More surprising to Viyeki, though, was the figure on the other side of the throne—Jijibo the Dreamer, a descendant of the queen so rarely seen outside of the palace as to be almost a legend in the rest of Nakkiga. Utuk’ku and Akhenabi were motionless as they watched the crowd assembling, but scrawny Jijibo was in perpetual, twitching motion, his fingers convulsively flexing and his wide mouth working as he muttered unendingly to himself.

Viyeki knew from experience that the Dreamer’s words seemed to leap from his thoughts to his tongue without even the faintest consideration for propriety or courtesy or even ordinary sense. Most of Nakkiga’s nobles considered Jijibo helplessly mad—a rare but not unknown affliction among the People—because he wore mismatched garments and talked to himself aloud, though often incomprehensibly. But the Dreamer had a talent for devices and plans that pleased his ancestor the queen, so he was suffered to go where he wished and to do largely as he pleased. Viyeki’s Order of Builders, in particular, often had to deal with his sudden demands for this or that space or materials they had planned to use themselves, but as a relative and favorite of the Mother of All, Jijibo was outshone perhaps only by mighty Lord Akhenabi himself, so Viyeki’s order seldom had any recourse but to let the Dreamer have his way.

Because his vision had been blocked by so many others, it was not until Viyeki reached a position in the crowd directly facing the queen’s throne that he saw a group of figures already kneeling at the queen’s feet as though to receive honors from their monarch—but their slumped postures and bound wrists told Viyeki more than he wanted to know about the nature of the reward they expected.

As the last of the Nakkiga nobles crowded into place behind Viyeki, the Lightless Ones began to sing in the unknown deeps below the Chamber of the Well, soft, strange cries as alien as bitterns booming in a marsh but also as complex as speech. Some said the Lightless Ones had lived in the depths even before the Hikeda’ya came to the mountain, some that their ancestors had traveled from the distant Garden on the Eight Ships with Queen Utuk’ku and the Keida’ya, but in truth nobody could say for certain whether they were many creatures or one thing with many voices. If the queen knew the Lightless’ full tale, she never spoke of it.

As they all waited in near-silence, Viyeki could feel fear and tension growing in his fellow nobles, as though they were a single flock of birds that might suddenly startle and take wing. Clearly most of them were as confused as he was, frightened by the unexpected summons, by the Hamakha guards who had led them here and the squadron’s worth of battle-armored Queen’s Teeth guards who stood behind Utuk’ku’s throne.

If we are not all to be executed, Viyeki thought, then there must be grave news indeed if the queen brings us all to the Well to hear it. Are we under attack? Have the mortals come again to besiege us?

Akhenabi spread his arms, his long sleeves hanging like the wings of a bat. “Silence for the Queen,” he said. “Hear the Mother of All.”

No one had been speaking above a whisper, but at the Lord of Song’s words the room grew silent in an instant. Utuk’ku leaned forward, her eyes glittering in the slots of her mask.

I need you, my children.

Her words were not spoken aloud, but flew straight into the minds of all those present like a sudden thunderclap, a crash of overwhelming fury that for a long moment turned Viyeki’s own thoughts into shards, splinters, powder.

I am weak, the queen told them, although the force of her thoughts brought tears of pain to Viyeki’s eyes. My strength has been spent in the defense of our race. The sacred sleep from which I just awakened will be my last—there is no further help for me there.

Many of the nobles around Viyeki began to moan, whether in pain like his at the force of the queen’s words, or in fear at what they signified, but Utuk’ku did not pause. Only with the aid of all your hearts and hands can I survive the present danger, she told them—can we all survive.

Several of the gathered nobles, overwhelmed by the force and terror of this message, now dropped to all fours and pressed their faces against the cavern floor like sacrificial beasts awaiting slaughter. Jijibo the Dreamer laughed and did a gleeful little loose-jointed dance beside the queen’s black stone chair, as though he had never seen finer entertainment.

Akhenabi raised his arms and spread his gloved hands and the observers quieted. “Our beloved queen has fought so long and hard for us,” the Lord of Song declared, “both here and in the lands beyond life, that she is weary—terribly weary. So she asks me to speak for her.” He raised one arm higher and curled his fingers into a fist. “Heed your queen! We are in peril! But before we can protect ourselves from the new dangers that threaten, we must put our house in order. There are those among us who took advantage of the queen’s keta-yi’indra—traitors who tried to use her long sleep for their own advantage.” He paused, and his masked face looked out blankly over the crowd of nobles and soldiers. “Libertines. Thieves. Traitors. And now they will face justice.”

A pair of tall Queen’s Teeth stepped forward and grabbed the first kneeling figure, dragged him to his feet, and then turned him around to face the crowd of nobles. His features, though battered and bruised, were all too familiar. It was Yemon, Viyeki’s secretary.

The magister’s terror returned like a blast of icy wind. Every sense, every nerve, urged him to flee, but his limbs would not respond; he could only stand and wait and watch. So it is to be death for me after all, he thought. Akhenabi has found someone to inform against me. Farewell, my family. I hope the disgrace is not too great to be endured. Farewell, Nezeru, my daughter and heir. But in that moment, instead of his lawful wife, it was the face of his mortal lover Tzoja that came to him. He hoped she and their daughter would not be punished for his mistakes.

One by one the other prisoners kneeling before the queen were dragged to their feet, named, and then forced around to face the watching crowd. To Viyeki’s increasing confusion, almost none of them held any higher rank than Yemon—a few clerics, another magister’s secretary, a Sacrifice commander who had only recently been named a general. The most important of them was Nijika, a Host Singer Viyeki remembered from the days of the Northmen’s siege of the mountain. Like Yemon, she had new wounds on her face and head, and had obviously suffered since being seized, but she stood expressionlessly in the grip of the Queen’s Teeth while the watchers murmured and stared and the Lightless Ones throbbed in the deep. After she had been named and displayed to the watching crowd, Nijika and all the other prisoners were forced back onto their knees again at the foot of the queen’s great stone chair.

“In these terrible times, we face dangers both from within and without,” Akhenabi warned. “While the People’s beloved Mother slept, these wretched creatures you see before you conspired to flout her will. They instigated laws and directives that went against our oldest traditions, weakening their own people and making a mockery of the very memory of our Garden.”

Viyeki was stunned by the Lord of Song’s words. Surely no one gathered here could believe that this small coterie of minor officials had instigated the idea of giving half-mortal bastards the right to join important Hikeda’ya orders like Sacrifice and Song. It had taken the combined power of Marshal Muyare and Viyeki’s master Yaarike, as well as Akhenabi himself and several more of the most powerful nobles, to create such sweeping changes. Had the great Singer somehow managed to convince the queen of such an obvious untruth? Or was something else going on?