Chapter Fifteen
I
Bullets hammered the north wall of the last redoubt, Akard’s communications center. Mortars crumped. Their bombs banged deafeningly. Bullets leaking through the two small north windows had made a shambles of the communications gear.

Marika had done what she could to stem the nomad tide, and she had failed. She had only two regrets: that her pack, the Degnan, would go into the darkness unMourned, and that for her there would be no journey to the Reugge cloister at Maksche. For her there would be no next step on the road that might have led to the stars.

The hammer of savage weapons rose to an insane crescendo. The nomads were closing in for the last kill. Then the uproar ended. Braydic, the communications technician, whimpered into the sudden silence, “Now they will come.”

Marika nodded. The last minutes had arrived. The inevitable end of the siege had come.

Marika did something never done before. She hugged the only surviving members of her pack, the huntresses Grauel and Barlog. The scent of fear was heavy upon their rough fur.

Pups of the upper Ponath packs hugged no one but their dams, and that seldom after the first few years.

The two huntresses were touched deeply.

Grauel turned to the tradermale Bagnel, who was teaching her to operate a firearm. His comrade, last of those who had survived last week’s fall of the tradermale packfast Critza, had fallen defending one of the north windows. Someone had to hold that against the savages. Grauel’s heavy spear was too unwieldy.

“Wait!” Marika gasped. Her jaw went slack. “Something . . . ”

The universe of the touch, the ghost plane into which silth like Marika ducked to work their witchery, had gone mad. Some mighty shadow, terrible in its power, was raging up the valley of the Hainlin River, which this last bastion of the fortress Akard overlooked. For a moment Marika was paralyzed by the power of that shadow. Then she flung herself to a south-facing window.

Three great daggerlike crosses stormed up the frozen river. They drove into the fangs of the wind in a rigid V. That fierce and dreadful shadow-of-touch preceded them, flaying the mind with terror. Upon each cross stood five black-clad silth, one at each tip of each arm, the fifth at the axis. The incessant north wind howled around them and tore at their dark robes. They seemed to notice it not at all.

“They are coming,” Marika shouted to Grauel and Barlog, who crowded her against the windowsill.

An explosion thundered out behind them. It threw them together. Marika gasped for breath. Grauel turned, pointed her rifle. It barked in unison with that of the tradermale Bagnel as savages appeared in the dust swirling in the gap created by the explosion.

Marika clung to the windowsill, looking out, waiting for death.

The rushing crosses rose as they neared Akard, screaming into lightly falling snow, parting. Marika slipped through her loophole into the realm of ghosts and followed them as they plunged toward the attacking nomads, spreading death and terror.

Grauel and Bagnel stopped firing. The nomads had fled the breach. In minutes the entire besieging horde was in full flight. Two of the flying crosses harried the savages northward. The third returned and hovered over the confluence of the forks of the Hainlin, above which Akard brooded on a high headland.

Akard’s pawful of survivors crowded the window, staring in disbelief. Help had come. After so long a wait. In the penultimate moment, help had come.

The cross drifted closer till the tip of its longest arm touched the fortress on the level above the communications center. Marika pushed weariness aside and went to meet her rescuers. She was only fourteen, as yet far from being a full silth sister, but was the senior silth surviving. The only silth surviving. Through eyes hazed with fatigue and reaction, she vaguely recognized the dark figure which came to meet her. It was Zertan, senior of the Reugge Community’s cloister at Maksche.

It looked like she would get to see the great city in the south after all.

A moment after she had fulfilled the necessary ceremonial obsequiences, exhaustion overtook her. She collapsed into the arms of Grauel and Barlog.

Marika wakened after the fading of the light. She found herself perched precariously upon the flying cross. In one hasty glance she saw that she shared the strange craft with the other survivors of Akard. Grauel and Barlog were as near her as they could get—as they always were. Bagnel was next nearest. He rewarded her with a cheerful snarl as her gaze passed over him. Communicator Braydic seemed to be in shock.

The wind seemed almost still as the cross ran with it. To the left and below, the ruins of Bagnel’s home, Critza, appeared. “No bodies anymore,” Marika observed.

In a hard, low voice, Bagnel said, “The nomads feed upon their dead. The grauken rules the Ponath.” The grauken, the monster lying so close beneath the surface of every meth. The archetypal terror of self with which every meth was intimately familiar.

The Maksche senior eyed Bagnel, then Marika from her standing place upon the axis of the cross. She pointed skyward. “It will get worse before it gets better. The grauken may rule the entire world. It comes on us with the age of ice.”

Marika looked skyward, trying to forget the dust cloud that was absorbing her sun’s power and cooling her world. She tried to concentrate on the wonder of the moment, to take joy in being alive, to forget the horror of the past, of losing first the pack with which she had lived her first ten years, then the silth packfast where she had lived and trained the past four. She tried to banish the terror lurking in her future.

Jiana! Doomstalker! Twice!

The voice in her mind was the voice of a ghost. She could not make it go away.

The hills of the Ponath gave way to plains. The snowfall faded. And the flying cross fled with the breath of the north wind licking behind.

II
For months Marika had seen nothing but overcast skies. Always the bitter north wind had been present, muttering of even colder times to come. But now the gale could not catch her. She mocked it quietly.

Cracks began to show in the cloud cover. One moon, then another, peeped through, scattering the white earth with silver.

“Hello, strangers,” Marika said.

“What?”

The response startled Marika, for she had been enclosed entirely within herself, unmindful of her bizarre situation. “I was greeting the moons, Grauel. Look. There is Biter. One of the small moons is running behind her. I cannot tell which. I do not care. I am just glad to see them. How long has it been?”

The huntress shifted her weapon and position gingerly. It was a long fall to the frozen river. “Too long. Too many months.” Sorrow edged Grauel’s voice. “Hello, moons.”

Soon Chaser, the second large moon, showed its face too, so that shadows below looked like many-fingered paws.

“Look there!” Marika said. “A lake. Open water.” She too had not seen unfrozen water in months.

Grauel would not look down. She clung to their transport with a death grip.

Marika glanced around.

Five strangers, five friends. All astride a metal cross the shape of a dagger, running with the wind a thousand feet above the earth and snow. Grauel and Barlog, known since birth. Bagnel, known only months, strange, withdrawn, yet with the aroma of someone who could become very close. At that moment she decided he would become an integral part of her destiny.

Marika was silth. The Akard sisters had called her the most powerful talent ever to be unearthed in the upper Ponath. Sometimes the strongest silth caught flashes intimating tomorrow.

Braydic. The only friend the exile pup had made in her four years at Akard. Marika was glad that Braydic had survived.

Finally, two pups of meth who had served the silth, holding one another, terrified still, not yet knowing their fates. She realized that she did not know their names. She had saved them, as she had saved herself, for redoubled exile. Shared terror and last-second salvation ought to account for more intimacy.

“So,” she said to Grauel and Barlog. “Here we go again. Into exile once more.”

Barlog nodded. Grauel merely stared straight ahead, trying to keep her gaze from taking in the long fall to the silvered snows.

The Hainlin twisted away to the west and out of sight for a time, then swept back in beneath. It widened into a vast, slow stream, though mostly it remained concealed behind a mask of white. Time passed. Marika shook off repeated fits of bleak memory. She suspected her companions were doing the same.

Meth were not reflective by nature. They tended to live in the present, letting the past lie and allowing the future to care for itself. But the pasts of these meth were not the settled, bucolic pasts of their foredams. Their pasts reechoed with bloody hammer strokes. Their futures threatened more of the same.

“Lights,” Grauel croaked. And in a moment, “By the All! Look at the lights!”

Ten thousand pinpricks in the night, like a nighttime sky descended to earth. Except that the sky of Marika’s world held few stars, filled as it was with a dense, vast cloud of interstellar dust.

“Maksche,” Senior Zertan said. “Home. We will reach the cloister in a few minutes.”

