All she felt was a numbness, though, not a burning, not a pain. She couldn’t understand it. She turned her gaze inward, searching for the cause of it.
But just in that moment it went from her, all at once: that numbness, that deepening ache that had plagued her since daybreak. She felt it go, a sudden startling cessation of discomfort, like the snapping of a tight bond. Then in its place was something even more troublesome: an absence, a bleak emptiness, sharp and painful, a terrible black void. She understood immediately what it was, and a chill ran through her that set her fur on end. Helplessly she began to weep. Wave after wave of grief swept over her. For the first time in more than forty years she could not feel the presence of Hresh within her. He was gone. Gone forever.
Under a glittering pockmarked moon the battlefield had the icy serene look of an immense glacier, even where the ground was cratered and upturned by the most recent round of fighting. Thu-Kimnibol’s warriors crept about warily on the broken earth, collecting the bodies of those who had fallen that day. Nialli Apuilana looked past them to the horizon, where she could see the bonfires of the hjjk camp. There was a respite now; but in the morning it would all begin again.
Thu-Kimnibol laughed harshly. “A war of nightmares,” he said. “We hurl flame and turbulence at them. They throw illusions at us. We return counterillusions of our own. Enemies who can’t see one another, blindly stumbling around.”
She could feel his fatigue. He had fought ferociously this day, rallying his troops in every part of the field as phantom after phantom came toward them, even as Salaman had warned. Repeatedly he had led his forces through some field of spurting fire, or some onrushing horde of sinister monsters, through flood and avalanche, through a rain of blood, through a hail of daggers. His goal was to maneuver himself into a position where he could work real damage against the hjjks with his Great World weapons; but they understood that now, and danced about him, hiding themselves behind illusions and nibbling at his forces from ambush. She had done what she could, wielding the Wonderstone to cut through the screen of hjjk hallucinations and to confuse them with projected phantoms of her own. But it had been a difficult day, an inconclusive day. And tomorrow promised more of the same.
“Were our losses very bad today?” Nialli Apuilana asked.
“Not as bad as it seemed at first. A dozen killed, perhaps fifty wounded. Some of those who died were Chham’s people, of the few that remain. The City of Yissou will be a broken place for years. A whole generation has been destroyed.”
“And the City of Dawinno?”
“We haven’t suffered the way Yissou has. They lost virtually an entire army in a single day.”
“Whereas we’re losing ours a few at a time. But in the end it’ll be the same, won’t it, Thu-Kimnibol?”
He gave her an enigmatic look. “Shall we surrender, then?”
“What do you say?”
“I say that if we fight, they’ll whittle us away to nothing no matter how much injury we inflict on them, and if we don’t fight, we’ll lose our souls. I say that time is against us, and that I find myself lost in confusions and mysteries as never before in my life.” He looked away from her, and stared into his open hands as though he hoped to read oracles in them. When he spoke again, it was clear he had not found them. “It seems to me, Nialli, that I lead this campaign in two directions at once. I go rushing forward eager to blast the hjjks before me as we blasted Vengiboneeza, and go riding onward to destroy the Nest and everything it contains. And yet at the same time a part of me is pulling back, urging retreat, praying for an end to the war before I harm the Queen. Can you understand what it’s like to be torn in such a way?”
“I felt it myself, once. The spell of the Nest is very powerful.”
“Is that why Hresh took me there, do you think? To hand me over to the Queen?”
Nialli Apuilana shook her head. “He only wanted you to see every side of the conflict. To understand that the hjjks are dangerous but not evil, that there’s greatness in them, but of a kind very far from anything we can comprehend. But when you touch the Nest it makes itself part of you, and you a part of it. I know. It was like that for me, far more deeply, even, than I think it is for you. Remember, I was of the Nest myself.”
“Yes. I know.”
“And freed myself. But not completely. I’ll never free myself completely. The Queen will always be within me.”
Thu-Kimnibol’s eyes flashed. “And is she within me also?” he cried, with anguish in his voice.
