Salaman came to him a little while afterward.
“You look troubled, cousin. The news must be bad.”
“Suddenly there seems to be an epidemic of murder in my city.”
“Murder?”
“During our holy festival, no less. Two killings. One was the captain of our city guard, the older brother of this messenger. The other was the boy the hjjks sent to us carrying the terms of the treaty they were offering.”
“The hjjk envoy? Who’d kill him? What for?”
“Who can say?” Thu-Kimnibol shook his head. “The boy was harmless, or so it seemed to me. The other one — well, he was a fool, but if simply being a fool is reason to be murdered, the streets would run red with blood. There’s no sense to any of this.” He frowned and went to the window, and stared off into the shadowy courtyard for a time. Then he turned toward Salaman. “We may have to break off our negotiations.”
“You’ve been recalled, have you?”
“The messenger said nothing about that. But with things like this going on there—”
“Things like what? A couple of murders?” Salaman chuckled. “An epidemic, you call that?”
“You may have five killings here every day, cousin. But we aren’t used to such things.”
“Nor are we. But two killings hardly seems—”
“The guard-captain. The envoy. A messenger racing all this way to tell me. Why is that? Does Taniane think the hjjks will retaliate? Maybe that’s it — maybe they think there might be trouble, maybe even a hjjk raid on Dawinno—”
“We killed the envoy that was sent to us, cousin, and we never heard a thing about it. You people are too excitable, that’s the problem.” Salaman stretched a hand toward Thu-Kimnibol. “If you haven’t been officially recalled, stay right where you are, that’s my advice. Taniane and her Presidium can take care of this murder business without you. We have work of our own to do here, and it’s only barely begun. Stay in Yissou, cousin. That’s what I think.”
Thu-Kimnibol nodded. “You’re right. What’s been happening in Dawinno is no affair of mine. And we have work to do.”
Alone in his chambers atop the House of Knowledge in the early hours of the night, Hresh tries to come to terms with it all. Two days have gone by since Nialli Apuilana’s disappearance. Taniane is convinced that she is somewhere close at hand, that she’s gone into seclusion until her grief has burned itself out. Squadrons of guardsmen are at work combing the city for her, and the outlying districts.
But no one has seen her. And Hresh is convinced that no one will.
She has fled to the Queen: of that he’s sure. If she reaches them safely, he thought, she’ll spend the rest of her life among them. A citizen of the Nest of Nests, that’s what she’ll be. If she thinks of her native city at all, it’ll be only to curse it as the place where the man she loved was murdered. It’s the hjjks that she loves now. It’s the hjjks, Hresh tells himself, to whom she belongs. But why? Why?
What power do they have over her? what spell did they use to pull her toward them?
He feels baffled and impotent. These events have all but paralyzed him. Thought has become an immense effort. His soul seems to be encased in ice. The murders — when had there last been a violent death in Dawinno? And Nialli Apuilana’s disappearance — he must try to think — to think—
Someone had said yesterday that a girl riding a xlendi had been seen that rainy afternoon, out by the perimeter of the city. Seen only at a distance, just at a distance. There were plenty of girls in the city, plenty of xlendis. But suppose it had been Nialli. How far could she get, alone, unarmed, not knowing the route? Was she lost and close to death somewhere out there in the empty plains? Or had bands of hjjks been waiting to receive her and lead her onward to the Nest of Nests?
You can’t possibly know what it’s like, father. They live in an atmosphere of dreams, of magic, of wonder. You breathe the air of the Nest, and it fills your soul, and you can never be the same again, not after you’ve felt Nest-bond, not after you’ve understood Nest-love.
She had promised to explain all that to him before she left. But there hadn’t been time, and now she is gone. And he still understands nothing, nothing at all. Nest-bond? Nest-love? Dreams? Magic? Wonder?
He glances toward the huge heavy casket of the chronicles. He has spent his lifetime ransacking the hodgepodge of ancient half-cryptic documents in that casket. His predecessors had copied and recopied those tattered books, and copied them again, during the hundreds of thousands of years in the cocoon. Ever since he was a child staring over Thaggoran’s shoulder, he has looked to the chronicles as an inexhaustible well of knowledge.
He opens the seals and the locks and begins to draw the volumes forth and lay them out one by one on the worktables of polished white stone that encircle the room.
Here is the Book of the Long Winter, with its tales of the coming of the death-stars. Here is the Book of the Cocoon, which tells how Lord Fanigole and Balilirion and Lady Theel led the People to safety in the time of cold and darkness. Here is the Book of the Way, containing prophecies of the New Springtime and the glorious role the People would play when they came forth again into the world. And this is the Book of the Coming Forth, which Hresh himself had written, except for the first few pages which Thaggoran who was chronicler before him had done: it tells of the winter’s end, and the return of the warmth, and the venturing of the tribe into the open plains at last.
This one is the Book of the Beasts, which describes all the animals that once had been. The Book of Hours and Days, telling of the workings of the world and the larger cosmos. This one here, with its binding hanging all in faded scraps, is the Book of the Cities, in which the names of all the capitals of the Great World are inscribed.
And these three: how sad they are! The Book of the Unhappy Dawn, the Book of the Wrongful Glow, the Book of the Cold Awakening, three pitiful tales of times when some chieftain, believing in error that the Long Winter was over, had led the People from the cocoon, only to be driven swiftly back by the icy blasts of unforgiving winds.
Concerning the hjjks, all he finds are old familiar phrases. In the dry northlands, where the hjjks dwell in their great Nest, or, And in that year the hjjks did march across the land. in very great number, devouring all that lay in their path, or, That was the season when the great Queen of the hjjk-folk despatched a horde of her people to the City of Thisthissima, and another vast horde to Tham. Mere chronicle-phrases, no real information in them.
He keeps rummaging. These books down here at the bottom have no names. They are the most ancient of all, mere elliptical fragments, written in a kind of writing so old that Hresh can perceive only the edge of its meanings. Great World texts is what they are, poems, perhaps, or dramatic works, or holy scriptures, or quite possibly all three things at once. When he touches the tips of his fingers to them, their frail vellum pages come alive with images of that glorious civilization that the death-stars had destroyed, of that splendid era when the Six Peoples had walked the glowing streets of the grand cities; but everything is murky, mysterious, deceptive, as though seen in a dream. He puts them back. He closes the casket.
Useless. The Book of the Hjjks, that’s what he needs. But he knows there’s no such thing.
“Three days,” said Taniane bleakly. “I want to know where she is. I want to know what kind of insanity came over her.”