“Yes. Yes, that would be good.”

Twilight was coming on. Most likely Salaman and his army would show up by midday tomorrow, if the emanations were this strong. The reunion of the two forces, after weeks of separation, was likely to be tense. And the gods only knew what a wild man the king had become by now. This entire campaign seemed to have been a voyage into ever deeper madness for him.

The trouble had started, Thu-Kimnibol thought, while they were planning the Vengiboneeza campaign: Salaman’s burst of anger after being told he wasn’t going to be given any of the Great World weapons had been the beginning. There had been a coldness between them ever since. They both obeyed the fiction that Salaman was commander-in-chief and Thu-Kimnibol the field general, but there hadn’t been much cordiality or real cooperation between them as the fighting itself got under way.

Still, everything had gone well so far. Better even than they might have expected, in fact.

The battle of Vengiboneeza had been an overwhelming triumph. The hjjks had constructed a Nest above ground there, a weird ramshackle array of flimsy gray tubes that ran in a hundred directions, spanning the old city from the waterfront to the eastern foothills. Salaman came upon the city from the western side, setting up a great uproar of flame and explosions along the seawall, while Thu-Kimnibol’s forces had descended carefully along the slopes of the great golden-brown mountain wall to the north and east. The hjjks were taken by surprise, rushing down to the water to see what the matter was while Thu-Kimnibol got ready to attack from above.

Then it was the moment to bring the Great World weapons into play. Thu-Kimnibol had used the one he called the Loop to set up an impenetrable barrier along the foothills to keep the hjjks from assailing his position. Then with the Line of Fire he raked the city with flames until the red tongues rose above the highest rooftop and the pulpy walls of the Vengiboneeza Nest blackened and shriveled. With the Bubble Tube he had caused such turbulence in the air that the city’s age-old towers, those marvelous spires of scarlet and blue, of glittering purple, of brilliant gold, of midnight black, crumbled like brittle sticks. Now he called into service the most potent of his weapons, the Earth-Eater, to gobble huge craters in the fabric of the dying metropolis below him. The boulevards and avenues themselves slipped downward into chaos, whole districts collapsing and sinking from sight, and a great pall of dust and smoke rose to choke the sky as if the death-stars had come again.

The Long Winter itself hadn’t been able to destroy Vengiboneeza. But Thu-Kimnibol had done it in a single afternoon, with four small devices that an ignorant farmer had found in a muddy hillside.

They had stayed all night to watch the city burn. All its immense population must have burned with it, for Thu-Kimnibol’s troops saw not a single hjjk try to escape on the foothills side, and Salaman’s warriors along the seawall cut down every one of those that attempted to get away by water. The armies rejoined on the far side of Vengiboneeza and set out side by side into the true hjjk heartland. Which was where Salaman’s army had split off after the destruction of one of the smaller Nests behind Vengiboneeza. The king, made wild by the love of slaughter, had insisted on pursuing and killing a few hundred hjjks that had managed to get away. Thu-Kimnibol found little joy in the thought of seeing him again. Too bad Salaman hadn’t decided to take a separate route all the rest of the way.

Pulling Nialli Apuilana close against him, he drew his breath deep, filling his lungs with the fragrance of her. At least tonight they’d be at their ease together. If Salaman turned up tomorrow, as seemed more and more likely, he’d deal with that problem when it presented itself.

“It still surprises me,” he said softly, “when I awaken and see that it’s you beside me. Even after all this time, I look at you, and I tell myself in wonder, That’s Nialli there! How strange!”

“You still expect to find Naarinta, do you?” she said playfully.

“Gods! How merciless you can be! You know what I mean, Nialli. I’ll always cherish Naarinta’s memory, yes. But she’s long gone. What I’m trying to tell you is that it continues to amaze me that I should have found such love with you, you, my half-brother’s own child, that strange wild girl whom no one in Dawinno was able to tame—”

“And have you tamed me now, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“Hardly. But I no longer see you as anyone’s child. Or strange. Or wild.”

“Ah, and how do you see me, then?” she asked, smiling.

“Why, as the most—”

“Sir? Lord prince?” came a deep familiar voice from outside the tent.

Thu-Kimnibol muttered a curse. “Is that you, Dumanka? By all the gods, this had better be important, that you come interrupting me in my tent when—”

“Sir, it is! It is!”

“I’ll have him flayed if it isn’t,” he said to Nialli Apuilana under his breath. “I promise you that.”

“Go to him. Dumanka’s not one to bother you over nothing.”

“Yes. I suppose.” Thu-Kimnibol put down his wine and made his way to the tent entrance, a little creakily, for his muscles were still sore from the last battle. He peered out.

Dumanka looked as astonished as if he’d just seen the sun moving backward through the sky. Thu-Kimnibol had never seen him in such a state.

“Lord prince—”

“Gods, man! What is it?”

“Hresh, sir. Hresh the chronicler?”

“Yes, I know who Hresh is. What of him? Is there a message from him?”

Dumanka shook his head. Hoarsely he blurted, “Sir, he’s here.”

“Here?”

“Plor Killivash just brought him in. Found him, sir, wandering around in a xlendi-wagon out in the patrol area. We’ve got him in the medic tent. He seems to be all right, just a little woolly in the head. He’s been asking for you, and I thought—”

Thu-Kimnibol, stunned, waved him into silence. He turned to Nialli Apuilana. “Did you hear that?”

“No. Trouble?”

“You might call it that. Your father’s here, Nialli. My lunatic brother. Dumanka says he just came wandering in out of the open country. Mueri and Yissou and Dawinno, what’s he doing here? On the front line of the war, no less. Just what we need. Gods! Gods!”

Quietly Hresh said, “Come with me to the Queen, brother. Let me show you what She is like.”

It was an hour after his arrival. He had been bombarded with surprises: Thu-Kimnibol and Nialli Apuilana sharing a tent like mates, Vengiboneeza destroyed, the hjjks being pushed back on every front. But, spent and drained as he was by his journey, startled and dismayed as he was by these developments, he kept his mind and strength focused on his purpose.

“To the Queen?” Thu-Kimnibol said. He seemed bewildered. Then he flashed a brief flickering smile, a look of patronizing indulgence. “You and I. The Queen of Queens, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“To speak with Her. Not to kill Her, only to have a chat with Her.”

“Yes,” said Hresh.

“And how will we get there? In your little wagon?”

“I have this,” Hresh said, and brought forth in his hand the little pouch that contained the Barak Dayir.

A grunt of amazement. “You’ve taken the Wonderstone with you?”

“The Barak Dayir is mine, brother. As were the weapons with which you destroyed Vengiboneeza.”

Thu-Kimnibol made no attempt to parry that. “Let me understand you. You’re proposing that we visit the Nest, but not in our actual bodies, just by using the Wonderstone to send our souls there?”

“That’s right.”

“And why, brother, do you want me to put myself in my enemy’s power?”

“So you can begin to understand your enemy’s nature: not just Her greatness, which I think you underestimate, but also Her vulnerability, which I don’t think you see at all.”