He offered her a blessing of Nakhaba, and went out.

She sat quietly, her hands resting on the masks.

No doubt there was truth to the story he had brought to her. The Kundalimon creed ran wild in the city these days: why shouldn’t its leaders attempt to force an end to the war? There was no one to oppose them here. Thu-Kimnibol and the rest of his faction were off at the battlefront, Hresh had disappeared, the younger men of the city seemed all to have entered the chapels. She herself no longer even pretended to exercise authority. It seemed to her that the world had passed her by, that events had gone on far beyond her understanding. Truly it was time for her to step aside, she thought. Just as the rock-throwers had told her even before the war. But in favor of whom? Give the city over to the Kundalimon priests? She wished Thu-Kimnibol would return. But he was off killing hjjks, or perhaps being killed by them himself. And Nialli Apuilana was with him.

Taniane shook her head. She was tired of living in this chaos. She was eager for rest.

And this other thing, this strange numbness that had entered her breast today — what was that? As though she were being hollowed out from within. Some illness, was it? She remembered how in Vengiboneeza Koshmar had begun suddenly to seem easily tired, had admitted to Hresh that there was a burning in her chest, pain, fever; and soon afterward she was dead. Now her own hour might be coming around, Taniane thought. She wondered if she should go to Boldirinthe for a healing; and then she remembered that Boldirinthe was dead. One by one they were all dying. Koshmar, Torlyri, Boldirinthe—

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 a 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.”