemanding needs. He looked forward to it now. A time to rest, a time to think about what he’d just undergone. Perhaps later they’d bring him a meal of some sort, the dried fruit and bits of sun-parched meat that seemed to be the only fare in this place and to which he had adapted without difficulty.

Now they had reached the head of the spiral ramp, the place where they re-entered the upper level. Nest-thinker turned here, not to the left where Hresh’s cubicle was, but in the other direction entirely. Hresh lingered behind, wondering if his sense of direction had misled him again, as it had so many times during his stay here. This time he was sure, though. His chamber lay to the left. Nest-thinker, by now a dozen paces away, swung about and looked back, and gestured brusquely to him.

“You will follow.”

“I’d like to go to my sleeping-place. I think it’s that way.”

“You will follow,” said Nest-thinker again.

In the Nest disobedience was simply not an option: if he persisted in going to his chamber, Hresh knew, Nest-thinker wouldn’t be angered so much as mystified, but in any case Hresh would end up going where Nest-thinker wanted him to go. He followed. The path ramped gently upward. After a time he saw what seemed surely to be the glow of daylight ahead. They were approaching one of the surface mouths of the Nest. Five or six Militaries were waiting there. Nest-thinker delivered Hresh to them and turned away without a word.

To the Militaries Hresh said, “I’d be grateful if you’d take me to my sleeping-place, now. This isn’t where I wanted Nest-thinker to bring me.”

The hjjks stared blandly at him as if he hadn’t said a thing.

“Come,” one said, pointing toward the daylight.

His wagon was waiting out there, and his xlendi, looking rested and well fed. The implication was clear enough. He had seen the Queen, and the Queen had seen him, and so the Queen’s needs had been served. Which was all that mattered here. His time in the Nest was over; now he was to be expelled.

A quiver of shock and dismay ran through him. He didn’t want to leave. He had been living easily and happily here according to the rhythm of the Nest, strange as it was. It had become his home. He had supposed that he would end his days in the warmth and the silence and the sweetness of this place, dwelling here until at last the Destroyer came to take him to his final rest, which very likely would be soon. The outside world held nothing more for him. He wanted only to be allowed to penetrate ever more deeply into the way of the hjjks in whatever time might remain to him.

“Please,” Hresh said. “I want to stay.”

He could just as well have been speaking to creatures of stone. They leaned on their spears and stared at him, motionless, impassive. They hardly even seemed alive, but for the rippling of the orange breathing-tubes that dangled from the sides of their heads as air passed through the tubes’ segmented coils.

The xlendi made a soft whickering sound. It had had its orders; it was impatient to set forth.

“Don’t you understand?” Hresh told the hjjks. “I don’t want to leave.”

Silence.

“I ask for sanctuary among you.”

Silence, icy, impenetrable.

“In the name of the Queen, I beg you—”

That, at least, brought a response. The two hjjks nearest him drew themselves up tall, and a brightness that might have been anger passed swiftly across the many facets of their huge eyes. They brought their spears up and held them out horizontally, as though they meant to push Hresh forward with them.

A silent voice said, “It is the Queen’s wish that you continue your pilgrimage now. In the name of the Queen, then, go. Go. ”

He understood that there was no hope of further appeal. They stared at him inexorably. The horizontal spears formed an impenetrable gate, cutting him off from the Nest.

“Yes,” he said sadly. “Very well.”

He clambered into the wagon. Immediately the xlendi set out almost at a canter across the barren gray plain. He was startled by that. The beast had been so unhurried during the journey up here from Dawinno. But Hresh suspected that the xlendi was being guided, and even propelled, by some force within the Nest, and he thought that he knew what that force was. He sat passively, letting the wagon run; and when the xlendi halted for water and forage, he sipped a little water himself and ate a little of the dried meat that the hjjks had put into his wagon, and waited for the ride to resume. And so it went, day after day, a long quiet time, almost like a dreamless sleep, first through a zone of strange flat-topped sand-colored pyramidal hills, and then into a region of eerie erosion where the fiery crimson rocks had been cut into fantastic arches and colonnades, and after that through a landscape of rough sedge and occasional stubby trees and scattered herds of some dark-striped grazing animal Hresh had never seen before, which did not even look up as his wagon went by.

Until at midday one day, while he was crossing what might not long ago have been a lake-bed, but was at this season a place of dry and cracked expanses of mud covered by a light scattering of sandy dust, he saw a figure on a vermilion just ahead, someone of the People, an unexpected sight indeed in this unknown place.

The xlendi halted and waited as the huge red creature came shambling up. The man riding it gasped.

“Gods! Can it really be you, sir? Or am I dreaming this? It must be a dream. It must.”

Hresh smiled. Tried to speak. He hadn’t used his voice in so long that it was harsh and ragged, a mere rasping croak. But he managed to say, “I know you, I think.”

The rider vaulted down from the vermilion and ran toward him. Peering over the wagon’s side, he stared at Hresh, shaking his head in wonder.

“Plor Killivash, sir. From the House of Knowledge! You don’t recognize me? I was one of your assistants, don’t you remember? Plor Killivash?”

“Is this Dawinno, then?”

“Dawinno? Sir, no! We’re way up in hjjk territory. I’m with the army, your brother Thu-Kimnibol’s army! We’ve been fighting for weeks. We’ve fought at Vengiboneeza, we’ve fought at a couple of the small Nests—” Plor Killivash’s eyes grew wider and wider. “Sir, how did you get here? You couldn’t possibly have come all this way alone, could you? And why are you here? You shouldn’t be at the battlefront, you know. Sir, can you hear me? Are you all right, sir? Sir?”

Thu-Kimnibol was in his tent. The army was camped on the edge of the prairie that they called the Plains of Minbain. He had given names to all the features of this unfamiliar land: the Mountains of Harruel, Lake Taniane, the Torlyri River, Boldirinthe Valley, Koshmar Pass. For all he knew, Salaman was bestowing names of his own on the same places as he advanced through them. Thu-Kimnibol didn’t care about that. To him the great jagged mountains they had gone past three weeks before were his father’s mountains, and this lovely serene tableland was his mother’s plain, and let Salaman call them what he would.

To Nialli Apuilana he said, “There it is again. I can feel the king approaching. Marching at the head of his troops, coming this way.”

“Yes. So do I. Or something dark and fierce, at any rate.”

“Salaman. No question of it.”

She put her hand to his thick forearm, where just a few days before he had taken a light wound from a hjjk spear. “You speak his name as though he’s the enemy, not the hjjks. Are you afraid of him, love?”

Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “Afraid of Salaman? I don’t often think in terms of who it is that I fear. But only a fool wouldn’t fear Salaman, Nialli. He’s become some kind of monster. I told you once that I thought he was mad. But he’s gone beyond madness now. Or so I think.”

“A monster,” Nialli Apuilana repeated. “But in war all warriors have to be monsters. Isn’t that so?”

“Not like that. I watched him when our two armies were last together. He was fighting as if he wanted not just to kill every hjjk he saw, but to roast it and eat it also. There was fire in his eyes. Long ago I saw my father Harruel fight, and he was a troubled man, with great hot angry forces churning within him; but at his fiercest he seemed calm and gentle when I compare him with Salaman as he looked that day.” Thu-Kimnibol’s sensing-organ quivered. “I felt him again just now. Closer and closer. Well, perhaps it’s best that the armies join again. I never meant for us to advance separately into the country of the hjjks.”

“Will you have some wine?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

“Yes. Yes, that would be good.”

Twilight was coming on. Most likely Salaman and his army would show up by midday tomorrow, if the emanations were this strong. The reunion of the two forces, after weeks of separation, was likely to be tense. And the gods only knew what a wild man the king had become by now. This entire campaign seemed to have been a voyage into ever deeper madness for him.

The trouble had started, Thu-Kimnibol thought, while they were planning the Vengiboneeza campaign: Salaman’s burst of anger after being told he wasn’t going to be given any of the Great World weapons had been the beginning. There had been a coldness between them ever since. They both obeyed the fiction that Salaman was commander-in-chief and Thu-Kimnibol the field general, but there hadn’t been much cordiality or real cooperation between them as the fighting itself got under way.

Still, everything had gone well so far. Better even than they might have expected, in fact.

The battle of Vengiboneeza had been an overwhelming triumph. The hjjks had constructed a Nest above ground there, a weird ramshackle array of flimsy gray tubes that ran in a hundred directions, spanning the old city from the waterfront to the eastern foothills. Salaman came upon the city from the western side, setting up a great uproar of flame and explosions along the seawall, while Thu-Kimnibol’s forces had descended carefully along the slopes of the great golden-brown mountain wall to the north and east. The hjjks were taken by surprise, rushing down to the water to see what the matter was while Thu-Kimnibol got ready to attack from above.

Then it was the moment to bring the Great World weapons into play. Thu-Kimnibol had used the one he called the Loop to set up an impenetrable barrier along the foothills to keep the hjjks from assailing his position. Then with the Line of Fire he raked the city with flames until the red tongues rose above the highest rooftop and the pulpy walls of the Vengiboneeza Nest blackened and shriveled. With the Bubble Tube he had caused such turbulence in the air that the city’s age-old towers, those marvelous spires of scarlet and blue, of glittering purple, of brilliant gold, of midnight black, crumbled like brittle sticks. Now he called into service the most potent of his weapons, the Earth-Eater, to gobble huge craters in the fabric of the dying metropolis below him. The boulevards and avenues themselves slipped downward into chaos, whole districts collapsing and sinking from sight, and a great pall of dust and smoke rose to choke the sky as if the death-stars had come again.

The Long Winter itself hadn’t been able to destroy Vengiboneeza. But Thu-Kimnibol had done it in a single afternoon, with four small devices that an ignorant farmer had found in a muddy hillside.

They had stayed all night to watch the city burn. All its immense population must have burned with it, for Thu-Kimnibol’s troops saw not a single hjjk try to escape on the foothills side, and Salaman’s warriors along the seawall cut down every one of those that attempted to get away by water. The armies rejoined on the far side of Vengiboneeza and set out side by side into the true hjjk heartland. Which was where Salaman’s army had split off after the destruction of one of the smaller Nests behind Vengiboneeza. The king, made wild by the love of slaughter, had insisted on pursuing and killing a few hundred hjjks that had managed to get away. Thu-Kimnibol found little joy in the thought of seeing him again. Too bad Salaman hadn’t decided to take a separate route all the rest of the way.

