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!”
More and more Yaldiv began to chant together: “Speak! Tell us the Great One’s will! Speak!” This went on until the warrior with the glowing patterns on its shell, the Arch-votary, lifted its own forelegs.
The assemblage swiftly became quiet.
“All praise to the One!” the Arch-votary said.
“All praise to the One, the Great One, the King, the Lord of All, the Master of Creation!” said all the gathered Yaldiv together. They all bowed to the swollen mass on the dais. It annoyed Dairine, but she bowed, too, as Ronan and Kit and everyone else was doing.
“Let the sacred story be told!” said the Arch-votary.
“Let it be told,” the immense crowd whispered in awe.
“In the beginning was the One,” said the Arch-votary. “And all things were well. But then, from outside, came Another. That Other said to the One, ‘Your way is wrong, and this other way is right; bow down to me and admit your wrongness!’”
“Down with the Other! Death to the Other!” the crowd answered.
“And the One rose up and said, ‘Evil Other, old shadow-ghost that haunts the ancient darkness, you have no right to question my creation or my will! I will never bow down to you.’”
“Never!” the crowd cried. “The One is all! These are in the One, and no Other!”
“And the Other spoke in pride, saying, ‘If you will even now bow down and admit your wrongness, you shall be forgiven!’ And the One spurned this craven word. Then the Other spoke in threat, saying, ‘If you do not bow, you shall be punished and driven out!’”
“The One must not bow! The Other is evil, the Other is outside!” chanted the crowd.
“But the Other could not frighten the One, or move It from Its purpose!” said the Arch-votary. “And when it realized this, the Other came with its minions and made everlasting war on the One. But it could not prevail. And while these are Its faithful servants, the evil Other can never prevail, not until worlds’ end and beyond!”
“Praise to the One! We will always be loyal! We will fight the Other until the ends of the worlds!” cried the crowd, and bowed down before the King.
Dairine kept doing what everyone else was doing. But she was both infuriated and disgusted. It takes the truth and twists It around to serve Its own purposes. But It doesn’t take any more of the truth than It absolutely has to … because truth’s essentially good, and It hates it for that.
“Now the One in our King gives commands for the next stage in the new war against the Other’s minions in our world,” said the Arch-votary. “Tomorrow a great force of warriors will be sent to intercept marauding warriors who are coming to attack our hive and devour us and our children. By bringing them the gift of death, we will turn their evil to good. By ending their miserable lives, we bring them peace, inside us, inside the King.”
“Glory to the great King! Glory to the One in the King!” the crowd shouted.
“The One in our King commands that we allow the attackers to cross the Great Ravine,” the Arch-votary said. “When enough of them arrive on our side, we will attack and destroy them. Their flesh will feed our King, and be the beginning of thousands of new children. Those children will grow into mighty warriors and fertile handmaidens, who will labor until their breath fails them for the destruction of the Other!”
“Let the Other be destroyed forever!” the crowd cried in anger and joy. “Death to the enemy of the One!”
“Go now and prepare the Other’s death,” said the Arch-votary, “and the glory of the One!”
“We go for the One’s glory!” cried the assembled masses.
The warriors stepped away from the dais, leaving that huge bloated shape lying there tended unendingly by its handmaidens. The assembled Yaldiv began streaming out the many entrances to the heart of the hive.
So there you have it, Dairine thought. Not just a declaration of war on the other hive, but on all the other “Others” in the universe, everything that’s not the Lone Power’s … or the Lone Power Itself.
What now? she heard Filif say to Kit.
We follow everybody out, I guess, Kit said. Ponch, did you scent anything we’re looking for while they were all in here?
I got something, Ponch said. The scent was familiar. He sounded uncertain, though.
Which tunnel did they go out?
I think—Ponch sniffed the air for a moment—I think that one. Ponch indicated one of about ten tunnels off to their right. I’ll be more certain when I get closer to it.
Okay … let’s go.
As the crowd in front of them lessened, the wizards started heading in the direction of that tunnel: first Kit, with Ponch close behind him, then Ronan, Filif, and Roshaun and, bringing up the rear, Dairine.
So now what? Ronan said.
Well, Kit said, we can spend some more time looking around here. If Spot’s saving data to help us find what we’re looking for, we should get some more.
You won’t need that much more, Ponch said. I should be able to bring you to where we can find what we’re after.
Assuming, Filif said, that the one Ponch is tracking is located in a place warriors are allowed to go.
So far, that’s been everywhere, Kit said. But his tone of thought suddenly sounded strained. Dairine looked ahead to see what the problem was.
Until now, there’d been only intermittent traffic through the doorway for which they’d been heading. Now, though, there was no traffic there at all. That doorway was completely blocked by warriors with the same kind of markings that the Arch-votary had worn. And between the group of wizards and the door, the Arch-votary itself stood and waited, watching them.
Suggestions? Roshaun said.
Just play it cool, Kit said.
They walked in line up to the Arch-votary. Kit stopped. Dairine, watching him, broke out in a sweat. The Arch-votary lifted those huge claws, but the gesture was not immediately threatening. It was more like the gesture it had used when calling the assembly to order. “This one is commanded to bring these before the King,” the Arch-votary said.
