Softly Catiriil said, “You’re upsetting your mother, you know. You don’t want to do that, do you? Look how pale she’s become. Perhaps we should go out for a little fresh air, love. The rain has stopped, and—”

“No,” Simthala Honginda said fiercely. “No, she should hear this too. She’s still the offering-woman, isn’t she? She’s a high official of the tribe, is she not? Well, then. She must hear it.” His hand trembled as he reached for yet another cup of wine. “What I have to tell you is that there will be war soon,” he cried. “With the hjjks, it’ll be. Salaman and Thu-Kimnibol have arranged it between them, some provocation, some pretext that’ll touch it off, and we’ll be plunged into the full fury of it, like it or not. This I know from what I heard, and what I overheard, and what I found by prowling about. There will be war! Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman will have it no other way! And we’ll all blindly follow them over the edge of the cliff!” He took a deep draught of the wine. More moderately he said, “They’re mad, those two. And their madness will infect all the world. Or perhaps it’s the world’s madness that has infected them. Perhaps we’ve already gone so far down the wrong road that this is the inevitable outcome, that Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman are the appropriate leaders for our time.”

Boldirinthe stared, horror-stricken. She felt her heart beating furiously in the depths of her immense body.

Catiriil rose now and took the cup from Simthala Honginda, and whispered in his ear, trying desperately to calm him down. He responded angrily at first, but something she said appeared to reach him, and he nodded and shrugged, and spoke more gently to her, and after a moment she slipped her arm through his and led him quietly from the room.

Quietly Boldirinthe said to Staip, “Can what he said be true? Will there be war, do you think?”

“I’m no confidant of Thu-Kimnibol’s,” said Staip impassively. “I know no more than you do of any of this.”

“There must be no war,” she said. “Who will speak for peace in the Presidium? Husathirn Mueri will, I know. And Puit Kjai. And Hresh, perhaps. And certainly I will, if they give me a chance. And you? Will you speak?”

“If Thu-Kimnibol wants war, there will be war,” said Staip, sounding as though he spoke from the other side of the grave. “What of it? Will you have to go to battle? Will I? No, no, no, this is no affair of ours. The gods determine everything. This is no affair of ours, Boldirinthe. If there is to be war, I say, let it come.”

“War?” Husathirn Mueri said. He looked at his sister in astonishment. “A secret understanding with Salaman? A trumped-up provocation?”

“So Simthala Honginda insisted,” said Catiriil. “So he said, in front of Staip, in front of Boldirinthe, in front of the whole family. It was bubbling inside him all day, and finally it came out. He’d been drinking heavily, you understand.”

“Would he say the same things to me, if I went to see him?”

“He’s never been really close to you, you know.”

Husathirn Mueri laughed. “How kind you are! What you mean, but aren’t willing to say, is that he dislikes me intensely. Eh, Catiriil?”

She shrugged almost imperceptibly. “I’m aware that you and he have never been friendly. What he said at dinner is something he really had no right to reveal. It’s almost treasonous, isn’t it, blurting out state secrets like that? He may not want to take you into his confidence.”

“No right to reveal that we’re being tricked into fighting a war that’ll ruin us, simply to gratify Thu-Kimnibol’s lust for battle? You call that treasonous? It’s Thu-Kimnibol who’s committed the treason, Catiriil.”

“Yes. So I think also. That’s why I’ve brought this to you.”

“But you doubt that I can get Simthala Honginda to give me the details of it himself.”

“I doubt it very much, brother.”

“All right. All right. This is valuable enough for now, simply knowing what Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman have cooked up together. I’ll take it from there.”

“And may the gods be with us, whatever may come,” Catiriil said.

“The gods,” Husathirn Mueri said softly to himself, with a little chuckle, when his sister was gone. “Yes. May the gods be with us, indeed.”

To me they are nothing at all, they are only names.Those were Nialli Apuilana’s words, that astounding time when she had raved in such frenzy before the Presidium. Our own inventions, to comfort us in our difficult times. Husathirn Mueri had never forgotten that moment, nor those words.

Nothing but names. His own view exactly. In truth he knew himself to be a worse case even than Nialli Apuilana, for he had no beliefs at all, other than that life was nonsense, a cruel joke, a series of random events, that there was no reason for our being here other than that we are here. She at least had swallowed the hjjk myth that a cosmic plan governs the world and that everything is part of a preordained pattern. He had never seen evidence of that. And so he had no moral center, and knew it; he was capable of taking any position that seemed useful to the moment, favoring war one day and opposing it the next, as circumstances required. All that mattered was attaining power and comfort in his own lifetime, for that one lifetime was all there was, and everything was a joke in any case.

Husathirn Mueri had tried once to expound on these things to Nialli Apuilana, hoping to prove to her that they shared a set of common beliefs. But she had looked at him in shock and dismay, and had said to him in the coldest voice he had ever heard, “You don’t understand me at all, Husathirn Mueri. You don’t understand a thing about me at all.”

So be it. Perhaps he didn’t.

But he did understand the implications of the astonishing tale Catiriil had brought to him this day. He was surprised to see how little surprise he felt. Of course Thu-Kimnibol had gone north to stir up a war with the hjjks; of course the bellicose Salaman would gladly conspire with him to bring it about. And doubtless Taniane would lend what was left of her waning energies and all of her still considerable power to the task of mobilizing the Presidium’s approval.

But possibly there was still a way to head them off. Just possibly, he thought. Or, if a war couldn’t be avoided, at least to expose the perfidious role Thu-Kimnibol had played in bringing it about. The city could only suffer, if it went to war against the insect-folk. The losses would be terrible, the disruption of the fabric of life perhaps irreparable. And in the aftermath, those who had fomented the war would be brought down by it, and those who had tried in vain to prevent it would rise to greatness.

Husathirn Mueri smiled.

I’ll see what I can do, he thought.

And may the gods be with me indeed.

They had marched for weeks, going northward all the time. Behind them the world was gliding happily onward once again into spring, but in these forlorn lands on the far side of Vengiboneeza an iron winter still seemed to prevail. To Zechtior Lukin that made no difference. The chill of winter and the hot blasts of summer were all the same to him. He scarcely noticed the change of seasons, except that the hours of darkness lasted longer at one time of the year than at another.

Now they were in a gray land. The ground was gray, the sky was gray, the wind itself was gray with a burden of dark sand when it came roaring out of the east. The only color came from the vegetation, which seemed to be striking back against the grayness with sullen fury. The tough sparse sawedged grass was an angry carmine; the big rigid dome-shaped fungi were a deathly yellow and exploded into clouds of brilliant green spores when they were trampled; the trees, tall and narrow, had gleaming blue leaves shaped like spines, and constantly dropped a rain of viscous pink sap that burned like acid.