Pulling Nialli Apuilana close against him, he drew his breath deep, filling his lungs with the fragrance of her. At least tonight they’d be at their ease together. If Salaman turned up tomorrow, as seemed more and more likely, he’d deal with that problem when it presented itself.

“It still surprises me,” he said softly, “when I awaken and see that it’s you beside me. Even after all this time, I look at you, and I tell myself in wonder, That’s Nialli there! How strange!”

“You still expect to find Naarinta, do you?” she said playfully.

“Gods! How merciless you can be! You know what I mean, Nialli. I’ll always cherish Naarinta’s memory, yes. But she’s long gone. What I’m trying to tell you is that it continues to amaze me that I should have found such love with you, you, my half-brother’s own child, that strange wild girl whom no one in Dawinno was able to tame—”

“And have you tamed me now, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“Hardly. But I no longer see you as anyone’s child. Or strange. Or wild.”

“Ah, and how do you see me, then?” she asked, smiling.

“Why, as the most—”

“Sir? Lord prince?” came a deep familiar voice from outside the tent.

Thu-Kimnibol muttered a curse. “Is that you, Dumanka? By all the gods, this had better be important, that you come interrupting me in my tent when—”

“Sir, it is! It is!”

“I’ll have him flayed if it isn’t,” he said to Nialli Apuilana under his breath. “I promise you that.”

“Go to him. Dumanka’s not one to bother you over nothing.”

“Yes. I suppose.” Thu-Kimnibol put down his wine and made his way to the tent entrance, a little creakily, for his muscles were still sore from the last battle. He peered out.

Dumanka looked as astonished as if he’d just seen the sun moving backward through the sky. Thu-Kimnibol had never seen him in such a state.

“Lord prince—”

“Gods, man! What is it?”

“Hresh, sir. Hresh the chronicler?”

“Yes, I know who Hresh is. What of him? Is there a message from him?”

Dumanka shook his head. Hoarsely he blurted, “Sir, he’s here.”

“Here?”

“Plor Killivash just brought him in. Found him, sir, wandering around in a xlendi-wagon out in the patrol area. We’ve got him in the medic tent. He seems to be all right, just a little woolly in the head. He’s been asking for you, and I thought—”

Thu-Kimnibol, stunned, waved him into silence. He turned to Nialli Apuilana. “Did you hear that?”

“No. Trouble?”

“You might call it that. Your father’s here, Nialli. My lunatic brother. Dumanka says he just came wandering in out of the open country. Mueri and Yissou and Dawinno, what’s he doing here? On the front line of the war, no less. Just what we need. Gods! Gods!”

Quietly Hresh said, “Come with me to the Queen, brother. Let me show you what She is like.”

It was an hour after his arrival. He had been bombarded with surprises: Thu-Kimnibol and Nialli Apuilana sharing a tent like mates, Vengiboneeza destroyed, the hjjks being pushed back on every front. But, spent and drained as he was by his journey, startled and dismayed as he was by these developments, he kept his mind and strength focused on his purpose.

“To the Queen?” Thu-Kimnibol said. He seemed bewildered. Then he flashed a brief flickering smile, a look of patronizing indulgence. “You and I. The Queen of Queens, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“To speak with Her. Not to kill Her, only to have a chat with Her.”

“Yes,” said Hresh.

“And how will we get there? In your little wagon?”

“I have this,” Hresh said, and brought forth in his hand the little pouch that contained the Barak Dayir.

A grunt of amazement. “You’ve taken the Wonderstone with you?”

“The Barak Dayir is mine, brother. As were the weapons with which you destroyed Vengiboneeza.”

Thu-Kimnibol made no attempt to parry that. “Let me understand you. You’re proposing that we visit the Nest, but not in our actual bodies, just by using the Wonderstone to send our souls there?”

“That’s right.”

“And why, brother, do you want me to put myself in my enemy’s power?”

“So you can begin to understand your enemy’s nature: not just Her greatness, which I think you underestimate, but also Her vulnerability, which I don’t think you see at all.”

“Her greatness. Her vulnerability.” Thu-Kimnibol frowned. “Of Her greatness I’ve already heard far too much. But Her vulnerability? What are you talking about?”

“Come with me, if you want to know.”

Hresh’s serenity was an unassailable armor. Thu-Kimnibol shot a glance at Nialli Apuilana as though begging for help.

Hresh saw now the healing wounds here and there beneath his brother’s thick brick-hued fur, at least half a dozen of them. He wondered what prodigies of heroism Thu-Kimnibol had managed in battle, how many scores of hjjks he had already sent to their deaths.

Nialli Apuilana said, “What risk is there in this, father?”

“Only the risk that we’ll fall under Her spell, which as you know is potent. But I think we can defeat it. I know we can. I’ve been able to escape from Her grasp once already.”

“Are you saying that you’ve already made the voyage to the Nest yourself?” Thu-Kimnibol asked.

“To a minor Nest, yes. I was there for weeks. And went from there to the great one with the help of the Barak Dayir. The Queen of Queens has a Wonderstone also, one that once belonged to the Bengs. It’s inside Her body. I spoke with Her, Wonderstone to Wonderstone. After which, the hjjks of the Nest where I was living sent me on my way. And guided my xlendi, I think, until I could be found by one of your men.”

“Then all this is a trap,” said Thu-Kimnibol.

“All of it is part of Dawinno’s plan,” Hresh replied.

Thu-Kimnibol fell silent. Hresh watched him patiently. He felt that he had infinite patience, now. He had never known such tranquility of spirit before. Nothing could shift him from his path.

He had noticed immediately the signs all over the tent that his brother and Nialli Apuilana were living together in intimacy. That had jolted him, but only for a fraction of an instant. Thu-Kimnibol and Nialli Apuilana each had greatness in them. That they should finally have come together in this troubled time seemed appropriate. Yes, even inevitable. Let them be.

Learning of Vengiboneeza’s destruction had been a shock too, of a different sort. Vengiboneeza had been a place of wonder and majesty since time’s early days. For it to be gone, that treasury of ancient miracles where he had spent his youth, ruined more completely now by this war than it had ever been by the Long Winter, was painful news.

But then he had put his regret aside. Nothing was eternal except Eternity itself. To mourn the loss of Vengiboneeza was to deny Dawinno. The gods provide, the gods take away. The flux of change is the only constant. The Transformer sweeps everything away in its time, and replaces it with something else. There had been cities greater than Vengiboneeza upon this Earth, Hresh knew, of which not a scrap remained, not even their names.

Thu-Kimnibol was staring at him. After a long while he said, “I think you need to rest, brother.”

Hresh laughed. “Are you telling me that I’m senile, or simply out of my mind?”

“That you’re exhausted from Yissou knows what kind of an ordeal. And that the last thing either of us needs to do right now is fly off into the clutches of the Queen.”

“I’ve been in Her clutches already, and here I am to tell the tale. I can get free of Her again. Before this war goes any further, brother, there are things you need to know.”

“Tell me about them, then.”

“You have to see them for yourself.”

Thu-Kimnibol stared. Another silence. An impasse.

Hresh said, “Do you trust me, brother?”

“You know I do.”

“Do you think I’d lead you into harm?”

“You might. Without meaning to. Hresh-full-of-questions, you are. You poke your nose everywhere. You’ve always been fearless, brother. Too fearless, maybe.”

“And you? Thu-Kimnibol the coward, is that who you are?”

Thu-Kimnibol grinned. “You think you can goad me into this lunacy by playing on my pride, do you, Hresh? Give me credit for a little intelligence, brother.”

“I do. More than a little. I ask you again: come with me to the Queen. If you hope to rule the world, Thu-Kimnibol, and I know that you do, you need to understand the nature of the one being who stands in your way. Come with me, brother.”

Hresh held out his hand. His voice was steady. His gaze was unwavering.

Thu-Kimnibol shifted his weight uneasily. He stood deep in thought, scowling, plucking at the ruff of fur along his cheeks. His face was dark with doubt. But then his expression changed. He seemed to be weakening — Thu-Kimnibol, weakening! — under Hresh’s unremitting pressure. Tightly he said to Nialli Apuilana, “What do you think? Should I do this thing?”

“I think you should.” Unhesitatingly.

Thu-Kimnibol nodded. A cloud seemed to have lifted from him. To Hresh he said, “How is it done?”

“We’ll twine; and then the Barak Dayir will carry us to the Nest of Nests.”

“Twine? You and I? Hresh, we’ve never done a thing like that!”

“No, brother. Not ever.”

Thu-Kimnibol smiled. “How strange that seems, twining with my own brother. But if that’s what we have to do, that’s what we’ll do. Eh, Hresh? So be it.” To Nialli Apuilana he said, “If for some reason I don’t come back—”

“Don’t even say that, Thu-Kimnibol!”

“Hresh offers me no guarantees. These possibilities have to be considered. If I don’t come back, love — if my soul doesn’t return to my body after a certain while, two full days, let’s say — take yourself to Salaman and tell him what has happened. Is that clear? Give our army over into his sole command. Let him have the four Great World weapons.”

“Salaman? But he’s a madman!”

“A great warrior, all the same. The only one, after myself, who can lead us in this campaign. Will you do that?”

“If I must,” said Nialli Apuilana in a low voice.

“Good.” Thu-Kimnibol drew in a deep breath and extended his sensing-organ to Hresh. “Well, brother, I’m ready if you are. Let’s go to visit the Queen.”

There is darkness everywhere, a great sea of dense blackness so complete that it excludes even the possibility of light. And then, suddenly, a fierce glow like that of an exploding sun blossoms on the horizon. The blackness shatters into an infinity of fiery points of piercing brightness and Thu-Kimnibol feels those myriad blazing fragments rushing past him on hot streams of wind.