The flying crosses pacing them suddenly swept ahead, vanished into the darkness. The lights ahead bobbed and rocked and swelled, and then the first passed below, maybe five hundred feet down. Marika felt no awe of the altitude. She exulted in the flying.

Soon the cross settled into a lighted courtyard, to a point between crosses already arrived. Scores of silth in Reugge black waited silently. The cross touched down. Zertan stepped off. Several silth approached her. She said something Marika did not catch, gestured, and stalked away. The other silth left their places at the tips of the cross.

A meth female in worker apparel approached Marika and the others. “Come with me. I have been instructed to show you quarters.” She assessed them cautiously. “Not you,” she told Bagnel, diffidently. “Someone from your Bond is coming for you.”

Marika was amused, for she knew this meth saw only savages out of the Ponath. Even her, for all she was silth. And she knew this city meth was frightened, for savages from the Ponath had reputations for being unpredictable, irrational, and fierce.

Marika gestured. “We go. You, lead the way.”

Bagnel stood aside, looking forlorn, one paw raised in a gesture of farewell.

Grauel followed the worker. Marika followed her. Barlog stayed close behind, weapon at port. Braydic and the pups tagged along at the end.

The Degnan refugees searched every shadow they passed. Marika listened with that talented silth ear that was inside her mind. She felt silth working their witcheries all around her. But the shadows were haunted by nothing more dangerous than projected fears of the unknown.

The servant led them through seemingly endless hallways, dropping first the pups, then Braydic. Marika sensed Grauel and Barlog becoming edgy. Their sense of location was confused. She grew uncomfortable herself. This place seemed too large to encompass. Akard was never so vast or tortuous that she had feared for her ability to get out.

Get out. Get out. That built within her, a smoldering panic, a dread of being unable to escape. She was of the upper Ponath, where pack meth ran free, at will.

The worker detected their mounting tension. She led them up stairs and outside, to the top of a wall at least vaguely reminiscent of the north wall at Akard, where Marika had made her away place, the place she went to be alone and think.

Each silth found such a place wherever she might be.

“It is huge,” Barlog breathed from behind Marika. Marika agreed, though she knew not whether Barlog meant the cloister or city.

The Maksche cloister was a square compound a quarter mile to a side. Its outer wall stood thirty feet high. It was constructed of a buttery brown stone. The structures it enclosed were built of the same stone, all topped with steep roofs of red tile. The buildings were all very old, very weathered, and all very rectilinear. Some had corner towers rising like obelisks peaked by triangles of red.

The worker said, “A thousand meth live in the cloister, separate from the city. The wall is the edge of our world, a boundary that is not to be passed.”

She meant what she said, no doubt, but the fierceness that rose in her charges made her drop the subject. Marika growled, “Take us where we are supposed to go. Now. I will hear rules from those who make them, and will decide if they are reasonable then.”

Their guide looked stricken.

Grauel said, “Marika, I suggest you recall all that has been said about this place.”

Marika stared at the huntress, but soon her gaze wandered. Grauel was right. At the beginning she had best submit to the local style.

“Stop,” she said. “I want to look.” She did not await approval.

The cloister stood at Maksche’s heart, upon a contrived elevation. The surrounding land was flat all the way to the horizons. The Hainlin, three hundred yards wide, looped past the city in a broad brown band two miles west of Marika’s vantage. Neat squares of cropland, bounded by hedgerows or lines of trees, showed through the snow covering the plain.

“Not a single hill. I think it will not be long before I become homesick for hills.” Marika used the simple dialect of her puphood, and was surprised when the worker frowned puzzledly. Could the common speech be so different here?

“I think so. Yes,” Grauel replied. “Even Akard was less foreign than this. It is like ten thousand little fortresses, this thing called a city.”

The buildings were very strange. But for Akard and Critza, every meth-made structure Marika had ever seen had been built of logs and stood under twenty-five feet high.

“I am not allowed much time away from my regular duties here,” the worker said, her tone whining. “Please come, young mistress.”

Marika scowled. “All right. Lead on.”

The quarters assigned had been untenanted for a long time. Dust lay thick upon what tattered furniture there was. Marika coughed, said, “We are being isolated in some remote corner.”

Grauel nodded. “Only to be expected.”

Barlog observed, “We can have this livable in a few hours. It is not as bad as it looks.”

Feebly, the worker said, “I must take you two to . . . to . . . ” She fumbled for a word. “I guess you would say, huntress’s quarters.”

“No,” Marika told her. “We stay together.”

Grauel and Barlog snarled and gestured toward the door with their weapons.

“Go,” Marika snapped. “Or I will tie a savage’s curse to your tail.”

The female fled in terror. Grauel said, “Probably whelped and raised here. Scared of her own shadow.”

“This is a place where shadows are terrors,” Barlog countered. “We will hear from the shadow mistresses now.”

But Barlog was wrong. A week passed without event. It was a week in which Marika seldom left her quarters and had no intercourse at all with the Reugge of Maksche. She let Grauel and Barlog do the physical exploration. No one came to her.

She began to wonder why she was being ignored.

The time free began as a boon. In her years at Akard she had spent most of every waking hour in study, learning to become silth. The only respite had come during summers when she had joined hunting parties stalking the nomadic invaders who brought Akard and the Ponath to ruin.

Once her quarters were clean and she had sneaked a few exploratory forays into nearby parts of the cloister, and had penetrated the rest of it riding ghosts, and had found herself an away place in a high tower overlooking the square where she had arrived, she grew bored. Even study became appealing.

She snarled her dissatisfaction at the worker who brought their meals. That was on her tenth day in Maksche.

Things seemed to move slowly in Maksche. Marika’s complaints continued for a week, growing virulent. Yet nothing happened.

“Do not cause trouble,” Grauel cautioned. “They are studying our conduct. It is all some sort of test.”

“Pardon me if I am skeptical,” Marika said. “I have walked the dark side a hundred times since we have been here. I have seen no indication that they even know we are here, let alone are watching. We have been put out of sight, out of mind, and are imprisoned in a dungeon of the soul.”

Grauel exchanged glances with Barlog. Barlog observed, “All things are not seen by the witch’s inner eye, Marika. You are not omnipotent.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that one young silth, no matter how strong, is not going to use her talent to see what a cloister full of more practiced silth are doing if they do not want her to see.”

Marika was about to admit that that might be possible when someone scratched at the door. She gestured. “It is not time to eat. The drought must be over.”

Barlog opened the door.

There stood a silth older than any Marika had encountered before. She hobbled in, leaning on a cane of some gnarled dark wood. She halted in the center of the room, surveyed the three of them with rheumy cataracted eyes. Her half-blind gaze came to rest upon Marika. “I am Moragan. I have been assigned as your teacher and as your guide upon the Reugge Path.” She spoke the Reugge low speech with an intriguing, elusive accent. Or was it a natural lisp? “You are the Marika who stirred so much controversy and chaos at our northern fastness.” Not a question. A statement.

“Yes.” Marika had a feeling this was no time to quibble about her role at Akard.

“You may go,” Moragan told Grauel and Barlog.

The huntresses did not move. They did not look to Marika for her opinion. Already they had positioned themselves so that Moragan stood at the heart of a perilous triangle.

“You are safe here,” Moragan told Marika when no one moved.

“Indeed? I have your sworn word?”

“You do.”

“And the word of a silth sister is worth the metal on which it is graven.” She had been studying the apparel of the old sister and could not make out the significance of its decorations. “As we who were under the sworn guardianship of the Reugge discovered. Our packsteads were overrun without aid coming. And when we fled to the Akard packfast for safety, that too was allowed to be destroyed.”

“You question decisions of policy about which you know nothing, pup.”

“Not at all, mistress. I simply refuse to allow policy to snare and crush me in coils of deceit and broken oaths.”

“They said you were a bold one. I see they spoke the truth. Very well. We will do it your way. For now.” Moragan hobbled to a wooden chair, settled slowly, slapped her cane down atop a table nearby. She seemed to go to sleep.