“I think that she is.”
“Then how can I fight this war, if my enemy is part of me, and I’m part of Her?”
She hesitated a moment. “There’s no way that you can.”
“I despise the hjjks. I mean to destroy them!”
“Yes, you do. But you’ll never allow yourself to do it.”
“Then I’m lost, Nialli! All of us are!”
She looked off into the shadows. “This is the great test that the gods have sent us, do you see? There’s no easy resolution. My father thought that we and the hjjks could enter into some sort of unity, that we could live harmoniously with them, side by side, as the sapphire-eyes and the rest lived with them in the Great World. But he was wrong, wise as he was. As I freed myself from the Queen’s spell he was starting to fall under it; and he was swallowed up in it. This isn’t the Great World, though. Assimilation of two such alien races is impossible. It’s the natural desire of the hjjks to achieve absorption, domination. The best we can hope for is to hold them at bay, as perhaps they were held at bay by the other races in the time of the Great World.”
“Why not destroy them altogether?”
“Because it’s probably beyond us to do any such thing. And because if somehow we did, it would be at a terrible cost to our own souls.”
He shook his head. “Is the best we can hope for a mere stand-off, then? A line drawn across the world, hjjks here, People there?”
“Yes.”
“As the Queen originally proposed. Why did we resist it, then? We could simply have accepted her treaty, and spared ourselves all this outlay of lives and toil.”
“Not so,” said Nialli Apuilana. “You forget an important thing. She proposed not just a division of territory, but also to send Nest-thinkers to live among us and spread Her truths and Her plan. In time they would bring us to embrace Queen-love; and that would deliver us forever into Her power. She’d control us all, as She controlled Kundalimon, as She controlled me. She’d regulate our rate of population increase, so there’d never be so many of us that we interfered with Her designs. She would designate the acceptable locations of any new cities we might build, to keep most of the world free for Her people. That was what the treaty would have done. What we must have is the boundary line, but not the infiltration of Nest-thinkers into our lives. There has already been too much of that.”
“Then the war must go on until She is beaten. And then we have to eradicate every trace of Queen-worship in our city.” He turned away from her and began to pace the tent. “Gods! Will there ever be an end to all this?”
Nialli Apuilana smiled. “We can make an end to it for tonight, at least.”
“What do you mean?”
She moved closer to him in the darkness. “This night we can allow ourselves a little time out of war, just for each other.” Her sensing-organ rose and moved tentatively against his. He shivered and seemed almost to draw back from her, as though unable to free himself from the doubts and turmoil that had engulfed him; but she stayed close by him, easing him gently out of his disquiet and apprehension. After a moment she could feel the tension begin to leave him. He came close to her, rising like a mountain above her, and encircled her with his arms. She took his hands and placed them over her breasts. They stood that way for a time, allowing the communion to build; and then they sank down slowly together, entwined in body and soul, and lay in each other’s arms through the rest of the night.
It’s the hour before dawn, now. T
hu-Kimnibol is still deep in dreams. His massive chest rises and falls evenly, his sword-arm is flung casually across his face. Nialli Apuilana kisses him lightly and slips away from his side, going to the opposite end of the tent they share.
There she kneels and whispers the name of Yissou the Protector, and makes his sign, and then says the name of Dawinno the Destroyer, who is also Dawinno the Transformer, and makes his sign as well. She feels their presence entering her and gives thanks for it.
She touches then the amulet that nestles in the thick fur between her breasts, and calls upon her father; and after a while she sees him, shining in the darkness before her, the familiar smile on his familiar sharp-chinned face. There’s someone else behind him, a much older man, white-furred and sunken chested. Nialli Apuilana doesn’t know him, but his presence seems benign. And deeper in the darkness is still another venerable stranger, a withered old Beng so thin and tall that he seems nothing more than an elongated straw that any breeze might blow away.
Now she draws the Barak Dayir from its pouch and touches it briefly to her forehead in a sign of respect, and grips it firmly with her sensing-organ.
