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He gaped at her, aghast, and checked his blow before it could strike her. His eyes glazed as though he had been smitten by the gods. Recoiling from her with a moaning outcry of despair, he lowered his arm and let his weapon drop from suddenly nerveless fingers. By now Thu-Kimnibol had managed to make his way around Nialli Apuilana in the confusion and started toward him. But Husathirn Mueri had already turned and was staggering crazily toward the rear of the platform, heading for Taniane, who had picked up Chevkija Aim’s knife and was studying it in wonder.
“Lady—” he muttered thickly. “Lady — lady — forgive me, lady—”
Thu-Kimnibol reached for him. Taniane waved him back. She stared at Husathirn Mueri as though he were an apparition.
In a dark anguished voice he said, “Kundalimon’s death was my doing. And Curabayn Bangkea’s as well, and all the grief that followed.”
With a desperate sob he threw himself upon her as if to embrace her. Unhesitatingly Taniane’s arm came forward, rising swiftly toward Husathirn Mueri’s rib cage in a single sharp jab. He stiffened and gasped. Clutching his middle, he took a couple of reeling steps back from her. For a moment he stood utterly motionless, rearing up on the tips of his toes. Blood trickled out over his lips. He took one tottering step toward Nialli Apuilana. Then he fell sprawling, landing beside the body of Chevkija Aim. He quivered once and was still.
“Guards! Guards!” Thu-Kimnibol roared.
Seizing Nialli Apuilana with one hand and Taniane with the other, he pulled them behind him and swung about to see what was happening below the platform. Some kind of disturbance was going on down there. The guardsmen were moving in to quell it. Further in the distance the warriors of Thu-Kimnibol’s own army, aware now of the strange struggle on the platform, had left their wagons and were rushing forward. At the center of everything Thu-Kimnibol saw the figure of a bright-robed boy of ten or twelve years, holding his hands high in the midst of the crowd and screaming curses of some sort in a terrifying furious voice sharp as a dagger.
“Look,” Nialli Apuilana said. “He has Kundalimon’s Nest-guardian! His Nest-bracelet, too!” Her eyes were gleaming as fiercely as the boy’s. “By the gods, I’ll deal with him! Leave him to me!”
The Barak Dayir was suddenly in her hand. Deftly she seized it with her sensing-organ. Thu-Kimnibol stared at her in bewilderment as the Wonderstone instantly worked some bizarre transformation on her: she seemed to grow in size, to turn into something huge and strange.
“I see the Queen within you,” cried Nialli Apuilana in a dark frightful tone, looking down with blazing eyes at the boy in bright robes. “But I call Her out! I cast Her forth! Now! Now! Now! Out! ”
For a moment all was silent. Time itself hung, frozen, still, suspended by a heartbeat.
Then the boy staggered as if he had been struck. He twisted about and made a dry chittering sound, a sound almost like one a hjjk would make, and his face turned gray and then black; and he fell forward and was lost to sight in the surging crowd.
Calmly Nialli Apuilana restored the Barak Dayir to its pouch.
“All’s well now,” she said, taking Thu-Kimnibol once more by the hand.
It was hours later, after general quiet had been restored. They were in the great chamber of the Presidium.
Taniane said, “So there is to be peace, of a sort. Out of the madness of the war comes a kind of victory. Or at any rate a truce. But what have we accomplished? At any time, at the Queen’s mere whim, it could all begin again.”
Thu-Kimnibol shook his head. “I think not, sister. The Queen knows better now what we’re like, and what we’re capable of doing. The world will be divided now. The hjjks will leave us alone, I promise you that. They’ll keep to their present territory, and we to ours, and there’ll be no more talk of Nest-thinkers setting up shop in our cities.”
“And how will it be in territories that are neither theirs nor ours? That was what troubled Hresh so much, that the hjjks would keep us from the rest.”
“The rest of the world will remain open, mother,” said Nialli Apuilana. “We can explore it as we choose, whenever we’re ready. And who knows what things we will find? There may be great cities of the People on the other continents. Or the humans themselves may have returned to the world from wherever it is they went when the Great World died, and are living there now, for all we know. Who can say? But we’ll find out. We’ll go wherever we want, and discover everything that is to be discovered, just as my father hoped we would. The Queen understands now that there’ll be no pe
“So it is a victory, then,” Taniane said. “Of a kind.” She did not sound jubilant.
“A victory, sister,” said Thu-Kimnibol sternly. “Make no mistake about that. We’ll be at peace. What else is that but victory?”
“Yes. Perhaps it is.” After a moment Taniane said, “And Hresh? You were with him when he died, Thu-Kimnibol has told me. What was it like for him, at the end?”
“He was at peace,” said Nialli Apuilana simply.
“I’ll want you to tell me more about that later. Now we have other matters to deal with.” Turning, she took the dark, gleaming Mask of Koshmar from the high table of the Presidium, where she had placed it when they entered. She held it forth. It was boldly carved: a powerful, indomitable face with strong full lips, a jutting jaw, wide flaring cheekbones. To Nialli Apuilana she said, “This was Koshmar, the greatest woman of our tribe. Without her vision and strength none of us would be here today. Without her we would have been nothing. Take her mask, Nialli.”
“What am I to do with it, mother?”
“Put it on.”
“Put it on?”
“It’s the mask of chieftainship.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“This is the last day of my forty years of rule. They’ve been telling me for a long while now that it’s time I stepped aside, and they’re right. Today I resign my office. Take the mask, Nialli.”
Amazement and uncertainty flared in Nialli Apuilana’s eyes.
“Mother, this can’t be. My father has already named me chronicler. That’s what I’ll be now. Not chieftain.”
Now it was Taniane’s turn to look amazed.
“Chronicler?”
“So he told me, in his last moments. It was his special wish. I have the Wonderstone. I know how to use it.”
Taniane was silent a long while, as if she had withdrawn into some distant world.
Then in a quiet voice she said, “If you are to be chronicler and not chieftain, then the old way is at its end. I felt that you were ready, that at last it would be possible for you to succeed me. But you will not have it; and there’s no one else to whom I would give this mask. Very well. There will be no more chieftains among the People.”
She looked away.
Thu-Kimnibol said, “Is there no way you could be chronicler and chieftain both, Nialli?”
“Both?”
“Why can’t the titles be joined? You’d have the mask and the Barak Dayir also. The mask makes you chieftain, the Wonderstone makes you chronicler. You’ll hold both and you’ll rule with both.”
“But the chronicles — the work of the House of knowledge — it’s too much, Thu-Kimnibol.”
“Chupitain Stuld can have charge of the House of Knowledge. She’ll do the work, but she’ll report to you.”
“No,” Nialli Apuilana said. “I see a different way. I’ll keep the Wonderstone, yes, because my father intended it that way. But I’m not the one who should sit at the head of the Presidium. Mother, give him the mask. He’s won the right to wear it.”
Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “I, wear Koshmar’s mask? Go before the Presidium in it, and call myself chieftain? This is a fine strong face, Nialli, but it’s a woman’s face!”