Within the fiery mystery that lies ahead, he is able now to make out texture and form. He sees something that seems to him to be an immense shining machine, a thing of whirling rods and ceaseless churning pistons, moving flawlessly with never a moment’s slackening of energy or failure of pattern. From it comes a pure beam of dazzling light that rises with scimitar force to cut across the sky.

The Nest, Thu-Kimnibol thinks. The Nest of Nests.

And a voice like the sound of worlds colliding says, speaking out of the core of that unthinkable tireless mechanism, “Why do you return to Me so soon?”

The Queen, that must be.

The Queen of Queens.

He feels no fear, only awe and something that he thinks might be humility. The presence of Hresh beside him gives him whatever degree of assurance he’s unable to find within himself. He has never been this close to his brother in all his life: it’s difficult now for him to determine where his own soul leaves off and that of Hresh begins.

They are descending, or falling, or plummeting. Whether it is by command of that great creature in the brightness before them, or Hresh is still in control of their journey, Thu-Kimnibol has no way of telling. But as they come nearer the Nest he sees it more clearly, and understands that it is no machine at all, but rather a thing of chewed pulp and soil, and what he has taken for a shining machine, rods flailing and pistons pumping in perfect coordination, is simply his perception of the stupendous oneness of the hjjk empire itself, in which not even the smallest of the newly hatched has free volition, but where everything is tightly woven in a predestined pattern with no room for imperfection.

And at the heart of that pattern lies such a creature as he has never imagined: a world in itself, that huge motionless thing. With the aid of the Wonderstone that his brother holds in the curl of his sensing-organ, somewhere thousands of leagues behind them where they have left their unconscious bodies, Thu-Kimnibol can perceive the vastness of the container of flesh that houses the mind of the Queen, the slow journey of the life-fluids through that gigantic ancient body, the ponderous workings of its incomprehensible organs.

It has waited through half of time for his coming here, so he feels. And he has passed all his life in a dream, waiting only for this moment of confrontation.

“There are two of you,” the Queen declares, in that same overwhelming tone. “Who is your other self?”

Hresh does not respond. Thu-Kimnibol sends a probe in his brother’s direction, to prod him to make some reply. But Hresh seems silent, dazed, as if the effort of the journey itself has exhausted the last of his powers.

All is in his own hands, then. He says, “I am Thu-Kimnibol, son of Harruel and Minbain, brother on the mother’s side to Hresh the chronicler, whom you already know.”

“Ah. You have an Egg-maker in common but you come from different Life-kindlers.” There is a long pause. “And you are the one who would destroy us. Why is that, that you feel such hatred for us?”

“The gods guide my hand,” Thu-Kimnibol says simply.

“The gods?”

“They who shape our lives and control our destinies. They tell me that I must lead my people forward against those who stand in the way of our achieving what we must.”

There comes a sound of great pealing laughter now, rising and spreading outward like the floodwaters of some mighty river, so that Thu-Kimnibol has to fight with all his strength to keep from being engulfed in that tremendous outpouring of mockery.

The words he has just spoken echo and re-echo in his ears, amplified and distorted by the tide of the Queen’s laughter so that they become pathetic comic shards of foolishness — destinies … lead … achieving … must …His staunch declaration of purpose seems only like empty nonsense to him now. Angrily he strives to reclaim some shred of his lost dignity.

“Do You mock the gods, then?” he cries.

Again that great flood of laughter. “The gods, you say? The gods?”

“The gods, indeed. Who have brought me here today, and who will strengthen my hand until the last of Your kind has been sent from the world.”

Thu-Kimnibol is aware now of Hresh, distant and vague, fluttering against him like a bird against a sealed window, as if trying to warn him against the course he has chosen. But he ignores his brother’s agitation.

“Tell me this, Queen: do You so much as believe in the gods? Or is Your arrogance so great that You deny them?”

“Your gods?” she says. “Yes. No.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your gods are symbols of the great forces: comfort, protection, nourishment, healing, death.”

“You know that much?”

“Of course.”

“And You have no belief in those gods?”

“We believe in comfort, protection, nourishment, healing, death. But they are not gods.”

“You worship no one and nothing, then?”

“Not as you understand worship,” the Queen replies.

“Not even Your creator?”

“The humans created us,” she says, in a strange offhanded way. “But does that make them worthy of our worship? We think not.” Once more the Queen’s laughter engulfs him. “Let us not discuss the gods. Let us discuss the injuries you do us. How can you carry on such war against us, when you have no true understanding of what we are? Your other self has already seen our Nest. Now it is your turn. Prepare yourself to behold us.”

But there is no time to prepare himself, nor does he know how, or for what. Before the Queen’s voice has died away the Nest in its totality sweeps like a rushing torrent into his soul.

He sees it all: the great shining machine, the flawless world within the world, Militaries and Workers, Egg-makers and Life-kindlers, Nest-thinkers and Nourishment-givers and Queen-attendants and all the rest, every one woven together in an inextricable way in the service of the Queen, which is to say in the service of the totality. He understands how the creation of Nest-plenty and Nest-strength fosters the furtherance of Egg-plan, by which Queen-love will ultimately be extended to all the cosmos. He sees the smaller Nests here and there and across the face of the planet, each of them tied to all the rest, and to the great central Nest, by the powerful force of Nest-truth that radiates from the immensity that is the Queen of Queens.

How puny his own armies seem, against the colossal confident single force that is the hjjks! How ragged and confused, how crippled by division and vainglory! There’s no hope of prevailing in this struggle, Thu-Kimnibol sees. Egg-plan is in direct conflict with the ambitions of the People, and Egg-plan must triumph through sheer will and force of numbers. He might win a battle now and then, he might deal one band of hjjks or another a grievous blow, but always the underlying force of hjjk unity will remain, always the power of the Nest will bring forth horde after horde, until in the end the upstarts out of the cocoon must inevitably be defeated.

Must — inevitably—

— be—

— defeated—

Or perhaps have been already. Despair presses against him with crushing weight. All strength seems to be leaving his limbs, and he sees that that strength was only an illusion, that he had thought of himself as a giant but had always in reality been nothing more than a flea: a bold flea and foolish flea who has dared to challenge an immortal monarch.

He is floating downward toward the colossus that is the Queen like a cinder drifting on the air. In another moment he will land on the great surface of Her and be swallowed up. When he looks toward Hresh for help his brother seems more distant even than before, a mere speck far away, already caught beyond hope of escape in the Queen’s compelling force, already sinking irretrievably within the layers of Her flesh.

He is next. They both are doomed.

The Queen is like some great cosmic force, a deadly elemental thing that holds the power of ending his life with a single contemptuous flicker of Her will.

Does She mean to kill him, Thu-Kimnibol wonders, or merely to swallow him up? He considers the vastness of Her and the probable power of the Wonderstone hidden somewhere within the incalculable volumes of Her flesh; and he decides that probably She doesn’t intend to kill him, but that if She tries it he’ll send such a flare of defiant fury into Her, by way of Hresh with whom he lies entwined and the Wonderstone which Hresh possesses, that She will sizzle in unthinkable pain.

More likely, though, he decides, She means to absorb and neutralize, to transform him from Her foe into Her slave. That he will not allow either.

Her strength is immense. And yet — and yet—

He thinks suddenly that he can see Her limits. How She could be brought to a standstill, if not defeated altogether.

The perfection of the hjjk empire hums and whirrs and gleams about him, and the power of the Queen holds him fast, and nonetheless in the midst of all that oppressive force Thu-Kimnibol knows what Hresh meant when he said that he must try to comprehend the vulnerability of the hjjks.

Their very perfection is their weak spot. The greatness of the self-contained civilization that they have built and sustained for so many hundreds of thousands of years contains the seed of its own destruction. Hresh has seen that already; and now Hresh, wherever he may be, is helping him to see it. The hjjks are a supreme achievement of the gods, Thu-Kimnibol thinks; but they will not allow themselves to understand that the essence of the gods’ way is unceasing change. Time has brought change to everything else that ever lived; and it will come also to the hjjks, or they will perish.

They are too rigid. They can be broken. If they won’t bend to the law of the gods, Thu-Kimnibol tells himself, then ultimately they’ll suffer the fate of all that can’t or won’t bend. In time they will be struck by a force too strong for them to withstand; and they will shatter in an instant. Yes.

“Come, brother,” he calls. “We’ve stayed here long enough. I’ve learned what you wanted me to learn.”

“Thu-Kimnibol?” Hresh says dimly. “Is that you? Where are you, brother?”

“Here. Here. Take my hand.”

“I am for the Queen now, brother.”

“No. No, never. She can’t hold you. Come: here.”

Vast peals of laughter resound all about him. She thinks that She has them both. But Thu-Kimnibol is undismayed. His initial awe of the Queen had placed him at Her advantage; but that awe is gone now, overcome by anger and contempt, and there is no other way that She could hold him.

He understands that next to Her he is nothing more than a flea. But fleas can go about their business unseen by greater creatures. That’s the great advantage fleas have, Thu-Kimnibol thinks. The Queen can’t hold us if She can’t find us. And She’s so confident of Her own omnipotence that She isn’t even trying very hard.

He begins to slip away from Her, taking Hresh with him.

Ascending from Her lair is like climbing a mountain that reaches halfway to the roof of the sky. But any journey, no matter how great, is done a single step at a time. Thu-Kimnibol draws himself upward, and upward again, holding Hresh in his arms. The Queen does not appear to be restraining him. Perhaps She thinks he’ll fall back to Her of his own accord.

Upward. Upward. Streams of light come from behind him, but they grow indistinct as he continues. Now the blackness lies before him, deep and intense.

“Brother?” Thu-Kimnibol says. “Brother, we’re free. We’re safe now.”

He blinked and opened his eyes. Nialli Apuilana, standing above him, made a soft little cry of joy.

“At last you’re back!”

Thu-Kimnibol nodded. He looked over at Hresh. His eyes had opened slit-wide, but he seemed stunned and dazed. Reaching across, Thu-Kimnibol touched his brother’s arm. Hresh seemed very cool; his arm twitched faintly as Thu-Kimnibol’s fingers grazed it.

