More and more figures, men and creatures, kept crowding into the cellar,
which was not very large. The place looked like the worst nightmare of a
drug-dreamer, ablaze with the colors of the smoking incense, the swaying
crowd, and their monotonous cries. Quite suddenly there was a blaze of
purple light and someone screamed in raving ecstasy: "_Na ki na Nebran
n'hai Kamaina!_"
"Kamayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena!" shrilled the tranced mob.
An old man jumped up and started haranguing the crowd. I could just
follow his dialect. He was talking about Terra. He was talking about
riots. He was jabbering mystical gibberish which I couldn't understand
and didn't want to understand, and rabble-rousing anti-Terran propaganda
which I understood much too well.
Another blaze of lights and another long scream in chorus:
"Kamayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena!"
Evarin stood in the blaze of the many-colored light.
The Toymaker, as I had seen him last, cat-smooth, gracefully alien,
shrouded in a ripple of giddy crimsons. Behind him was a blackness. I
waited till the painful blaze of lights abated, then, straining my eyes
to see past him, I got my worst shock.
A woman stood there, naked to the waist, her hands ritually fettered
with little chains that stirred and clashed musically as she moved
stiff-legged in a frozen dream. Hair like black grass banded her brow
and naked shoulders, and her eyes were crimson.
And the eyes lived in the dead dreaming face. They lived, and they were
mad with terror although the lips curved in a gently tranced smile.
Miellyn.
Evarin was speaking in that dialect I barely understood. His arms were
flung high and his cloak went spilling away from them, rippling like
something alive. The jammed humans and nonhumans swayed and chanted and
he swayed above them like an iridescent bug, weaving arms rippling back
and forth, back and forth. I strained to catch his words.
"Our world ... an old world."
"Kamayeeeeena," whimpered the shrill chorus.
"... humans, humans, all humans would make slaves of us all, all save
the Children of the Ape...."
I lost the thread for a moment. True. The Terran Empire has one small
blind spot in otherwise sane policy, ignoring that nonhuman and human
have lived placidly here for millennia: they placidly assumed that
humans were everywhere the dominant race, as on Earth itself.
The Toymaker's weaving arms went on spinning, spinning. I rubbed my eyes
to clear them of _shallavan_ and incense. I hoped that what I saw was an
illusion of the drug--something, something huge and dark, was hovering
over the girl. She stood placidly, hands clasped on her chains, but her
eyes writhed in the frozen calm of her face.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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