Wizards At War

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.