And when they had all laughed until they had no more tears left to shed, the wind carried the laughter to the ends of the Dark Country, and it seemed to them that all the pocket universe laughed with them.

  Of all this Windstriker perceived nothing. But he sensed that the strangers were experiencing something beyond his perception … once he touched his daughter’s face. An electric warmth leapt from it; when he stroked her features he knew that she was beyond this kind of touching, that she was in the grip of some great joy that he would never fathom.

  And so he waited.

  And after a very long while, when their dreamvision had subsided, he asked his daughter to bring him the leader, the one she had named Man-who-sits-in-judgment-over-worlds.

  They stood close to each other, Darktouch interpreting the words.

  He signed, Among our people we give our children no names, not until they have gone on a great dreamquest and experienced a true vision of what their name must be. I have not touched your vision; how can l? But I have touched your joy. And through this touching, the shadow of your vision has fallen on me. Know, then, what I know. There is a dreamquest beyond the dreamquest of the adolescents. There is a true name truer than the true name that a child-before-Naming uncovers. And though you have peeled away another layer of truth, your search will never end. That is what it means to be human. And you— for all your superhuman powers—you are as human as I.

  Man-who-sits-in-judgment-over-worlds opened his mouth and let forth the windshapes with which his people communicated; faintly Windstriker smelled the breath and felt the curious puffing of the stranger’s words. And Darktouch translated: Yes. Once I believed that I was greater than a man. But that’s over now. Windstriker … remember the pact.

  Yes. The pact.

  Windstriker turned away; he wanted to seek out a softer part of the Windbringer on which to rest. But before he could do so he felt a strong hand on his arm. It was a boy’s grip: firm, full of life. And the boy signed to him, in crude strokes that told the words but did not embroider them with twists of emotion: Goodbye, Windstriker, Touch-father.

  Gently he freed himself from the boy’s grasp. The brain-stuff shook a little, and he knew that someone had come to fetch the strangers away in those fleet airskiffs that had no smell. He would be alone forever now. But for a few more sleeps, before his life ebbed away and his mind dissolved into the Windbringer’s like a vapor-droplet into the Sunless Sound, he would still be fully a man, feeling, yearning, striving, wringing hope from the big darkness.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE CURSE

  “Vara, oh Vara.”

  “Daavye.”

  “Again, again, one final time, before—”

  “No. All things end. Especially love, Daavye. I know what yon must do. I am content. I rejoice, Ton Davaryush. And now I will call up the dawn for you.”

  Light stirred in the canopy of gray. Silveredged the clouds. Stole over the sky.

  The throne room.

  The throne: hard basalt scooped from the heart of the Dark Country, softened with a quilt of jangyll feathers.

  The sky: gray turning to gray-blue, gray-blue to ultra-marine, ultramarine blushing to pink—the colors of shimmercloaks.

  Davaryush rose from a recess of the floor, whore they had made love for the last time. He looked at his empty throne.

  He said, “Before they come, Vara … I want you to know…”

  “It’s all right. You don’t have to tell me anything.” And she smiled at him, understanding his grief and joy. She was beautiful in the cold light: cloaked in a drape of silvery sable that matched her unbrushed hair. She said, “I was the first to land on Uran s’Varek, twenty millennia ago. I was the first to see the trillion-pearled sky of the Inquestral homeworld .. . the world we usurped. It was a playground for us; a world of toys: healing toys, toys that transported us across the Galaxy, killing toys. We were children then, and we knew we could make a utopia out of the Dispersal of Man. We aren’t children anymore. I know you mean to kill me.”

  “Vara—” But he did not deny it.

  “Did you know, Daavye, that your hair has turned quite white?”

  “Strange.”

  “Beautiful ”

  He took another step towards his throne.

  Then, turning to her, he burst out in anguish: “Vara, we are cursed, we Inquestors. Look at the dreams we had. Wiping it all out! Cleansing the Dispersal of the evil we ourselves spawned! Starting it over! I rushed like an eager child into the Dark Country, hoping that the vision I saw would help me save the universe … and when I reached Windstriker and I saw the light on the sound, how many more deaths had I caused? The ghost people. The blind people. The childsoldiers. And the delphinoid who seemed to threaten us. There was blood in my vision, blood shed by me.