“Who are you besides Moragan?” Marika asked. “I cannot read your decorations.”

“Just a worn-out old silth so far gone she is past being what you would call Wise. We are not here to discuss me, though. Tell me your story. I have heard and read a few things. Now I will assess your version of events.”

Marika talked, but to no point. A few minutes later Moragan’s head dropped to her chest and she began to snore.

And so it went, day after day, with Moragan doing more asking and snoring than teaching. That day of her first appearance, she had been in one of her more lucid periods. Sometimes she could not recall the date or even Marika’s name. Most of the time she was of little value except as a reference guide to the cloister’s more arcane customs. Always she asked more questions than she answered, many of them irritatingly personal.

Her role, though, provided Marika with a role of her own. As a student she occupied a recognized place in cloister society and was answerable principally to Moragan for her conduct. Safely knit into the cultural fabric, Marika felt more comfortable teaching herself by exploring and observing.

Marika liked little of what she did learn.

Within the cloister the least of workers lived well. Outside, in the city, meth lived in abject want, suffering through brief lives of hunger, disease, and backbreaking labor. Everyone and everything in Maksche belonged to the Reugge silth Community, to the tradermale brotherhood calling itself the Brown Paw Bond, or to the two in concert. The Brown Paw Bond maintained its holdings by Reugge license, under complicated and extended lease arrangements. Residents of Maksche who were neither tradermale nor silth were bound to their professions or land for life.

Marika was bewildered. The Reugge possessed meth as though they were domestic animals? She interrogated Moragan. The teacher just looked at her strangely, evidently unable to comprehend the point of her questions.

“Grauel,” Marika said one evening, “have you figured this place out? Do you understand it at all? That old carque Moragan cannot or will not explain anything so it makes any sense.”

“Take care with her, Marika. She is more than she seems.”

“She is as All-touched as my granddam was.”

“She may be senile and mad, but she is not harmless. Perhaps the more dangerous for it. It is whispered that she was not set to teach you but to study you. It is also whispered that she was once very important in the order, and that she still has the favor of some who are very high up. Fear her, Marika.”

“I should fear someone I could break?”

“As strength goes? This is not the upper Ponath, Marika. It is not the strength of the arm that counts. It is the strength of the alliances one forms.”

Marika made a sound of derision. Grauel ignored her.

“Marika, suppose that some of them hope you try your strength. Suppose some of them want to prove something to themselves.”

“What?”

“Our ears are sharp from many years of hunting the forests of the upper Ponath. When we go among the huntresses of this place—and sorrier huntresses you will never see—we sometimes overhear whispers never meant for our ears. They talk about us and they talk about you and they talk about the thinking of those around Senior Zertan. In a way, you are on trial. They suspect—maybe even know—about Gorry.”

“Gorry? What about Gorry?”

“Something happened to Gorry in the final hours of the siege. There was much speculation, overheard by everyone. We said nothing to anyone about that, but we are not the only survivors brought out of the ruins of Akard.”

Marika’s heart fluttered as she thought of her one-time instructress. But she felt no remorse. Gorry had deserved the torment she had suffered, and more. All Marika felt was a heightened apprehension about being ignored. It had not occurred to her that it was that sort of deliberateness. She would have to be careful. She was in no position of strength.

Grauel watched expectantly while Marika wrapped her mind around the implications.

“Why are you looking at me that way?”

“I thought you might have some regrets.”

“Why?”

“She was—”

“She was a carque of an old nuisance, Grauel. She would have done it to me if she could have. She tried often enough. She got what she asked for. I do not want to hear her mentioned again.”

“As you wish, mistress.”

“Have you found Braydic yet?”

“She was assigned to the communications center here, as you might expect. Students are not permitted entry there. And technicians are not allowed out.”

“Why not?”

“I do not know. This is a different world. We are still feeling our way. They never tell you what is permitted, only what is not.”

Marika realized that Grauel was upset with her. When Grauel was distressed, she insisted on using the formal mode of speech. But Marika had given up trying to interpret the huntress’s moods. She was exercised about something most of the time.

“I want to go out into the city, Grauel.”

“Why?”

“To explore.”

“That is not permitted.”

“Why not?”

“I do not know. Rules are not explained here. They are enforced. Ignorance is no excuse.”

What was the penalty for disobedience?

Marika banished the thought. It was too early to challenge constraints. Still, she felt compelled to say, “If this is life in the fabulous Maksche cloister, Grauel, I may go over the wall.”

“Barlog and I have very little to do either, Marika. They think we are too backward.”

III
The absolute, enduring stone of the cloister became a hated enemy. It crushed in upon Marika with the weight of massively accumulated time and alien tradition. Enforced inactivity made it almost intolerable. Each day she spent more time in her towertop away place. Each day meditation did less to ease her spiritual malaise.

Her place overlooked nothing but the courtyard, the city, and the works of meth. There was a constant wind, a north wind, but it did not speak to her as had the winds at Akard. It carried the wrong smells, the wrong tastes. It was heavy with the sweat of industry. It was a foreign, indifferent wind. That wind of the north had been her friend and ally.

Often she did not leave her cell at all, but lay on her pallet and used a finger to draw stick figures in the sweat on the cold wall.

Sometimes she went down through her loophole into the realm of ghosts, but she found little comfort there. Ghosts were scarce where so many silth were gathered. She sensed a few great monsters way high above, especially in the night, but she could not touch them. She might as well reach for Biter.

There was a change in atmosphere in the cloister around the end of Marika’s sixth week there. It puzzled her till Barlog showed up to announce, “Most Senior Gradwohl is coming here.” Most Senior Gradwohl ruled the entire Reugge Community, which spanned the continent. “They are frantic trying to get ready.”

“Why is she coming?” Marika asked.

“To take personal charge of the effort to control the nomads. Two days ago nomads were seen from the wall of the packfast at Motchen. That is only a hundred miles north of Maksche, Marika. They are catching up with us already.” In a lower voice Barlog confided, “These Maksche silth are frightened. They have a contract with the tradermales that obligates them to protect traders anytime they are in Reugge territory. They have been unable to do that. Critza is just one of three tradermale packfasts that were overrun. There is a rumor that some tradermales want to register an open petition for the Serke sisterhood to intercede in Reugge territories because the Reugge can no longer maintain order.”

“So?” Marika asked indifferently.

“That would affect us, Marika.”

“How? We have no part in anything. We are tolerated for some reason. Barely. We are fed. And otherwise we are ignored. What do we have to fear? If no ones sees us, who can harm us?”

“Do not talk that way, Marika.”

“Why not?”

“These sisters can go around unseen. One of them might hear you.”

“Don’t be silly. That’s nonsense.”

“I heard it from . . . ” Barlog did not finish for fear of compromising her source.

“How much longer can you tolerate this imprisonment, Barlog? What does Grauel think? I won’t endure it much longer, I promise you that.”

“We can’t leave.”

“Says who?”

“It’s not permitted.”

“By whom? Why not?”

“That’s just the way it is.”

“For those who accept it.”

“Marika, please . . . ”

“Go away, Barlog. I don’t want to hear you whine.” As Barlog was about to leave, she added, “They’ve tamed you, Barlog. Made a two-legged rheum-greater out of a once fine huntress.” Use of the familiar mode made Marika’s words all the more cutting.

Barlog’s lips parted in a snarl of fury. But she restrained herself and even closed the door gently.

Marika went to her tower to observe the most senior’s arrival. Gradwohl came in on one of the flying crosses, standing at its axis. Marika watched it drop past the tower, the silth at the tips of its arms standing rigidly with their eyes closed. There was a thrumming rhythm between them that Marika had missed during her flight south. But then she had been exhausted physically, drained mentally and emotionally, and had been interested in little but leaving a shattered fortress and life behind.

