Kundalimon looked to him, amazed.

“Yes! Yes!” the children cried. “Are you here to take us to the hjjks?”

“Would you like that?”

“No!” they yelled, so loudly that his ears rang. “Don’t take us! Please don’t!”

“I was taken. You see that no harm came to me.”

“But the hjjks are monsters! They’re horrible and dangerous! Awful giant bug-creatures, is what they are!”

He shook his head. “It isn’t so. You don’t understand, because you don’t know them. No one here does. They’re kind. They’re loving. If you only knew. If you only could feel Nest-bond, if you only could experience Queen-love.”

“He sounds crazy,” a small boy said. “What’s he saying?”

“Shhh!”

“Come,” Kundalimon said. “Sit down with me, here in the park. There’s so much I want you to know. Let me tell you, first, what things are like, in the Nest—”

There was nothing left of the City of Yissou that Thu-Kimnibol remembered from his youth. Just as the first crude wooden shacks of Harruel’s original Yissou had been swept away to be replaced by the early stone buildings of Salaman’s city, so too by now had every vestige of that second city disappeared. A still newer and more powerful one had been superimposed on it, obliterating the other, which was gone without a trace, palaces and courts and houses and all.

Salaman said, “It looks good to you, does it? It looks like a real city, eh?”

“It doesn’t look at all the way I expected it would.”

“Speak up, speak up!” Salaman said sharply. “I have trouble understanding a lot of what you’re saying.”

“A thousand pardons,” said Thu-Kimnibol, in a voice twice as loud. “Is this better?”

“You don’t have to shout. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing. It’s all those damnable Beng words you use. You speak with helmets in your mouth. How am I supposed to make sense out of that? I suppose if I lived with Bengs in my lap the way you people do—”

“We are all one People now,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

“Ah. Ah. Is that what you are? Well, try not to speak so much Beng, if you want me to know what you’re saying. We’re conservatives here. We still speak the pure speech, the language of Koshmar and Torlyri and Thaggoran. You remember Torlyri? You remember Thaggoran, do you? No, no, how could you? He was the chronicler before Hresh. The rat-wolves killed him, right after the Coming Forth, that time when we were crossing the plain. But you weren’t even born then. You don’t remember any of that. I should have realized. I’m turning into a forgetful old man. And very cantankerous, Thu-Kimnibol. Very cantankerous indeed.”

Salaman grinned disarmingly, as though trying to deny his own words. But it was plain to see he was telling the truth. Cantankerous was what he had become, testy and sharp.

Time had brought changes to Salaman as well as to his city. Thu-Kimnibol remembered a Salaman from the early days who had been supple and resilient of mind, a clever and cunning planner, intelligent, far-seeing, a natural leader, an innately likable person. But then the changes had begun in him, that new Salaman emerging, darker, more crabbed of soul, a difficult and suspicious man. And now, twenty years later, the process was far along. The king seemed chilly and morose, gripped by some bitter malaise, or stained from within, perhaps, by the absolute power he had taken for himself here. You could see it in his face, drawn in upon itself, cheeks sunken, temples hollow, and in the taut, guarded way he carried himself. His fur had entirely whitened with age. There was a harsh wintry look about him.

The city he had created was like that too. Here were no broad sunny avenues, no brightly tiled towers against the blue of the sky, no green and leafy gardens, such as Thu-Kimnibol saw every day in airy Dawinno. The City of Yissou, penned within its crater-rim and its titanic rampart of heavy black stone, was a cramped, dismal place of narrow streets and low, thick-walled stone buildings with mere slits for windows. It looked more like a fortress than a city.

Was this what my father had in mind, Thu-Kimnibol wondered, when we left Vengiboneeza to found a city of our own? This dark, huddled, nasty town?

In the aftermath of the victory over the hjjks, on that sorry day when King Harruel had died fighting the insect hordes, Salaman had said, flushed with his new kingship, “We will call the city Harruel, in honor of him who was king before me.” But later — by demand of the people, said Salaman, claiming that they preferred to honor the god who protected them rather than the man who had brought them to this place — he had restored the original name. Just as well, Thu-Kimnibol thought now. He wouldn’t have wanted his father’s name forever attached to so grim and cheerless a city as Salaman’s City of Yissou.

Yet Salaman had managed to welcome him, at any rate, in an open-spirited and even cheerful way. He betrayed hardly a trace of recollection of the angry words that had passed between them long ago. Coming down from his walltop pavilion as Thu-Kimnibol’s wagons passed through the great gate of the city, he had waited calmly with folded arms for Thu-Kimnibol to step forth, and then, his stern and rigid face softening unexpectedly into a smile, he strode forward, arms extended, hands reaching for Thu-Kimnibol’s.

“Cousin! After so many years! What is this, do you return at last to take up your old life here, which was so suddenly interrupted?”

“No, king, I come only as an ambassador,” Thu-Kimnibol replied evenly. “I have messages for you from Taniane, and other things to discuss with you. My place is in Dawinno, now.” But he met Salaman’s embrace with an embrace of his own, reaching down to encircle the king in his arms. There was some difficulty in it for him, but only because Salaman was so much shorter a man.

To Thu-Kimnibol’s surprise, his heart did not resist the act of clasping Salaman to him, nor was there any insincerity in it. So it must be true, then: whatever grievance he had had against Salaman, or had thought he had, had burned away with time. The slights Salaman had visited upon him, or had seemed to visit upon him, when he was a young man, no longer mattered.

“We have our finest hostelry ready for you,” said Salaman. “And after you’re settled, a feast, eh? And then we’ll talk. Not the official business, not so soon. Just a talk, between two who once were good friends. Eh, Thu-Kimnibol?”

Fair enough, and friendly enough, thought Thu-Kimnibol. He let them take him to his rooms. Esperasagiot went off to find stables for the xlendis, and Dumanka to see about housing for the ambassadorial entourage, and Simthala Honginda to meet with officials of the city and discuss the local rules of diplomatic courtesy.

It was only much later, in the huge dark stone-walled ceremonial hall of the palace, after the feasting and after too much wine, and after Thu-Kimnibol had presented the gifts he had brought with him for Salaman from Taniane, the fine white cloths and green-tinged porcelains, and the expensively bound volume of chronicles that Hresh had assembled, and also personal gifts of his own to the king, casks of wine from his own vineyards, pelts of rare animals from the far southlands, preserved fruits, and more — it was only then that tensions finally began to surface between Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman.

Perhaps it was the language problem, which had bothered him from the first, that caused him finally to flare up. Salaman, who spoke the pure Koshmar speech, seemed genuinely annoyed by the Beng words and intonations Thu-Kimnibol habitually used. Thu-Kimnibol hadn’t realized how much the language of the People had changed in Dawinno since the union with the Bengs, how filled with Beng it had become. Salaman had never liked Bengs, ever since the golden-furred helmet-wearers had declined his invitation to settle in Yissou after being crowded out of Vengiboneeza by the hjjks, and had gone off to Hresh’s new Dawinno instead. And apparently the grudge had never left him, if the mere sound of Beng phrases in Thu-Kimnibol’s speech could so offend him.