She reached for his hand and held it.
“Do you know how much I’ve missed you?” she asked.
“You could have come to me.”
“No. No. It was impossible. Everything must be properly packed — there are blessings to say — it’s a job that should take weeks and weeks. I don’t know how I can ever finish it in time. You shouldn’t have come tonight, Trei Husathirn.”
“I had to talk to you.”
That sounded wrong. He should have said, I had to see you, I wanted to see you, I couldn’t stay away from you. But he had to talk to her? About what?
She released his hand and drew back, uncertain, uneasy.
“What is it?” she asked.
He was silent a moment. Then he said, “Has there been any change in the day of departure?”
“None.”
“So it is just a few more days.”
“Yes,” Torlyri said.
“What shall we do?”
She wanted to look away, but she kept her eyes steadily on him. “What do you want to do, Trei Husathirn?”
“You know what I want. To come with you.”
“How could you?”
“Yes,” he said. “How could I? What do I know of your ways, your gods, your language, your anything? All I know of your people is you. I would never fit in.”
“In time you might,” she said.
“Do you think so?”
Now she did look away.
“No,” she told him, barely able to make the single word emerge from her lips.
“So I conclude, after asking myself the question a thousand times. I have no place with Koshmar’s tribe. I would always be a stranger. An enemy, even.”
“Surely not an enemy!”
“An enemy, to Koshmar, and to others, I think.” Suddenly he crushed the glowberry cluster in his hand and threw it to the floor. In the darkness Torlyri felt unexpected fear of him. What did he have in mind? To kill them both, out of thwarted love? But all he did was take her hands in his and draw her close again, and hold her in a tight embrace. Then he said, in a hollow, distant voice, “And also I would have to leave my helmet-brothers, my chieftain, my gods. I would have to leave Nakhaba!” He was shivering. “I would leave everything. I would no longer know myself. I would be lost.”
Her hand stroked his ear, his cheek, the bare scarred place along his shoulder. By some strand of fugitive light she saw his face, and a track of tears glistening on it. She thought that the sight would make her own tears flow, but no, no, she had no tears at all any longer.
“What shall we do?” he asked again.
Torlyri caught hold of his hand and pressed it to her breast. “Here. Lie down with me. On the floor, in front of all these preposterous machines. That is what we will do. Lie down. Here, Trei Husathirn. With me. With me.”
Morning had come. Hresh looked down lovingly at Taniane, who lay sleeping deeply, exhausted by their night’s foraging. Quietly he went from their room into the open. All was still. There was a rich heavy sweetness in the air, as if some night-blooming flower had opened just a little while before.
It had been a night of wonder. The last barriers to the departure from Vengiboneeza had fallen. The little ball of golden-bronze metal ensured that.
Now Hresh held in one hand a different ball, the silvery sphere that they had found some nights earlier. He had not managed to find time before this to examine it properly, but in this misty dawn, after a night without sleep, a night when sleep had been unthinkable, a night of heroic endeavor, the small sphere weighed profoundly upon his soul. It seemed to be calling to him. He looked around, but no one was in sight. The settlement still slept, Hresh hid himself away in a crevice between two mighty alabaster statues of sapphire-eyes who had lost their heads and touched the stud that activated the sphere.
For a moment nothing happened. Had he burned the sphere out, that one time that he had used it? Or perhaps he had not pressed the stud hard enough just now. He cupped it in his palm, wondering. Then there came from it that sharp high sound that it had made before, and pulses of cool green light shot from it again.
Hastily he put his eye to its tiny viewing hole, and the Great World once again was made visible to him.
This time there was music as well as vision. Out of nowhere came a slow, heavy melody, three strands wound one about another, one that was of a dull gray tonality, one that reached his soul in the hue of deep blue, and the third a hard, aggressive orange. The music had the character of a dirge. Hresh understood that it was music fit to signify the last days of the Great World.
Through that tiny hole Hresh found that he had access to a vast and sweeping panorama of the city.
All Vengiboneeza was displayed to him in its final hours. It was a fearful sight.
The sky over the city is black, and terrible black winds sweep through it, creating patterns of turbulence that are black on black. A shroud of dust chokes the air. Feeble beams of sunlight dance erratically through it, falling weakly to the ground rather than striking it. A faint rime of frost is beginning to form on the tips of plants, on the edges of ponds, on windows, on the air itself.
A death-star has lately fallen, Hresh knows. One of the first ones, or even the very first.
With an impact that made all the world shudder, the death-star has plummeted to earth somewhere close by Vengiboneeza — or perhaps not there, perhaps on the other side of the world altogether — and a great black cloud of debris has risen higher than the highest mountains. The air is dense with it. All the sun’s warmth is cut off. The only light that breaks through is a pale wintry gleam. The world is beginning to freeze.
This is only the beginning. One by one the death-stars will fall, every fifty years, every five hundred, who knows how often, and each one will bring new calamity over the interminable length of the Long Winter to come.
But for the Great World the first impact will be the fatal one. The sapphire-eyes and the vegetals and the sea-lords and the rest inhabit a world where the air is mild and gentle and winter never comes. Winter is only a faint memory out of prehistoric antiquity, a mere ancestral dream. And now winter returns; and of the Six Peoples only the hjjk-folk and the mechanicals will be capable of surviving it without special protection, though the mechanicals will choose, Hresh cannot understand why, to let themselves perish.
For the Great World it is the time of last times.
A bitter wind blows. A few swirling white flakes dance in the air. Already the new cold has brought frightened beasts sweeping in a wild migration toward the shelter that Vengiboneeza affords. Hresh sees them everywhere, hooves and horns and tendrils and fangs, a horde of shining terrified eyes and gaping mouths and sweat-flecked jaws.
The harsh winds are a mighty drum overhead, beating out the solemn rhythm that commands the animals to seek refuge here. Under the force of that horrific gale they run on and on and on. They swarm in the streets of the city, racing to and fro as if frantic activity by itself will keep them warm enough to live. The wondrous white villas of Vengiboneeza are beset. Wherever the vision lets Hresh look, animals of a thousand kinds climb walls, slither across thresholds, burrow into bed-chambers. Great snuffling herds of massive quadrupeds plunge and stampede in the boulevards. The raucous cries of the four-legged invaders cruelly punctuate the serene music that streams from the silvery sphere.
And yet, and yet, and yet—
The sapphire-eyes—
Hresh sees them going steadily about their business in the midst of the madness. The huge crocodilians are calm, terribly calm. It is as though nothing more serious than a light summer rainstorm has begun to fall.
All about them, fear-maddened creatures of the wilds boil and writhe and leap and prance. And calmly, calmly, never betraying the slightest sense of alarm or dismay, the sapphire-eyes pack away their treasures, dictate instructions for their care, perform their regular obeisances to the gods who even now are sending doom.