She went down inside herself and through her loophole and was astonished to find the cross surrounded by a roiling fog of ghosts, great ghosts similar to the dark killing ghosts she had ridden in the north. The sister at the tip of the longer arm controlled them. They moved the ship. The other sisters provided reservoirs of talent from which the senior sister drew. The most senior did nothing. She was but a passenger.

This, finally, was something about which Marika could get excited. How did they manage it? Was it something she could learn to do? It would be fantastic to ride above the world by night upon one of those great daggers. She studied the silth. What they were doing was different from killing, but it did not appear difficult. She touched the senior sister, trying to read what was happening, as the cross neared the ground.

Her touch distracted the silth. The cross dropped the last foot. Marika recoiled quickly. A countertouch brushed her, but was not specific. It did not return.

A great deal of pomp and ceremony followed the most senior’s landing. Marika remained where she was. The most senior, her party, and those who welcomed her, vanished into the labyrinthine cloister. Marika gazed over the red rooftops at the horizon. For once the wind carried a hint of the north. That chill breath of home worsened her feeling of alienation.

Grauel found her still there near midnight, chin on arms on stone, eyes vacant, staring at the far fields of moon-frosted snow as if awaiting a message. “Marika. They sent me to bring you.”

Grauel seemed badly shaken. There was something in her voice that stirred the dangerous flight-fight response within her. “Who sent you?”

“Senior Zertan. On behalf of the most senior. Gradwohl herself wants to talk to you. That Moragan was with them. I warned you to watch yourself with her.”

Marika bared her teeth. Grauel was terrified. Probably of the possibility that they would get thrown out of the cloister. “Why does she want me?”

“I don’t know. Probably about what happened at Akard.”

“Now? They’re interested now? After almost two months?”

“Marika. Restrain yourself.”

“Am I not perfectly behaved before our hosts?”

Grauel did not deny that. Marika even treated Moragan with absolute respect. She made a point of giving no one cause to take offense—most of the time.

Nevertheless, she was not liked by the few sisters who crossed her path. Grauel and Barlog claimed the Maksche sisters feared her. Just as had the sisters at Akard.

“All right. Show me the way. I’ll try to mind my manners.”

They made Grauel stop at the door to the inner cloister, the big central structure opened only for high ceremonies and days of obligation. Marika touched Grauel’s elbow lightly, restraining her. Grauel responded with a massive shrug of resignation—and, Marika thought, just the faintest hint of amusement in the tilt of her ears. It was a hint only one who knew Grauel well would have caught.

What was she up to? And where was Grauel’s rifle? She had not been parted from the weapon since she had received it from Bagnel. She slept with it, it was so precious. Her carrying it all the time had to be cause for consternation and comment.

Almost, Marika looked back. Almost. Native guile stopped her.

Two silth led her to a vast, ill-lighted chamber. No electricity there, just tapers shuddering in chilly drafts. As must be in a place where silth worked their magics. Electromagnetic energies interfered with their talents.

This was the chamber where the most important Reugge rites were observed. Marika had been there before only as a dark-walker. Other than in its symbolic value, the place was nothing special.

Two dozen ranking silth waited, perched silently upon tall stools. Only the occasional flick of an inadvertently exposed tail betrayed the fact that anything was happening behind their cold obsidian-flake eyes. Every one of those eyes was fixed upon Marika.

She was less intimidated than she expected.

Several worker-servants moved among the silth, managing wants and refreshments. One with a tray approached Marika. She was an ancient whose fur had fallen in patches, leaving only ugly bare spots. She dragged her right leg in a stiff limp. As Marika waved her away, she was startled by the meth’s scent. Something familiar . . .

In a low voice the servant said, “Mind your manners, pup.” She hitch-stepped off to the sideboard that seemed to be her station.

Barlog!

Barlog. With a limp. And Grauel’s treasure was missing.

With that rifle Barlog could cut down half the silth in the room before any even thought of employing their witchery.

Marika was pleased by the resourcefulness of Grauel and Barlog. But she felt no more confident of her ability to handle the subtleties of the coming interview.

Of the silth in that room, Marika recognized only two. Zertan and Moragan. Marika faced the senior and performed the appropriate ceremonial greeting to perfection. She would show Barlog who could mind her manners.

“This is the one from Akard?” a gravelly voice asked.

“Yes, mistress.”

The most senior, Marika assumed. Younger than she had expected. She was a hard, chunky, grizzled female with slightly wild eyes. Like a Gorry still sane. A sister who was as much huntress as silth, and a hungry huntress at that.

“I thought she would be older. And bigger,” the most senior said, echoing Marika’s own thoughts.

“She is young,” Moragan said, and Marika noted that she was completely awake and vibrant and alive. Moragan’s stool stood between those of Zertan and the most senior, an inch nearer that of the latter, subtly proclaiming her most important tie.

Senior Zertan said, “We do not know what to do with her. Her history is repellent at best. She is an astoundingly strong feral detected accidentally four years ago. Akard took her in. That was soon after the first nomadic incursions into the upper Ponath. Her hamlet was one of the first overrun. It seems that, with no training whatsoever, purely instinctively she drew to the dark and slew several savages. Her latent ability in that respect so disturbed some of our sisters that they labeled her Jiana, after the mythological and archetypal doomstalker Jiana. A sister, Gorry, who had a Community-wide reputation before the necessity for her rustification arose—”

A revenant shrieked in Marika’s mind. Jiana! Doomstalker!

“Zertan.” Most Senior Gradwohl’s voice was coldly cautionary.

Zertan shifted her emphasis slightly. “Gorry had very strong, very negative feelings about the pup. In one way of seeing, Gorry was correct. She has twice been almost the only survivor of monstrous disasters that befell those who nurtured her. Gorry was very much afraid of her, but was her teacher. Thus her training there was haphazard at best. Reliable reports do indicate that she achieved a commanding ability to reach and command the darkest of those-who-dwell.”

The object of discussion was growing more irate by the moment. Barlog’s cold stare helped her control her tongue.

“Zertan,” Gradwohl said again. “Enough. I have seen all the reports you have, and more.” For a moment the Maksche senior seemed startled. “Can you tell me anything new? Anything I do not know? How does she feel about the sisterhood?”

After a silence that began to stretch painfully, Zertan admitted, “I have no idea how she feels. But it does not matter. A pup’s attitudes are the clay that the teacher—”

Gradwohl did not seize upon Zertan’s clumsiness. Instead, she shifted approach. “Senior Koenic reported to me shortly before Akard fell. Among other things, we discussed a feral silth pup named Marika. This Marika, though only fourteen years old, was directly responsible for the deaths of several hundred meth. Senior Koenic was as scared of her as Gorry was. Because, as she put it, this Marika was an embryonic Bestrei or Zhorek—without the intellectual handicaps of those two dark-walkers. Senior Koenic knew Bestrei and Zhorek before her rustification. She watched Marika for four years. She was in a position to form an intelligent estimate of the pup.”

Gradwohl eased down off her stool, surveyed the assembly. “What does it matter what a pup thinks of the Community? Consider two ideas. Trust, and personal loyalty.

“For all the backbiting that goes on, trust cements the Reugge Community. We know we are in no physical danger from one another. We know none of our sisters will willfully work to the detriment of the order. Our subordinates know we will protect and nurture them. But Marika believes none of that.

“Why? Because her hamlet and hundreds of others were overrun by savages the Reugge were pledged to repel. Because genuine attempts have been made upon her life. Because she has not been educated to see the good of the Community as paramount.”

Gradwohl sounded like some windy Wise meth giving the convocation on a day of high obligation. The longer Gradwohl talked, the less closely Marika listened and the more she became wary. There was some silth game running and she was just a counter.

“About personal loyalty, few of you know a thing,” the most senior continued in a hard voice. “Let us experiment. Moragan. Proceed.”

Moragan got off her stool. She drew a long, wicked knife from inside her robe, presented it to Senior Zertan.

Gradwohl said, “Carry out your instructions, Zertan.”

Zertan left her stool with obvious reluctance. She looked at Marika for a moment.

