“When? How?”
He smiled gently. “Not in the actual flesh, Nialli. I wasn’t really there. It was with the Barak Dayir, only.”
“Then you were there, you were!” she exclaimed, clutching his arm in her excitement. “The Barak Dayir shows you true visions, father. You told me so yourself. You’ve seen into the Nest! And so you must know Nest-truth. You understand!”
“Do I? I think I’m very far from understanding anything.”
“That isn’t so.”
He shook his head. “Perhaps I understand a little. But only a little, I think. Only the beginning of the beginning. What I had was simply a fleeting vision, Nialli. It lasted just a moment.”
“Even a moment would be enough. I tell you, father, there’s no way you can touch the Nest without experiencing Nest-truth. And therefore knowing Nest-bond, Egg-plan, all of it.”
He searched his mind. “I don’t know what those words mean. Not really.”
“They’re the things you spoke of a moment ago. When you talked of the Nest as a great living machine, and spoke of the perfection of its pattern.”
“Tell me. Tell me.”
Her expression changed. She seemed to disappear deep within herself. “Nest-bond,” she said, in an odd high-pitched way, as though reciting a lesson, “is the awareness of the relationship of each thing in the universe to everything else. We are all parts of the Nest, even those of us who have never experienced it, even those of us who look upon the hjjks as dread monsters. For everything is united in a single great pattern, which is the endless unstoppable force of life. The hjjks are the vehicle through which this force is manifested in our times; and the Queen is its guiding spirit on our world. That is Nest-truth. And Egg-plan is the energy that She expresses as She brings forth the unceasing torrent of renewal. Queen-light is the glow of Her warmth; Queen-love is the sign of Her great care for us all.”
Hresh stared, thunderstruck by the girl’s strange burst of eloquence. The words had come pouring out of her almost uncontrollably, almost as if someone or something else were speaking through her. Her face was aglow, her eyes were shining with absolute and unshakable conviction. She suddenly seemed swept up into some rapture of visionary zeal. She was aflame with it.
Then the flame flickered and went out, and she was only Nialli Apuilana again, the troubled, uneasy Nialli Apuilana of a moment before.
She sat stunned and depleted before him.
She is such a mystery, he thought.
And these other mysteries, those of the Nest — they were great and complex, and he knew that merely hearing of them like this could never give him a true grasp of them. He wished now that he had lingered longer when he had made his Barak Dayir voyage into the country of the hjjks. He began to see that he must before much longer make that voyage again, and experience the Nest far more deeply than he had allowed himself to do that other time. He must learn what Nialli Apuilana had learned, and he must learn it at first hand. Even if the learning of it cost him his life.
He felt very weary. And she looked exhausted. Hresh realized that they had carried this meeting as far as it could go this day.
But Nialli Apuilana apparently wasn’t quite ready to end it.
“Well?” she asked. “What do you say? Do you understand Nest-bond now? Egg-plan? Queen-love?”
“You look so tired, Nialli.” He touched her cheek. “You ought to get some rest.”
“I will. But first tell me that you understood what I was saying, father. And I didn’t really need to say it, isn’t that true? You already knew all that, didn’t you? You must have seen it when you looked into the Nest with your Wonderstone.”
“Some of it, yes. The sense of pattern, of universal order. I saw that. But I looked so quickly, and then I fled. Nest-bond — Queen-light — no, those terms are just words to me. They have no real substance in my mind.”
“I think you understand more than you suspect.”
“Only the beginning of the beginning of understanding.”
“That’s a beginning, at least.”
“Yes. Yes. At least I know what the hjjks are not.”
“Not demons, you mean? Not monsters?”
“Not enemies.”
“Not enemies, no,” Nialli Apuilana said. “Adversaries, maybe. But not enemies.”
“A very subtle shade of difference.”
“Yet a real one, father.”
Thu-Kimnibol was home at last. The journey south had been swift, though not nearly swift enough for him, and uneventful. Now he walked the grand, lonely halls of his great villa in Dawinno, rediscovering it, reacquainting himself with his own home, his own possessions, after his long absence. It seemed to him that he had been away ten thousand years. He was alone as he went from one echoing room to another, pausing here and there to examine the objects in the display cases.
There were phantoms and spectres everywhere. These were Naarinta’s things, really: she was the one who had collected most of the ancient treasures that filled these rooms, the bits of Great World sculpture and architectural fragments and strange twisted metallic things whose purpose would probably never be known. As he looked at them his sensing-organ began to tingle and he felt the immense antiquity of these battered artifacts come crowding in about him, alive and vital, jigging and throbbing with strange energy, making the villa itself seem a dead place, though it had been built only a dozen years before.
It was still early in the day, just hours after his return from Yissou. But he had lost no time setting in motion his preparations for war. He was due to see Taniane in the afternoon; but first, messengers had gone out to Si-Belimnion, to Kartafirain, to Maliton Diveri, to Lespar Thone: men of power, men he could trust. He waited impatiently for their arrival. It was not good, being here by himself. He hadn’t expected that, how painful it would be to come back to an empty house.
“Your grace?” His majordomo, Gyv Hawoodin, an old Mortiril who had been with him for years. “Your grace, Kartafirain and Si-Belimnion are here.”
“Send them up. And then set out some wine for us.”
Solemnly Thu-Kimnibol embraced his friends. Solemnity seemed the appropriate mood of the day: Si-Belimnion wore a dark mantle that emanated a bleak funereal glow, and even the ebullient Kartafirain was somber and subdued. Thu-Kimnibol offered them wine and they drained their cups as though it were water.
“You won’t believe what has happened here while you were away,” Kartafirain began. “The common folk sing hymns to the Queen of the hjjks. They gather in cellars and children lead them in nonsensical catechisms.”
“This is the heritage of the envoy Kundalimon,” muttered Si-Belimnion, peering moodily into his cup. “Husathirn Mueri warned us that he was corrupting the young, and indeed he was. A pity he wasn’t killed even sooner.”
“It was Curabayn Bangkea that did it?” Thu-Kimnibol asked.
Kartafirain replied, with a shrug, “The guard-captain, yes. So everyone says, at any rate. Someone killed him too, the same day.”
“I heard about that up north. And who was it that killed him, do you suppose?”
“Very likely whoever it was that hired him to kill Kundalimon,” said Si-Belimnion. “To silence him, no doubt. No one knows who it might have been. I’ve heard twenty different guesses, all of them absurd. In any case the investigation’s just about forgotten, now. The new religion’s the only thing that anyone thinks about.”
Thu-Kimnibol stared. “But isn’t Taniane attempting to stamp it out? That’s what I heard.”
“Easier to stamp out wildfire in the dry season,” said Kartafirain. “It was spreading faster than the guards could close the chapels. Eventually Taniane decided that trying to eradicate it was too risky. There might have been an uprising. The common folk profess to see great blessings in the teachings of the Queen. She is their comfort and their joy, the prayer goes. She is the light and the way. They think everything will be love and peace here, once the kindly hjjks are among us.”