But Divvis—who surely had no knowledge of how his father had died; there was no secret more closely guarded than that among the Piurivar folk—was not being at all careless, Faraataa thought gloomily. His headquarters was tightly protected by devoted knights, and there was no possibility of slipping an assassin through that line, no matter how shrewdly disguised. With angry stabbing gestures of his keenly honed wooden dirk Faraataa dug the lines of Divvis’s march deeper and deeper into the riverbank. Down from Khyntor, and along the inside wall of the great western mountains, making roads through wild country that had been roadless since the beginning of time—sweeping everything before him, filling Piurifayne with his innumerable troops, closing off the countryside, polluting the sacred streams, trampling the sacred groves.…
Against that horde of troops Faraataa had been compelled to unleash his army of pilligrigorms. He regretted that, for they were very nearly the nastiest of his biological weapons, and he had been hoarding them to dump into Ni-moya or Khyntor at some later phase of the war: land-dwelling crustaceans the size of a fingertip, they were, with armored shells that could not be crushed with a hammer, and a myriad busy fast-moving legs that Faraataa’s genetic artists had altered so that they were as sharp as saws. The appetite of a pilligrigorm was insatiable—it demanded fifty times its own weight in meat each day—and its method of satisfying that appetite was to carve openings in any sort of warmblooded animal life that lay in its path, and devour its flesh from the inside out.
Fifty thousand of them, Faraataa had thought, could bring a city the size of Khyntor into total turmoil in five days. But now, because the Unchanging Ones had chosen to invade Piurifayne, he had had to release the pilligrigorms not within a city, but on Piurifayne’s own soil, in the hope that they would drive Divvis’s immense army into confusion and retreat. No reports had come in yet, though, on the success of that tactic.
On the other side of the jungle, where the Coronal Lord Hissune was leading a second army southward on another impossible route along the west bank of the Steiche, it was Faraataa’s plan to string a net of the infinitely sticky and impenetrable birdnet vine for hundreds of miles in their path, so that they were forced to take wider and ever wider detours until they were hopelessly lost. The difficulty with that stratagem was only that no one could handle birdnet vine effectively except the forest-brethren, those maddening little apes who secreted in their perspiration an enzyme that rendered them immune to the vine’s stickiness. But the forest-brethren had little reason to love the Piurivars, who had hunted them for centuries for the rich flavor of their flesh, and gaining their assistance in this maneuver was apparently not proving easy.
Faraataa felt the rage rising and boiling over within him.
It had all gone so well, at first. Releasing the blights and plagues into the farming districts—bringing agriculture into collapse over such a wide region—the famine, the panic, the mass migrations—yes, all according to plan. And setting loose the specially bred animals had worked nicely too, on a smaller scale: that had intensified the fears of the populace, and made life more complicated for the city-dwellers…
But the impact had not been as strong as Faraataa had hoped. He had imagined that the blood-hungry giant miluftas would terrorize Ni-moya, which had already been in a state of chaos—but he had not expected that Lord Hissune’s army would be in Ni-moya when the miluftas reached the city, or that his archers could dispose of the deadly birds so easily.
And now Faraataa had no more miluftas, and it would take five years to breed enough to make any impact…
But there were pilligrigorms. There were gannigogs by the millions in the holding tanks, ready to be set loose. There were quexes; there were vriigs; there were zambinaxes; there were malamolas. There were new plagues: a cloud of red dust that would sweep over a city in the night and leave its water supply poisonous for weeks, and a purple spore from which came a maggot that attacked all grazing animals, and even worse. Faraataa hesitated to let some of these loose, for his scientists had told him it might not be so simple to bring them under control after the defeat of the Unchanging Ones. But if it seemed that the war would go against his people, if there appeared to be no hope—why, then, Faraataa would not hesitate to release whatever could do harm to the enemy, regardless of the consequences.
Aarisiim returned, approaching timidly.
“There is news, O King That Is.”
“From which front?”
“Both, O King.”
Faraataa stared. “Well, how bad is it?”
Aarisiim hesitated. “In the west they are destroying the pilligrigorms. They have a kind of fire that they throw from metal tubes, which melts their shells. And the enemy is advancing rapidly through the zone where we have let the pilligrigorms loose.”
“And in the east?” said Faraataa stonily.
“They have broken through the forest, and we were not able to erect the birdnet vines in time. They are searching for Ilirivoyne, so the scouts report.”
“To find the Danipiur. To make an alliance with her against us.” Faraataa’s eyes blazed. “It is bad, Aarisiim, but we are far from finished! Call Benuuiab here, and Siimii, and some of the others. We will go to Ilirivoyne ourselves, and seize the Danipiur before they can reach her. And we will put her to death, if need be, and then who will they make their alliance with? If they seek a Piurivar with the authority to govern, there will be only Faraataa, and Faraataa will not sign treaties with Unchanging Ones.”
“Seize the Danipiur?” said Aarisiim doubtfully. “Put the Danipiur to death?”
“If I must,” Faraataa said, “I will put all this world to death, before I give it back to them!”
5
In early afternoon they halted at a place in the eastern Rift called Prestimion Vale, which Valentine understood had once been an important farming center. His journey across tormented Zimroel had taken him through scenes of almost unrelieved grimness—abandoned farms, depopulated cities, signs of the most terrifying struggles for survival—but this Prestimion Vale was surely one of the most disheartening places of all.
Its fields were charred and blackened, its people silent, stoic, stunned. “We were growers of lusavender and rice,” said Valentine’s host, a planter named Nitikkimal, who seemed to be the district mayor. “Then came the lusavender smut, and everything died, and we had to burn the fields. And it will be two years more, at least, before it is safe to plant again. But we have remained. Not one of us from Prestimion Vale has fled, your majesty. We have little to eat—and we Ghayrogs need very little, you understand, but even we do not have enough—and there is no work for us to do, which makes us restless, and it is sad to look at the land with these ashes upon it. But it is our land, and so we stay. Will we ever plant here again, your majesty?”
“I know that you will,” said Valentine. And wondered if he were giving these people false comfort.
Nitikkimal’s house was a great manor at the head of the valley, with lofty beams of black ghannimor wood, and a roof of green slate. But it was damp and drafty within, as though the planter no longer had the heart to make repairs as they became necessary in Prestimion Vale’s rainy and humid climate.