She flung herself forward.

Marika’s response was instantaneous and instinctive. She ducked through her loophole into the ghost realm. A thought captured a ghost. A mental shout scattered the few others before any other silth could come through and seize them. She hurled her ghost at the vaguely perceived form plunging toward her.

She returned to reality while the bark of a rifle still reverberated through the chamber. Zertan was pitching forward, dropped knife not yet to the floor. Gradwohl was turning, spun by Barlog’s bullet. Marika flung up a paw, restraining Barlog before she commenced a massacre.

The chamber door exploded inward. The guards posted outside tumbled through. Grauel leaped through with a Degnan ululation, shield on one arm, javelin poised for the cast. Behind her, a quivering Braydic menaced the guards with a sword she had no idea how to use.

Not one of the silth on the stools moved more than the tip of a tail.

Some silth game.

Most Senior Gradwohl recovered. The bullet had but clipped her shoulder. She met Marika’s cold stare. “I seldom miscalculate. But when I do, I do it big.” Her paw went to her shoulder, where moisture seeped into the fabric of her robe. “I did not anticipate firearms. Halechk! See to Zertan before she dies on us.”

A silth with healer’s decorations left her stool and hastened to Zertan.

Gradwohl said, “Personal loyalty. Even in the face of certain disaster.” Her teeth ground together. Her wound had begun to hurt.

Zertan’s knife had come to rest only inches from the tip of Marika’s right boot. She kicked it across the floor to the most senior’s feet.

Gradwohl’s cheek began to twitch. She whispered, “Have a care, pup. Had it been real, you might have gotten through it by having surprise on your right paw.”

“Had it been real, there would be only three meth alive in this room right now.” Marika spoke with conviction. She broke eye contact long enough to glance at the knife. “We had a saying in the Ponath. ‘As strength goes.’ ” She had to say it in dialect. Gradwohl did not react. Perhaps it went past her.

“When I am manipulated or pushed, mistress, I must push back.”

Gradwohl ignored her. She surveyed the silth, still perched upon their stools. “This assembly has served its purpose. It is as I suspected. Someone has been remiss. Someone allowed prejudice to overwhelm reason. Listen! This pup ambushed and destroyed a ranking sister of the Serke Community. And I promise you, that House is giving that fact a lot more attention than this one has.”

Gradwohl stared at Marika hard. Marika continued to meet her gaze, refusing to be intimidated. Beneath, beyond the test of wills, she sensed a kindred soul.

“This assembly is at an end,” Gradwohl said, still holding Marika’s gaze. “Go. All but you, pup.”

Silently, silth began filing out. Two helped carry Senior Zertan.

Barlog and Grauel did not move.

Braydic, though, Marika noted, had disappeared. Ever cautious and timid Braydic.

Just as well, perhaps. Just as well.

Marika focused upon this meth strong enough to rule the fractious Reugge Community.

Chapter Sixteen
I
Gradwohl climbed onto a stool. “Sit if you like,” she told Marika.

Marika settled crosslegged upon the floor, as had been the custom among the packs of the upper Ponath. Furniture had been unknown in her dam’s loghouse.

“Tell me about yourself, pup.”

“Mistress?”

“Tell me your story. I want to know everything there is to know about you.”

“You know, mistress. Through your agent Moragan.”

Gradwohl seemed amused. “She was that transparent?”

“Only looking back.”

“Nothing substitutes for direct examination. Begin simply. Tell me your story. What is your name?”

“Marika, mistress.”

“Tell me about Marika. From her birth to this moment.”

Marika sketched an autobiography which included her first awarenesses of her talent, her unusually close relationship with her male littermate Kublin, her troubles with one of the Wise of her dam’s loghouse, and all her troubles during her stay at the fortress Akard.

Gradwohl nodded. “Interesting. But possibly even more interesting in complete privacy.”

“Mistress?”

“You have told me very little about Marika inside.”

Marika grew uneasy.

“Do not be frightened, pup.”

“I am not, mistress.”

“Liar. I met a most senior when I was your age. I was petrified. There is no need. I am here to help. You are not happy, are you? Honestly, now.”

“No, mistress.”

“Why not?”

She thought she had made that clear. Perhaps their backgrounds were too alien. She rambled till Gradwohl lost patience. “Get to the point, pup. There are no ears here but mine. Even were there, your sisters would make no reprisals for what you say. I will not permit that. And do not lie. I want to know what the real Marika thinks and feels.”

Irked, Marika tested the water with a few mild remarks. When Gradwohl did not explode, she continued till she had revealed most of her dissatisfactions.

“Exactly what I suspected. An absolute lack of vision from the very beginning. I was not a feral myself, but I endured similar troubles. They sense strength and power, and it frightens them. In their way, silth have minds as small as any common meth. Those who might be surpassed want to stifle you before you develop the skills to command them. It is a severe shortcoming of the society silth have developed. Now. Tell me more about Akard.”

Gradwohl spoke no more of Marika’s place in things, nor of her feelings. Instead, she concentrated upon a minute examination of events during Akard’s final days. “What has become of the other survivors? Especially the commtech and the tradermale?” She used the Ponath dialect word tradermale as though it was unfamiliar.

Marika reflected carefully before saying, “Braydic was assigned work in the communications center here.” Had the most senior noted the sword-carrying meth who had threatened the guards behind Grauel, keeping them from interfering? “They will not let me see her. Bagnel vanished. I assume he rejoined his brotherhood. They say there is a tradermale place here in Maksche.”

“Presumably I could reach him through his factors.”

“Darkship, mistress?”

“The flying cross. That was you in the tower, was it not? You touched Norgis just before we set down.”

“Yes, mistress.”

“What did you think?”

“I was awed, mistress. The idea of riding such a thing. . . . I rode one coming down from Akard, but most of that escapes me.”

“You are not frightened by it?”

“No, mistress.”

“You do not find those-who-dwell frightening?”

“No, mistress.”

“Good. That will be all, pup. Return to your quarters.”

“Yes, mistress.”

“There will be changes in your life, pup.”

“Yes, mistress,” Marika said as she walked toward the doorway.

Grauel went through first, surveyed the hallway, nodded. Barlog backed out behind Marika, rifle still trained on the most senior.

Not one word about the confrontation passed between the three of them.

The changes began immediately. The morning following the interview, a silth the age of Marika’s dam came to her cell. She introduced herself as Dorteka. “I am your instructress, detached from the most senior’s staff for that purpose. The most senior has ordered an individualized program for you. We will get started now.” Plainly, Dorteka did not like her assignment, but she was careful to avoid saying so.

Marika would soon note a cloisterwide shift of attitude toward one who had caught the most senior’s interest.

That first morning Dorteka took her to a meditation chamber. They sat upon the floor, across a table of the same stone as the cloister, in the eerie light of a single oil lamp. On Dorteka’s side lay a clipboard and papers. Dorteka said, “Your education has been erratic. The most senior wants you to go back and begin at the beginning.”

“I would be with pups . . . ”

“You will proceed at your own pace, independent of everyone else at every level. Where your training has been adequate, you will advance rapidly, to your limits.” Dorteka straightened a paper. “What would you like to do for the sisterhood?”

Marika did not hesitate. “Fly the darkships. To the starworlds.”

A trace of amusement showed in the tilt of Dorteka’s ears. “So the most senior suggested. The darkship is possible. The starworlds are not.”

“Why?”

“We were too late going out. We looked in the wrong places. The starworlds are all enfiefed, and they are guarded jealously by the sisterhoods who own them. Even to leave the planet now would mean an immediate challenge to darkwar. So darkwar can be our only reason for entering the dark. We will not. We have no one capable of challenging.”

Puzzled, Marika asked, “What is darkwar? No one will explain.”

“At your level it will be difficult to comprehend. In essence, darkwar is a bloodduel between the leading Mistresses of the Ships of Communities in conflict. The survivor wins the right of the dispute. Darkwar is rare because it usually seals the fate of an entire Community.”

