But a shouter? A ranter? A babbler of slogans? No. This man was cool and tough, with an air of icy reserve that Salaman immediately recognized as much like his own. He could surely have been a king, this one, if things gone a little differently in the early years of the city. Instead he had become a butcher, a meat-cutter, who spent his days not in a stone palace but in a slaughterhouse, chopping joints and loins and flanks while blood ran in rivers around him. And in the evenings he and his followers met in a drafty gymnasium in the eastern quarter, and drilled one another in the strange tenets of their creed.

He stood calmly before the king, square-shouldered, unintimidated.

“How long is it since you people first started this?” Salaman asked.

“Years.”

“Three years? Five?”

“Almost since the founding of the city.”

“No,” Salaman said. “That’s impossible, that you could have been in existence that long a time without my even hearing about you.”

Zechtior Lukin shrugged. “There were very few of us, and we kept to ourselves. We studied our texts and held our meetings and practiced our disciplines, and we didn’t go out looking for recruits. It was our private thing. My father Lakkamai was the first of us, and then—”

“Lakkamai?” Another surprise. In the cocoon and in Vengiboneeza Lakkamai had been a silent man, who kept to himself and seemed to have no depths to his soul. He had been the lover of the offering-woman Torlyri in Vengiboneeza, but when the Breaking Apart had happened Lakkamai had abandoned Torlyri without a qualm, to go off with Harruel as one of the founders of the tiny settlement that would become the City of Yissou. He had died long ago. Salaman couldn’t remember his ever having taken a mate, let alone siring a son.

“You knew him,” Zechtior Lukin said.

“Many years back, yes.”

“Lakkamai taught us that what happened to the Great World was by design of the gods. He said that everything that happens is part of their plan, whether it seems good or ill to us, and that when the Great World people chose to die, it was because they understood the will of the gods and knew that it was their time to go from the world. So they lifted no hand to avert the death-stars, and allowed them to strike the world, and the great cold descended on them. He learned these things, he said, while speaking with Hresh, the chronicler of the Koshmar people.”

“Yes,” said Salaman. “You talk with Hresh, your mind becomes filled with all sorts of fancies and strangenesses.”

“These are truths,” said Zechtior Lukin.

Salaman let the blunt contradiction pass. There was no point in arguing with the man. “So there were originally only a few of you. A couple of families only, is that it? But now my son says that there are a hundred ninety of you.”

“Three hundred seventy-six,” Zechtior Lukin said.

“I see.” One more black mark for Athimin. “So now you’ve decided to go out looking for new recruits after all, is that it? Why?”

“In dreams I saw the hjjk Queen hovering in the air over the city. I felt the tremendous presence of Her like a great weight above us. This was last year. And I saw that the day of reckoning is coming. The hjjks, as everyone knows, were exempted from the destruction of the Great World. The Five Heavenly Ones had some other purpose in mind for them, and brought them safely through the time of cold and snow so that they could perform that purpose in the New Springtime.”

“And you know what that purpose is, of course.”

“They are meant to destroy the People and their cities,” said Zechtior Lukin calmly. “They are the scourge of the gods.”

So he’s crazy after all, Salaman thought. What a pity that is.

But with calmness that matched the Acknowledger’s he said, “And how would that serve the purposes of the Five? They brought us safely through the Long Winter to be the inheritors of the world — so say all our chronicles. Why did the gods bother to preserve us, if all they had in mind was to let the hjjks destroy us now? It would have been simpler just to leave us out in the cold and let the Long Winter finish us off hundreds of thousands of years back.”

“You don’t understand. We were tested, and we have failed the test. As you say, we were spared from the cold so that we might inherit the world. But we have taken the wrong turn. We build cities; we live in ever more comfortable houses; we grow soft and lazy. It’s worse in Dawinno than it is here, but everywhere the People fall away from the intent of the Five. What was our aim, after all, in building these cities? Only to duplicate the ease and comfort of the Great World, so it would appear. But such a duplication is wrong. If the gods wanted the world to be as it was when the sapphire-eyes lived, they would merely have left the Great World as it was. Instead they destroyed it. As they will destroy us. I tell you, king, the hjjks will be the instruments of our correction. They will fall upon us; they will shatter our cities; they will force us out into the wild lands, where we will finally accept the disciplines that the gods intended for us to learn. Those few of us who survive the onslaught will make another attempt at building a world. This is Dawinno’s will: he who transforms.”

“And if you all die of freezing, dancing in the plazas at night, is that going to create this wonderful new world for you?”

“We do not freeze. We will not die.”

“I see. You’re invulnerable.”

“We are very strong. You saw us, that night, at our festivals. You haven’t seen us at our training. Our spiritual exercises, our physical drills. We are warriors. We have developed immense endurance. We can march for days without sleep or food. We are unafraid of cold or privation. We have given up our individual selves, to form a new unity.”

All this was astonishing to Salaman. The philosophies of Lakkamai’s son were gibberish and lunacy; but all the same the king felt a great kinship of temperament with this man, and much affection for him. His strength, his ferocity, were evident. Secretly he had built an entire little kingdom within the kingdom. He had the true force of royalty about him. They could almost have been brothers. And yet he was crazy. It seemed an immense pity.

He said, “You must let me see you at your training.”

“This very night, if you wish, King Salaman.”

“Done. Perform your most difficult exercises for me. And then, my friend, you and your friends will need to start packing. You’ll be leaving here.”

Zechtior Lukin seemed unsurprised by that, and even indifferent, as he appeared to be toward everything that came his way.

“Where would you have us go?” he asked calmly.

“Northward. Obviously you’re unhappy here in Yissou, living amidst our contemptible softness. And I tell you truly that I have no great eagerness to have you spread your creed of inevitable destruction in the city that I love. So it’s in your interest and mine also for you to leave, wouldn’t you say? You wouldn’t want to go south, of course. Life’s too easy there. Besides, as our city expands into the lands to the south and Dawinno grows northward, we’re bound to trespass on your privacy. So go north, Zechtior Lukin. Cold doesn’t bother you, you say. Hunger is unimportant to you. And there’s plenty of land to the north where you can found a settlement that lives according to your principles and precepts. It could well be the capital of the great and pure and proper world that we of the cities have failed to create.”

“You mean, we should go into the hjjk lands?”

“I mean that, yes. Beyond Vengiboneeza, even. Deep into the cold dry northlands. Choose the territory to please yourselves. It may be that the hjjks will leave you unmolested. From what you say, your ways are very much like theirs, anyway — warriors, unafraid of discomfort, free of individual ambition. They may welcome you because you’re so much like them. Or they’ll simply ignore you. Why should a few hundred settlers matter to them, when they have half a continent? Yes: go to the hjjks. What do you say, Zechtior Lukin?”