Faraerth wasn’t so sure how to evaluate the enemy’s sentience, nor if such questions truly mattered when the Devils were inflicting so much damage upon the Hegemony—and while such a hellish adversary stood between the Neyel people and the Riftmouth that could enable them to regain Auld Aerth.

And another problem had recently assumed an urgency far greater than the recovery of Aerth: Lately the now-all-but-invisible Riftmouth, the source of the increasingly perilous alien infestation, had begun drifting ever further downsystem from the outer comet cloud, falling inexorably—and at an apparently accelerating rate—toward the warm climes wherein orbited Oghen, the Coreworld to which all other Neyel Hegemony planets paid tribute in troops, raw materials, and finished goods.

Oghen, a planet nearly as revered among Neyelkind as was Far Aerth itself, might soon be utterly helpless before the Devil onslaught. Gran Drech’tor Zafir had to redouble the fleet’s efforts [297] not only to repulse the expanding Devil incursion, but also to seek to end it at its source.

And that was why, Faraerth supposed, he now found himself standing under the semicylindrical vault of the Great Hall of Oghen, in the august presence of the Gran Drech’tor Herself, along with some of her most senior visors. That she had called upon Faraerth’s expertise in spite of his shamefully permanent injuries—and despite his having committed the even more outrageous offense of surviving the destruction of Slicer—spoke volumes to him about the fear and desperation that now reigned at Gran Drech’tor Zafir’s court.

Why she believesI can do anything to stem the Devil tide is Vangar’s own mystery,Faraerth thought, glancing down at his mangled stump of an arm. It was a brutal, unhealed scar that often served as a useful call to humility. Such a talisman might serve some of Zafir’s other visors even better than it serves me.

Faraerth looked up across the cavernous hall, a space whose polished nickel-iron surfaces brought to mind the hallowed nullgrav Core Spaces of the Vangar Innerworld, the original Great Rock which even now stared down from Oghen’s cloud-scudded sky like some beneficent deity, from the place where Drech’tor Wafiyy had parked it nearly a century earlier. His eyes lighting upon the broad, gleaming dais, Faraerth saw Gran Drech’tor Zafir, flanked by her guards. The guards were hard-pressed to keep up with her pacing, and to avoid being struck by the heavy club end of her anxiously switching tail.

Standing on either side of the wide, oblong table that lay between Faraerth and the Gran Drech’tor were Jerdahn, an expert in the Soft Sciences renowned across the Hegemony, and Loford, an equally well regarded, top-echelon military and technical visor whose hard-line views toward the Devils were celebrated across the Hegemony, thanks to her voluminous monographs and commentaries on the subject.

Splayed across the table, and the principal object of [298] attention for the monarch and her visors, was a Devil. Or rather, the charred, cracked-open husk of one, the lifeless residuum of both battlefield and pathology lab.

“Behold the foe, Gran Drech’tor,” intoned Visor Loford. She gestured toward the alien corpse with both hands and the distal end of her tail. “See that which stands between us and the Ur-world which is the birthright of all Neyelkind.”

Zafir complied, her thick-lidded black eyes unfathomable. “This creature seems to be a thing of stone or crystal,” she said at length, eyeing the neatly cleaved planes and angles of the dead creature’s open thoracic cavity, the blocky heaviness of its rigid, semitranslucent internal organs. “It hardly seems real.”

“It is unlike any exobiota we have ever encountered before. Yet it lived, right up until it fell in battle,” Visor Jerdahn said. Faraerth suppressed a smile at the academic’s froshclass lecture-chamber tone, no doubt an unconscious mannerism. Loford scowled noticeably, but the Gran Drech’tor seemed too absorbed by the dead creature that lay before her to pay any heed to the byplay.

“Even the Tuskers of antiquity bore at least someresemblance to us,” Jerdahn continued, apparently not realizing that Loford had been about to speak. “Even they were constructed of nucleic acids and proteins. The Devils, by contrast, are crystalline mineral constructs, evidently the product of one of the harshest, hottest, highest-pressure environments imaginable. Even a species as adversity-hardened as we Neyel could not survive long unprotected under the atmospheric conditions that prevail within their war vessels. It may take us many oghencycles merely to begin fathoming their biotic processes.”

“Such is the unknowable face of the Devils,” Loford said. “Mindless beasts who would extinguish our way of life as though they were bred merely for that sole purpose. As they have already amply demonstrated, their continuation necessarily means the end of our race.”

“Assuming, of course, that we continue to fail to [299] communicate with them,” said Jerdahn. Though Faraerth often harbored such thoughts privately, he was surprised to hear the academic give them voice in this chamber. Given the imperative for war that now suffused even the intelligentsia of the Hegemony, such a comment was tantamount to treason.

But Zafir seemed to take the scholar’s remark in stride, her slate-gray countenance showing a thoughtful aspect. The war must truly be going badly for us,Faraerth thought, if she is actually considering an attempt to parley.Faraerth knew well that most, if not all, Hegemony citizens found the notion utterly unthinkable. Fighting for survival was too ingrained a Neyel characteristic to be headed off by even the wisest of leaders, or by the direst of consequences.

“We are better off devoting our resources toward studying and countering the instinct-ruled tactics and strategies of the Devils,” Loford countered, a muscular sneer contorting her otherwise rigid face. “Only by pursuing such a course can we succeed in wiping out this scourge before it annihilates usinstead.”

Faraerth still said nothing, silently noting the irony of Loford’s tuskish words. He knew that she had never taken up arms in the service of the Hegemony, nor braved the madness-inducing regions that bordered Riftspace, nor faced down the Devils’ lethal energy webs as he had. The stump of his arm throbbed and a phantom itch crept across a nonexistent elbow as he considered these things. What does she know of war?he thought.

Jerdahn approached the table. With a theatrical flourish, he raised the Devil’s severed head, reminding Faraerth of a scene from one of the ancient stage plays that had survived the exodus from Auld Aerth. A Devil of infinite jest,the maimed spacer thought wryly.

“We may be better able to anticipate and counter our attackers’ moves,” Jerdahn said, “if we first understand the contents of this.”

[300] Loford snorted, her eyelids shuttering down to hostile slits, her gaze like a pair of particle cannons. “We understand thatquite well enough, I think. The Devils exist only to kill us, and that is the only thing approximating thought in their hard, subsentient brains. They lack the wit even for intelligible language, and thus aren’t fit even to be slaves, much less free sentients. There can be no coexistence with them.”

Faraerth found himself growing irritated at this irrelevant line of reasoning. Intelligent or not, the Devils endangered the very existence of the Hegemony.

“They have sufficient wit to pilot starships, and to unleash terrible energies upon us,” he said, no longer able to hold his tongue. “Their brainpower suffices to do things such as this.” Using his one good arm and his scarred but unbowed tail, Faraerth pointed to the battle-ravaged stump on his right side.