Nightfall found him squatting atop a towering pyramid-shaped mound of broken alabaster columns, which once perhaps had stood on the portico of the shattered temple with wide, sweeping wings that lay opposite him. Small furry skittering creatures with long narrow bodies and short frantic legs ran back and forth near him, altogether unafraid. They seemed harmless. One ran up onto his knee and sat there a long moment, cocking its head, peering wisely this way and that but otherwise motionless. When Hresh tried to stroke it, it ran.
The darkness deepened. He made no move to leave. He wondered what it would be like to spend the night in this place.
Koshmar will be furious with me, he thought.
Torlyri will be deeply worried. Perhaps Taniane will be, too.
He shrugged. Koshmar’s anger no longer mattered to him. If Torlyri felt any distress over his disappearance, well, it would be forgotten when he returned. As for Taniane — Taniane would probably not even notice that he wasn’t in the settlement this evening, he thought. He put them all from his mind. He put everything and everyone from his mind: the People, the Bengs, the Great World, the humans, the death-stars. He sat quietly, watching the stars begin to appear. He grew calm. It was almost a trance.
Just as true darkness fell he saw a glimmer of motion out of the corner of his eye, and at once he snapped to attention, heart pounding, breath coming in short bursts.
He rose and looked around. Yes, something was definitely moving: there across the way, near the foundation of the ruined temple. At first he thought it was a small round animal that had come out to sniff for prey, but then by the white gleam of starlight he saw the metallic sheen, the jointed legs. What was this? A mechanical of some sort? But the mechanicals were all dead! And this looked nothing like the Great World mechanicals that he had seen in his visions, or like the dead and rusting ones on that hillside during the long trek westward. Those had been huge, awesome beings. There was something almost comical about this, a small bustling thing perhaps half as tall as he was, spherical, moving earnestly and solemnly about on curious little metal rods.
He saw another, now. And another. There were half a dozen of them roving the rubble-strewn street. Quietly Hresh approached them. They paid no heed to him. Little globes that emitted bright beams of light were mounted on their upper surfaces, and they flashed these about as though looking for something. Now and then they paused, probing the ruins with metal arms that sprang like whips from their bodies. Sometimes they reached between two fallen slabs, as if making an adjustment to something hidden underneath them. Or making repairs.
Hresh caught his breath. He had long since observed evidence all over Vengiboneeza that repair work was somehow going on — that the city, ruined as it was, nevertheless was under the care of invisible powers, ghosts of some sort, Great World forces that worked behind the scenes in a foolhardy attempt to put the place back together. It stood to reason, he thought. Much of the city was in sad shape, but not so dreadfully ruinous as one would expect it to be after the passage of such a great span of time, and some districts seemed hardly damaged at all. He could easily believe that beings of some kind moved through the city trying to patch it. But there was no real proof that such beings existed. No one had ever seen one, and few among the People cared even to speculate about them, for if they were there they might well be spirits, and therefore terrifying.
Yet here they were. Little round machines, poking in the rubble!
They paid no more heed to him than the short-legged furry animals had. He came up behind them and studied them as they worked. Yes, they were definitely trying to tidy things: sucking up the clouds of stone dust, shoving great girders and slabs into orderly heaps, bolstering arches and doorframes. Then, as Hresh watched, one of them touched a metal extension to a door of red stone set at an angle in the ground and the door slid back as if on a greased track. Light came bursting from within. Hresh peered past the little mechanical and saw an underground room, brilliantly lit, in which all manner of shining machines stood in rows, seemingly in good working order. It was an exciting, tantalizing sight: another Great World treasure-trove, one that he had not known of! He leaned forward, staring intently.
A hand touched him from behind, making him leap with fear and astonishment, and he felt himself gripped and caught.
A harsh Beng voice barked, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Squirming about, Hresh beheld a burly warrior of the Helmet Men, flat-faced, scowling, nearly as awesome a presence as Harruel himself. He wore a monstrous bronze cone of a helmet from which great fanciful metal antlers sprang, rising and rising to a terrifying height. His scarlet eyes were grim and fearsome, his lips were angrily clamped. Behind him was the enormous bulk of a vermilion.
“I am Hresh of Koshmar’s People,” Hresh said in the strongest voice he could muster, though in his own ears it did not sound very strong at all.
“You have no business here,” was the cold reply.
“This is the shrine of the god Dawinno, to which I have made a holy pilgrimage. I ask you to turn back, and leave me to my prayers.”
“There is no god Dawinno. Your kind may not enter here.”
“By whose command?”
“By order of Hamok Trei, king of Bengs. I have followed you across half the city this evening, but you will trespass no more. Your life is forfeit.”
Forfeit?
The Beng carried a spear, and there was a short wide blade in a sheath dangling from his sash. Hresh stared, fighting back his distress. The Beng was twice his size; any sort of combat was out of the question, even if he were carrying a weapon, and he was not. Turning to flee seemed equally foolish. Perhaps he could dazzle this warrior with second sight, but even that was risky and uncertain. Still, to die here, alone, at the hands of a stranger, merely for having gone someplace where Hamok Trei didn’t want him to go—
Hresh lifted his sensing-organ and made ready to bring it into play. His eyes met the hard scarlet ones of the Helmet Man squarely. The Beng raised his spear.
If he touches me, Hresh thought, I’ll hit him with all the power I have. I don’t care whether it kills him or not.
But there was no need for that. With a quick brusque movement the Beng pointed to Hresh with his spear, and then pointed over his shoulder, vaguely in the direction of the settlement of the Helmet People. He intended simply to bring Hresh before Hamok Trei. “You will ride with me,” he said, indicating the vermilion. As easily as though Hresh had been made of air the Beng scooped him up with one hand and deposited him between the great creature’s ponderous humps. Then the Helmet Man leaped up beside him and touched his sensing-organ to the back of the vermilion’s head. With a slow, agonizing, lurching motion that made Hresh dizzy to the point of nausea almost at once, the huge red beast set off toward the Beng settlement.
But it was Noum om Beng and not Hamok Trei who emerged to dispense justice that night. The withered old man, summoned from his chambers by Hresh’s captor, came tottering forth, looking puzzled. But he began laughing when the situation was explained to him.
“You must not go into places where you should not go, boy,” the Beng chronicler said, and slapped Hresh lightly on the cheek. “You saw the signs?”
Hresh made no reply. He would not recognize the Beng markings as having authority over his movements through the city.