His words were blades. Taniane pressed her hand to her heart. He was right that this should never have been poured out in front of all these others. It was family business, scandalous, mortifying. But too late now.

“They told you this?” Taniane said leadenly.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“The day before the games. They came to me to ask my blessing.”

Taniane said, incredulous, “You knew they were going to leave, and you kept it to yourself?”

His expression darkened. In a thin voice he said, “As I told you before, we’d have done better discussing this in private. But you insisted, remember. I kept what Nialli had told me to myself, Taniane, because I knew you’d have tried to stop her from going.”

“Which you had no objection to?”

“What was I to do? Order them thrown into prison? Even that wouldn’t have accomplished anything. You know the girl. Nothing stops her. She’s like a force of nature. She told me her plans out of love, so that I’d understand it when she disappeared. She knew I wouldn’t take any steps to prevent her.”

Taniane shook her head in disbelief. At Hresh’s stupidity, at Nialli Apuilana’s willfulness. And at her own idiocy in pushing her into Kundalimon’s arms. No, not idiocy. It had been for the good of the city. There were things she had needed to learn, and only Nialli Apuilana could have discovered them for her. She would do it all again.

“So you think that’s where she’s gone? To the Nest?”

“To the Nest, yes. The Nest of Nests.”

“Even though Kundalimon is dead?”

“ BecauseKundalimon is dead,” Hresh said. “She sees the Nest as a place of love and wisdom. When she heard he was dead, she went running to the hjjks to take refuge.”

The room was terribly silent.

Taniane trembled with rage and disbelief. “But it would take months, or years, even, to get to them. Who knows how far it is to the great Nest? How could Nialli even think of trying to do it alone?” For a moment she felt herself teetering on the brink. It was too much. Hresh’s perfidy, Nialli Apuilana’s madness. And now a room full of wide-eyed faces and gaping mouths, everyone too amazed to speak. Pitying her. Perhaps feeling contempt for her, even. Pretends to rule the city, can’t even control her own daughter. No. No. She wasn’t going to let this overwhelm her. Fiercely she said, “You’re talking foolishness, Hresh. The girl may have been crazed with love, and maybe even some sort of hjjk insanity that the boy poured into her. But she wouldn’t ever have been crazy enough to go off on a trip like that by herself. Not Nialli. No, Hresh. I still think she’s in the city somewhere. Hiding, like a wounded animal. Until she gets over her grief.”

“Dawinno grant that you’re right,” Hresh said.

“You don’t think I am?”

“I saw her with Kundalimon the day before she vanished. I talked with her. I know how she felt about him. And about the hjjks.”

Angrily Taniane said, “Then you look for her your way, and I’ll look for her mine. You’re the one with the powers. If you think she’s heading for the hjjks, send your wonderful mind after her, and track her down, and talk her into coming home, if you can. Meanwhile I’ll keep my guardsmen out searching for her.” She looked toward Husathirn Mueri, who was in charge of the murder investigations, and to Chevkija Aim, the young Beng who was the acting captain of the guards. “I want reports every four hours, day and night. Understood? The girl’s someplace nearby. She has to be. Find her. This has gone on long enough.”

Husathirn Mueri, slick and smooth as ever, smiled as though she had asked for nothing more than an extra copy of some routine report. In his most resonant way he declared, “Lady, I’m confident we’ll have her back by nightfall. Or by tomorrow at the latest. I feel sure of it. By all the gods, I’m sure of it!”

And moved his head in a slow half-circle, looking around the room at each of the others in turn, as if defying them to contradict him. With a flourish he requested permission to withdraw and get about his task.

Taniane nodded. It was time to get away from this room herself. Her shoulders quivered. She realized suddenly that she was at the end of her endurance, on the verge of tumbling down in a sobbing heap. That was new, this weakness. She battled to control herself. She couldn’t let herself break down in front of these people, whose conflicting ambitions she had held in check so long by strength, by guile, and, when necessary, by sheer force of will. Force of will was what she needed now. But she felt so weak — so drained of the power that had always been hers—

There was someone beside her, then. She heard heavy wheezing breaths. She felt soft arms, warm comforting flesh.

Boldirinthe. The enormous bulk of the offering-woman enfolded her in a steadying embrace.

“Come with me,” Boldirinthe said gently. “You need to rest now. Come. We’ll pray together. The gods will watch over Nialli Apuilana. Come with me, Taniane.”

I could pray to Dawinno, Hresh tells himself. But he doubts it would do any good. It was Dawinno, after all, who had taken Nialli Apuilana away — not Dawinno the Destroyer, but Dawinno the Transformer, the god in his higher manifestation. Dawinno seems to want her to live with the hjjks. That was why the god had allowed her to be taken the first time, so that they could fill her mind with love for them. And now he has sent her to them again. If that is what Dawinno wants — Blessed be Dawinno! Who can know his ways? — then no amount of prayer is going to bring her back. The girl has been swept from him by the hand of the Transformer, who has uses of his own for her that go beyond mere mortal understanding.

After a time Hresh’s hand reaches for the little amulet that dangles against his breastbone, the one that he took from the body of old Thaggoran when the rat-wolves killed him in the frosty plains, long ago, just a few days after the tribe had left the cocoon. It is an oval bit of what might have been polished green glass, obviously ancient, with inscriptions in its center so faint and fine that no one can make them out. Thaggoran had said it was a Great World thing. Hresh has worn it almost constantly ever since Thaggoran’s death.

He touches it now, fondling its smooth worn surface. It has no real power that he had ever been able to discover. But it was a thing of Thaggoran’s; and in those first days when Hresh became chronicler he had touched the amulet often, hoping desperately that Thaggoran’s wisdom would descend from it to him. And perhaps it has.

“Thaggoran?” he says, looking into the dimness of the darkened room atop the House of Knowledge. “Can you hear me now, wherever you are? It’s me, Hresh.”

There is silence, a silence so profound that it roars. It deepens into a stillness deeper even than any silence could be: not only the absence of any sound, but the absence even of the possibility of it. And then a murmur as of a gentle wind comes drifting in. There is a lightness in the air, a barely perceptible glow.

Hresh feels a presence entering the chamber. It seems to him that he can see gaunt grizzled bent-backed old Thaggoran before him, eyes red-rimmed and rheumy with age, his fur pure white.

“You,” Hresh says. “You, here, old man?”

“Yes. Of course. What is it, child?”

“Help me,” Hresh says softly. “Just this one last time.”

“Why, child, I thought you always insisted only on doing things by yourself!”

“Not now. Not any longer. Help me, Thaggoran.”

“If that is what you need, yes. But wait a moment. Look there, boy. There, by the door.”

There is that all-consuming roaring silence again, and then the even deeper stillness once more, and another gradual ghostly stirring in the darkness beyond the door; and then the sound of soft wind once more. A second figure has come in, just as grizzled, just as frail with age, or even more so: Hresh’s other great mentor, it is, the wise man of the Helmet People, Noum om Beng, who in the Vengiboneeza days had ordered him to call him “father,” and had taught him deep wisdom by means of oblique questions and sudden unexpected slaps in the face.