“Not so,” said Nialli Apuilana. “You forget an important thing. She proposed not just a division of territory, but also to send Nest-thinkers to live among us and spread Her truths and Her plan. In time they would bring us to embrace Queen-love; and that would deliver us forever into Her power. She’d control us all, as She controlled Kundalimon, as She controlled me. She’d regulate our rate of population increase, so there’d never be so many of us that we interfered with Her designs. She would designate the acceptable locations of any new cities we might build, to keep most of the world free for Her people. That was what the treaty would have done. What we must have is the boundary line, but not the infiltration of Nest-thinkers into our lives. There has already been too much of that.”
“Then the war must go on until She is beaten. And then we have to eradicate every trace of Queen-worship in our city.” He turned away from her and began to pace the tent. “Gods! Will there ever be an end to all this?”
Nialli Apuilana smiled. “We can make an end to it for tonight, at least.”
“What do you mean?”
She moved closer to him in the darkness. “This night we can allow ourselves a little time out of war, just for each other.” Her sensing-organ rose and moved tentatively against his. He shivered and seemed almost to draw back from her, as though unable to free himself from the doubts and turmoil that had engulfed him; but she stayed close by him, easing him gently out of his disquiet and apprehension. After a moment she could feel the tension begin to leave him. He came close to her, rising like a mountain above her, and encircled her with his arms. She took his hands and placed them over her breasts. They stood that way for a time, allowing the communion to build; and then they sank down slowly together, entwined in body and soul, and lay in each other’s arms through the rest of the night.
It’s the hour before dawn, now. Thu-Kimnibol is still deep in dreams. His massive chest rises and falls evenly, his sword-arm is flung casually across his face. Nialli Apuilana kisses him lightly and slips away from his side, going to the opposite end of the tent they share.
There she kneels and whispers the name of Yissou the Protector, and makes his sign, and then says the name of Dawinno the Destroyer, who is also Dawinno the Transformer, and makes his sign as well. She feels their presence entering her and gives thanks for it.
She touches then the amulet that nestles in the thick fur between her breasts, and calls upon her father; and after a while she sees him, shining in the darkness before her, the familiar smile on his familiar sharp-chinned face. There’s someone else behind him, a much older man, white-furred and sunken-chested. Nialli Apuilana doesn’t know him, but his presence seems benign. And deeper in the darkness is still another venerable stranger, a withered old Beng so thin and tall that he seems nothing more than an elongated straw that any breeze might blow away.
Now she draws the Barak Dayir from its pouch and touches it briefly to her forehead in a sign of respect, and grips it firmly with her sensing-organ.
The music rises within her. It carries her toward the heights of the world.
She climbs easily, confidently, fearing nothing: for isn’t Yissou with her, and Dawinno, and her father also? Only when she’s aloft, and the world is no more than a speck beneath her, does she feel the first tremor of concern. It would be so easy to go on and on from here, forever upward into that sphere of the unknown that surrounds the world, outward and outward and outward among the comets and the moons and the stars: and never to return. All she has to do is cut the mooring that binds her to the Earth. But that’s not what she’s about to do.
What she seeks is the Queen: the Queen of Queens, indeed, in Her lair at the Nest of Nests, in the cold bleak northlands.
She focuses her mind and propels it forward. At first she feels a moment of uncertainty, a curious doubleness of destination. The Queen seems to be in two places at once, one of them distant and one very close at hand. Nialli Apuilana doesn’t know what to make of that. But then she understands. The memory arises in her of that terrible time after Kundalimon’s death and her own flight into the wilderness, when she had hidden herself in her room and struggled with all that possessed her spirit. The Queen had been within her then; and the Queen has remained within her to this day. That dark presence had never relinquished its place at the heart of her soul.
But that Queen within her is only the shadow of the true one. It’s the Queen Herself, and not the shadow, with whom she has to deal today.
“Do you know me?” she calls. “I am Nialli Apuilana, daughter of Hresh.”
And out of the depths of the Nest of Nests comes an answer from the great motionless pallid thing that lies hidden there.
“I know you. What do you want with Me?”
“To negotiate with you.”
Derisive laughter rings down upon her like a hail of fire. “Only equals can negotiate, little one.” And from the Queen comes a storm of power that makes the air shiver and bend upon itself, so that Nialli Apuilana can see the roots of the world showing through the fabric of the atmosphere.
But she will not let herself be swayed.
“You have a Wonderstone,” Nialli Apuilana says. “I have a Wonderstone. We are equals, therefore.”
“Are we?”
“Can You harm me?”
“Can you harm Me?” the Queen says.
Bolts of blue flame arch upward from the Nest. They dance and swirl about Nialli Apuilana in frenzied weaving motions, looking for a vulnerable place. She brushes them away as though they’re gnats.
The Queen sends a storm of boulders. The Queen sends a wall of fire. The Queen sends a cloud of searing mist.
“You waste Your time. Do You think I’m a child, who can be frightened this way? What the Wonderstone sends, the Wonderstone can turn aside. We can spend all day threatening each other like this, and nothing will be achieved.”
“What is it that you hope to achieve?”
“Let me show You a vision,” says Nialli Apuilana.
From the Queen, after a moment, comes grudging assent.
From Nialli Apuilana to the Queen goes an image of the terrain that surrounds the Nest of Nests, as she knows it must be, though she had never seen it with her own eyes: hard sparse plains, broad endless grayness under an unforgiving sky. She draws it from the soul of Kundalimon that is still within her. Kundalimon had lived in the Nest of Nests. She shows the Queen the dry puckered soil, the pitiless saw-edged grass, the small vicious creatures that scrabble fiercely for their livelihoods in that remote and dreadful land.
And then she shows Her the dark mouths of the Nest gaping here and there in the plain, and the barely perceptible rise of the Nest itself, a faint humped swelling beneath the surface of the land, myriad corridors running off in every direction.
“Do You recognize this place?” Nialli Apuilana asks.
“Go on.”
Now Nialli Apuilana shows the Queen the armies of the People advancing from east and west and south: not merely the force that Thu-Kimnibol had brought with him from Dawinno, but the warriors of all the Seven Cities of the continent, from Yissou and Thisthissima and Gharb, from Ghajnsielem, from Cignoi, from Bornigrayal, every tribe of every land, all of them united here in one cataclysmic outpouring of joined strength. And there, rising above that multitude like the tallest tree of the forest, is Thu-Kimnibol of Dawinno; and in his hand is one of the weapons of the Great World. The chieftain of Gharb has a similar weapon, and that of Cignoi, and all the others; and they hold them trained on the Nest of Nests.