“Will he be all right?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

“He’s very tired. So am I. How long were we gone, Nialli?”

“Just short of a day and a half.” She was staring at him as though he had undergone some great metamorphosis. “I was beginning to think that you — that—”

“A day and a half,” he said, in a musing tone. “It felt like years. What’s been happening here?”

“Nothing. Not even Salaman. He marched around our camp without even stopping, and is heading on north without us.”

“A madman, he is. Well, let him go.”

“And you?” Nialli Apuilana was still staring. “What was it like? Did you see the Nest? Did you make contact with the Queen?”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “I never understood the half of it. How awesome She is — how mighty the Nest is — how intricate their life is—”

“I tried to tell you all, that day at the Presidium. But no one would listen, not even you.”

“Especially not me, Nialli.” He smiled. “They’re a frightening enemy. They seem so much wiser than we are. So much more powerful. Superior beings in every way. I get the feeling that I almost want to bow down before them.”

“Yes.”

“At least before their Queen,” he said. A note of discouragement came into his voice. The triumph of his escape seemed far behind him now. “She’s almost like some sort of god. That ancient immense creature, reaching out everywhere, running everything. To resist Her seems, well, blasphemous.”

“Yes,” Nialli Apuilana said. “I know what you mean.”

He shook his head wearily. “We have to resist, though. There’s no way we can arrive at any kind of accommodation with them. If we don’t keep on fighting them, they’ll crush us. They’ll swallow us up. But if we go on with the war, if we should win it, won’t we be going against the will of the gods? The gods brought them through the Long Winter, after all. The gods may have intended them to inherit the world.” He looked at her in perplexity. “I’m speaking in contradictions. Does any of this make sense?”

“The gods brought us through the Long Winter also, Thu-Kimnibol. Maybe they realize that the hjjks were a mistake, that they were an experiment that failed. And so we’ve been brought on to finish them off and take their place.”

He looked at her, startled. “Do you think so? Could it be possible?”

“You call them superior beings. But you saw for yourself how limited they really are, how inflexible, how narrow. Didn’t you? Didn’t you? That was what Hresh wanted you to see: that they don’t really want to create anything, that they aren’t even capable of it. All they want to do is keep on multiplying and building new Nests. But there’s no purpose to it beyond that. They aren’t trying to learn. They aren’t trying to grow.” She laughed. “Can you imagine? I stood up in the Presidium and said we ought to think of them as humans. But they aren’t. I was wrong and you were all right, even Husathirn Mueri. Bugs is what they are. Horrible oversized bugs. Everything I believed about them is something that they put into my head themselves.”

“Don’t underrate them, Nialli,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “You may be going too far in the other direction now.” Hresh made a soft sighing sound. He turned and looked at him. But Hresh seemed asleep, breathing gently and calmly. Thu-Kimnibol turned back to Nialli Apuilana. “There’s one more thing, something the Queen told me that seemed even stranger than all the rest. Were you ever taught, when you lived among them, that the hjjks believe they were created by the humans?”

Now it was her turn to look startled. “No. No, never!”

“Can it be true, do you think?”

“Why not? The humans were almost like gods. The humans may have been the gods.”

“Then if the hjjks are their chosen people—”

“No,” she said. “The hjjks were a chosen people. Chosen to survive, to endure the Long Winter, to take over the world afterward. But they didn’t work out, somehow. So the gods created us. Or the humans did, one or the other. As replacements for them.” Her eyes were bright with a fervor he had rarely seen in them before. “Someday the humans are going to come back to Earth,” she said. “I’m certain of it. They’ll want to see what’s been happening here since they left. And they won’t want to find the whole place one gigantic Nest, Thu-Kimnibol. They put us in those cocoons for a purpose, and they’ll want to know whether that purpose has been fulfilled. So we have to keep on fighting, don’t you see? We have to hold our own against the Queen. Call them gods, call them humans, whatever they are, they’re the ones who made us. And they expect that of us.”

“This is the kind of country the bug-folk love,” Salaman muttered. “Dead country, with all its bones showing.” The king brought his xlendi to a halt and looked around at his three sons. Athimin and Biterulve were riding alongside him, and Chham just a short way behind.

“You think there’s a Nest out there, father?” Chham asked.

“I’m sure of it. I feel its weight pressing on my soul. Here, I feel it. And here. And here.” He touched his breast, and his sensing-organ, and his loins.

The territory ahead had a bleached, arid look. The soil was pale and sandy and the fierce blue sky glared with whipcrack intensity. The only sign of life was a malign-looking woody low dome of a plant that looked almost like a weatherbeaten skull, from which two thick strap-like gray leaves, tattered and shredded by the wind, extended across the desert floor to an enormous length. These plants grew far apart, each presiding over its little domain like a sullen immobile emperor. Otherwise there was nothing.

Athimin said, “Shall I give the order to make camp, father?”

Salaman nodded. He stared into the distance. A sour chilly breeze struck his face, a wind of trouble. “And send scouts forward. Protected by patrols just behind them. There are hjjks out there, plenty of them. I can smell them.”

Strange uneasiness was growing in him. He had no idea why.

Until this moment Salaman had been confident that his army, and his army alone, would be able to march all the way to the great Nest and destroy it. Certainly they had met no real opposition thus far. The hjjks had numbers on their side, and they were strong and tireless warriors. But they didn’t seem to have any real idea of how to fight. It had been that way forty years ago too, Salaman remembered, when they had tried to lay siege to the newly founded City of Yissou.

What they did was come swooping down in great terrifying hordes, shrieking and waving their spears and swords. Most of them wielded two weapons at once, some of them even more than that. It was a sight that could make the blood run backward in your veins, if you let yourself be awed by their frenzy and by the frightful look of them.

But if you stood your ground, side by side in a sturdy wedge of warriors, and met them hack for hack, chop for chop, you could beat them down. The thing was not to carry the battle to them, but let them come to you. For all their wild dancing about, they were inefficient fighters, too many of them too close together. What you had to do was get your strongest and most fearless men into a phalanx up front, and slash away at any hjjk that came too near. Try to cut its breathing-tubes: that was where they were most vulnerable, the loose dangling orange breathing-tubes that hung from their heads to the sides of their chests. Snip one of those and within moments the hjjk was down, paralyzed by lack of air.

And so Salaman’s army had marched on and on and on, beyond the smoldering rubble-heap that was Vengiboneeza, into the ever more parched country to the north, eradicating the hjjks as they went. There had been four great battles so far, and each one had ended in a rout. His soul tingled with the memory of those victories — the hjjks hunted down to the last one, the severed claw-tipped limbs scattered about everywhere, the dry weightless bodies piled in stacks. Every army the Queen had sent against him had met the same fate.

Now, though, the invaders were approaching the first of the lesser Nests that rimmed the frontier of the true hjjk domain.

It was Salaman’s plan to wipe out those Nests and their Queens one by one as he passed northward, so that no enemies would remain behind him when he moved into the far side of the great emptiness to begin his assault on the central Nest. He had no clear notion yet how he was going to destroy them. Pour some sort of liquid fire into their openings, perhaps. It would all have been much easier if he’d had one or two of Thu-Kimnibol’s fancy weapons. But he was sure that he would find a way that would work, when the time came. He hadn’t had a moment’s worry on that score.

Now, though — this foul wind blowing, this sudden sense of distress, of impending disaster—

“Father!” Biterulve cried.

Out of nowhere a wall of water appeared before them, rising out of the desert like a gigantic ocean wave springing from the ground to blot out half the sky. The xlendis whinnied and reared wildly. Salaman swore and flung up his arm before his face in astonishment. Behind him he heard the panicky yelling of his men.

He needed only a moment to collect himself.

“A trick!” he bellowed. “An illusion! How can there be water in the desert?”

Indeed that titanic wave hung above them but did not descend. He saw the curling edge of white foam, the green impenetrable depths behind, the huge curve of inconceivable falling mass; but the mass did not fall.

“A trick!” Salaman roared. “The hjjks are attacking us! Form the wedge! Form the wedge!”

Chham, wild-eyed, rode up close behind him. Salaman shoved him fiercely back in the direction of the main body of the army. “Get them in formation!” he ordered. He saw Athimin already heading back, signaling, gesticulating, trying to keep the troops from scattering.

They seemed to realize that the sudden ocean wasn’t real. But now the ground itself was wavering like a blanket being shaken to free it from crumbs. Salaman, appalled, saw the Earth rippling all about him. He grew dizzy and sprang down from his xlendi. An actual earthquake? Or another illusion? He couldn’t tell.

The wall of water had become a wall of fire, enclosing them on three sides. The air sizzled and crackled and blazed. He felt heat pressing inward on him. Blue-tipped flames streamed upward from the quivering earth.

And now bright bolts of shimmering light were dancing in the sky like spears running amok. Salaman, whirling to avoid their blinding light, saw dragons advancing from the north, breathing fire. Ravenous mouth-creatures. Birds with fangs like knives.

“Illusions!” he cried. “They’re sending Wonderstone dreams against us!”

Others saw that too. The army was rallying, trying desperately to get into fighting formation.

But then in the swirling madness he caught sight of an angular yellow-and-black figure just in front of him, clutching a short sword in one bristly claw and a spear in another. A force of hjjks had come upon them under cover of these hallucinations and was beginning an attack.

Lashing out with his blade, the king slashed a breathing-tube, and turned and saw a second hjjk coming at him from the left. He caught it in its exposed knee-joint and sent it to the ground. On his other side Chham was thrusting away now at two other insect-warriors. One was down, the other staggering. Salaman grinned. Let them send dragons! Let them send earthquakes and oceans! When it came to hand-to-hand fighting, his troops would still slaughter them without mercy.

The illusions were continuing. Geysers of blood, fountains of coruscating light, whole mountains tumbling out of the air, sudden abysses opening a hand’s-breadth away — there seemed no limit to their ingenuity. But so long as you ignore it all, Salaman thought, and simply keep your mind on the task of chopping down every hjjk that comes within reach of your weapon—

There! There! Strike, cut, kill!

