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A mighty cry escaped Harruel’s throat.
The gods had not forsaken him! They had sent his friends to help him in this day of danger! He was forgiven for all his sins, he was redeemed, he was spared!
“Yissou!” he cried. “Dawi
“On your left, Harruel,” said Salaman suddenly.
He looked around. Five hjjks, and a vermilion that loomed like a mountain. Harruel hurled himself savagely into the midst of them, laying about him on all sides. Salaman was with him too, and Konya was coming.
Something touched him like fire on the arm that had been wounded. He whirled, saw a hjjk reaching out again to rip open his flesh a second time, and slashed its throat in two. Then he felt a blow against his back. They were all around, sprouting like weeds on the hillside! Salaman called his name and Harruel turned again, striking as he moved. No use. No use. They were everywhere. The vermilion reared and snorted. When its huge feet came down they flattened a hjjk. Harruel laughed. He struck and struck again. Too soon to give up hope. One by one we will kill them all, yes! But then something jagged sliced across his back, and something else just as sharp took him in the thigh. He began to quiver in shock. He heard voices, Salaman’s, Konya’s, Samnibolon’s. His name, over and over. He swayed, nearly fell, steadied himself, took a few stumbling steps. He swung his blade, fiercely cutting air. He meant to go on fighting until he dropped. All he could do was fight. The city would survive, even if he did not. He was forgiven; he was redeemed. “Dawi
Hresh had never felt such confidence as he had in that moment of gathering darkness on the night before the battle, alone in that broad meadow with Taniane. He had taken the Barak Dayir from its pouch — Taniane staring close at it, her eyes glowing with that mixture of fear and keen curiosity that she had shown whenever he had bared the Wonderstone to her — and placed it in the curve of his sensing-organ.
“Be still while I do this,” he told her.
He closed his eyes. Reached out into the army of hjjks — gods, there were myriads upon myriads of them! — and searched patiently among them, picking and sorting through their dry, displeasing spirits until he found what he sought: one pair who had turned aside from the march in order that they might yield to the coupling impulse. In all that multitude there had to be at least a few who would pause to give in to that. And indeed Hresh was able to find more than a few.
One couple in particular were deeply enmeshed in the act, heart and soul, beaks and limbs and abdomens and thoraxes all convulsing as they embraced each other. Hresh shuddered. The female was larger than the male, and she held her mate in a fierce and strange grip, as though she meant not to couple with him but to devour him. From his body small swift organs had emerged and were moving over her lower part with a startling nervous quickness. It was a frightful, alien thing. And yet as he watched Hresh began to find it not so alien. Their forms and limbs and organs were very different from anything he knew, yes, but the impulse that drew them together was not too far from that which made Taniane attractive to him, or he to Taniane. The two of them emitted a potent emanation of desire for union, the hjjk equivalent of lust, Hresh thought. And a second emanation that denoted the fulfillment of desire: the hjjk equivalent of passion.
Good. Good. It was what he had hoped to find.
From those two coupling insect-beings Hresh had drawn the essence of their lust-emanation and their passion-emanation, and pulled it by way of the Barak Dayir deep into his own soul. Once he had incorporated it it no longer felt at all alien to him; he understood it, he respected it. He might just as well have been a hjjk-man himself, at that moment.
But he had not kept those essences within himself for long. He spun them forth, he wove them into a column of whirling force that rose to the heavens like a giant tower; and he set that tower in place around the metal tube that he had brought with him from Vengiboneeza.
Then he reached into the camp of the invaders a second time, and found a female vermilion who had come into heat that day. She stood with her back to a lofty tree, uttering horrifying roars and snorts of endearment and stamping her black-clawed feet and flapping her vast ears about like great sheets in the breeze. Three or four gigantic scarlet males jockeyed uneasily about her. Hresh slipped between them and took from her the essence of her heat, and drew that into himself also, and made it fifty times more intense. This he formed into a column too, and set it in place far to the west, where the plateau tumbled off into a broken area of streams and jumbled boulders.
“There,” Hresh said to Taniane. “Everything’s ready now. I’ve done all I can. The rest is in the hands of the warriors.”
That had been only a few hours ago, in the darkest of the night.
Dawn had come, and with it the battle. And now it was all over.
Hresh walked through the battlefield with Taniane at his side, and Salaman, and Minbain. No one spoke. A mist of death and confusion had settled over everything, and a great silence, and words seemed beside the point.
The hjjks were gone. Hresh could not say how many of them had vanished into the tube of strange light and even stranger darkness, but it must have been thousands of them, perhaps many thousands. In a terrible mad frenzy they had rushed toward the thing and leaped all over it, but it had engulfed them with an insatiable appetite as they came within its range of power, and they had disappeared. The rest of them, those who had not been attracted to the device or who had run from it in fear, were gone also, fled to all the corners of the earth. And those few who had tried to scale the sides of the crater had been killed by Taniane’s warriors as they came rushing past, or slain at the top by Harruel’s defenders waiting there.
The vermilions too had stampeded off elsewhere. Of all that astounding horde perhaps a dozen were still to be seen, shambling about in a lost purposeless way here and there on the plateau. Good: they could be rounded up, they could be domesticated for the tribe’s own uses. Of the others, it seemed that the males without exception had raced into the western hinterlands questing after the impassioned female that they thought to find there, and the females, puzzled or perhaps angered by that lunatic stampede, had gone off on journeys of their own, back to the wilderness from which the hjjks had taken them. In any case there were none hereabouts.
Hresh smiled. It had worked so well! It had worked perfectly!
And the little city — the City of Yissou, that was what they called it — the city was safe.
He looked around. Haniman sat quietly against a pink boulder, dabbing now and then at a cut on his forehead. He was glassy-eyed with fatigue. He had fought like a demon, had Haniman. Hresh had not known there was such strength in him. A little way from him lay Orbin, deep in sleep. He clutched the severed leg of a hjjk in one hand, a grisly trophy. Konya slept too. Staip. It had been a day of terrible conflict.
Hresh turned to Salaman. This quiet warrior whom he had scarcely known in the old days now seemed transformed, enlarged, a man of strength and wisdom and power, a giant.
“Will you be king now?” Hresh asked. “Or call yourself by some other title?”
“King, yes,” Salaman said quietly. “Over a tribe that can be numbered on the fingers of two hands. But I will be king, I think. It is a good name, king. We respect kings, in this city. And we will call the city Harruel, in honor of him who was king before me, though Yissou will still, I hope, be its protector.”