Bloodduel Marika understood. She nodded.

“Time enough for such things after you gain a solid foundation. You wish to become involved with the ships. Then you shall become involved, if you remain interested once you become qualified. There are never enough sisters willing to work them. You do read and write?”

“Yes, mistress.”

Dorteka handed her a sheet of paper. “This is our schedule. We will adjust it as needed.”

Marika looked it over. “Not much time left for sleep.”

“You wish to fly darkships, you must learn to endure sleeplessness. You wish to see your friend Braydic, you will remain stubbornly devoted to your studies.” Dorteka pushed a scrap of paper across the table. The notes on it were in a paw almost mechanically perfect. “Suggested motivators for the feral subject Marika.”

“The most senior?”

“Yes.”

The interest shown by the most senior was a bit intimidating.

The sheet was filled with a complicated diagram for earning the right to visit Braydic or the city.

“As you see, a visit to your friend requires you to accumulate one hundred performance points. Those are mapped out for you there. Leave to go outside the cloister will be more difficult to obtain. It is subject to my being satisfied with your progress. You will never get out if I feel you are giving less than one hundred percent.”

Crafty old Gradwohl. She had speared to the heart of her and tapped forces which could make her learn. The thought of seeing Braydic sparked an immediate urge to begin. The opportunity to get into the city, too, stirred her, but less concretely.

“I doubt that I will permit a city visit anytime soon. Perhaps we will accumulate several opportunities for later.”

“Why, mistress?”

“The streets could be dangerous for an untrained silth. We have been having a problem with rogue males. I expect the Serke are behind that, too. Whatever, silth have been assaulted. Last summer ringleaders were rounded up and sentenced to the mines, but that did little good. The brethren—those you call tradermales—may have a paw in the movement.”

“The world is not so complicated on an upper Ponath packstead,” Marika observed.

“No. You see the schedule and rewards. Are they acceptable?”

“Yes, mistress.”

“You will become a full-time student, with no other duties. You will accept the discipline of the Community?”

“Yes, mistress.” Marika was surprised to find herself so eager. Till this morning she had cared about nothing. “I am ready to begin.”

“Then begin we shall.”

II
Marika’s education commenced before the next dawn. Dorteka wakened her and took her to a gymnasium for an hour’s workout. A bath followed.

Marika’s determination almost broke. She nearly broke her vow to obey and conform.

A bath! Meth—of the upper Ponath, at least—hated water. They never entered it voluntarily. Only when the populations of insects in one’s fur became too great to stand . . .

The bath was followed by a hurried meal prior to the first class of the day, which was an introduction to being silth. Rites and ceremonies, dogma and duties, and instruction in the secret languages of the sisterhood, which she hardly needed. She discovered that there were circles of sisterhood mysteries silth were supposed to penetrate as they became older and more skilled. Till Dorteka, she had no idea how much she had been shut out.

She ripped through those studies swiftly. They required rote learning. Her memory was excellent. Seldom did she need to be shown anything more than once.

She excelled in the gymnasium. She was her dam’s pup. Skiljan had been fast, strong, hard, and tough.

The second class lay across the cloister from the first. Dorteka made her run all the way. Dorteka made her run everywhere, and ran with her. The second class was not as susceptible to rote learning, for it was mathematics. It required the use of reason. Silth naturally tended to favor intuition.

After mathematics came the history of the sisterhood, a class which Marika devoured in days. The Reugge were a minor Community with a short, uneventful past, an offshoot of the Serke that had established independence only seven centuries earlier. Sustenance of that independence was the outstanding Reugge achievement.

Silth had a history that stretched into prehistory, countless millennia back, when all meth lived in nomadic packs. The earliest sisterhoods existed long before the keeping of records began. Most silth had little interest in those days. They lived in an eternal now.

Marika’s pack had maintained a record of its achievements called the Degnan Chronicle. That it had been kept in her dam’s loghouse had been a source of pride to the pup. Barlog still kept it up, for she and Grauel believed that as long as it survived and remained current, the Degnan pack survived. As a historical instrument, the Degnan Chronicle was superior to any kept by the Reugge even now. For the Reugge Community, history was an oral tradition mainly of self-justification.

Broader historical studies proved no more informative. They raised more questions than they answered, as far as Marika could see. What were the origins of the meth? In olden times—as now among the nomads of the north—they were pack hunters. Physically, they resembled a carnivore called a kagbeast. But kagbeasts were not intelligent, nor did their females rule their packs. In fact, female meth did not rule the primitive packs of the southern hemisphere, where silth births were rare. There the males hunted on equal footing.

When Marika asked, Dorteka theorized, “Female rule developed because of the high incidence of silth births in northern litters. So I have heard.

“Primitive packs such as your own are structured around the strong. When the strong become weakened by time or disease, they are pushed aside. But a silth could stave off challengers even though she was weak physically, and once in command would tend to be partial to those who shared her talent. In primitive packs where breeding rights are reserved for the dominant females, silth dominance would mean especial favor to the spread of the silth strain.”

Marika observed, “Then an old female like my instructress Gorry, at Akard, could stay in control till she died, yet could not lead or make rational decisions, really.”

Dorteka snorted. “Which indicts the silth structure, yes. For all the most senior said about trust and whatnot in your interview—yes, I have heard all about that—we live under rule by terror, pup. The most capable do not run the Communities. The most terrible do. Thus you have a Bestrei among the Serke without a brain at all but in high station because she is invincible in darkwar. She is one of many who would not survive long if stripped of her talent.”

After general history came another meal, followed by a long afternoon spent trying to harness and expand Marika’s talents.

Dorteka went through everything with her, side by side. She graded herself, making herself the standard against which Marika should perform.

Marika almost enjoyed herself. For the first time since the fall of the Degnan packstead, she felt like her life was going somewhere.

The exercises, the entire program, were nothing like what she had had to suffer through with Gorry. There were no monsters, no terrors, no threats, no abuses. For silth class Marika seated herself upon a mat, closed her eyes, led herself into a trance where her mind floated free, unsupported by ghosts. Dorteka adamantly insisted she shun those-who-dwell.

“They are treacherous, Marika. Like chaphe is treacherous. You can turn to them too often, till you become dependent upon them and turn to them every time you are under pressure. They become an escape. Go inside and see how many other paths lie open.”

Marika was amazed to discover that most silth could not reach or manipulate the deadly ghosts. That was a rare talent, dark-walking. The rarest and most dread talent of them all was being able to control the giants that moved the darkships—the very giants she had summoned at Akard for more lethal employment against nomads.

Her heart leapt when she learned that. She would fly!

Flight had become a goal bordering upon obsession.

“When can I begin learning the darkships, mistress?” she asked. “That is what interests me.”

“Not soon. Only after you have a sound grounding in everything it takes to become true silth. The most senior would like you to become a flying sister, yes, but I feel she wants you to be much more. I suspect she plans a great future for you.”

“Mistress?” At Akard there had been much talk of a great future, little of which anyone had been willing to explain.

“Never mind. Go through and see how far you can extend your touch.”

“To whom, mistress?”

“No one. Just reach out. Do you need a target?”

“I always have.”

“To be expected of the self-taught, I suppose.” Dorteka never became exasperated, even when she had cause. “It is not necessary. Try it without.”

Despite the grind, which left little time for sleep, Marika often visited her tower, sat staring at the stars, mourning the fate that had enlisted her in a sisterhood incapable of reaching them.

Dorteka’s sessions could be as intense as Gorry’s, if not as dangerous. Marika found herself grasping skills instinctively, progressing so rapidly she unsettled her instructress. Dorteka began to see what the most senior had intuited. That much talent in the paws of one raised to the primitive huntress world view, with its harsh and uncompromising values . . . The possibilities were frightening.

