The queen moved, shifted position; so did all the others. She breathed out a note that made the walls shake, and after that was quiet.
A human wept, audible, soft sobs.
Raen leaned against Merry a moment, then gathered herself from him, from all the azi, and rose—walked among the still shapes of majat, Warriors, Workers, with the badges of blue-hive, red-hive, green and gold comingled. The rifle was stiff slung from her shoulder. She realised it, and dropped it echoing to the pavement, for there was no way out but to kill a queen, the last Mother of a world, and that she would not do.
She walked within reach of Her, without weapons in hand, and gazed up into the great jewelled face, the moiré eyes, heard the sough of Her breathing.
It was a gold. The pattern was on Her, for those who could read it.
“Mother,” she said, “I’m Raen a Sul, Meth-maren.”
Air sucked in. “Meth-maren,” She sighed, and the huge head lowered, sought taste.
Raen kissed Her, touched the scent-patches, waited for the vast jaws to close; and they did not.
“Meth-maren,” Mother said. “Kethiuy-queen.”
It was blue queen’s memory.
xii
The sun was unbearable. Jim felt the burn of it before he felt anything more, and struggled to shade his face from it. He was held, and had to think which way to turn; and that meant consciousness.
His hands met spines and hair and chitin. He focused at that, and shoved in horror at the stiffening limbs that lay over him, the intertwined corpses of a majat and an azi.
All about him were corpses, shimmering and running in the tears the sun brought to his eyes. He struggled to pull the visor which hung about his neck up to his eyes, to see—and found nothing living anywhere.
The house was ruined, gaping rubble; and bodies lay thickly over the garden, save in one vast track which led to the broken walls . . . bodies majat and human, naked and clothed. Insects flitted about him as they settled on the dead; he batted at them, fought with fingers stiffening with sunburn to fasten the sunsuit.
Rock moved, a shifting outside the wall. He gathered up a rifle, staggered in that direction, his senses wavering in and out of focus.
He climbed over the rubble, blinked, saw a shadow on the ground and whirled, whipped the rifle up, but the majat’s leap was faster. The gun went off, torn from his hands. Another was on him, pulling from the other side. Chelae gripped his arm, cutting flesh.
Red: he saw the badge and tried to pull from it; the badge of the second was green. It lowered its head, jaws wide, and the palps brushed his lips, his face.
And it drew back. “Jim,” it intoned.
He lived. The fact numbed him. He ceased to struggle, understanding nothing any longer.
“Meth-maren sendss,” red Warrior said.
“Let me go,” he asked then, his heart lurching a beat. “Let me go, Warrior; I’ll come with you.”
It released him. He clutched his injured arm and followed it, trailed by the green, down into the circle of the street, into the dark entry of the subway, into the deep places of the city, where no lights shone at all. At times he stumbled, blind, and his hands met bodies, yielding ones of majat-azi or the spiny hardness of majat. Chelae urged at him, hastening him, lifting him each time he fell.
Blue lights drifted toward him. At first he shrank from meeting them, not wanting delay, not wanting to be left: but he saw her bearing one of those lights, and he thrust his way free of the Warriors and ran, stumbling, toward her.
She met him, held him off at arm’s length to look at him. “You’re all right,” she said, a question in her impatient manner; but her voice trembled. There was Merry by her, and other faces that he knew.
She hugged him then, and he nearly wept for joy; but she did not know, he thought, the things that he must admit, the knowledge that he had stolen, the thing he had made of himself.