“Come to me,” Koshmar said. “Twine with me.”

“Yes,” Torlyri said. “Gladly!”

Koshmar was a great comfort to her in these difficult days. They twined often, far more often than they had for years, and at each twining Torlyri could feel Koshmar pouring strength, warmth, love into her soul.

Torlyri knew that Koshmar had been deeply hurt by her infatuation with Lakkamai. Koshmar had never said it in so many words, but there was no way for her to hide her true feelings from Torlyri, in twining or outside of it, after all their years together. Still, Koshmar had stood aside, allowing Torlyri to do as she wished. And now that it was over, now that Lakkamai had casually allowed Torlyri to fall from his grasp, Koshmar offered no recriminations, no smugness, no cruelty: only love, warmth, strength.

That could not be easy for her. Yet she did it.

And did it, Torlyri knew, at a time when she herself was undergoing great stress. The secession of Harruel had been a powerful blow to her. Koshmar had never had to face such mockery before. No chieftain had. To be scorned in front of her entire tribe, to be reviled, to be rejected — for eleven of her own people to turn their backs on her — what humiliation, what a lessening of her! And then to have this great horde of Helmet People swarming into the city, with all their bustle and energy, their colossal smelly beasts, their strange costumes, their alien ways. Once upon a time the cocoon had been an entire world, and Koshmar had been supreme ruler of that world; but now the People had come forth into a much bigger world and she was nothing more than the chieftain of a small splintered tribe occupying one small corner of a large city, with a much larger tribe nearby, pressing close, impinging, encroaching.

These things threatened to eclipse the bright sun of Koshmar’s power. They struck at her prestige, at her confidence, at her spirit itself. But Koshmar in her extraordinary resilience had withstood all these blows. And had strength left over to share with her beloved Torlyri, for which Torlyri was powerfully grateful.

As they lay together Koshmar’s fingers dug lovingly into Torlyri’s dense black fur. The familiar warmth of her close at hand was comforting. Torlyri felt Koshmar trembling, and smiled at her.

“You,” Koshmar whispered. “My dearest friend. My only love.”

Their sensing-organs touched. Their souls slipped into communion.

Torlyri asked herself then how she could ever have wanted Lakkamai more than she did Koshmar.

Afterward, though, when she lay back in the calmness that comes after twining, she knew that that was an idle question. The thing she had received from Lakkamai was altogether different from the love she shared with Koshmar. From Lakkamai had come passion, turbulence, mystery. There had been a communion with him, which she had mistaken for communion of the soul, but she realized now that it had been only a communion of the body: strong, yes, intensely strong, but not a lasting thing. A true thing, but not a lasting one. He had wanted her, and she had wanted him, and for a time they had eased those wants in each other. And then he had ceased to want her, or had wanted something else more keenly, and when Harruel had called for companions to join him in the conquest of the wild country Lakkamai had stepped forward without a glance in her direction, without a thought for her. Nor had he asked her to go with him. Perhaps he had thought she would not — that she would inevitably remain loyal to her duties as offering-woman here. Or perhaps he had not cared. Perhaps be simply had had whatever it was that he had wanted from Torlyri, and was done with her now, and was ready for a new adventure.

Torlyri wondered whether she would have gone, giving up tribe and duties and Koshmar and all, if Lakkamai had asked her.

She could not bring herself to answer that question. She was glad that it had not been asked.

Harruel walked ahead of the others when they were on the march, going by himself, surrounding himself in a mantle of kingly isolation. It was a way of emphasizing his power and his separateness. And it gave him a chance to think.

He knew that he had no real plan, except to march onward and onward until the gods showed him the destiny they had in mind for him. Vengiboneeza, for all the comfort and ease that it provided, had not been that destiny. Vengiboneeza was a dead place and it had belonged to other peoples. All it was was a place to hide and wait: but wait for what? For nothing, he thought. For the whitened ruins to tumble and choke them in clouds of powder? And even if Vengiboneeza could be brought back to life of some sort, the buildings repaired, the machines somehow made to run again, it would not be their life. He detested the idea of living in someone else’s old abandoned city. It was like sleeping in someone else’s dirty bedclothes. No, Vengiboneeza was no place for him.

He was unsure where the place for him was. He meant to keep moving until he discovered it.

But they had gone as far as they could go this day. Night was near. They had entered a cheerful terrain of gentle undulating valleys, rich with dense carpets of new grass both green and red. Just ahead the land dropped away sharply, and what lay before them down there struck Harruel as being strangely beautiful, and beautifully strange.

At the heart of the broad meadow below them was an enormous circular basin, broad and shallow, with a clearly demarcated rim around it. Its center was thickly wooded, a dark grove of mysteries, which promised an abundance of game.

The basin looked too symmetrical to be natural. Harruel wondered about it. Who could possibly have built so huge a thing? And why? If it was some city or ceremonial center out of the Great World, how was it that he could see no trace of ruined buildings? All that was apparent from above was a vast shallow depression, nearly as big across as Vengiboneeza itself, perfectly circular, surrounded by a rim and heavily overgrown with shrubs. Well, whatever it was, it was preferable to where they had just been.

For close to a week now they had been tramping through a grim zone of disheartening forests where the branches were knotted tightly together overhead by tangled black glossy vines so that the sun could never get through. The forest floor was dry and barren, covered with powdery duff. The only thing that would grow there was a large pale dome-shaped plant, fleshy and somber, which sprouted without warning in a matter of moments, erupting from the ground with incredible speed. It was sticky, and if you touched it it burned your hand. Yet eerie long-legged blue-furred little animals went loping through the forest at night-fall in search of these squat solemn things, and when they found one they would burrow right into its center to devour it from the inside out. The creatures were hard to catch unless you came upon them while they were feeding, when they were utterly lost in the heat of their gluttony and you could seize them by their legs. But then they gave no joy in the eating, for their flavor when roasted was even less palatable than when you ate them raw. Harruel was glad to be leaving that place behind.

He turned and looked back along the broad ridge that he had just crossed, peering into the late-afternoon darkness that was descending upon them from the east. The sky was almost black, except where a single shaft of golden light struck a towering wall of fiery-edged clouds. He saw Konya and Lakkamai not far behind him and the rest of his people straggling, stretched out at wide intervals halfway back to the forest.

Cupping his hand, Harruel shouted back to Konya, “We’ll camp here. Pass it on!”

A warm wind was blowing out of the south. It carried the promise of rain. Large gawky gray-plumaged birds with bright silvery necks that were long and coiling and scaly, like serpents, came fluttering out of the treetops and took off in a great flock, heading northeast. They were disagreeable-looking, but they sang like a chorus of gods as they flew away. A week or two ago, on the other side of the forest, Harruel had seen flocks of small delicate birds with green-and-blue wings that glittered like a handful of jewels when they flew, and they had screeched like devils. He wondered why such mismatches of voice and beauty existed.