Other than Hresh and Taniane, she saw no one. A note came from Husathirn Mueri, asking if she’d care to dine with him. She let it pass unanswered.

“You’re a smart one,” the young Beng priest who had the room just down the hall from her said one day, meeting her as she came out to get her tray of food. “Staying holed up in there all the time. If I could, I’d do the same thing. This filthy rain goes on and on.”

“Does it?” Nialli Apuilana asked, without interest.

“Like a scourge. Like a curse. Nakhaba’s curse, it is.”

“Is it?” she said.

“Whole city washing away. Better off staying indoors, is what I say. Oh, you’re a smart one!”

Nialli Apuilana nodded and smiled faintly, and took her tray, and retreated into her room. Afterward she made a point of looking out before going into the hall to make certain that no one was there.

Sometimes, after that, she went to the window and watched the rain. Most often she sat crosslegged in the center of the room, absentmindedly grooming herself hour after hour while letting her thoughts drift without direction.

Now and again she would take the hjjk star down from the wall, the amulet of plaited grass that she had carried back with her from the Nest years ago. Would hold it, would stare into the open place at its center, would let her mind drift. Sometimes she could see the pink glow of Nest-light coming from it, and dim figures moving about: Militaries, Egg-makers, Kindlers, Nest-thinkers. Once she thought she even had a glimpse of the Queen-chamber itself, of the great unmoving mysterious bulk within it.

But the visions were vague ones. Most of the time the star showed her nothing at all.

She had no clear idea of where to go next, or what to do, or even who she was. She felt lost between worlds, mysteriously suspended, helpless.

Kundalimon’s death had been the death of love for her, the death of the world. No one had understood her as he had; and she had never felt such an understanding of anyone else. It hadn’t been just the twining, and certainly not the coupling, that had bound them together. It was the sense of shared experience, of knowledge held in common. It was Nest-bond. They had touched the Queen; the Queen had touched them; the Queen then had stood as a bridge between their souls, making it possible for them to open themselves to one another.

It had only been a beginning, though. And then Kundalimon had been taken away. And everything had seemed to end.

What didn’t end was the rain. It fell on the city and on the bay, on the hills and on the lakes. In the farming district of Tangok Seip, on the eastern side of the Emakkis Valley where the inner range of coastal mountains began to rise, it fell with such force that it peeled the soil from the slopes in torrential mud-slides such as had never been seen since the founding of the city. Whole hillsides sheared away and flowed down into the bottomlands.

A Stadrain farmer named Quisinimoir Flendra, taking advantage of a lull in the latest storm to chase after a prize vimbor bull that had broken free from its compound, was crossing the rain-soaked breast of a hill when the earth gave way practically at his feet. He dropped down and dug his fingers into the sodden earth, sure that he’d be swept over the edge into this newly formed abyss and buried alive. There was a terrible sickening sound, a kind of sucking roar, a liquid thunder.

Quisinimoir Flendra held tight and prayed to every god whose name he could remember: his own first, the All-Merciful, and then Nakhaba the Interceder, and then Yissou, Dawinno, Emakkis. He was struggling to remember the names of the other two Koshmar gods when he realized that the hill had stopped collapsing.

He looked down. The earth had broken away in a crescent just in front of him, revealing a sheer face of brown earth laced with exposed roots.

Other things were showing too. A great tiled arch, for one; a row of thick columns, their bases hidden somewhere deep in the earth; a scattering of shards and fragments of ruined structures strewn over the newly exposed face of the shattered hillside like so much trash. And also there was the mouth of a stone-vaulted tunnel, leading into the hill. Quisinimoir Flendra, hanging head-down, was able to make out the beginnings of a cave. He peered in astonishment and awe into its mysterious depths.

Then the rain started up again. The hill might collapse a little further, and take him down with it. Hastily he scrambled down the back face of the hill and headed for his house.

He said nothing about what he had seen to anyone.

But it remained with him, even entering his dreams. He imagined that the Great World people still lived inside that hill: that slow solemn massive sapphire-eyes folk were moving about in there with reptilian grace, speaking to one another in mystic poetry, and with them were pale fragile long-limbed humans, and the little flowery vegetals, and the dome-headed mechanicals, and all the other amazing beings of that splendid era, living on and on in a kind of cocoon much like the cocoon that Quisinimoir Flendra’s own tribe had inhabited all during the Long Winter.

Why not? We had a cocoon. Why not them?

He wondered if he dared to investigate the place again, and decided that he didn’t. But then it struck him that there might be treasure in that cave, and that if he didn’t go in there to look for it someone else sooner or later would.

When there had been three straight days without rain he went back to the broken hillside, carrying a rope, a pick, and some clusters of glowberries. He let himself down very carefully over the edge of the cave-in and wriggled into the tunnel. Paused, listened, heard nothing, warily went deeper.

He was in a stone-vaulted room. Another one lay beyond. A rockfall blocked access beyond that. There was no sign of any life. The silence had a weight of thousands of years. Quisinimoir Flendra, prowling cautiously, saw nothing useful at first, only the usual bits and fragments that these ancient sites contained. But toward the back of the inner room he found a box of green metal, half buried in the detritus on the floor of the cave, that came apart like wet paper when he poked it.

There were machines inside: of what kind, he had not the slightest idea. There were eleven of them, little metal globes, each one larger than his fist, with little studs and projections on their surfaces. He picked one up and touched one of the studs. A beam of green light burst from an opening in the thing and with a little whooshing sound it cut a round hole the size of his chest in the wall of the cave just opposite him, so deep that he couldn’t see how far it went. Hastily he let the globe drop.

He heard pebbles falling in the new opening. The hillside creaked and groaned. It was the sound of rock masses shifting about somewhere far within.

All-Merciful save me! It’s all going to fall in on me!

But then everything was still again, except for the faint dry trickle of falling sand in the hole he had so inadvertently carved. Quisinimoir Flendra, scarcely daring to breathe, tiptoed to the mouth of the tunnel, pulled himself up quickly and frantically to the safety of the hilltop, and ran all the way back to his house.

He had heard about such machines. They were things of the Great World. You were supposed to report such finds to the House of Knowledge in the city. Well, so be it. The scholars of the House of Knowledge were welcome to anything they could find in that cave. He didn’t even want a reward. Let them have it all, he thought. Just so long as I don’t have to go near any of those things again — so long as they don’t ask me to go back in there myself to show them where everything is—

Suddenly, with a shudder, Nialli Apuilana imagines that her room is full of hjjks. She isn’t even holding the plaited star when they come. They simply burst into being all around her, congealing out of the air itself.