Oh, God, it knows! Dairine thought, and sweated harder. Kit merely said, “These obey the command.”
The Arch-votary led them across the rapidly clearing hall toward the dais. Dairine was having trouble looking at it steadily. The closer she got, the more she felt that vast glowing mass on top of it was somehow sucking her toward it—sucking her attention into it, maybe even sucking out her will. But then the thought occurred to her that the sensation might have something to do with the mochteroof. And I’m still me in here, she told herself fiercely. No refugee from a dime-store ant farm is going to make me forget that!
The feeling of ebbing will backed down a little bit, but as they got closer, Dairine found she had to expend more effort to stave it off. If we don’t have to be here too long, I’ll be okay. But if it knows what we are—
“The warriors are brought to you according to your command, Great One,” said the Arch-votary.
Dairine watched Kit to see what he would do. He bowed, as the Arch-votary had done, and Dairine and all the others followed suit.
For a long moment, no one said anything. Then the King spoke.
“You are minions of the Other,” he said.
There was something about the voice that Dairine instantly found repulsive. The voice was very slow and rich, very deep; and somehow it hardly sounded conscious—as if it was not a living thing but some kind of recording, like the kind of thing you might associate with a very high-end in-car GPS system.
“We are servants of the One,” Kit said.
Inside the mochteroof, even through her nerves, Dairine smiled at the steady sound of Kit’s voice. He was fighting to keep his anxiety out of it, and it was working.
“Your appearan
ce is that of servants of the Great One,” the King said. “You have the scent of Yaldiv, and the look of Yaldiv. But your souls betray you. They smell of the Other.”
Dairine broke out in a sweat again, and glanced ever so briefly in Roshaun’s direction. Kit said nothing, just met what he could see of those tiny, empty black eyes.
“What is the Great One’s will with these?” the Arch-votary said.
Here it comes, Dairine thought silently to Spot. Get something ready. Slowly, inside the mochteroof, she reached sideways into her otherspace pocket and felt around for one of the more deadly wizardries she had at hand.
Then, in the silence, the King laughed.
Dairine actually had to suppress the desire to retch, for the sound was truly revolting. It was full of the casual amusement of someone who has you completely in his power, and can do anything he likes with you. “Let them go about my business as they have done,” the King said. “They have no power here.”
Dairine’s eyes went wide.
The laughter began again, sounding even more self-assured and unconcerned. “Many other such minions are traveling among the worlds in these days,” said the King. “They seek to undo the great gift of the greatest and final Death. They cannot undo it. Now that Death is coming, inescapable, for them all.” The King chuckled as if at a particularly nasty joke. “They have no power to stop it—least of all here, where my strength is most strong.”
The Arch-votary, bowing, looked completely puzzled by all this. “To what labor shall they be put, Great One?” it said.
“They labor already,” said the King, his voice lazily, wickedly amused. “They labor to no purpose. And when their labor comes to an end, and the gift of Death comes to them all—very soon now—they will know that all their work, from the first to the last, has been in vain.”
It laughed again. Dairine gritted her teeth. “Let them go, Arch-votary. Whatever they do here, they will be doing my business. And it will amuse me to watch them doing it.”
The Arch-votary bowed down. Much against her will, Dairine bowed along with Kit and Roshaun and the others. “The Great One bids you go about Its business,” the Arch-votary said, and then turned away and ignored them.
Kit glanced at Ronan; then the two of them turned away from the dais and started to make their way across the vast hall. The others followed, and Dairine came last of all, heartily wishing she had an excuse to blow King Bug up. It’d mess everything up, of course. Our chances of doing what we came here to do would become about zero. But, boy, it’d be so much fun.
None of the others said a word as they made their way across the hall. As they approached the tunnel for which they’d originally been heading, the warriors who had been standing guard over it moved away.
Silently the wizards headed into the tunnel. Dairine was alert for whatever trap might be on the far side, but there was none. As Kit led them around a curve into the next tunnel, lined with many more tunnel exits and a number of chambers, all Dairine saw before them was the normal steady traffic of Yaldiv, going and coming about the Great One’s business.
We should find somewhere quiet, Kit said at last, get out of here, and figure out what to do next.
No argument, Ronan said. To Dairine’s ear they both sounded as if they’d been in a fight that they felt they’d lost, and couldn’t figure out why.
Ahead, Dairine saw Kit turn a corner into another tunnel. Behind him, Ponch paused, looking back, then went after Kit.
And then something unexpected happened to Dairine, something as literally shocking as when she’d brushed up against an exposed wire in the Christmas tree lights the year before last. One of the chambers they passed had a long line of Yaldiv waiting outside, and another line going out. More of these handmaidens, Dairine thought, glancing in as they passed. Getting food for King Bug. She was beginning to recognize the slender look of the handmaidens, the smaller foreclaws. One handmaiden in the incoming line, as Dairine looked in, turned to glance out at the Yaldiv “warriors” passing in the corridor.