Evenings after supper, Marika’s education turned to the mundane, to the sciences as the Reugge knew them. Though they were laden with a mysticism that left Marika impatient, her progress was swift, and limited only by her ability to grasp and internalize the principles of ever more complex mathematics.

Word came down from the most senior: expand the time given math. Let the sisterhood trivia slide.

Dorteka was offended. The forms of silthdom were important to her. “We are our traditions,” she was fond of saying.

“Why is the most senior doing this?” Marika asked. “I do not mind. I want to learn. But what is her hurry?”

“I am not sure. I am certain she would disapprove of my guessing. But I believe she may be thinking in terms of sculpting some sort of liberator for the Reugge. If the Serke keep pressing us and the winter keeps pushing south, we could be devoured within ten years. She does not want to be remembered as the last most senior of the Reugge Community. And she has begun to feel her mortality.”

“She is not that old. I was surprised when first I saw her. I thought she would be ancient.”

“No, she is not old. But always she hears the Serke baying behind her. However, that is not our worry. Mine is to teach. Yours is to learn. The whys are not relevant now. Time will unfold its leaves.”

Marika continued to advance at a rate that shocked Dorteka. The teacher observed, “I begin to suspect that, despite themselves, our sisters at Akard taught you a great deal. At this rate you will, in every way, surpass your own age group before summer. In some ways you already exceed many sisters accounted full silth.”

Much of what Marika encountered was new. She did not tell Dorteka that, afraid of frightening her teacher with the ease with which she learned.

After evening classes there was an events-of-the-day seminar conducted by the Maksche senior’s second, a silth named Paustch. This took place in the hall where Marika had confronted Gradwohl, and Marika was required to attend. She kept the lowest profile possible. Her presence was tolerated only because Gradwohl insisted. No one asked her opinion. She offered none. She had no illusions about her presence there. She was the senior’s marker, but she did not know in what game. She ducked out first when the seminar ended.

Thus she stayed close to the warming feud with the Serke, with the latest on nomad predations, gained an idea of the shape of politics between sisterhoods, heard of all their squabbles, caught rumors about the explorations of distant starworlds. But mostly the Maksche leadership discussed the nomads and the ever more common problem of male sedition.

“I came into this in the middle,” Marika told Dorteka. “I am not certain I understand why the problem is such a problem.”

“These males are few and really only a minor irritant,” Dorteka said. “Taken worldwide their efforts would not be noticeable. But they have concentrated their terrorism in Reugge territories, especially around Maksche. And a large portion of their attacks have been directed against guests of the Reugge—clearly an effort to make us appear weak and incapable of policing our fiefs. And the Serke, as you might expect, have been making the most of the situation. We have been subjected to a great deal of outside pressure. All part of the Serke maneuver against us, of course. But we cannot prove they are behind it.”

“If the behavior of males here is unusual . . . Are these rogues homegrown?” As an afterthought, she added the appropriate, “Mistress?”

Dorteka’s ears tilted in mild amusement. “You strike to the heart of the matter. In fact, they are not. Our native males are perfectly behaved, though they often lend passive support by not reporting things they should. Sometimes they even grow so bold as to provide places of hiding. Certainly they sympathize with the rogues’ stated goals.”

Those goals were nothing less than the overthrow and destruction of all silthdom. A grand vision indeed, considering the iron grip the Communities had upon the world.

III
Marika’s first attempt to visit Braydic did not go well at all. Called out of the communications center, the technician met her with evasive eyes and an obvious eagerness to be away. Marika was both amused and pained, for she recalled who it was who had held the door guards at bay in the heat of crisis.

“No one saw you, Braydic,” she said. “You are safe. I doubt the guards themselves could identify you. They were on the edge of hysteria and probably recall you as being a demon nine feet tall and six wide.”

Braydic shuddered and stared at the floor. Marika was disappointed, but knew what that momentary commitment had cost Braydic. She had risked everything.

“I owe you, Braydic. And I will not forget. Go, then, if you fear having me for a friend. But I promise my friendship will not falter for it.”

Marika returned two weeks later. Braydic was no more sure of herself. Pained, Marika determined that she would not return again till she had attained some position of power, the shadow of which could fall upon Braydic.

She had begun to grow aware of the value and uses of power, and to think of it. Often.

That second visit, cut short, left her an hour free. She went to her away place in the tower.

Spring now threatened Maksche. The city lay under a haze from factories working overtime to fulfill production quotas before their workers had to report to the fields. Because of the shortening growing seasons, every worker now had to labor in the fields to get sufficient crops planted, tended, and harvested. Else the city would not make it through the winter.

This failing winter had been the worst in Maksche’s history, though it was mild compared to those Marika had seen in the upper Ponath. But succeeding winters would be worse. The Maksche silth were now driving their tenants, their dependents, their meth property, so Maksche would be prepared for the worst when it came.

A darkship rose from the square below. The blade of the dagger turned till it pointed northward. Once it was above Maksche’s highest structures, it fled into the distance.

From the date of the most senior’s arrival, darkships had been airborne every day the weather permitted, hunting nomads, tracking nomads, scouting out their strong points and places of meeting, gathering information for a summer campaign. The Reugge could not challenge the Serke directly. They had neither the strength nor proof other Communities would consider adequate. So the most senior meant to defeat their efforts by obliterating their minions.

She was tough and bloodyminded, this Gradwohl. She meant to fertilize the entire northern half of the Reugge province with nomad corpses. And if she could manage it, she would add several hundred troublesome rogue males to the slaughter.

The cloister was ahum with an anticipation Marika hardly noticed. She did not expect to become involved in Gradwohl’s campaign.

How long before Dorteka allowed her to explore Maksche? She was eager to be away from the cloister, to break for a few hours from this relentless business of becoming silth.

Maksche was odd, a city of marked contrasts. Here sat the cloister, all but its ceremonial heart electrically lighted and heated. One could get water simply by lifting a lever. Wastes were carried away in a system of sewage pipes. But outside the cloister’s walls few lights existed, and those only candles or tallow lamps. Meth out there drew their water from wells or the river. Their sewers consisted of channels in the alleyways, washed clean when it rained.

It had not rained all winter.

Meth out there walked, unless they were the rare, rich, favored few who could rent dray beasts, a driver, and a carriage from the tradermales of the Brown Paw Bond. Silth sisters going abroad in the town usually rode in elegant steam coaches faster than any carriage. If Dorteka allowed her out, would she be permitted the use of such a vehicle? Not likely. They were guarded jealously, for they were very expensive. They were handcrafted by one of the tradermale underbrotherhoods not part of the local Brown Paw Bond, and imported. They were not silth property.

The traders sold no vehicle outright, but leased them instead. Lease contracts demanded huge penalty payments for damages done. Marika suspected that was motivated by a desire to keep lessees from dismantling the machines to see how they worked.

A tradermale operator came with every vehicle. Outsiders were not allowed to learn how to drive. Those males obligated to the vehicles of the cloister lived in a small barracks across the street from the cloister’s main gate, whence they could be summoned on a moment’s notice.

When her hour was up, Marika went to Dorteka and asked, “How many more points do I have to accumulate before I can go into the city?”

“It is not a point system, Marika. You can go whenever I decide you deserve the reward.”

“Well? Do I?” She had held back nothing. Having been used as a counter in a contest she did not understand, for reasons she could not comprehend, she had gone all out to arm herself for her own survival. Dorteka could not have demanded more. There was no more she could give.

“Perhaps. Perhaps. But why go out into that fester at all?”

“To explore it. To see what is out there. To get out of this oppressive prison for a while.”

“Oppressive? Prison? The cloister?”

“It is unbearable. But you grew up here. Maybe you cannot imagine freedom of movement.”

“No. I cannot. At least not out there. My duties have taken me into the city, Marika. It is disgusting. I would rather not traipse around after you while you crawl through the muck.”

“Why should you, mistress?”

“What?”

“There is no reason for you to go.”

“If you go, I have to go.”

“Why, mistress?”

“To keep you out of trouble.”

“I can take care of myself, mistress.”

