She hastened down the grand boulevard to the plaza of the gate.

When she was less than halfway there, she caught sight of her warriors standing in a line across the boulevard from one side to the other: Orbin, Konya, Staip, Lakkamai, Praheurt. Old Anijang was with them too, and Hresh. They were facing south, standing still as statues, utterly without movement, scattered so far apart from one another that they would have been all but useless as a defensive force. Koshmar could not understand why they had arranged themselves so ineptly.

Then she came closer to them, and she too halted in her tracks and stared in wonder toward the southern gate.

A fantastic procession was slowly making its way up the boulevard toward them.

The Helmet People had indeed come: thirty, forty, fifty of them, maybe more. And they were riding the most extraordinary animals Koshmar had ever seen, or imagined. Monstrous hulking beasts, they were. Colossal monsters, like walking hills, twice as high as a man, or more, and three times as long as they were high. With every step they took the ground shook as if in an earthquake. The fur of those great animals, thick and shaggy and densely matted, was a brilliant eye-stabbing scarlet. Their high-domed heads were long and narrow, with ears like platters and cavernous nostrils rimmed with black, and fiery golden eyes of startling size. Their four huge legs, which bent oddly at the knee, ended in terrifying curved black claws, rising backward almost to the level of their great protuberant ankles. A pair of towering humps rose on their backs, with a kind of natural saddle between them, big enough for two Helmet Men to ride comfortably on each creature.

If the beasts on which the Helmet People had entered Vengiboneeza were frightful, the Helmet People themselves were the stuff of nightmare.

They all had eerie crimson eyes like the spy that Harruel and Konya had captured long ago, and fine golden fur. And each of them wore an enormous horrific helmet, and no two helmets were alike. This one was a three-sided tower of metal plates with dark jutting studs emerging everywhere on it, and a pattern of golden flames inlaid in front. This, a domed bowl of black metal with two gigantic mirror-bright metal eyes set at its upper corners. This, a bleak low-brimmed half-mask with three square shield-shaped plaques above it. One warrior wore what looked like a lacquered mountain sprinkled with silver dust; another, a startling red-and-yellow cone with mighty horns; another, a sharp-peaked gold headpiece with a pair of coiling green tails sweeping up and up and up. There was nothing human about those helmets. They seemed to have come from some other world, a dark and terrible one. It was hard to see where the man left off and the helmet began, which made the invaders seem all the more horrendous.

Sachkor rode in the middle of the group, on one of the biggest of the scarlet animals. They had given him a helmet too, smaller than any of theirs but just as strange, with curving iron plates arranged like the petals of an inverted flower, and a golden spike rising above it. His slender form seemed lost atop the vast creature, and he sat quietly, as if dreaming. His face bore no expression.

Surely this tribe is a tribe of monsters riding upon monsters, Koshmar thought. And they are through the gateway; and all is over for us. But we will die bravely before we give up Vengiboneeza to them.

She looked toward Konya, toward Staip, toward Orbin.

“Well?” she cried. “Will you just stand there and let them advance? Attack! Kill as many as you can before they kill us!”

“Attack? How can we attack?” Konya said, speaking very quietly but in a manner that would carry great distances. “Look at the size of the animals they’re sitting on. There’s no way we can reach that high. Those things would simply trample us as if we were beetles.”

“What kind of foolishness is this? Simply thrust at the legs and bellies of those beasts, and bring them down. And then slay their masters.” Koshmar brandished her spear. “Forward! Forward!”

“No,” Hresh said suddenly. “These are not enemies.”

She looked toward him, bewildered. Then she burst into harsh laughter. “Right, Hresh. They’re simply guests. Sachkor has brought them to visit us, them and their little pets, and they’ll have dinner with us and leave tomorrow. Is that what you believe?”

“They aren’t here to do battle,” Hresh said. “Put forth your second sight, Koshmar. They come in peace.”

“Peace,” Koshmar said derisively, and spat.

But there was a look on Hresh’s face that was new to her, a look of such strength and insistence that she was shaken by it. It seemed to Koshmar suddenly that it might not be wise to set herself against him in this, for Hresh, she knew, sometimes saw things that no one else was capable of seeing. With an effort she calmed herself, forcing the juices of war to subside within her soul, and sent her second sight toward the advancing horde.

And what Hresh said was true.

She could detect no enmity there, no hatred, no menace.

Yet even now Koshmar could not let herself yield to the boy. Angrily she shook her head. “A trick,” she said. “Trust me in this, Hresh. You are wise, but you are young, you know nothing of the world. These people have some way of making it seem as if they pose no threat. But took at the armor they wear. Look at the monsters they ride. They’ve come to kill us, Hresh, and take Vengiboneeza from us.”

“No.”

“I say yes! And I say we have to slay them before they slay us!” Koshmar stamped her feet in fury. “Harruel! Where’s Harruel? He would understand! He’d be up there among them already, knocking them down from their beasts!” Looking around at them all, from Orbin to Konya, from Konya to Staip, from Staip to Lakkamai, she said, “Well? Who’ll come with me? Who will fight by my side? Or must I go out there and die alone?”

“Do you see, Koshmar?” Hresh said, and pointed past her shoulder.

She turned. The thunder of those great black-clawed feet had ceased. The oncoming horde had halted, perhaps a hundred paces down the boulevard, or even less. One by one the huge red animals were beginning to kneel, bending in a bizarre way on those peculiarly constructed knees of theirs, and their helmeted riders were jumping to the ground. Already half a dozen of the invaders, with Sachkor in their midst, were coming up the center of the grand boulevard toward her as though to parley.

“Koshmar?” Sachkor called.

She held her spear in readiness. “What have they done to you? How did they capture you? Have they tortured you, Sachkor?”

“You misunderstand,” said Sachkor calmly. “They’ve done me no harm. Nor did they capture me. I left the city to go in search of them, for I thought they were somewhere nearby, and when finally I found them they received me gladly.” His voice was steady. He looked older, wiser, deeper than he had been when he had disappeared earlier that year. “These are the Beng people,” he said, “and they have been out of the cocoon longer than we have. They come from a far place on the other side of the great river where we once lived. They are different from us, but they intend us no injury.”

Hresh nodded. “He tells the truth, Koshmar.”

Koshmar still could grasp none of this. She felt as though she were adrift on the breast of a rushing torrent, carried helplessly along. War she could understand, but not this.

“They’re lying to you,” Koshmar muttered dourly. “This is some trick.”

“No. No trick, Koshmar. And no lie.”

Sachkor indicated two of the Helmet Men, who stepped forward beside him. One was old and shrewd-eyed, with a dry, wizened look about him that reminded Koshmar somewhat of Thaggoran the chronicler. His fur was a pale yellow, almost white; and he wore a tapering conical helmet that was made of richly embossed bands of different-colored metal, dwindling to a rounded top. Huge black metal ears sprouted from its sides like wings.