“You will follow.”

“I’d like to go to my sleeping-place. I think it’s that way.”

“You will follow,” said Nest-thinker again.

In the Nest disobedience was simply not an option: if he persisted in going to his chamber, Hresh knew, Nest-thinker wouldn’t be angered so much as mystified, but in any case Hresh would end up going where Nest-thinker wanted him to go. He followed. The path ramped gently upward. After a time he saw what seemed surely to be the glow of daylight ahead. They were approaching one of the surface mouths of the Nest. Five or six Militaries were waiting there. Nest-thinker delivered Hresh to them and turned away without a word.

To the Militaries Hresh said, “I’d be grateful if you’d take me to my sleeping-place, now. This isn’t where I wanted Nest-thinker to bring me.”

The hjjks stared blandly at him as if he hadn’t said a thing.

“Come,” one said, pointing toward the daylight.

His wagon was waiting out there, and his xlendi, looking rested and well fed. The implication was clear enough. He had seen the Queen, and the Queen had seen him, and so the Queen’s needs had been served. Which was all that mattered here. His time in the Nest was over; now he was to be expelled.

A quiver of shock and dismay ran through him. He didn’t want to leave. He had been living easily and happily here according to the rhythm of the Nest, strange as it was. It had become his home. He had supposed that he would end his days in the warmth and the silence and the sweetness of this place, dwelling here until at last the Destroyer came to take him to his final rest, which very likely would be soon. The outside world held nothing more for him. He wanted only to be allowed to penetrate ever more deeply into the way of the hjjks in whatever time might remain to him.

“Please,” Hresh said. “I want to stay.”

He could just as well have been speaking to creatures of stone. They leaned on their spears and stared at him, motionless, impassive. They hardly even seemed alive, but for the rippling of the orange breathing-tubes that dangled from the sides of their heads as air passed through the tubes’ segmented coils.

The xlendi made a soft whickering sound. It had had its orders; it was impatient to set forth.

“Don’t you understand?” Hresh told the hjjks. “I don’t want to leave.”

Silence.

“I ask for sanctuary among you.”

Silence, icy, impenetrable.

“In the name of the Queen, I beg you—”

That, at least, brought a response. The two hjjks nearest him drew themselves up tall, and a brightness that might have been anger passed swiftly across the many facets of their huge eyes. They brought their spears up and held them out horizontally, as though they meant to push Hresh forward with them.

A silent voice said, “It is the Queen’s wish that you continue your pilgrimage now. In the name of the Queen, then, go. Go. ”

He understood that there was no hope of further appeal. They stared at him inexorably. The horizontal spears formed an impenetrable gate, cutting him off from the Nest.

“Yes,” he said sadly. “Very well.”

He clambered into the wagon. Immediately the xlendi set out almost at a canter across the barren gray plain. He was startled by that. The beast had been so unhurried during the journey up here from Dawinno. But Hresh suspected that the xlendi was being guided, and even propelled, by some force within the Nest, and he thought that he knew what that force was. He sat passively, letting the wagon run; and when the xlendi halted for water and forage, he sipped a little water himself and ate a little of the dried meat that the hjjks had put into his wagon, and waited for the ride to resume. And so it went, day after day, a long quiet time, almost like a dreamless sleep, first through a zone of strange flat-topped sand-colored pyramidal hills, and then into a region of eerie erosion where the fiery crimson rocks had been cut into fantastic arches and colonnades, and after that through a landscape of rough sedge and occasional stubby trees and scattered herds of some dark-striped grazing animal Hresh had never seen before, which did not even look up as his wagon went by.

Until at midday one day, while he was crossing what might not long ago have been a lake-bed, but was at this season a place of dry and cracked expanses of mud covered by a light scattering of sandy dust, he saw a figure on a vermilion just ahead, someone of the People, an unexpected sight indeed in this unknown place.

The xlendi halted and waited as the huge red creature came shambling up. The man riding it gasped.

“Gods! Can it really be you, sir? Or am I dreaming this? It must be a dream. It must.”

Hresh smiled. Tried to speak. He hadn’t used his voice in so long that it was harsh and ragged, a mere rasping croak. But he managed to say, “I know you, I think.”

The rider vaulted down from the vermilion and ran toward him. Peering over the wagon’s side, he stared at Hresh, shaking his head in wonder.

“Plor Killivash, sir. From the House of Knowledge! You don’t recognize me? I was one of your assistants, don’t you remember? Plor Killivash?”

“Is this Dawinno, then?”

“Dawinno? Sir, no! We’re way up in hjjk territory. I’m with the army, your brother Thu-Kimnibol’s army! We’ve been fighting for weeks. We’ve fought at Vengiboneeza, we’ve fought at a couple of the small Nests—” Plor Killivash’s eyes grew wider and wider. “Sir, how did you get here? You couldn’t possibly have come all this way alone, could you? And why are you here? You shouldn’t be at the battlefront, you know. Sir, can you hear me? Are you all right, sir? Sir?”

Thu-Kimnibol was in his tent. The army was camped on the edge of the prairie that they called the Plains of Minbain. He had given names to all the features of this unfamiliar land: the Mountains of Harruel, Lake Taniane, the Torlyri River, Boldirinthe Valley, Koshmar Pass. For all he knew, Salaman was bestowing names of his own on the same places as he advanced through them. Thu-Kimnibol didn’t care about that. To him the great jagged mountains they had gone past three weeks before were his father’s mountains, and this lovely serene tableland was his mother’s plain, and let Salaman call them what he would.

To Nialli Apuilana he said, “There it is again. I can feel the king approaching. Marching at the head of his troops, coming this way.”

“Yes. So do I. Or something dark and fierce, at any rate.”

“Salaman. No question of it.”

She put her hand to his thick forearm, where just a few days before he had taken a light wound from a hjjk spear. “You speak his name as though he’s the enemy, not the hjjks. Are you afraid of him, love?”

Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “Afraid of Salaman? I don’t often think in terms of who it is that I fear. But only a fool wouldn’t fear Salaman, Nialli. He’s become some kind of monster. I told you once that I thought he was mad. But he’s gone beyond madness now. Or so I think.”

“A monster,” Nialli Apuilana repeated. “But in war all warriors have to be monsters. Isn’t that so?”

“Not like that. I watched him when our two armies were last together. He was fighting as if he wanted not just to kill every hjjk he saw, but to roast it and eat it also. There was fire in his eyes. Long ago I saw my father Harruel fight, and he was a troubled man, with great hot angry forces churning within him; but at his fiercest he seemed calm and gentle when I compare him with Salaman as he looked that day.” Thu-Kimnibol’s sensing-organ quivered. “I felt him again just now. Closer and closer. Well, perhaps it’s best that the armies join again. I never meant for us to advance separately into the country of the hjjks.”

“Will you have some wine?” Nialli Apuilana asked.