Fifty thousand of them, Faraataa had thought, could bring a city the size of Khyntor into total turmoil in five days. But now, because the Unchanging Ones had chosen to invade Piurifayne, he had had to release the pilligrigorms not within a city, but on Piurifayne's own soil, in the hope that they would drive Divvis's immense army into confusion and retreat. No reports had come in yet, though, on the success of that tactic.

On the other side of the jungle, where the Coronal Lord Hissune was leading a second army southward on another impossible route along the west bank of the Steiche, it was Faraataa's plan to string a net of the infinitely sticky and impenetrable birdnet vine for hundreds of miles in their path, so that they were forced to take wider and ever wider detours until they were hopelessly lost. The difficulty with that stratagem was only that no one could handle birdnet vine effectively except the forest-brethren, those maddening little apes who secreted in their perspiration an enzyme that rendered them immune to the vine's stickiness. But the forest-brethren had little reason to love the Piurivars, who had hunted them for centuries for the rich flavor of their flesh, and gaining their assistance in this maneuver was apparently not proving easy.

Faraataa felt the rage rising and boiling over within him.

It had all gone so well, at first. Releasing the blights and plagues into the farming districts—bringing agriculture into collapse over such a wide region—the famine, the panic, the mass migrations—yes, all according to plan. And setting loose the specially bred animals had worked nicely too, on a smaller scale: that had intensified the fears of the populace, and made life more complicated for the city-dwellers....

But the impact had not been as strong as Faraataa had hoped. He had imagined that the blood-hungry giant miluftas would terrorize Ni-moya, which had already been in a state of chaos—but he had not expected that Lord Hissune's army would be in Ni-moya when the miluftas reached the city, or that his archers could dispose of the deadly birds so easily.

And now Faraataa had no more miluftas, and it would take five years to breed enough to make any impact....

But there were pilligrigorms. There were gannigogs by the millions in the holding tanks, ready to be set loose. There were quexes; there were vriigs; there were zambinaxes; there were malamolas. There were new plagues: a cloud of red dust that would sweep over a city in the night and leave its water supply poisonous for weeks, and a purple spore from which came a maggot that attacked all grazing animals, and even worse. Faraataa hesitated to let some of these loose, for his scientists had told him it might not be so simple to bring them under control after the defeat of the Unchanging Ones. But if it seemed that the war would go against his people, if there appeared to be no hope—why, then, Faraataa would not hesitate to release whatever could do harm to the enemy, regardless of the consequences.