Thu-Kimnibol nodded to Nialli Apuilana. Together they stepped down from their wagon. Pelithhrouk smiled and spread his arms wide, and solemnly embraced them, Thu-Kimnibol first, then Nialli Apuilana, in a formal gesture of salute.
“What a fine day this is,” Thu-Kimnibol murmured, as they followed Pelithhrouk toward the reviewing stand. Guardsmen kept the crowds back on either side. Banners fluttered everywhere. The sun, bright and warm, was high overhead. As they started up the steps to the platform above Nialli Apuilana reached for Thu-Kimnibol’s hand. They interlaced their fingers.
A row of guardsmen waited there. Behind them were Taniane and all the city’s notables in formal array. Time had dealt with them in a heavy way. The chieftain seemed no more than a gray ember of herself now, and Staip looked withered and ancient beyond belief, and the others too had aged startlingly, Puit Kjai, Chomrik Hamadel, Lespar Thone. Thu-Kimnibol wondered how he must look to them, after the long months of marching through distant bleak lands, the battles, the wounds he had taken.
But his mood was buoyant despite all that. The battles were done for now; he was returning with victory. And more than that. Often in days gone by he had felt himself oppressed by the great weight of the world’s past, the vastness of it. Now, though, what he sensed was the exhilarating vastness of the future: its infinite possibilities, more to come than lay behind, world without end, many difficulties, many triumphs, many wonders not yet dreamed of, never imagined even in the greatest eras of the past. The world might be ancient but also it was ever new and young. The best was still to come.
He reached the top of the platform and halted there, facing the great ones of the city.
There was a moment when everyone stood utterly still, frozen in a solemn ceremonial tableau. Thu-Kimnibol, still holding Nialli Apuilana’s hand, bowed his head toward them all. Were they waiting for him to speak first? Surely the first word belonged to the chieftain. He remained silent. Taniane held the burnished, gleaming Mask of Koshmar in her hands. She appeared to be about to don it. No one else moved.
Finally Taniane began to speak, her voice faltering a little: “The gods have brought you safely home. We rejoice, Thu-Kimnibol, in your victorious—”
An eruption of frantic action then, sudden, bewildering. The figure of Husathirn Mueri burst into view, emerging from behind Taniane and rushing toward Thu-Kimnibol. A knife gleamed in his upraised left hand.
In that same moment Chevkija Aim, sprinting up the three steps that separated the lower platform from the one where the notables stood, came running toward Husathirn Mueri from the side. He too carried a drawn blade.
“Lady, watch out!” the guard-captain shouted. “He’s a traitor!”
And an instant later Husathirn Mueri and Chevkija Aim were tangled up together in a desperate struggle at the center of the platform. Thu-Kimnibol, too astonished to move, saw weapons flashing in the sun. There was a grunting sound of pain. A startling gout of blood spurted from Chevkija Aim’s chest and ran down over his thick golden Beng fur. The guard-captain lurched forward, his arms jerking convulsively, his knife skittering across the platform and landing practically at Taniane’s feet as he fell. Husathirn Mueri, his face contorted and wild, swung around a second time toward Thu-Kimnibol. But Nialli Apuilana stepped swiftly between them just as Husathirn Mueri raised his blade.
He gaped at her, aghast, and checked his blow before it could strike her. His eyes glazed as though he had been smitten by the gods. Recoiling from her with a moaning outcry of despair, he lowered his arm and let his weapon drop from suddenly nerveless fingers. By now Thu-Kimnibol had managed to make his way around Nialli Apuilana in the confusion and started toward him. But Husathirn Mueri had already turned and was staggering crazily toward the rear of the platform, heading for Taniane, who had picked up Chevkija Aim’s knife and was studying it in wonder.
“Lady—” he muttered thickly. “Lady — lady — forgive me, lady—”
Thu-Kimnibol reached for him. Taniane waved him back. She stared at Husathirn Mueri as though he were an apparition.
In a dark anguished voice he said, “Kundalimon’s death was my doing. And Curabayn Bangkea’s as well, and all the grief that followed.”
With a desperate sob he threw himself upon her as if to embrace her. Unhesitatingly Taniane’s arm came forward, rising swiftly toward Husathirn Mueri’s rib cage in a single sharp jab. He stiffened and gasped. Clutching his middle, he took a couple of reeling steps back from her. For a moment he stood utterly motionless, rearing up on the tips of his toes. Blood trickled out over his lips. He took one tottering step toward Nialli Apuilana. Then he fell sprawling, landing beside the body of Chevkija Aim. He quivered once and was still.
“Guards! Guards!” Thu-Kimnibol roared.
Seizing Nialli Apuilana with one hand and Taniane with the other, he pulled them behind him and swung about to see what was happening below the platform. Some kind of disturbance was going on down there. The guardsmen were moving in to quell it. Further in the distance the warriors of Thu-Kimnibol’s own army, aware now of the strange struggle on the platform, had left their wagons and were rushing forward. At the center of everything Thu-Kimnibol saw the figure of a bright-robed boy of ten or twelve years, holding his hands high in the midst of the crowd and screaming curses of some sort in a terrifying furious voice sharp as a dagger.
“Look,” Nialli Apuilana said. “He has Kundalimon’s Nest-guardian! His Nest-bracelet, too!” Her eyes were gleaming as fiercely as the boy’s. “By the gods, I’ll deal with him! Leave him to me!”
The Barak Dayir was suddenly in her hand. Deftly she seized it with her sensing-organ. Thu-Kimnibol stared at her in bewilderment as the Wonderstone instantly worked some bizarre transformation on her: she seemed to grow in size, to turn into something huge and strange.
“I see the Queen within you,” cried Nialli Apuilana in a dark frightful tone, looking down with blazing eyes at the boy in bright robes. “But I call Her out! I cast Her forth! Now! Now! Now! Out! ”
For a moment all was silent. Time itself hung, frozen, still, suspended by a heartbeat.
Then the boy staggered as if he had been struck. He twisted about and made a dry chittering sound, a sound almost like one a hjjk would make, and his face turned gray and then black; and he fell forward and was lost to sight in the surging crowd.
Calmly Nialli Apuilana restored the Barak Dayir to its pouch.
“All’s well now,” she said, taking Thu-Kimnibol once more by the hand.
It was hours later, after general quiet had been restored. They were in the great chamber of the Presidium.
Taniane said, “So there is to be peace, of a sort. Out of the madness of the war comes a kind of victory. Or at any rate a truce. But what have we accomplished? At any time, at the Queen’s mere whim, it could all begin again.”
Thu-Kimnibol shook his head. “I think not, sister. The Queen knows better now what we’re like, and what we’re capable of doing. The world will be divided now. The hjjks will leave us alone, I promise you that. They’ll keep to their present territory, and we to ours, and there’ll be no more talk of Nest-thinkers setting up shop in our cities.”
“And how will it be in territories that are neither theirs nor ours? That was what troubled Hresh so much, that the hjjks would keep us from the rest.”
“The rest of the world will remain open, mother,” said Nialli Apuilana. “We can explore it as we choose, whenever we’re ready. And who knows what things we will find? There may be great cities of the People on the other continents. Or the humans themselves may have returned to the world from wherever it is they went when the Great World died, and are living there now, for all we know. Who can say? But we’ll find out. We’ll go wherever we want, and discover everything that is to be discovered, just as my father hoped we would. The Queen understands now that there’ll be no penning us up in our little strip of coastline. If anyone has been penned up, it’s the hjjks, in the godforsaken lands they’ve always inhabited.”