  “Our hands are tainted, we who have killed and killed again in compassion’s name! Don’t you see, Vara? We plotted with the very weapons we loathed: makrúgh, the soldiers, the power satellites. We are not the ones who will bring about the fall of the Inquest. But there will come a fall, and soon … I promise you. In the Dark Country, for the first time, I saw how the fall will come about.

  “But first I will buy time, Vara.”

  “Yes.”

  “Summon the children. Today I give my final commands as Inquestor and Kingling. Today I mount the throne of the multimillennia for the last time.”

  As he spoke he struggled up the steps. He had never felt old before, but today he had to grip the railings of the steps to hold himself erect.

  “The children.”

  “I have sent for them; they are tired, and need to be roused.”

  “I love you, Varuneh.”

  The Inquestor sat down. In that moment he was no longer Daavye but Ton Davaryush z Galléndaran K’Ning, Inquestor and Kingling, Hunter of Utopias, the mouthpiece of the High Inquest itself. As he did so, the two children materialized on a displacement plate in the center of the great hall.

  He looks like Death himself, Kelver thought, wondering at the old man who sat in the black throne, almost drowning in the swirling splendor of his shimmercloak. The Lady Varuneh sat at his feet.

  He was sleepy still: he had been roused from a fever-trance and summoned into the presence. Darktouch was beside him. In his dreams he had stood again on the back of the Windbringer, with the light raging all around him. He knew that whatever he did from now on would be colored by the memory of it.

  “Children,” Davaryush said, “come to me.” The voice was feeble.

  He and Darktouch approached the throne. Together they knelt. “Hokh’Ton,” he whispered. For this was the multi-millennial throne, and its words were the words of the High Inquest, infallible and unchallengeable.

  “First,” Davaryush said (Kelver strained to hear him) “the thinkhives of healing have spoken to me. They tell me that the child that we brought out of the Dark Country can be cured very simply; that he need never lose his sight and his hearing. And so this is how I will wage war on the Inquest: I will command that babies be stolen … healed … returned to the Dark Country. … In time they will come to see the imagesongs, and they will no longer be able to bear what they must do: they will question authority. They will destroy from within … while Windstriker, acting from the heart of the Dark Country, will harass the hunters, making their task more difficult. I will dispatch childsoldiers, loyal only to me, trained in secret. But they will need a leader.”

  Darktouch nodded.

  “But Lord Inquestor—won’t she stay with me?” Kelver said. “The Lady Varuneh said you had grand plans for me—”

  “Silence! It is the High Inquest who speaks to you.” He had not used this tone with Kelver before.

  Kelver waited.

  “And now … I must buy time. I must divert the Inquest’s interest from my real plans. So I will play one final game of makrúgh . The greatest game that I have ever played. And for my first move I shall reveal the identity of the Lady Vanrneh; I shall accuse her of treachery, heresy, disloyalty; and I shall have her executed.”

  Kelver trembled. He couldn’t bear this anymore. The old man was a stranger, the vision had twisted him somehow instead of healing him, he wasn’t the man who had found him in the shipyards and had talked about beginning anew, with love … “You can’t do that to her!” he shouted. “It’s monstrous!”

  “It is all I can do.”

  Then he dismissed the two women; but he motioned Kelver to wait.

  Kelver said: “I don’t know why you’ve done any of this. Maybe you didn’t see the same vision I saw. I trusted you. Are you going to kill me too?”

  “No.” An eerie sadness emanated from the throne, a sense of terrible futility. Kelver was enraged by it. He couldn’t stand it. He wanted to go away, to dash out his own brains against the Skywall, and not have to look at this shell of a man, this man driven mad by a vision.

  “Kevi, Kevi—” the old man said. “I know you are angry. And that is good. Let me tell you why, Kelver.

