And Harruel swelled with wrath, and his powerful arm swung in sudden fury.

“Miserable boy! Flea-ridden little cheat!”

The blow was only a glancing one. But it was enough to knock Hresh off his feet and send him flying through the air. He landed in a heap, stunned and trembling. And stayed there until Torlyri went to him and lifted him and held him in her warm embrace.

“Think about it,” said Torlyri’s son now. “Is it your brother Thu-Kimnibol who’s drilling that army on the stadium grounds now? Or is it King Harruel?” Husathirn Mueri gave him a close, searching look. Then he turned and was gone almost at once.

As Hresh entered the vestibule of the House of Knowledge, haunted by all that Husathirn Mueri had told him and deep in thoughts of the anguished past and the foreboding future, Chupitain Stuld stepped out of one of the inner offices and said, “Shall I bring the artifacts from Tangok Seip up to your study now, sir?”

“The artifacts from Tangok Seip?”

“The ones the farmer found in the cave, after the mudslide. You said you’d look at them today.”

“Ah. Yes. Yes. Those tools, you mean.”

He tried to shake off the fog that had engulfed him. His mind was scattered from one end of the world to the other.

That cache of Great World artifacts, yes. Chupitain Stuld had been after him persistently for the past few days to examine those things. She was probably right, he supposed. It was weeks since their discovery and he hadn’t even bothered to look at them. Other preoccupations had distracted him completely. But Plor Killivash had said the find was important. The least he could do, he told himself, was take a look.

Chupitain Stuld was waiting for an answer.

“Bring them upstairs, yes,” he said. “In half an hour, will you? I have a few things to do first.”

He made his way up the spiral ramp and into his private chamber.

Somehow he is outside the building, on the parapet. Then, without even troubling to take the Barak Dayir from its pouch, he feels himself rising, floating off into the upper air, soaring above the city, climbing effortlessly higher and higher, beyond the clustering clouds, into the sky above the sky. Everything up here is black, streaked with scarlet. Streams of cool air rush past him like rivers. Tiny pellets of ice strike his fur. There are crystals of ice on his fingertips. He dances on nothingness.

Looking down, he can see everything, as if through a clear window in the darkness. The entire city lies open to his gaze.

He sees the stadium grounds, and the troops of the Sword of Dawinno marching in formation, while at their head the impressive figure of Thu-Kimnibol struts and prances, gesturing emphatically and barking commands.

He sees Nialli Apuilana walking in a park, moving like one lost in a dream. Mysteries shroud her soul. A bright crimson line of conflict runs through it as though it is splitting apart.

Behind her, a considerable distance behind, lurks Husathirn Mueri. He is a mystery too: obvious enough on the surface, hungry for power and pathetically obsessed with Nialli Apuilana. But what lies beneath? Hresh senses only a void. Can it be, such emptiness in the son of Torlyri and Trei Husathirn? There must be more within him than that. What, though? Where?

Hresh’s gaze moves on.

Here is his garden of captive animals, now. The furry enigmatic blue stinchitoles, the gentle thekmurs, the stanimanders. The twittering sisichils frisk as though they know he’s watching them. The stumbains — the diswils — the catagraks — all the multitudinous horde of wondrous creatures that Dawinno the Transformer has tumbled forth upon the face of the thawing Earth, and which Hresh’s hunters have brought together for him here.

The caviandis. There they are beside their stream, the two slender gentle creatures. How lovely the sleekness of their purple fur, the brightness of their thick yellow manes. They look up and see him in the sky far above, and they smile.

He feels the warmth of their spirits radiating toward him. She-Kanzi, He-Lokim: his friends, his friends. His caviandi friends.

Their wordless greeting comes floating up to him, and his wordless reply descends. They speak again, and he replies; and then he asks, and they answer. Without words, without concepts, even. A simple, silent communion of being, an ongoing exchange of spirit that could not possibly be expressed other than as itself.

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— -

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He knows by now they have no use for words as he understands words, just as “He-Lokim” and “She-Kanzi” are not names as he understands names. They live outside the need of such things, just as they and all their kind live outside the need for the building of cities, or the fabrication of objects, or any other such “civilized” thing. The otherness of them is the central fact of their nature: their strangeness, their non-Peopleness.

Their souls flood into his, and he into theirs, and suddenly there comes to him a vision within the vision he is having. He sees a second Great World upon the Earth, different from the first but no less glorious, a world not of six races but of dozens, of hundreds, of People and caviandis and stinchitoles and thekmurs, of sisichils and stanimanders and catagraks, of all the creatures that lived — united, locked in perpetual understanding sharing in everything, a world deeper and richer in its fullness than even the old Great World had been, a world that embraced everything that lived upon the Earth—

A sudden discordant voice within him asks:

Even the hjjks?

And he answers at once, without pausing to think:

Yes. Even the hjjks. Of course, the hjjks.

But then, considering it, he asks himself if the hjjks would in fact join any such new confederation of races. They had, after all, been part of the earlier one. And the Transformer has had all the hundreds of centuries since the time of the Great World to alter and elevate them. It might be that they have moved so far beyond the other races of the Earth now that they are incapable of joining them as equals in anything.

Was that so? Hresh wonders. Have they become gods? Is She a god, the great Queen of the hjjks?

In that instant, but only for an instant, his dreaming mind flashes northward into the bleakness of the cold lands, where the horizon is lit by a brilliant incandescent glow. And he beholds there the vast secret Queen, lying motionless in Her hidden chamber while She directs the destinies of all the millions of insect-folk, and, for all Hresh can tell, of the rest of the world as well. He feels the force and power of that immense mind, and of that great living machine, the Nest over which She rules. He observes the meshing of the parts, the weaving of gleaming pistons, the spinning of the web of life.

Then it is gone and he hovers again in the indeterminate void; but the tolling echo of that immensity lingers in him.

A god? Ruling over a race of gods?

No, he thinks. Not gods.

The Five Heavenly Ones, they are gods: Dawinno, Emakkis, Mueri, Friit, Yissou — the Transformer and Destroyer, the Provider, the Comforter, the Healer, the Protector.

And Nakhaba of the Bengs: he is a god. The Interceder, he who stands between the People and the humans, and speaks with them on our behalf. So old Noum om Beng had taught him, when he was a boy in Vengiboneeza.

And therefore it must be so, Hresh tells himself, that the humans also are gods, for we know that they are higher even than Nakhaba, and older than the Great World.

Perhaps they are the ones who brought the other five races of the Great World into being, the hjjks and the sea-lords, the mechanicals and vegetals, the sapphire eyes. Could it be? That they had grown weary of living alone on the Earth, the humans, and had created the others to join with them in a new great civilization, which would flourish for many years, and then perish as all civilizations perished?