The joy of battle was on him now as perhaps never before. He fought his way across the field, paying no heed to writhing serpents that floated before his face, to jeering luminous ghosts issuing from sulphurous crevices opening on every side, to disembodied eyes swirling about his head, to stampeding vermilions, to tumbling boulders. His warriors, rallied by Chham and Athimin, had formed themselves into three fighting wedges arranged in a circular pattern and were defending themselves well.

But what was this? Biterulve in the outermost arc of one of the wedges?

That was against his explicit order. The boy was never to be exposed in that way. Athimin knew that. Let him fight in the secondary line, yes, but never in the prime row of warriors. Salaman looked around in fury. Where was Athimin? He was supposed to look after his brother at all times.

There he was, yes. Five or six men down the row from Biterulve, hacking away vigorously.

Salaman called to him and pointed. “Do you see him? Get over there! Get over to him, you fool!”

Athimin gasped and nodded. Biterulve seemed heedless of his own safety. He was striking at the hjjks in front of him with a ferocity that the king hadn’t imagined he possessed. Athimin was turning now, fighting his way across the confusion, going to the boy’s defense. Salaman came rushing forward also, intending to slay the hjjk closest to Biterulve and shove the boy deeper into the phalanx of warriors.

Too late.

Salaman was still twenty paces away, straggling through a zone of phantom monsters and murky black cloud, when he saw as though by a quick flash of lightning a hjjk that seemed twice the height of Thu-Kimnibol rise up before Biterulve and drive his spear through the boy’s body from front to back.

The king let loose a terrible roar of rage. It seemed to him as though a hot bar of iron had been thrust through his forehead. In an instant he reached the spot where Biterulve lay and sent the hjjk’s head flying across the field with one swift stroke. An instant later Athimin was blurting useless apologies and explanations into his ear, and unhesitatingly Salaman, turning on him the full force of the fury that possessed him, cut him down too with the stroke of his backswing, slashing him across his chest, deep through fur and flesh and bone.

“Father — ?” Athimin murmured thickly, and fell at his feet.

Salaman stared. Biterulve lay to his left, Athimin at his right. His mind was unable to absorb the sight. His soul throbbed with unanswerable torment.

What have I done? What have I done?

Everywhere about him the battle raged; and the king stood silent and still, purged in one stunning instant of all madness and bloodlust. To his ears came the sounds of sobbing wounded warriors and the moans of the dying and the savage cries of those who still lived and fought, and it was all incomprehensible to him, that he should be here in this place at this time, with two of his sons dead on the ground before him, and phantoms and monsters dancing all about, and huge-eyed shrieking insect-creatures waving swords in his face. Why? For what?

Madness. Waste.

He stood frozen, bewildered, lost in pain.

Then he felt a searing flash of pain of a different sort as a hjjk weapon went lancing through the fleshy part of his arm. It was astonishing, the agony. Sudden hot tears stung his eyes. He blinked in confusion. A heavy mist shrouded his soul. For a moment, under the shock of his wound, the years rolled away and he thought that he was the ambitious young warrior again, nearly as clever as Hresh, whose scheme it was to build a great city and a dynasty and an empire. But if that was so, why was he in this old stiff body, why did he hurt like this, why was he bleeding? Ah. The hjjks! Yes, the hjjks were attacking their little settlement. Already Harruel had fallen. Everything looked hopeless. But there was no choice but to keep on fighting — to keep on fighting—

The mist parted and his mind cleared. Biterulve and Athimin lay before him on the ground and he was about to die himself. And there came to him with complete clarity an awareness of the futility of his life, the years spent in building a wall, in hating a distant and alien enemy who might better have simply been ignored.

He turned and saw the gleaming yellow-and-black creature studying him gravely, as though it had never seen a man of the People before. It was preparing to strike again.

“Go ahead,” Salaman said. “What does it matter?”

“Father! Get back!”

Chham, that was. Salaman laughed. He pointed to his two fallen sons. “Do you see?” he said. “Biterulve was fighting in the front line. And then Athimin — Athimin—”

He felt himself being pushed aside. A sword cleaved the air in front of him. The hjjk fell back. Chham’s face was close up against his own, now. The same face as his: it was like looking into a mirror that reflected back through time.

“Father, you’ve been wounded.”

“Biterulve — Athimin—”

“Here — let me help you—”

“Biterulve—”

Thu-Kimnibol said, “What? Salaman here? And his army?”

“What’s left of them,” said Esperasagiot. “It’s a fearful sight, sir. You’d best ride out to meet them. They hardly seem to have the strength to come the rest of the way to us.”

“Can this be some sort of trick?” Nialli Apuilana asked. “Does he hate us so much that he means to draw us out of our camp and attack us?”

Esperasagiot laughed. “No, lady, there’s no hatred left in him. If you saw them, you’d know. They’re a beaten bunch. It’s a wonder any of them made it here alive.”

“How far are they?” Thu-Kimnibol asked.

“Half an hour’s ride.”

“Get my xlendi ready. You, Dumanka, Kartafirain to accompany me, and ten warriors.”

“Shall I go also?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

Thu-Kimnibol glanced at her. “You ought to stay with your father. They tell me he’s very weak this morning. One of us should be with him if the end comes.”

“Yes,” she said softly, and turned away.

What remained of the army of the City of Yissou had made camp, more or less, beside a small stream in the open country a little way north of Thu-Kimnibol’s encampment. Esperasagiot had not exaggerated: it was a fearful sight. Only a few hundred warriors, of the great horde that had set forth from Yissou, were there, and every one of them seemed to bear wounds. They were sprawled here and there like a scattering of cast-off garments on the ground, with three ragged tents behind them. As Thu-Kimnibol approached, a grim-faced man whom he recognized as Salaman’s son Chham came limping out to greet him.

“A sad and sorry reunion this is, Prince Thu-Kimnibol. It shames me to come before you like this.”

Thu-Kimnibol sought for words and did not find any. After a moment he reached down and embraced the other in silence, doing it gingerly, for fear of opening some wound.

“Can we do anything for you?” he asked.

“Healers. Medicines. Food. What we need most of all is rest. We’ve been in retreat for — I couldn’t tell you how long. A week, two weeks? We kept no count.”

“I’m saddened to see how badly things have gone for you.”

Chham managed a momentary flare of vigor. “They went well enough at first. We beat them again and again. We killed them without mercy. My father fought like a god. Nothing could stand before his attack. But then—” He looked away. “Then the bug-folk used tricks against us. Wonderstone illusions, magical fantasies, things out of dreams. You’ll see: they’ll come at you the same way, when you next encounter them.”

“So there was a battle of dreams. And a great defeat.”

“Yes. A very great defeat.”

“And your father the king?”

Chham jerked his hand over his shoulder, toward the largest of the tents. “He lives. But not so as you’d know him. My brother Athimin was killed, and Biterulve also.”

“Ah. Biterulve too!”

“And my father was gravely wounded. But also he’s changed within, very much changed. You’ll see. We escaped by mere luck. A sudden windstorm came up. The air was full of sand. No way for the hjjks to see where we were. We crept away unnoticed. And here we are, Prince Thu-Kimnibol. Here we are.”

“Where is the king?”

“Come: I’ll take you to him.”

The withered, feeble man who lay on the pallet within the tent was not much like the Salaman that Thu-Kimnibol had known. His white fur was matted and dull. In places it had fallen out completely. His eyes too were dull, those wide-set gray eyes that had pierced once like augers. Bandages swathed his upper body, which seemed shrunken and frail. He didn’t appear to notice as Thu-Kimnibol entered. A thin old woman whom Thu-Kimnibol recognized as the chief offering-woman of the City of Yissou sat beside him, and holy talismans were piled up all around him.

“Is he awake?” Thu-Kimnibol whispered.

“He’s like this all the time.” Chham stepped forward. “Father, Prince Thu-Kimnibol has come.”

“Thu-Kimnibol?” A faint papery whisper. “Who?”

“Harruel’s son,” Thu-Kimnibol said quietly.

“Ah. Harruel’s boy. Samnibolon, that’s his name. Does he call himself something else now? Where is he? Tell him to come nearer.”

Thu-Kimnibol looked down at him. He could hardly bear to meet that burned-out gaze.

Salaman smiled. In the same faint voice he said, “And how is your father, boy? The good king, the great warrior Harruel?”

“My father is long dead, cousin,” said Thu-Kimnibol gently.

“Ah. Ah, so he is.” A flicker of brightness came into Salaman’s eyes for a moment, and he tried to sit up. “They beat us, did Chham tell you? I left two sons on the field, and thousands of others. They cut us to bits. No more than we deserved, that’s the truth. What a foolishness it was, making war on them, marching like idiots into their own land! It was madness and nothing but madness. I see that now. And perhaps you do too, Samnibolon. Eh? Eh?”

“I’ve been called Thu-Kimnibol these many years.”

“Ah. Of course. Thu-Kimnibol.” Salaman managed a kind of smile. “Will you continue the war, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“Until victory is ours, yes.”

“There’ll never be any victory. The hjjks will drive you back the way they did me. They’ll drown you in dreams.” Slowly, with obvious effort, Salaman shook his head. “The war was a mistake. We should have taken their treaty and drawn a line across the world. I see that now, but now’s too late. Too late for Biterulve, too late for Athimin, too late for me.” He laughed hollowly. “But do as you wish. For me the war’s over. All I want now is the forgiveness of the gods.”

“Forgiveness? For what?” Thu-Kimnibol said, his voice rising suddenly above a sickroom murmur for the first time.

Chham tugged at Thu-Kimnibol’s arm, as though to tell him that the king did not have the strength for such discussions. But Salaman said, his voice louder now too, “For what? For leading my warriors off to be cut to pieces in this filthy land. And for sending my Acknowledgers to their doom, and the army that followed them also, all for the sake of stirring up a war that should never have been fought. The gods didn’t mean us to strike at the hjjks. The hjjks are the gods’ creatures as much as we are. I have no doubt of that now. So I have sinned; and for that I will undertake a purification, and by the grace of Mueri and Friit I will have it before I die. I should ask the forgiveness of the Queen as well, I suppose. But how would I do that?” Salaman reached up and caught Thu-Kimnibol by the wrist with surprising strength. “Will you give me an escort home, Thu-Kimnibol? A few dozen of your troops, to help us retrace our steps across all this miserable wasteland that we’ve crossed at such cost. To bring me back to my city, so that I can go before the gods in the shrine that I built for them long ago, and pray them give me peace. That’s all I ask of you.”