  “The Inquest falls, Kevi. But what I have commanded— the healing of the babies, the murder of the woman I love —will be but a temporary irritation to the Inquest. You have no idea how vast the Inquest is. Come, sit by me, on my throne.”

  Clumsily the boy obeyed, stumbling on the steep steps. As he mounted them he felt ever heavier, as though the weight of the Inquestorhood were passing to him. When he reached the seat of power he sat down on the farthest comer of the seat, away from Davaryush. He did not look at his eyes; he was afraid of being won over. He would not trust the man, no matter what he said.

  “There. Don’t be afraid. Take off your clingfire and cast it down, at the foot of the throne. There.” Kelver found himself obeying … he was naked now, hunched into a corner of the throne, the cold basalt biting his back.

  The Inquestor did not look at him; he seemed to be talking to himself, almost. As he spoke he drew a crystal egg from a fold of his shimmercloak and gazed into it; his mind seemed far away. “Yes, Kelver. We need … a man who is free, not a man who has been touched by the curse of the Inquest. A man who has seen the light as a child, who already, before he can be indoctrinated with the countless lies of his training, has had inklings of truth. Do you understand, then, why I failed, why Varuneh failed? We are too thoroughly of the Inquest: she created it, I was formed by it.” He held the egg to the meager dawnlight.

  A single star sparkled on the egg’s surface: the crystal shimmered, ruby and sapphire melding in its depths. Reiver could not help looking at it, for all that he was determined to pay no attention to the old man’s ramblings.

  “Why then,” said Davaryush, “am I baiting you like this, spurring you to needless anger, separating you from the one you love? Because—” At that moment he drew Reiver close. He shattered the egg in his fist and sprinkled it onto Reiver’s hair. A viscous liquid, sweet-smelling, trickled onto his face. Reiver did not know what to think, what mad ritual this might be.

  And the Inquestor went on. “I made you angry because I want to be sure that what you will do will not be for my sake, but for the sake of all men … it would be better if you hated me, if you remembered me as the demon who killed the woman he loved … you see, even at the ending of my power I am still playing makrúgh , playing it with a mere child … don’t you see, Revi? Once you told me that you would never want to be in my place … that is the first requirement. That the candidate should not wish it. Because it is a terrible power that should not be wished for lightly.”

  “What are you talking about?” Reiver said, terrified now.

  “I have broken a shimmeregg over your head, Reiver. It will be my last decree as Inquestor and Ringling. I have foreseen the fall of the Inquest… and I know it will come from one who comes to the Inquestorhood knowing beforehand of the canker at the Inquest’s heart… who will destroy from within … who will not have known the curse as all the others have. When you rise from my throne, Rel-ver-without-a-Clan, you will be an Inquestor.”

  “No! You can’t do this!” And without warning the tears came welling up, mingling with the fluid from the shimmer-egg—

  “Do not weep!” Davaryush’s voice was cold now, commanding. “An Inquestor does not weep!”

  And when Reiver blinked away the tears he saw that the old man was weeping openly, great sobs racking his emaciated face, staining the shimmercloak … his eyes were red as fire … but the sound of weeping, of one man’s pain, was soon swallowed up in the heavy stillness of the vast throne room … at the foot of the steps a man would have heard nothing.

  Kelver offered the man no help: the greatness of his grief awed him too much. He sat there feeling very alone, confused by the future, trying to be invisible. A single ray of dawnlight transsected the steel-gray clouds and illuminated the throne of power, of tragedy.

  The wombroom of the thinkhive: dark. Cold.

  “Are you healed, thinkhive? Or still insane?”

  Daavye. What is sanity ?

  “Answer me!”

  I have repaired myself. I hope you have forgiven my outburst. Oh, Daavye, I saw everything you saw. You are alone now, Inquestor. And I too pity you. I wish there were something I could do. But what? I cannot make love to you, although I wish I could.

  “Do not mock me! You are a machine, without a soul.”

  In twenty millennia even a machine can acquire many things.

  “You’ve learnt to play makrúgh with compassion, then?”