The music rises within her. It carries her toward the heights of the world.
She climbs easily, confidently, fearing nothing: for isn’t Yissou with her, and Dawinno, and her father also? Only when she’s aloft, and the world is no more than a speck beneath her, does she feel the first tremor of concern. It would be so easy to go on and on from here, forever upward into that sphere of the unknown that surrounds the world, outward and outward and outward among the comets and the moons and the stars: and never to return. All she has to do is cut the mooring that binds her to the Earth. But that’s not what she’s about to do.
What she seeks is the Queen: the Queen of Queens, indeed, in Her lair at the Nest of Nests, in the cold bleak northlands.
She focuses her mind and propels it forward. At first she feels a moment of uncertainty, a curious doubleness of destination. The Queen seems to be in two places at once, one of them distant and one very close at hand. Nialli Apuilana doesn’t know what to make of that. But then she understands. The memory arises in her of that terrible time after Kundalimon’s death and her own flight into the wilderness, when she had hidden herself in her room and struggled with all that possessed her spirit. The Queen had been within her then; and the Queen has remained within her to this day. That dark presence had never relinquished its place at the heart of her soul.
But that Queen within her is only the shadow of the true one. It’s the Queen Herself, and not the shadow, with whom she has to deal today.
“Do you know me?” she calls. “I am Nialli Apuilana, daughter of Hresh.”
And out of the depths of the Nest of Nests comes an answer from the great motionless pallid thing that lies hidden there.
“I know you. What do you want with Me?”
“To negotiate with you.”
Derisive laughter rings down upon her like a hail of fire. “Only equals can negotiate, little one.” And from the Queen comes a storm of power that makes the air shiver and bend upon itself, so that Nialli Apuilana can see the roots of the world showing through the fabric of the atmosphere.
But she will not let herself be swayed.
“You have a Wonderstone,” Nialli Apuilana says. “I have a Wonderstone. We are equals, therefore.”
“Are we?”
“Can You harm me?”
“Can you harm Me?” the Queen says.
Bolts of blue flame arch upward from the Nest. They dance and swirl about Nialli Apuilana in frenzied weaving motions, looking for a vulnerable place. She brushes them away as though they’re gnats.
The Queen sends a storm of boulders. The Queen sends a wall of fire. The Queen sends a cloud of searing mist.
“You waste Your time. Do You think I’m a child, who can be frightened this way? What the Wonderstone sends, the Wonderstone can turn aside. We can spend all day threatening each other like this, and nothing will be achieved.”
“What is it that you hope to achieve?”
“Let me show You a vision,” says Nialli Apuilana.
From the Queen, after a moment, comes grudging assent.
From Nialli Apuilana to the Queen goes an image of the terrain that surrounds the Nest of Nests, as she knows it must be, though she has never seen it with her own eyes: hard sparse plains, broad endless grayness under an unforgiving sky. She draws it from the soul of Kundalimon that is still within her. Kundalimon had lived in the Nest of Nests. She shows the Queen the dry puckered soil, the pitiless saw-edged grass, the small vicious creatures that scrabble fiercely for their livelihoods in that remote and dreadful land.
And then she shows Her the dark mouths of the Nest gaping here and there in the plain, and the barely perceptible rise of the Nest itself, a faint humped swelling beneath the surface of the land, a myriad corridors running off in every direction.
“Do You recognize this place?” Nialli Apuilana asks.
“Go on.”
Now Nialli Apuilana shows the Queen the armies of the People advancing from east and west and south: not merely the force that Thu-Kimnibol had brought with him from Dawinno, but the warriors of all the Seven Cities of the continent, from Yissou and Thisthissima and Gharb, from Ghajnsielem, from Cignoi, from Bornigrayal, every tribe of every land, all of them united here in one cataclysmic outpouring of joined strength. And there, rising above that multitude like the tallest tree of the forest, is Thu-Kimnibol of Dawinno; and in his hand is one of the weapons of the Great World. The chieftain of Gharb has a similar weapon, and that of Cignoi, and all the others; and they hold them trained on the Nest of Nests.