“If you wish it, yes. Of course.”

“And will you pray for me, also, as you go onward toward the Nest? Pray for the repose of my spirit, Thu-Kimnibol. And I’ll do the same for yours.”

He closed his eyes. Chham gestured, beckoning Thu-Kimnibol from the tent.

Outside Chham said, “He’s beside himself with guilt for my brothers’ deaths. His soul is flooded with remorse, for that, for everything in his life that he sees now as a sin. I never knew a man could be so changed in a single moment.”

“He’ll have his escort home, you can be sure of that.”

Chham smiled sadly. “He’ll never see Yissou again. Two, three days — that’s all he has, so the healer tells me. We’ll put him to rest in hjjk country. As for those of us that remain—” He shrugged. “We’re willing to put ourselves under your command for the rest of the war. If you’ll have us, broken as we are. Or if you won’t, we’ll limp back to our city and wait to hear how you’ve fared.”

“Join us, of course,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “Join us and fight alongside us, if you have the strength to go on. Why would we refuse you? We are meant to be allies always, your city and mine.”

Darkness was coming quickly on. Nialli Apuilana knelt beside her father. Thu-Kimnibol stood well back from them, in the shadows where the glowglobes couldn’t reach.

“Take this amulet from around my throat,” Hresh whispered. “Put it on.”

Nialli Apuilana’s hands tightened into fists. She knew what must be in Hresh’s mind. He had worn that amulet all his life: she had never seen him without it. To give it to her now—

She glanced toward Thu-Kimnibol. He nodded. Do it, he said silently. Do it.

Unfastening the cord that held the amulet, she drew it gently free. It was a little thing, just a bit of smooth green glass, or so it seemed, with signs inscribed on it that were much too small for her to decipher. It seemed very old and worn. She felt an odd chill coming from it; but when she tied it around her neck she was aware of a faint tingling, and a distant warmth.

She stared at it, resting between her breasts.

“What does it do, father?”

“Very little, I think. But it was Thaggoran’s, who was chronicler before me. A piece of the Great World, is what he told me. It’s the chronicler’s badge of office, I suppose. Sometimes it summons Thaggoran for me, when I need him. You have to wear it now.”

“But I—”

“You are chronicler now,” Hresh said.

“What? Father, I have no training! And the chronicler has never been a woman.”

Hresh managed the bare outlines of a smile. “All that’s changing now. Everything is. Chupitain Stuld will work with you. And Io Sangrais and Plor Killivash, if they live through the war. The chronicles must stay in our family.” He reached for her hand and clutched it tightly. His fingers seemed tiny, she thought. He was becoming a child again. He opened his eyes for a moment and said, “I never expected to have a daughter, you know. To have any child at all.”

“And to think, father, how much grief I’ve caused you!”

“Never. Only joy, child. You must believe that.” His hand grew even tighter on hers. “I’ve always loved you, Nialli. And I always will. You’ll send my love to Taniane, won’t you? My partner all these years. My mate. How sad she’ll be. But she mustn’t be. I’ll be sitting beside Dawinno, asking him so many things.” He paused. “Is my brother here?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he was. Send him to me.”

But Thu-Kimnibol was already on his way to Hresh’s side. He knelt and reached out his hand, and Hresh touched it, very lightly, fingertips to fingertips. “Brother,” he murmured. “I’ll carry your love to Minbain for you. And now you must go out. What follows must be just for Nialli and me. She can tell you afterward, if she likes.”

Thu-Kimnibol nodded. Lightly, lovingly, he let his hand rest a moment on Hresh’s forehead, as though he hoped the wisdom would pass into him at a touch. Then he rose, and left the tent without looking back.

Hresh said, “At my side, under my sash, you’ll find a little velvet pouch.”

“Father—”

“Take it. Open it.”

She let the small piece of polished stone tumble into her palm and stared at it in wonder. She had never handled it before. No one, so far as she knew, was permitted to touch it but Hresh. She had hardly ever been allowed even to see it. In some ways it was like the amulet he had just given her, for it was very smooth, and along its edges a pattern of lines had been carved into it, lines so fine that she couldn’t clearly make out the pattern. It gave off a barely perceptible warmth. But the amulet had little mass or weight, and seemed only a flimsy thing. The Wonderstone, though scarcely any larger, felt as weighty as a world to Nialli Apuilana. It made her uneasy to hold it. The power that it contained was frightening.

Hresh said, “Do you know what that is?”

“The Barak Dayir, father.”

“Yes. The Barak Dayir. But what the Barak Dayir is, not even I can say. The old Beng prophet told me that it is an amplifier, which means that which makes something greater than it is. As I told you once, it was the humans who once ruled the Earth that made it, before the Great World ever was. And gave it to us, to protect us when they would no longer be here. That’s all I know of it. You must keep it, now. And master the art of using it.”

“But how will I—”

“Twine with me, Nialli.”

Her eyes widened. “Twine — with — you, father?”

“You must. No harm can come of it, and much good. And when we are joined, take the Barak Dayir and place it by the tip of your sensing-organ, and seize it and grasp it tightly. You’ll hear a music, then. And I’ll help you after that. Will you do that, Nialli?”

“Of course I will.”

“Come closer, then.”

She cradled him in her arms. He weighs almost nothing now, she thought. All that remains of him now is the husk, and the mind that burns within it.

“Your sensing-organ, close to mine—”

“Yes. Yes.”

It was a communion Nialli Apuilana had never expected to have. But the moment her sensing-organ touched his, all fear and uncertainty went from her; and it was with almost unimaginable joy that she felt the rich torrent of his spirit come flooding into hers. It was a joy so great that it dizzied her and for a moment it swept her away; but then she remembered the Wonderstone, and carefully she curled the tip of her sensing-organ around it and gripped it with all her strength. The world turned to mist. A column of music rose beneath her. A great overwhelming chord of love buoyed her upward, carrying her soul toward the sky.

But Hresh was beside her, smiling at her tenderly, serenely, holding her, steadying her, guiding her. Together they soared across the vault of the heavens. A great golden glow was streaming from the west, a brilliant outpouring of dazzling radiance, darkening now into a stunning crimson, and then into rich deep scarlet, and then to silky purple. The darkness was beginning to reach out for him. But as they journeyed toward that waiting realm, he offered her a final sharing, the girl of his light, his love, his wisdom. He told her in a single unbroken flow all that she must know, until he could tell her no more.

So now it begins, Hresh thinks. The last journey of all. The world is growing dark around him.

Nialli, he thinks. Minbain. Taniane.

The vortex comes whirling up to claim him. He stares into it.

Is that where I’m going? What will it be like? Will I feel anything? Will I be able to taste and smell? If only I could see a little more clearly—

Ah. That’s better, now. But how strange it looks in there. Is that you, Torlyri? Thaggoran? How strange it all is!

Mother. Nialli. Taniane.

Oh, look, Taniane! Look!

When she emerged from the tent she found Thu-Kimnibol with Chham. The two men broke off their conversation as she approached, and looked at her strangely, as though she had been transformed into some unworldly creature of a kind they had never before beheld.

“How is it with your father?” Thu-Kimnibol asked.

“He’s with Dawinno now.” She was dry-eyed and oddly calm.

“Ah.” A shiver passed through Thu-Kimnibol’s massive frame, and he made the Five Heavenly Signs, slowly and deliberately, twice through, and Dawinno’s sign a third time afterward. “There was no one like him ever,” he said after a while, in a splintered voice. “We had the same mother, but I tell you I never truly felt myself his brother, because he was what he was. His mind was almost like a god’s. How will it be for us without him, I wonder?”

Nialli Apuilana held out her hand to show him the Barak Dayir in it in its pouch.

“I have the Wonderstone,” she said. “And I have much of Hresh within me now too. You heard him say that I’m to be the chronicler? I am to be Hresh for us now, if I can. I’ll say the words for him tonight, and we’ll put what remains of him to rest. But he is already with Dawinno.”

“He was always with Dawinno, lady,” said Chham suddenly. “Or so it was reported of him, that he walked with the gods from the day of his birth. Surely it was so. I wouldn’t doubt it, though I never knew him myself. What a day of great losses this has been!”

Thu-Kimnibol said, “King Salaman has died this day also. Prince Chham — King Chham, is it now? — has just come from him.”

“Then we mourn together,” Nialli Apuilana said. “When I say the words for my father, I’ll say them also for yours.”

“If you will, lady. It would please me greatly.”

“We will lay them here side by side, in this forlorn place,” said Thu-Kimnibol. “Which will be forlorn no more, because Salaman and Hresh were buried here. They were the two wisest men in all the world.”

Taniane, resting her left hand on the Mask of Koshmar and her right on that of Lirridon, fought back the numbness that had been growing in her soul all afternoon, a strange disagreeable coldness behind her breastbone; and with such strength as she could muster she compelled herself to follow what Puit Kjai was trying to tell her.

“An insurrection, you say? Against me?”

“Against us all, lady. An uprising that’s meant to sweep away all those who hold power in the City of Dawinno.”

She gave him a weary, skeptical look. “Does anyone hold power any more in the City of Dawinno, Puit Kjai?”

“Lady! Lady, what are you saying?”

Taniane glanced away. The eerie force of Puit Kjai’s intense scarlet eyes was more than she wanted to meet this day. She had lived with this weariness of soul for what seemed like years, but today it seemed to have deepened almost to paralysis.

She stroked the masks. Once they had hung on the wall behind her; but some time back, not long after the departure of Nialli Apuilana to the war and the disappearance of Hresh, she had taken them down and put them on the desk beside her, where she could see them easily and touch them when she wished. They gave her comfort and, she thought, strength. In the time of the cocoon, Boldirinthe once had told her, there had been a certain black stone mounted in the wall of the central chamber that had been sacred to the memory of the tribe’s former chieftains. Koshmar used to touch that stone and pray to her predecessors when she was facing difficulties. That black stone had remained behind in the cocoon when the tribe made its Coming Forth. Taniane wished she had it now. But at least she had the masks.