As she met that Yaldiv’s eyes, a jolt went straight through Dairine like that shock from the Christmas lights. She knew those eyes. On the mobiles’ world, she had looked out through them. And she saw herself looking out of them now.
Hastily Dairine glanced away. But it was too late; she had seen the Yaldiv’s reaction. It was one of recognition… and then alarm. Those eyes had not seen the mochteroof, the Yaldiv shape. They had seen what lay under it. They’d seen Dairine.
In front of her, Roshaun felt Dairine’s shock. What is it? What’s the matter?
Don’t stop. We’re in trouble. Just keep going!
They headed down the tunnel at the same steady pace. Dairine reached into her otherspace pocket and got out the wizardry she’d been prepared to use earlier to give them time to escape. She was hoping even now that she wouldn’t have to use it. Time-stops were expensive in terms of energy, even in the present circumstances. But I’ll use it if I have to, she thought. The spell burned cold and ready in her hand, a rigid lattice of frozen temporal variables, all set to let go. Every moment she expected the shout from behind: “The Other! The minions of the Other are here! After them! Kill them!”
But the shout never came. Everything around them went on exactly as it had. Dairine hugged Spot to her and kept walking, too, terrified, and moment by moment increasingly confused. She saw me. Why isn’t anything happening?
Greatly daring, Dairine glanced behind her. The lines were still there, Yaldiv going in, Yaldiv going out. And in the doorway, a single Yaldiv, looking after them—
Dairine looked away before she could meet those eyes again. All the same, they were looking at her. The Yaldiv watched them go, silent, still. Then it vanished again.
Dairine hurried after the others, eager to get someplace where they could talk. Things were going terribly wrong…
…but possibly, just possibly, in the right kind of way.
***
Nita appeared among the trees at the far end of her backyard. For a long moment she just stood there, getting her breath. It wasn’t that the transit from the Crossings put you through much in the way of physical difficulties. It was just that, now that she was here, she was almost afraid to go into the house and see what she would find.
She took a deep breath and walked out from among the trees. Nita fished around in the pockets of her vest to find her house keys, but as she got close enough to the backyard gate to see the driveway, she saw her dad’s car there. The sight both reassured and scared her. If he was home before, why wasn’t he answering the phone?
She ran up the steps to the back door, got her keys out, and bumped the screen door aside with one hip to keep it open while she unlocked the inside door. “Dad?” she said, walking into the kitchen. It was clean; no one had eaten any meals here recently. “Daddy?”
She went into the dining room. The table was clean; it was almost as if no one had been here for a while.
Nita turned her head, hearing the TV in the living room. “Daddy?” she said, going in. The living room was tidy; the newspapers, usually left in a casual heap, were stacked neatly by her dad’s easy chair.
“—Tension continues to build in the Caucasus as the government of Ossetia maintains its hard-line stance against the paramilitary group that claims to have stolen between ten and twelve kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium,” the TV said. Nita saw several different shots of men in military uniforms rushing around— Some kind of SWAT team, she thought. “—rumors of a nuclear briefcase weapon, and has threatened to sell the material to terrorist organizations in the area—”
Nita swallowed, and picked up the remote to change channels. But even on the nonnews channels, she kept running into screens that said NEWS BULLETIN or SPECIAL REPORT. Even the main cartoon channel had a news crawl running along the bottom of its screen. Are the network people crazy? Nita thought, annoyed. Don’t they realize how scared little kids are going to get when they see that? Do they think that just
because they watch cartoons, they can’t read? She changed the channel again, finding herself looking at another BULLETIN screen. What the heck’s going on around here?
But she knew. It was the local effect of the Pullulus, which Tom and Carl had predicted: people being pushed further and further away from one another. She threw the remote down on the hassock by her dad’s chair. “Daddy?”
And then Nita jumped nearly out of her skin, because he was right behind her; she’d been so preoccupied with the TV that she hadn’t even heard him. She grabbed her dad and hugged him, hard, and said, “What were you doing there?”
“I live here,” her dad said. “This is my house. And yours, when you have time to get home to it.” He hugged her back, looking over her shoulder. “I didn’t expect you to come home just to watch TV, though.”
“I didn’t,” Nita said. “Daddy, where were you? I was worried sick! I tried to call you, and I couldn’t reach you on the cell phone, and you weren’t in the shop, and you weren’t at home—” She was almost babbling, and she didn’t care. “I started thinking maybe you’d been in an accident—or, or—”
Her dad kissed Nita on the forehead and hugged her harder. “What is it they say,” he said, “about living long enough to worry your children? Guess I’ve done at least that.” He held her away from him. “I had to be out of the shop this afternoon,” he said. “I had to take Mike to the hospital.”
Nita stared at him. “What’s the matter with Mike?”
Her dad laughed a little, though the sound was rueful. “He had an allergic reaction to some lilies,” he said. “He swelled up in the most incredible hives. He couldn’t see to work, or even get himself to the hospital; I had to drive him.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah, they pumped him full of antihistamines and cortisone,” her dad said. “He’ll be all right in a couple of days. Meantime, I have to handle the shop by myself and make the deliveries, so the place’ll be closed while I’m gone. It’s no big deal.”