  Judge for yourself.

  “I do not know.”

  What will you do, Inquestor?

  “Like the delphinoids who wait in the heart of the Dark Country for the killers to come … I will sit on my throne, in the heart of this glittering palace, and wait for the hunters. It won’t be long now before they come for me.”

  What of the boy? The young Inquestor? Do you honestly believe that a peasant child will succeed where you’ve failed?

  “He is no longer my concern.”

  You lie, Davaryush. For you will never give up that compassion for which, half a millennium ago, Ton Alka-mathdes gave you the title of Inquestor.

  And Davaryush drew himself up tall, and spoke to the thinkhive the formal words that concede victory in the game of makrúgh : uAttà heng, thinkhive; you have vanquished me.”

  No, Daavye. It is you who have vanquished yourself

  davémyras dáraran ypnat:

  nekéúnqilas yauxúh zfelethat

  ekáqila eméruat mílilas:

  nendé z’néqilas erdhandat

  néqilas aiuath kezi:

  eruden arissath, vallath,

  shentrath, eih, elethat.

  nendé eméruat lauker z’ekandar;

  ne árshenath náruvas nikas;

  eká emerud Enguester.

  eih heng! eih heng!

  oraden daded:

  aiuved daras sta lévaran

  ka davémyrah hoshan ypnándaran

  A million young boys dreamed of the stars;

  Nine hundred thousand grew up and forgot

  One hundred thousand became childsoldiers;

  Ninety-nine thousand died.

  Nine hundred came home: tilled the soil, danced, sang, forgot

  Ninety grew wealthy and famous.

  Nine sought out and found new worlds.

  One became an Inquestor: and lo, he gave the command,

  He yawned the stars from his lips

  for a million boys to dream of.

  —Galléndaran children’s song

  EPILOGUE

  KELVER

  Uran s’Varek! Here the sky glowed like an endless sheet of mother-of-pearl. Here there was no horizon: a single field could stretch, lush and beautiful, to the end of one’s vision; a tiny flower in the distance might be a megalopolis of a billion souls; a pebble in the grass might be a chain of mountains. And yet it might all be illusion; on Uran s’Varek it was sometimes impossible to tell the imagined from the real.

  Kelver gathered his shimmercloak to him and made for the displacement plate. He had been alone for many sleeps now, having been given the run of the estate of Ton Kara-kael, his mentor. A light breeze tickled the waist-high grass.

  A voice: “Kevi. Kevi. They’re calling us. It’s very important. A trial. You must come.”

  In the distance, a blurry dot of shimmerfur darted in the grass; it vanished, reappeared closer, vanished again as the shimmercloak’s owner ran from displacement plate to displacement plate.

  “Oh, Sirissheh.”

  The girl appeared beside him now. Her hair was long and white; even her eyelashes. In his days on Uran s’Varek he had sometimes even forgotten about Darktouch. The clarity of the sky, the sweetness of the wind, had a lulling quality to them. They linked hands, tossed their shoulders to send their shimmercloaks streaming behind them; and then they stepped onto the displacement plate together.

  The chamber was huge … perhaps a klomet high, columned with hundred-meter-tall Ontian fireblooms whose petals shook and flamed in the sky, and vaulted with arching rainbows. A hundred Inquestors were there already, each on his hoverthrone… some with floaters full of their retinues: musicians, rememberers, dancers, secretaries. Like butterflies with iridescent wings, fluttering from flower to flower. In the center of the hall was a hoverdais on which stood three thrones: a throne of crystal laced with flame; a throne of running water caged with forceshields; and a throne of black rock woven with starlight. Three Inquestors of judgment sat in them, their faces expressionless. Kelver could hardly make them out.

  “Quick,” said Sirissheh, “we’ll have to get a good view!” He stared at her, perplexed, for a moment; then the two of them ran for the gleaming displacement plates that spangled the floorfield of living shimmerfur. In a few moments they had worked their way to the center of the hall. Few of the others were this near; perhaps they had no curiosity, or perhaps they were too afraid to draw close.