Her pleasure thwarted, the queen ordered a hundred of the stewards of the Palace of the Winds, whose job it was to keep the lamps trimmed and filled with oil, exiled from the City in the Sky. The Palace Guard herded the unfortunates down the ancient avenue paved with skulls of past rulers toward the center of the City. Wailing, weeping, pleading for forgiveness, the stewards huddled at the lip of the Skywell. Her nakedness wrapped only in a lush fur robe, the queen had made a quick inspection of her City. In spite of the great festival she had decreed celebrating the victory at Chanobit Creek, she saw no lights. It meant that greater powers were loosed.

But it would not suit the majesty of the new queen to be indecisive and revoke the punishment she had commanded. Besides, having been cheated of the climax to which her private diversion had been building, she felt the aching need for some other release. The mass exiling would serve; the short walk from the Palace had made her sleek body hum with anticipation. A single hand gesture sent a hundred men screaming to their deaths on the snowy prairie a thousand feet below.

Later, when the drugged wine she had imbibed as part of her evening's merriment wore off, she wondered again why the lights had gone out all over the City. No comforting answer came.

And in that dark womb far to the north, the air began to vibrate and formed a single word from nothingness. That one word was the answer, the promise, the exaltation, the vindication of millennial faith.

The word was: Soon.