The older man nodded. "I think you're right."

"I've saved the worst for last. Come: look at these."

In a cage of closely woven metal mesh so fine that he was able to see through its walls, Khitain observed an agitated horde of small winged creatures fluttering angrily about, battering themselves against the sides of the cage, striking it furiously with their leathery black wings, falling back, rising again for another try. They were furry little things about eight inches long, with disproportionately large mouths and beady, glittering red eyes.

"Dhiims," said Nayila. "I captured them in a dwikka forest over by Borgax."

"Dhiims?" Khitain said hoarsely.

"Dhiims, yes. Found them feeding on a couple of little forest-brethren that I suppose they'd killed—so busy eating they didn't see me coming. I knocked them out with my collecting spray and gathered them up.

A few of them woke up before I got them all in the box. I'm lucky still to have my fingers, Yarmuz."

"I know dhiims," said Khitain. "They're two inches long, half an inch wide. These are the size of rats."

"Yes. Rats that fly. Rats that eat flesh. Carnivorous giant dhiims, eh? Dhiims that don't just nibble and nip, dhiims that can strip a forest-brother down to its bones in ten minutes. Aren't they lovely? Imagine a swarm of them flying into Ni-moya. A million, two million—thick as mosquitos in the air. Sweeping down.

Eating everything in their way. A new plague of locusts—flesh-eating locusts—"

Khitain felt himself growing very calm. He had seen too much today. His mind was overloaded with horror.

"They would make life very difficult," he said mildly.

"Yes. Very very difficult, eh? We'd need to dress in suits of armor." Nayila laughed. "The dhiims are their masterpiece, Khitain. You don't need bombs when you can launch deadly little flying rodents against your enemy. Eh? Eh?"

Yarmuz Khitain made no reply. He stared at the cage of frenzied angry dhiims as though he were looking into a pit that reached down to the core of the world.

From far away he heard the shouting begin: "Thallimon! Thallimon! Lord Thallimon!"

Nayila frowned, cocked an ear, strained to make out the words. "Thallimon? Is that what they're yelling?"

"Lord Thallimon," said Khitain. "The new Coronal. The new new Coronal. He surfaced three days ago, and every night they have a big rally for him outside Nissimorn Prospect."

"There was a Thallimon who used to work here. Is this some relative of his?"

"The same man," Khitain said.

Vingole Nayila looked stunned.

"What? Six months ago he was sweeping dung out of zoo cages, and now he's Coronal? Is it possible?"

"Anybody can be Coronal now," Yarmuz Khitain said placidly. "But only for a week or two, so it seems.

Perhaps it will be your turn soon, Vingole." He chuckled. "Or mine."

"How did this happen, Yarmuz?"

Khitain shrugged. With a wide sweep of his hand he indicated Nayila's newly collected animals, the snarling three-horned haigus, the dwarf dhumkar, the single-eyed canavong, the dhiims: everything bizarre and frightful, everything taut with dark hunger and rage. "How did any of this happen?" he asked. "If such strangenesses as these are loosed upon the world, why not make dung sweepers into Coronals? First jugglers, then dung sweepers, then zoologists, maybe. Well, why not? How does it sound to you? Vingole!