“So you’re here too, father?”

A tall gaunt figure, flimsy as a water-strider: who can it be but Noum om Beng? He nods to Thaggoran, who offers him a salute as one would to an old comrade, even though in life they had never met. They whisper together, shaking their heads and smiling knowingly, as if discussing their wayward pupil Hresh and saying to each other, “What will we do with him? The boy is so promising, and yet he can be so dense!”

Hresh smiles. To these two he would always be an unruly boy, though by now he is as old and grizzled as they, and the last tinge of color will soon be gone from his own whitening fur.

“Why do you call us?” asks Noum om Beng.

“The hjjks have taken my daughter once again,” he tells the two half-visible spectral figures who stand side by side in the shadows at the far side of the room. “The first time, they simply seized her and carried her off. She was able to escape from them, then. But now I fear something far worse. It’s her spirit they’ve captured.”

They are silent. But he feels their benign presence, sustaining him, nourishing him.

“Oh, Thaggoran, oh, father, how frightened I am, how sad and weary—”

“Nonsense!” Noum om Beng snaps.

“Nonsense, yes. You have ways, boy,” comes Thaggoran’s hoarse wispy voice. “You know that you do! The shinestones, Hresh. Now is the time at last to make use of them.”

“The shinestones? But—”

“And then the Barak Dayir,” comes the thin whisper of Noum om Beng. “Try that, too.”

“But first the shinestones. The shinestones, first.”

“Yes,” Hresh says. “The shinestones.”

He crosses the room. With quivering hands he draws the little talismans from their place of safekeeping. The shinestones are still mysteries to him after all these years. Thaggoran had died before he had any chance to tell Hresh how they were used.

Tools of divination is what they are, that much he knows: natural crystals, found deep in the Earth beneath the cocoon. They can be used in some way to focus one’s second sight and provide glimpses of things that could not be seen by ordinary methods.

Carefully he lays them out in the five-sided pattern he remembers from a day long ago when he had spied on Thaggoran in the cocoon. It seems to him that Thaggoran stands by his elbow, guiding him.

The shinestones are shining black things, bright as mirrors, which burn with some cool inner light. This one, Hresh knew, is named Vingir, and this is Nilmir, and these are Dralmir, Hrongnir, Thungvir. He stares a long while at the stones. He touches them, one by one. He feels the force that lies within them. Then, with reverence, he opens himself to them.

Tell me tell me tell me tell me—

There comes a warmth. A tingling. Hresh brings his second sight into play, and feels the stones interacting with it somehow.

“Go on,” Thaggoran says hoarsely, from the shadows.

Tell me tell me tell me—

The stones grow warmer. They throb under his hands. In fear and anguish he frames the question whose answer he is half afraid to learn.

My daughter — is she still alive?

And he conjures up the image of Nialli Apuilana with his mind.

A moment passes. The image of Nialli begins to blaze with celestial radiance. A fiery corona of white light surrounds it. Nialli Apuilana’s eyes are bright and keen. She is smiling; her hand is extended lovingly toward him. Hresh feels the vitality of her, the deep surging energy of her.

She’s alive, then?

The image comes toward him, glowing, arms outstretched.

Yes. Yes, it must be so.

Her presence is almost overpoweringly real. Hresh feels as though she were actually in the room with him, only an arm’s length away. Surely that’s proof that she lives, he thinks. Surely. Surely.

He stares in wonder and gratitude at the shinestones.

But where is she, then?

The shinestones can’t tell him that. Their warmth diminishes, the tingling ceases. The light within them seems to be flickering. The image of Nialli he has conjured up is beginning to fade. He looks toward Thaggoran, toward Noum om Beng. But he can barely find the two old ghosts. They look faint, filmy, insubstantial, in the darkness across the room.

Fiercely Hresh puts his hands to Vingir and Hrongnir. He touches Dralmir, the largest shinestone, pressing down hard. He brings the tips of his fingers to bear on Thungvir and Nilmir, and begs the stones to give him an answer. But he gets nothing from them. They have told him all they mean to tell him this day.

But Nialli is alive. He’s certain of that much.

“She’s gone to the hjjks, hasn’t she?” Hresh asks. “Why? Tell me why.”

“The answer is in your hands,” Thaggoran says.

“I don’t understand. How—”

“The Barak Dayir, boy,” says Noum om Beng. “Use the Barak Dayir!”

Hresh nods. He sweeps the shinestones into their case and takes from its pouch the other and greater talisman, the one that the tribe calls the Wonderstone, a thing older even than the Great World, which is feared by all, and which only he knows how to use.

He has come to fear it too, in these latter years. When he was a boy he thought nothing of using it to soar to the farthest realms of perception; but no longer, no longer. The Barak Dayir is too powerful now for him. Whenever he touches his sensing-organ to it now, he can feel it pulling the waning strength from him; and the visions that it gives him carry so great a freight of meaning that often they leave him dazed and stunned. In recent years he has used it only rarely.

He places the stone before him, and looks down into its mysterious depths.

“Go on,” Thaggoran says.

“Yes. Yes.”

Hresh raises his sensing-organ, coils it around the Wonderstone without actually touching it; and then, in a swift convulsive gesture, he seizes the talisman in the innermost coil and presses the tip of his sensing-organ to it.

There is a sharp sensation of dislocation and shock, as though he is plunging down an infinite shaft. But with it comes the familiar celestial music that he associates with the device, descending about him like a falling veil, enfolding him, sustaining him. He knows there is nothing to fear. He enters that music, as he has done so often before, and allows himself to be dissolved by it and swept aloft by it, and carried upward into a world of light and color and transcendental forms where all things are possible, where the entire cosmos is within his grasp.

Northward he soars, traversing the great breast of the planet, flying high over dark land scaled and crusted with the myriad deposits of the Earth’s long history, the rubble and debris left behind by the world that had been before the world.

The City of Dawinno is below him, white and grand and lovely, nestling in its lush hills beside its sheltered bay. To the west he sees the immense ominous black shield of the sea lying with monstrous weight across half the Earth, concealing deep mysteries beyond his comprehension. He goes higher and higher yet, and onward, northward, over the zone where the city gives way to scattered outer settlements, and then to farms and forest.

As he climbs he seeks the hot bright spark that is the soul of Nialli Apuilana. But he feels no trace of her.

He is well to the north, now, looking down on tiny farming villages, bright specks of white and green against the brown of newly tilled fields, and beyond them into the land that hasn’t yet been resettled in the New Springtime, where the wild beasts of the Long Winter still roam free in the forests and the parched and eroded relics of abandoned Great World cities lie shriveling like shards of bone on the dry windy uninhabited plateaus. From them, dead as they are, the formidable resonant presence of the Six Peoples whose domain all this once had been still radiates.

No Nialli. He is mystified. Had they come for her in a magic chariot, and carried her in the twinkling of an eye across the thousands of leagues to the Nest?