Hjjks come streaming now from the Nest, the finest of the Queen’s Militaries; and as they rush toward the invaders Thu-Kimnibol and the other chieftains raise their weapons high, and bright light flares and a clap like the sound of the world’s final thunder sounds, and the plains are swept by fire and the Militaries fall, crisped like twigs in a firestorm. And the armies of the Seven Cities move onward toward the Nest.
They surround it now. They peer down into each of its many mouths. They raise their weapons high once again and touch the studs that bring them to life.
And force leaps from those gleaming ancient devices, an invincible force that rips the earth apart and lifts the roof from the Nest, stripping it bare, revealing the corridors and passages and channels so painstakingly constructed over so many hundreds of thousands of years. In that terrible glare all the Egg-layers and the Life-kindlers stand revealed, and the Nest-thinkers, and the uncountable hordes of workers; and they perish in the first blasts. Then the deadly power descends into deeper, more tender places, where the Nourishment-givers are holding the newborn to their mouths to give them food; and they die also, Nourishment-givers and newborn both, in the next wave of the onslaught.
And then, deeper yet, to the deepest cavern of all—
To the place where the Queen Herself lies hidden, but hidden no longer, for a flick of force has stripped the roof of Her chamber away and Her pale immense body is exposed and defenseless, while desperate Queen-attendants cluster close about her and frantically brandish their weapons in vain. Thu-Kimnibol looms above Her, grasping a small sphere of shining metal from which a sudden amber light comes forth. And the Queen quivers and convulses and pulls away from that hot probing pressure. But where can she go, in that close chamber? Remorselessly the amber light plays up and down the length of Her. Huge bubbles and blisters begin to appear on the charred and blackening surface of Her. Black smoke rises from her as she sizzles and crisps under that merciless amber beam. Until—
Until—
“This could never occur,” comes the cold voice of the Queen.
“Are you so certain? Vengiboneeza lies in ashes. The dead bodies of the insect-folk litter the plains already for hundreds of leagues. And we have only begun.”
“You are small-souled creatures. You would turn away in terror long before you r
eached us.”
“Are you absolutely certain of that?” asks Nialli Apuilana. “Could small-souled creatures have built our cities? Could small-souled creatures have fought You as we’ve fought You thus far? I tell You: we have only begun.”
There is a silence.
The Queen says at length, “I know you. You are of the Nest, girl. You were one of us, and then I sent you from the Nest, back to your own kind: but I meant to have you serve me there, not to oppose me. Why these threats? How can you utter such things? Queen-love is still within you.”
“Is it?”
“I know that it is. You are mine, child. You are of the Nest, and you can never do harm to it.”
Nialli Apuilana doesn’t reply. By way of answer she looks within herself, to that secret place in her soul where the Queen had placed a part of Herself long ago. And seizes it, and draws it out as though it were no more than a shallow splinter in her flesh, and hurls it from her. Down it tumbles through the many layers of the sky. And as it nears the surface of the world it bursts into flames and is consumed.
“Do You still think I am of the Nest?” Nialli Apuilana asks.
There’s another great silence.
Once again now Nialli Apuilana shows the Queen the vision of the final war: the Nest ripped open, its inhabitants consumed by flames, the royal chamber despoiled, the vast charred body, split apart and ruined, dead in the smoking depths.
“You know nothing of what it is to die,” says Nialli Apuilana. “You know nothing of pain. You know nothing of loss. You know nothing of defeat. But You’ll learn. You’ll perish in flame and agony; and the worst agony of all will be the knowledge that there is no way You can take revenge upon those who did this to You.”
The Queen doesn’t respond.
“It will happen,” Nialli Apuilana says. “We are a determined people. The gods have shaped us to be what we are.”
Silence.
“Well?” Nialli Apuilana says. “Is that Your answer? Is this what You’d have us do? Because I tell You that we will do it, if You won’t give us what we ask.”