To Puit Kjai she said, after a little while, “All right, go on. Who are the ringleaders of this insurrection?”

“That I cannot say.”

“But you’re certain that one is being planned.”

Puit Kjai shrugged. “The word comes out of the chapels, from the common people. It reaches me from the daughter of the nephew of an old groom in my son’s stables, who worships in the chapel of Tikharein Tourb.”

“The daughter of the nephew of a groom—”

“A tenuous chain, yes. What I’m told is that they mean to kill Thu-Kimnibol when he returns from the wars, unless the hjjks do it first, and that they will put you to death also, and me, and most of the rest of the Presidium, except those who they’ll keep alive to go before the city as rulers in their name. And then they’ll make peace with the hjjks and beg their forgiveness.”

“You say this as though you never wanted peace with the hjjks yourself, Puit Kjai.”

“Not this way. Not by a violent purging of the highborn. And this is no fantasy, lady, this talk of a conspiracy. They may already, I suspect, have done away with Hresh.”

“No,” Taniane said at once. “Hresh still lives.”

“Does he? Where is he, then?”

“Far from here, I think. But I know that he lives. There’s a bond between us, Puit Kjai, that transcends all distance. I feel him close beside me no matter how far away he may be. No harm has come to Hresh. Of that I’m certain.”

“Nakhaba grant that it be so,” Puit Kjai said.

They faced each other in silence for a time. The powerful old Beng leader stood so tall that his helmeted head neared the ceiling. He was gaunt and thin, but there was a majesty about his very gauntness. Dimly Taniane remembered Puit Kjai’s father, the ancient wise one of the Helmet People, Noum om Beng, to whom Hresh had gone for wisdom. Puit Kjai was coming to look like him now: that same frail but stern bearing, his great height compensating for the slenderness of his frame. His helmet today was a black one, with gnarled golden antlers rising from it.

At length Taniane said, “I’ll look into these rumors. If you hear anything more, come to me immediately.”

“You have my word on it, lady.”

He offered her a blessing of Nakhaba, and went out.

She sat quietly, her hands resting on the masks.

No doubt there was truth to the story he had brought to her. The Kundalimon creed ran wild in the city these days: why shouldn’t its leaders attempt to force an end to the war? There was no one to oppose them here. Thu-Kimnibol and the rest of his faction were off at the battlefront, Hresh had disappeared, the younger men of the city seemed all to have entered the chapels. She herself no longer even pretended to exercise authority. It seemed to her that the world had passed her by, that events had gone on far beyond her understanding. Truly it was time for her to step aside, she thought. Just as the rock-throwers had told her even before the war. But in favor of whom? Give the city over to the Kundalimon priests? She wished Thu-Kimnibol would return. But he was off killing hjjks, or perhaps being killed by them himself. And Nialli Apuilana was with him.

Taniane shook her head. She was tired of living in this chaos. She was eager for rest.

And this other thing, this strange numbness that had entered her breast today — what was that? As though she were being hollowed out from within. Some illness, was it? She remembered how in Vengiboneeza Koshmar had begun suddenly to seem easily tired, had admitted to Hresh that there was a burning in her chest, pain, fever; and soon afterward she was dead. Now her own hour might be coming around, Taniane thought. She wondered if she should go to Boldirinthe for a healing; and then she remembered that Boldirinthe was dead. One by one they were all dying. Koshmar, Torlyri, Boldirinthe—

All she felt was a numbness, though, not a burning, not a pain. She couldn’t understand it. She turned her gaze inward, searching for the cause of it.

But just in that moment it went from her, all at once: that numbness, that deepening ache that had plagued her since daybreak. She felt it go, a sudden startling cessation of discomfort, like the snapping of a tight bond. Then in its place was something even more troublesome: an absence, a bleak emptiness, sharp and painful, a terrible black void. She understood immediately what it was, and a chill ran through her that set her fur on end. Helplessly she began to weep. Wave after wave of grief swept over her. For the first time in more than forty years she could not feel the presence of Hresh within her. He was gone. Gone forever.

Under a glittering pockmarked moon the battlefield had the icy serene look of an immense glacier, even where the ground was cratered and upturned by the most recent round of fighting. Thu-Kimnibol’s warriors crept about warily on the broken earth, collecting the bodies of those who had fallen that day. Nialli Apuilana looked past them to the horizon, where she could see the bonfires of the hjjk camp. There was a respite now; but in the morning it would all begin again.

Thu-Kimnibol laughed harshly. “A war of nightmares,” he said. “We hurl flame and turbulence at them. They throw illusions at us. We return counterillusions of our own. Enemies who can’t see one another, blindly stumbling around.”

She could feel his fatigue. He had fought ferociously this day, rallying his troops in every part of the field as phantom after phantom came toward them, even as Salaman had warned. Repeatedly he had led his forces through some field of spurting fire, or some onrushing horde of sinister monsters, through flood and avalanche, through a rain of blood, through a hail of daggers. His goal was to maneuver himself into a position where he could work real damage against the hjjks with his Great World weapons; but they understood that now, and danced about him, hiding themselves behind illusions and nibbling at his forces from ambush. She had done what she could, wielding the Wonderstone to cut through the screen of hjjk hallucinations and to confuse them with projected phantoms of her own. But it had been a difficult day, an inconclusive day. And tomorrow promised more of the same.

“Were our losses very bad today?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

“Not as bad as it seemed at first. A dozen killed, perhaps fifty wounded. Some of those who died were Chham’s people, of the few that remain. The City of Yissou will be a broken place for years. A whole generation has been destroyed.”

“And the City of Dawinno?”

“We haven’t suffered the way Yissou has. They lost virtually an entire army in a single day.”

“Whereas we’re losing ours a few at a time. But in the end it’ll be the same, won’t it, Thu-Kimnibol?”

He gave her an enigmatic look. “Shall we surrender, then?”

“What do you say?”

“I say that if we fight, they’ll whittle us away to nothing no matter how much injury we inflict on them, and if we don’t fight, we’ll lose our souls. I say that time is against us, and that I find myself lost in confusions and mysteries as never before in my life.” He looked away from her, and stared into his open hands as though he hoped to read oracles in them. When he spoke again, it was clear he had not found them. “It seems to me, Nialli, that I lead this campaign in two directions at once. I go rushing forward eager to blast the hjjks before me as we blasted Vengiboneeza, and go riding onward to destroy the Nest and everything it contains. And yet at the same time a part of me is pulling back, urging retreat, praying for an end to the war before I harm the Queen. Can you understand what it’s like to be torn in such a way?”

“I felt it myself, once. The spell of the Nest is very powerful.”

“Is that why Hresh took me there, do you think? To hand me over to the Queen?”

Nialli Apuilana shook her head. “He only wanted you to see every side of the conflict. To understand that the hjjks are dangerous but not evil, that there’s greatness in them, but of a kind very far from anything we can comprehend. But when you touch the Nest it makes itself a part of you, and you a part of it. I know. It was like that for me, far more deeply, even, than I think it is for you. Remember, I was of the Nest myself.”

“Yes. I know.”

“And freed myself. But not completely. I’ll never free myself completely. The Queen will always be within me.”

Thu-Kimnibol’s eyes flashed. “And is She within me also?” he cried, with anguish in his voice.

“I think that She is.”

“Then how can I fight this war, if my enemy is part of me, and I’m part of Her?”

She hesitated a moment. “There’s no way that you can.”

“I despise the hjjks. I mean to destroy them!”

“Yes, you do. But you’ll never allow yourself to do it.”

“Then I’m lost, Nialli! All of us are!”

She looked off into the shadows. “This is the great test that the gods have sent us, do you see? There’s no easy resolution. My father thought that we and the hjjks could enter into some sort of unity, that we could live harmoniously with them, side by side, as the sapphire-eyes and the rest lived with them in the Great World. But he was wrong, wise as he was. As I freed myself from the Queen’s spell he was starting to fall under it; and he was swallowed up in it. This isn’t the Great World, though. Assimilation of two such alien races is impossible. It’s the natural desire of the hjjks to achieve absorption, domination. The best we can hope for is to hold them at bay, as perhaps they were held at bay by the other races in the time of the Great World.”

“Why not destroy them altogether?”

“Because it’s probably beyond us to do any such thing. And because if somehow we did, it would be at a terrible cost to our own souls.”

He shook his head. “Is the best we can hope for a mere stand-off, then? A line drawn across the world, hjjks here, People there?”

“Yes.”

“As the Queen originally proposed. Why did we resist it, then? We could simply have accepted Her treaty, and spared ourselves all this outlay of lives and toil.”

“Not so,” said Nialli Apuilana. “You forget an important thing. She proposed not just a division of territory, but also to send Nest-thinkers to live among us and spread Her truths and Her plan. In time they would bring us to embrace Queen-love; and that would deliver us forever into Her power. She’d control us all, as She controlled Kundalimon, as She controlled me. She’d regulate our rate of population increase, so there’d never be so many of us that we interfered with Her designs. She would designate the acceptable locations of any new cities we might build, to keep most of the world free for Her people. That was what the treaty would have done. What we must have is the boundary line, but not the infiltration of Nest-thinkers into our lives. There has already been too much of that.”

“Then the war must go on until She is beaten. And then we have to eradicate every trace of Queen-worship in our city.” He turned away from her and began to pace the tent. “Gods! Will there ever be an end to all this?”

Nialli Apuilana smiled. “We can make an end to it for tonight, at least.”

“What do you mean?”

She moved closer to him in the darkness. “This night we can allow ourselves a little time out of war, just for each other.” Her sensing-organ rose and moved tentatively against his. He shivered and seemed almost to draw back from her, as though unable to free himself from the doubts and turmoil that had engulfed him; but she stayed close by him, easing him gently out of his disquiet and apprehension. After a moment she could feel the tension begin to leave him. He came close to her, rising like a mountain above her, and encircled her with his arms. She took his hands and placed them over her breasts. They stood that way for a time, allowing the communion to build; and then they sank down slowly together, entwined in body and soul, and lay in each other’s arms through the rest of the night.

