Three guesses who that is, Dairine said silently.
No need to guess, Ronan said. Dairine couldn’t see much of his expression, but the tone of his thought was more than usually angry, even for Ronan.
It’s all too familiar. It was the Champion’s thought this time, and though it, too, was angry, there was something challenging about the emotion. All too often I’ve seen this kind of thing, in other shapes and styles. The places where a species’ Choice has gone wrong and we’ve lost the fight.
But you keep coming back, Kit said as they kept walking deeper into the spire.
Someone has to, said the Champion. Someone has to go down to the souls in prison, down in the dark, and try to bring them the fire—even just a spark of it, just enough to light a candle and find the door. No matter how many times they’ve rejected it, no matter how many times It catches you sneaking in and chucks you out, we have to keep trying—
Through Ponch’s mochteroof, Dairine could see his head suddenly go up. Do you smell that? he said.
Dairine sniffed. It wasn’t so much a smell he was describing but a change in the air, and the Yaldiv senses in the mochteroof immediately knew what it meant. The guards have sealed up the door-tunnels for the night, she said. Unless we gate out, we’re stuck in here.
That’s no problem, Filif said. Even in here we should be able to find somewhere private long enough to gate.
But then something else started to happen. The workers and warriors, and the more slender Yaldiv whom Dairine had also started to spot in the tunnels, now all paused where they were. After a second, they all began to head in the same direction, deeper into the city.
Kit and Ronan and Filif and Dairine and Roshaun all looked at one another. When in Rome, Ronan said.
They turned and followed the others. The tunnels, like the paths out in the forest, widened as they went in deeper. Soon the group was hemmed in by other Yaldiv, pressing against them, starting to hum a chorus of sounds deeper and more rhythmic than the ones heard outside. Carried along by the wave of Yaldiv, the wizards were swept into higher-ceilinged spaces, wider hallways and colonnades—and finally through a tunnel opening into the biggest space of all.
It’s like one of those skyscraper hotel atriums, Dairine thought. The hollow space speared upward into what was probably the highest reaches of the city-hive. In the vast open space, thousands of Yaldiv were already crowded together, and still more were crowding in.
Kit plainly didn’t mean to be caught in the middle of them all, which was an idea Dairine approved of. He and Ronan started pushing and forcing their way closer to one of the farther walls of the great space. The other Yaldiv, workers mostly, let them pass. Shortly they found themselves close to the wall across from the tunnel by which they’d entered. The space was somewhat bowl-like, like their cavern. By being near the wall, they were slightly higher than most of the other Yaldiv. They turned to look out across the tremendous gathering … and saw what they had not been able to see before because of the crush and press of Yaldiv bodies.
The space was shaped more like an ellipse than anything else. At what would have been the farthest focus of the ellipse, on a dais maybe a hundred feet in diameter, lay a huge and swollen form, glowing with heat. Dairine instantly knew what it was from her earlier look at the species précis in Spot. It wasn’t a Queen; it was a King.
The original carapace of a Yaldiv body was now almost the smallest thing about it. The organic structures inside that carapace had long outgrown it, burst out of it, pushed it up and away; the whole original sloughed-off body, now split in two, clung to the top of the much-enlarged thorax like a little shriveled pair of wings. Down near the floor of the dais, the head of the King was almost invisible in the shadow of its vast bulk. The mirror-shade eyes were two tiny dots nearly lost in the upswelling of the vast, puffy body.
Near the head, on each side of it, stood a line of slender Yaldiv, smaller and lighter than the warriors. Handmaidens, Dairine thought, watching them come and go. She’d had a chance to check Spot earlier for some of the details on Yaldiv physiology, and immediately thereafter she’d really wished she hadn’t. These handmaidens, though, weren’t doing any of the things that had grossed her out. They were bowing before the head, feeding it, then moving away again. But Dairine found that this grossed her out differently—the mindless, endless munching of the mouth-mandibles as the handmaidens put food into it, bowed, moved away. She gulped and quickly turned her attention elsewhere.
It was hard. This whole gigantic space seemed to direct one’s eye back to the swollen thing lying at the heart of it, the apparition before which, as if before some indolent living idol, the whole mighty congregation of Yaldiv lay bowed down in abject worship. And of course I’m anthropomorphizing, Dairine thought. It’s not like your toenails or your spleen worship the rest of you. These guys don’t even see themselves as separate from the King. But the air was thick with feelings, and she was having trouble keeping her own reactions in order.
This was a problem that recently had been getting worse for her. Is this Roshaun’s fault somehow? Dairine wondered. Or something to do with Spot? Whatever the cause, the feeling of sheer evil that flowed off the King, and was reflected back to it by its worshippers, was horrifying to Dairine, and familiar. She’d felt it before, on the mobiles’ world, during her Ordeal. This was the sentiment behind the terrible gloating laughter she had kept hearing back then—the amusement of the Lone Power, darkly entertained by the pitiful struggles of mortal life in the universe in which It went from door to door selling Its invention, Death, to the unwary. But here there was something different about the silent laughter. There was a sense of smugness. There’s nothing more to do here, It seemed to be saying. Everything’s just the way I want it. Now all there is to do with eternity is take it easy and enjoy what I’ve accomplished.
It’s not the whole Lone Power at all, Dairine thought. It’s an avatar, like all the others. Maybe a more aware one. But, otherwise, it may not have a lot of autonomy.
A warrior with strange glowing patterns laid out on its carapace came forward and was joined by several others. It abased itself before the dais, along with its compatriots. The King never gave it even a glance, as far as Dairine could tell. Though whether it can move at all is the next question, she thought.
The crowd began slowly to press toward the dais. “The day is done! Let the Arch-votary speak!” a Yaldiv said, lifting up its forelegs. Others began to chime in: “Let the Arch-votary tell us the Great One’s will for tomorrow!”