“No,” Konya said, with a little laugh. “The moon’s brightness couldn’t trouble us, when we dwelled in the cocoon.”

They walked together in silence for a while. This was a street of shattered buildings whose golden-hued facades, perversely, were in perfect condition. Empty windowframes still bore their elegantly worked shutters of thin-cut white stone. Elaborate doors stood ajar, revealing rubble and emptiness behind them. Then they came to one building that was of the opposite condition: its facade was gone, so that each of its many floors was revealed along one side, but the interior was intact. Wordlessly Harruel entered it and began to ascend, not knowing what he was looking for. Konya went with him unquestioningly.

With difficulty they ascended a staircase that had been built for sapphire-eyes, with wide flat risers so low that it was more of a ramp than a stair. After a time Harruel developed the knack of taking the steps two and even three at a time in loping bounds, and the ascent became easier. Along the walls, all the way up, were carvings that troubled the eye. Seen from the side they seemed to show the figures of living creatures, sapphire-eyes and hjjks and other things that must have lived in the time of the Great World, but when you looked at them straight on they dissolved into jumbles of meaningless lines. The rooms of the building were empty. There was not even dust in them.

Eventually the staircase narrowed to a spiral passage that coiled upward for half a dozen bends and delivered them to the building’s flat roof of dark tile. Here they were high above the surrounding district. The city lay behind them, to the north. Looking southward over the edge of the roof they saw the closely arrayed trees of the jungle glowing eerily in the harsh bright moonlight.

There were stirrings in the treetops, little snicking sounds.

“Monkeys, there,” Konya said.

Harruel nodded. They were swinging through the treetops no more than a good stone’s throw away, those shrieking stinking chattering things of the jungle. How he loathed them! He felt a rushing in his ears. If he could, he would march through the jungle from tree to tree, spearing them all and piling their repellent little bodies in heaps for the snuffling scavenger-beasts to devour.

“Filthy creatures,” said Harruel. “I’d like to kill them all. A good thing that they keep out of the city, mostly.”

“I see them sometimes. Not many.”

“Just a few, yes, once in a while. It’s not hard for them to get in. They just have to swing right over that open space there and they’re inside. Good thing for us that it’s usually only one or two at a time. Yissou, I detest them! Foul filthy things!”

“They’re just wild animals, Harruel.”

“Animals? They’re vermin. You saw them yourself, right up close. They have no souls. They have no minds.”

“The sapphire-eyes who guard the gate said that they are our cousins.”

Harruel spat. “Dawinno! Do you believe that foolishness?”

“They look a little like us.”

“Anything with two arms and two legs and a tail would look a little like us, if it walked on its hind legs. We are humans, Konya, and they are beasts.”

Konya was silent a while. “You think that’s so, Harruel? What about the thing the sapphire-eyes said, that we aren’t human at all, that the humans were a different race altogether, that we’re nothing but monkeys with a high opinion of themselves?”

“We are human, Konya. What else could we be? Do you feel like a relative of those things swinging from their tails out there?”

“The sapphire-eyes said—”

“Dawinno take the sapphire-eyes! They’re dead lying things. They only want to make trouble for us!” Harruel turned toward Konya, glaring coldly. “Look: we think, we talk, we have books, we know the gods. Therefore we are human. I know it. I have no doubt of it. Regardless of what the sapphire-eyes may say. Besides, they let us enter the city, didn’t they? The city is reserved for the humans who will come here at winter’s end: that’s what the prophecy said. And the winter is over, and we are here, by permission of the three guardians. Therefore we are the ones who were supposed to come here. The humans, that is.”

“Koshmar made them let us in.”

“ Madethem? When they have magic in their hands? No, Konya, it wasn’t Koshmar’s doing. She could have talked at them all day, and if they truly felt we weren’t human beings they never would have accepted us. They let us in because it was our destiny to come in here, our right to come in here, and they knew it. They were only testing us with their idiotic lies, to see if we had the strength of spirit to claim our rights. If Koshmar hadn’t spoken out, I would have done so, and they would have yielded. And if they hadn’t yielded I would have slain the three sapphire-eyes to win admission here.”

After another silence Konya said, “You would have slain them? When they have magic in their hands?”

“There’s magic in this spear, Konya.”

“But how can you slay what isn’t alive? The boy Hresh says they’re just artificials in the guise of sapphire-eyes, and not sapphire-eyes themselves.”

Harruel nodded distantly. He had lost interest in this debate. Narrowing his eyes against the moonlight, he stared at the frolicking monkeys, thinking thoughts of slaughter.

After a time he said, “This city is full of mysteries. I find it a troublesome place.”

“I find it hateful,” said Konya, with sudden surprising vehemence. “I hate it the way you hate the monkeys of the jungle.”

Harruel turned to him, eyes widening. “Do you?”

“It is a dead place. It has no soul.”

“No, it lives,” Harruel said. “It’s dead, I agree, but somehow it lives. I hate it as much as you, but not because it is dead. It has a strange kind of life that is not our kind of life. It has a soul that is not a soul like ours. And it’s for that that I hate it.”

“Dead or alive, I’d be glad to leave it tomorrow, Harruel. I would have been glad never to have seen it at all. We shouldn’t have come here in the first place.” Something in Konya’s tone made it seem as though he were seeking Harruel’s approval.

But Harruel shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not so, Konya. It was right to come. This city holds things that are important for us. You know what the chronicles say. In Vengiboneeza we will find ancient things of the sapphire-eyes that will help us to rule the world.”

“We’ve been here many months, and we’ve found nothing.”

With a shrug Harruel said, “Koshmar’s too timid. She lets only Hresh search, and no one else. A vast city, one small boy — no, we should all be out there every day, everyone seeking in the hidden places. The things are here. Sooner or later we’ll find them. And then we must take them and get out of this place. That’s the important thing, to leave once we have achieved what we came here to achieve.”

Konya said, “It seems to me that Koshmar is thinking of staying here forever.”

“Let her stay, then.”

“No. I mean she would have us all stay here. The city is becoming a new cocoon for her. She has no thought of leaving.”

“We must leave,” Harruel said. “The whole world is awaiting us. We are the new masters.”

“Even so, I think Koshmar—”

“Koshmar doesn’t matter any longer.”

Sudden amazement gleamed in Konya’s eyes. “What are you saying, Harruel?”

“What I’m saying is that we’ve come to this city for a purpose, which is to learn how to rule the world in the New Springtime, and we must strive with all our might to achieve that purpose. And then we must go forth so that we may continue to fulfill our destiny elsewhere. You hate this place. So do I. If Koshmar doesn’t, she can make it her home forever. When the time comes — and it must come soon — I will lead the way out of here.”

“And I will follow you,” Konya said.

“I know that you will.”