"Not as Gathenavalona," she begged. "Give me a new name, and a new destiny."
Math Valone's three mouths issued a quiet harmony of resignation, grief, and gladness. He reached out with one palp-cluster and traced the line of one of her jaws, an almost shocking gesture of intimacy between a grown male and a grown female.
"You will have a new name and a new destiny," he said. "Do you know what I feared? Many a Gathena will kill herself, or her charge, in the time of anointing or afterward. As always, you make me proud."
She gestured gratitude and an inability to speak.
He waved her past. "Go then. Keep your promise to her. When you emerge from the nest, I will have a new name for you, a new task."
Gathenavalona passed by him and climbed into the nest.
New Valona's bulk nearly filled the vast Mother's Nest. She had grown so much after that night of the first anointing.
Her limbs had thickened and grown; her body was more massive, especially her neck with the enormous burden of her egg-sac. Her internal organs had swelled to support her greater size-most of them, anyway. She crawled along lengthwise, of course: she was too enormous to stand on her hind legs and ped-clusters. All her palp-clusters had become heavy, padlike pedclusters. She had regrown the quadrilimbs that all Khroi are second-born with; they were as massive as her other legs.
Valona's eyes fell on her old nurse, standing at the entrance to the nest. Gathenavalona looked in vain for any glint of recognition in those eyes. The transformation wrought by the royal jelly magnified the body many times, but the enormous ovaries in a Mother's abdomen seemed to crowd out most of the room for the brain. Mature Khroi mothers never spoke, and it was hard to say what they understood.
Valona caught sight of a trough of food at the base of her nest. She moved toward it, grunting with excitement.
Gathenavalona thought of her promise to Dhyrvalona. She thought of Math Valone's promise: a new name and a new destiny.
She kept her promise. As young Valona ate to sustain her vast bulk, her old nurse told her how the story ended.
XVI
SPEARS OF WINTER RAIN
WORDS ALSO, AND THOUGHT AS RAPID AS AIR, HE FASHIONS TO HIS GOOD USE; STATECRAFT IS HIS, AND HIS THE SKILL THAT DEFLECTS THE ARROWS OF SNOW, THE SPEARS OF WINTER RAIN: FROM EVERY WIND HE HAS MADE HIMSELF SECUREFROM ALL BUT ONE: IN THE LATE WIND OF DEATH HE CANNOT STAND.
As the ice storm raged about him, the crooked man stood in a cleft of the mountains watching another crooked man walk a twisting path through the shattered icy stones of the rockslide to the west. He saw the man fall among the ice-glazed stones, saw him struggle to his feet again, saw him continue his slow meandering way eastward.
"A plodder," muttered Merlin, and shook his head. It was the only way Morlock would ever reach anything, the older Ambrosius decided: by finding out where it was and walking straight toward it, literally or metaphorically. Well, it was a way to get somewhere. Unfortunately, it left you open to observation and attack by your enemies, a fact Morlock had never learned, apparently.
Merlin shook his head and sighed. This had been a long hard struggle, and it was nearly over. In a way, he would miss it, he decided. That was why he was withholding his final weapon. But that was not the only reason.
Merlin grimly noted that Morlock was not carrying his backpack. He had hidden it somewhere before coming to the confrontation he anticipated between himself and his father. Merlin's map of the future had predicted this, and that was why he planned to avoid any such confrontation.
They were high in the mountains, well above the treeline on the north face of the Blackthorns. Morlock, of course, was approaching from the west. He knew where Merlin was, because Merlin was necessarily near the core-self of Nimue, and Nimue's shell and impulse-cloud together were able to tell where her final segment lay. They had told Morlock, and he proceeded to walk directly toward his goal, along the path Merlin had foreseen.
Several days earlier, Merlin had deliberately started several avalanches on the slopes above Morlock's future route, and halted them with a network of force-wefts. He had only been waiting until Morlock was directly in their path to loose the wefts. And now Morlock was, and if he did not loose them soon there was some chance that Morlock would be able to make his way out of the danger zone before the avalanche caught him.
Merlin took one last look at his only living son, then sighed. He took a rune-slate from a pocket in his left sleeve, and he broke it with his fingers. It was bound-in-state to the force wefts; once it was broken, they were no more.
The avalanche started. First there was a low rumble, and the man far below, antlike in his distance and his vulnerability, began to run. Of course, Morlock had been raised among mountains and he knew that sound well. The torrent of snow and ice and stone rolled down toward him like a tidal wave, took him, buried him, rolled onward until it exhausted itself on the slopes below. Soon enough the slide was quiet and the icy rain was glazing the fresh surface of snow. If Morlock hadn't had his neck broken or his body crushed in the avalanche, it was only a matter of time until he smothered. The long struggle between father and son was over.
Merlin sighed again. Unlike Morlock, he was an introspective man, and he understood how complex his own motives were. If Morlock had succeeded in reuniting Nimue's segments and negating the antideath spell, it would have been terrible; he would have been furious at his defeat and the loss of his beloved wife. But it would have been a relief, too: a relief to be free from the endless struggle against death. Death was an enemy even more plodding and relentless than Morlock, even harder to defeat. Now he would have to carry on that fight.
"And so I will," he decided. "I'll win, too," he added, because there was no penalty for bravado, at least when no one was listening.
"Anyway," he said to himself, "now I am the master of all makers again. By default." He scowled. Well, he reflected, in any fight the last man standing is the winner.
Merlin pulled his cowl over his head and stepped out of the cleft's shelter into the bright bitter rain. His cloak and his shoes did not get wet (a man does not reach the second half of his second millennium without being able to avoid these inconveniences), but still from time to time the wind turned and a dash of freezing rain stung his face. It was irritating, but he bore it. He had just won a victory, a great victory. No doubt he would feel the full impact of it presently.
Now it was his turn to meander across the treacherous ground he had used to kill his son. There was no reason to hurry, so he did not. He was careful to avoid using the sight-for one thing, he needed all his material senses to keep himself from Morlock's icy fate; for another he could not risk a confrontation with Nimue. It was possible that he might defeat her, in her divided state, but it would be difficult to defeat her and Morlock in tandem, and something told him that Morlock, though doomed, was not dead yet. In fact, as he passed by the western edge of the avalanche-field, his insight told him there was someone in visionary withdrawal. Morlock, no doubt: it was shrewd to go into withdrawal, reducing the body's needs almost to nothing, waiting for help to come. But there was no one to come rescue him; Morlock would die there of cold, if nothing else.
Merlin scowled again and turned away. It occurred to him that for most people, for the short-lived people of a day (like that Naeli woman, or Nimue herself, really), children were the chief weapon in the struggle against death. He had been forced to sacrifice one of his children to win a brief respite in his struggle against death-not even a real victory, just a respite. Perhaps death might not be merely a plodder, might be an extremely subtle antagonist who could sneak through your windows even as you were locking your door. Never mind. Merlin would not stop fighting because he did not know how to stop. If Morlock had chosen to fight beside him instead of against him, it would have been different; they might even have forced death to retreat a step or two. That would have been a famous victory.