It’s the hour before dawn, now. Thu-Kimnibol is still deep in dreams. His massive chest rises and falls evenly, his sword-arm is flung casually across his face. Nialli Apuilana kisses him lightly and slips away from his side, going to the opposite end of the tent they share.

There she kneels and whispers the name of Yissou the Protector, and makes his sign, and then says the name of Dawinno the Destroyer, who is also Dawinno the Transformer, and makes his sign as well. She feels their presence entering her and gives thanks for it.

She touches then the amulet that nestles in the thick fur between her breasts, and calls upon her father; and after a while she sees him, shining in the darkness before her, the familiar smile on his familiar sharp-chinned face. There’s someone else behind him, a much older man, white-furred and sunken-chested. Nialli Apuilana doesn’t know him, but his presence seems benign. And deeper in the darkness is still another venerable stranger, a withered old Beng so thin and tall that he seems nothing more than an elongated straw that any breeze might blow away.

Now she draws the Barak Dayir from its pouch and touches it briefly to her forehead in a sign of respect, and grips it firmly with her sensing-organ.

The music rises within her. It carries her toward the heights of the world.

She climbs easily, confidently, fearing nothing: for isn’t Yissou with her, and Dawinno, and her father also? Only when she’s aloft, and the world is no more than a speck beneath her, does she feel the first tremor of concern. It would be so easy to go on and on from here, forever upward into that sphere of the unknown that surrounds the world, outward and outward and outward among the comets and the moons and the stars: and never to return. All she has to do is cut the mooring that binds her to the Earth. But that’s not what she’s about to do.

What she seeks is the Queen: the Queen of Queens, indeed, in Her lair at the Nest of Nests, in the cold bleak northlands.

She focuses her mind and propels it forward. At first she feels a moment of uncertainty, a curious doubleness of destination. The Queen seems to be in two places at once, one of them distant and one very close at hand. Nialli Apuilana doesn’t know what to make of that. But then she understands. The memory arises in her of that terrible time after Kundalimon’s death and her own flight into the wilderness, when she had hidden herself in her room and struggled with all that possessed her spirit. The Queen had been within her then; and the Queen has remained within her to this day. That dark presence had never relinquished its place at the heart of her soul.

But that Queen within her is only the shadow of the true one. It’s the Queen Herself, and not the shadow, with whom she has to deal today.

“Do you know me?” she calls. “I am Nialli Apuilana, daughter of Hresh.”

And out of the depths of the Nest of Nests comes an answer from the great motionless pallid thing that lies hidden there.

“I know you. What do you want with Me?”

“To negotiate with you.”

Derisive laughter rings down upon her like a hail of fire. “Only equals can negotiate, little one.” And from the Queen comes a storm of power that makes the air shiver and bend upon itself, so that Nialli Apuilana can see the roots of the world showing through the fabric of the atmosphere.

But she will not let herself be swayed.

“You have a Wonderstone,” Nialli Apuilana says. “I have a Wonderstone. We are equals, therefore.”

“Are we?”

“Can You harm me?”

“Can you harm Me?” the Queen says.

Bolts of blue flame arch upward from the Nest. They dance and swirl about Nialli Apuilana in frenzied weaving motions, looking for a vulnerable place. She brushes them away as though they’re gnats.

The Queen sends a storm of boulders. The Queen sends a wall of fire. The Queen sends a cloud of searing mist.

“You waste Your time. Do You think I’m a child, who can be frightened this way? What the Wonderstone sends, the Wonderstone can turn aside. We can spend all day threatening each other like this, and nothing will be achieved.”

“What is it that you hope to achieve?”

“Let me show You a vision,” says Nialli Apuilana.

From the Queen, after a moment, comes grudging assent.

From Nialli Apuilana to the Queen goes an image of the terrain that surrounds the Nest of Nests, as she knows it must be, though she had never seen it with her own eyes: hard sparse plains, broad endless grayness under an unforgiving sky. She draws it from the soul of Kundalimon that is still within her. Kundalimon had lived in the Nest of Nests. She shows the Queen the dry puckered soil, the pitiless saw-edged grass, the small vicious creatures that scrabble fiercely for their livelihoods in that remote and dreadful land.

And then she shows Her the dark mouths of the Nest gaping here and there in the plain, and the barely perceptible rise of the Nest itself, a faint humped swelling beneath the surface of the land, myriad corridors running off in every direction.

“Do You recognize this place?” Nialli Apuilana asks.

“Go on.”

Now Nialli Apuilana shows the Queen the armies of the People advancing from east and west and south: not merely the force that Thu-Kimnibol had brought with him from Dawinno, but the warriors of all the Seven Cities of the continent, from Yissou and Thisthissima and Gharb, from Ghajnsielem, from Cignoi, from Bornigrayal, every tribe of every land, all of them united here in one cataclysmic outpouring of joined strength. And there, rising above that multitude like the tallest tree of the forest, is Thu-Kimnibol of Dawinno; and in his hand is one of the weapons of the Great World. The chieftain of Gharb has a similar weapon, and that of Cignoi, and all the others; and they hold them trained on the Nest of Nests.

Hjjks come streaming now from the Nest, the finest of the Queen’s Militaries; and as they rush toward the invaders Thu-Kimnibol and the other chieftains raise their weapons high, and bright light flares and a clap like the sound of the world’s final thunder sounds, and the plains are swept by fire and the Militaries fall, crisped like twigs in a firestorm. And the armies of the Seven Cities move onward toward the Nest.

They surround it now. They peer down into each of its many mouths. They raise their weapons high once again and touch the studs that bring them to life.

And force leaps from those gleaming ancient devices, an invincible force that rips the earth apart and lifts the roof from the Nest, stripping it bare, revealing the corridors and passages and channels so painstakingly constructed over so many hundreds of thousands of years. In that terrible glare all the Egg-layers and the Life-kindlers stand revealed, and the Nest-thinkers, and the uncountable hordes of workers; and they perish in the first blasts. Then the deadly power descends into deeper, more tender places, where the Nourishment-givers are holding the newborn to their mouths to give them food; and they die also, Nourishment-givers and newborn both, in the next wave of the onslaught.

And then, deeper yet, to the deepest cavern of all—

To the place where the Queen Herself lies hidden, but hidden no longer, for a flick of force has stripped the roof of Her chamber away and Her pale immense body is exposed and defenseless, while desperate Queen-attendants cluster close about Her and frantically brandish their weapons in vain. Thu-Kimnibol looms above Her, grasping a small sphere of shining metal from which a sudden amber light comes forth. And the Queen quivers and convulses and pulls away from that hot probing pressure. But where can She go, in that close chamber? Remorselessly the amber light plays up and down the length of Her. Huge bubbles and blisters begin to appear on the charred and blackening surface of Her. Black smoke rises from Her as She sizzles and crisps under that merciless amber beam. Until—

Until—

“This could never occur,” comes the cold voice of the Queen.

“Are You so certain? Vengiboneeza lies in ashes. The dead bodies of the insect-folk litter the plains already for hundreds of leagues. And we have only begun.”

“You are small-souled creatures. You would turn away in terror long before you reached us.”

“Are You absolutely certain of that?” asks Nialli Apuilana. “Could small-souled creatures have built our cities? Could small-souled creatures have fought You as we’ve fought You thus far? I tell You: we have only begun.”

There is a silence.

The Queen says at length, “I know you. You are of the Nest, girl. You were one of us, and then I sent you from the Nest, back to your own kind: but I meant to have you serve Me there, not to oppose Me. Why these threats? How can you utter such things? Queen-love is still within you.”

“Is it?”

“I know that it is. You are mine, child. You are of the Nest, and you can never do harm to it.”

Nialli Apuilana doesn’t reply. By way of answer she looks within herself, to that secret place in her soul where the Queen had placed a part of Herself long ago. And seizes it, and draws it out as though it were no more than a shallow splinter in her flesh, and hurls it from her. Down it tumbles through the many layers of the sky. And as it nears the surface of the world it bursts into flames and is consumed.

“Do You still think I am of the Nest?” Nialli Apuilana asks.

There’s another great silence.

Once again now Nialli Apuilana shows the Queen the vision of the final war: the Nest ripped open, its inhabitants consumed by flames, the royal chamber despoiled, the vast charred body, split apart and ruined, dead in the smoking depths.

“You know nothing of what it is to die,” says Nialli Apuilana. “You know nothing of pain. You know nothing of loss. You know nothing of defeat. But You’ll learn. You’ll perish in flame and agony; and the worst agony of all will be the knowledge that there is no way You can take revenge upon those who did this to You.”

The Queen doesn’t respond.

“It will happen,” Nialli Apuilana says. “We are a determined people. The gods have shaped us to be what we are.”

Silence.

“Well?” Nialli Apuilana says. “Is that Your answer? Is this what You’d have us do? Because I tell You that we will do it, if You won’t give us what we ask.”

Silence. Silence.

The Queen says at length, “What is it, then, that you want?”

“An end to the war. A truce between our peoples. A line drawn between Your lands and ours, never to be violated.”

“These are your only terms?”

“Our only terms, yes,” says Nialli Apuilana.

“And the alternative?”

“War to the death. With no quarter given.”

“You deceive yourself if you think there can ever be peace between us,” says the Queen.

“But there can be an absence of war.”

There is one last silence. It seems to stretch on forever.

“Yes,” replies the Queen finally. “There can be an absence of war. So be it. I grant you what you ask. There will be an absence of war.”

It was done. Nialli Apuilana bade the Queen farewell, and in a single moment withdrew from the high realm, sweeping swiftly downward toward the breast of the land, where dawn now had begun to glow. She relinquished her grasp on the Barak Dayir and sat up. She was back in the tent that she shared with Thu-Kimnibol.

He was just beginning to stir. He looked over at her and smiled.

“How strange. I slept like a child, lost to the world. And I dreamed the war was over. That a truce had been agreed on between ourselves and the Queen.”

“It was no dream,” said Nialli Apuilana.