“Maksche is not the Ponath, pup.”

“I doubt that the city has dangers to compare with the nomad.”

“It is not danger to your flesh I fear, Marika. It is your mind that concerns me.”

“Mistress?”

“You do not fool me. You are not yet silth. And you are no harmless, eager student. A shadow lives behind your eyes.”

Marika did not respond till she carefully stifled her anger. “I do not understand you, mistress. Others have said the same of me. Some have called me doomstalker. Yet I do not feel unusual. How could the city harm my mind? By exposing me to dangerous ideas? I have enough of those myself. I will create my own beliefs here or there, regardless of what you would have me believe. Or could it harm me by showing me how cruelly Reugge bonds live so we silth can be comfortable here? That much I have seen from the wall.”

Dorteka did not reply. She, too, was fighting anger.

“If I must have company and protection, send my packmates, Grauel and Barlog. I am certain they would be happy to accept your instructions.” Her sarcasm was lost on Dorteka.

She and Grauel and Barlog had been at odds almost since the confrontation with the most senior. The two huntresses had been making every effort to appear to be perfect subjects of the Community. Marika did not want them to surrender quite so fast.

“I will consider that. If you insist on going out there.”

“I want to, mistress.”

The great ground-level gate rolled back. Grauel and Barlog stepped out warily. Marika followed, surprised at their reluctance. Behind her, Dorteka said, “Be back before dark, Marika. Or no more passes.”

“Yes, mistress. Come on!” She ran, exulting in her freedom. Grauel and Barlog struggled to keep pace. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“It stinks,” Grauel said. “They live in their own ordure, Marika.”

And Barlog; “Where are you going?” Already it was evident that Marika had a definite destination in mind.

“To the tradermale enclosure. To see their flying machines.”

“I might have guessed,” Barlog grumbled. “Slow down. We’re not as young as you are. Marika, all this obsession with flying is not healthy. Meth were not meant for it. Marika! Will you slow down?”

Marika glanced back. The two huntresses were struggling with the cumbersome long rifles they carried. “Why did you bring those?” She knew Grauel preferred the weapon she had gotten from Bagnel.

“Orders, Marika. Pure and simple and malicious orders. There are some silth who hope you’ll get killed out here. The only reason you get a pretense of a bodyguard is because you have the most senior’s favor.”

“Pretense?”

“Any other silth would have at least six guards. If she was insane enough to come out on foot. And they would not be so shoddily armed. They would not have let us come except that we are two they won’t miss if something happens.”

“That’s silly. Nobody has been attacked since we’ve been here. I think all that is just scare talk. Good old grauken in the bushes.”

“No one has been foolish enough to walk these streets either, Marika.”

Marika did not want to argue. She wanted to see airships. She pressed ahead. The tradermales built machines that flew. She had seen them in her education tapes and from her tower in the nether distance, but it was hard to connect vision screen images and remote specks with anything real. The airfield lay too far from the cloister for examination from her tower.

An aircraft was circling as Marika approached the fence surrounding the tradermale enclave. It swooped, touched down, rolled along a long concrete strip, and came to a halt with one final metallic belch. Marika checked Grauel and Barlog for their reactions. They had seen nothing like it before. Servants of the silth saw very little of the world, and tradermale aircraft were not permitted to fly near the cloister.

They might have been watching carrion birds land upon a corpse.

“Let’s get closer,” Marika said. She trotted along the fence, toward a group of buildings. Grauel and Barlog hurried after her, glancing over their shoulders at the aircraft and at two big transport dirigibles resting in cradles on the far side of the concrete strip.

The advantage of being silth, Marika believed, was that you could do any All-bedamned thing you wanted. Ordinary meth would grind their teeth and endure. She breezed into an open doorway, past a desk where a sleepy tradermale watched a vision screen, dashed down a long hallway and out onto the field proper, ignoring the startled shout that pursued her. She headed for the freighters.

The nearest was a monster. The closer she ran, the more she was awed.

“Oh,” Grauel said at last, and slowed. Marika stopped to wait. Grauel breathed, “All bless us. It is as big as a mountain.”

“Yes.” Marika started to explain how an airship worked, saw that she had lost both huntresses, said instead, “It could haul the whole Degnan pack. Packstead and all. And have room left over.”

Tradermale technicians were at work around the airship’s gondola. One spotted them. He yelled at the others. A few just stared. Most scattered. Marika thought that was amusing.

The fat flank of the ship loomed higher and higher. She leaned back, now as awed as Grauel and Barlog. She beckoned a male either too brave or too petrified to have fled. He approached tentatively. “What ship is this, tradermale?”

He seemed puzzled by that latter, dialect word, but got the sense of the question. “Dawnstrider.”

“Oh. I do not know that one. It is so big, I thought it must be Starpetal.”

“No. Starpetal is much larger. Way too big for our cradles here. Usually only the smaller ships come up to the borderlands.”

“Borderlands?” Marika asked, bemused by the size of the ship.

“Well, Maksche is practically the end of the world. Last outpost of civilization. Ten miles out there it turns into Tech Three Zone and just gets worse the farther you go.” He tilted his ears and exposed his teeth in a way that said he was making a joke.

“I thought I hailed from the last outpost,” Marika countered in a bantering tone. “North edge of the Tech Two.” If she could overcome his awe, he might have something interesting to say. She did realize that most meth considered Maksche the end of the world. It was the northernmost city of consequence in the Hainlin basin, the limit of barge traffic and very border of Tech Four-permitted machine technology. It had grown up principally to service and support trade up the Hainlin, into the primitive interior of the vast and remote northern Reugge provinces. “Well, savagery is relative. Right? We are civilized. They are savages. Come, Barlog. Grauel.”

“Where are you going?” the tradermale squeaked. “Hey! You cannot go in there.”

“I just want to look at the control cabin,” Marika said. “I will not touch anything. I promise.”

“But . . . wait . . . ”

Marika climbed the ladder leading to the airship’s gondola. After a moment of silent debate, Grauel and Barlog followed, shaking visibly, driven onward only by their pride. A Degnan huntress knew no fear.

Dawnstrider was a freighter. Its appointments were minimal, designed to keep down mass so payload could be maximized. Even so, the control cabin was bewildering with its array of meters and dials, levers, valves, switches, and push-buttons. “Do not touch anything,” Marika warned Grauel and Barlog for the benefit of the technician, who refused to leave them unsupervised. “We do not want this beast to carry us away.”

The huntresses clutched their weapons and stared around. Marika was puzzled. They were not ignorant Ponath dwellers anymore. They had been exposed to the greater meth universe. They should have developed some flexibility.

She did not remain impressed long. Dawnstrider was a disappointment, though she could not pin down why. “I have seen enough. Let us go look at the little ships.”

She went down the ladder behind the technician, amused by the emotion betrayed in his every movement. She was getting good at reading body language.

She did not sense the wrongness till she had moved several steps from the base of the ladder. Then it was too late.

Tradermales rushed from beneath the airship, all of them armed. Grauel and Barlog snapped their weapons to the ready, shielded Marika with their bodies.

“What is this?” Marika snapped.

“You do not belong here, silth,” a male said. “You are trespassing on brethren land.”

Marika’s nerve wavered. Yet she stared the male in the eye with the arrogance of a senior and said, “I go where I please, male. And you mind your manners when you speak—”

“You are out of line, pup. No one comes into a brethren enclave without permission of the factors.”

He had the right of it. She had not thought. There were compacts between the Reugge and the tradermales. She had overlooked them in her enthusiasm.

A stubborn something within her refused to back down, insisted that she up the risk. “You better have these males put their weapons aside. I do not wish to harm anyone.”

“I have twenty rifles, pup. I count two on your side.”

“You are speaking to a darkwalker. I can destroy the lot of you before one trigger can be pulled. You think about dying with your heart ripped out, male.”

His lips peeled back in a snarl. He was ready to call her bluff. The set of Grauel’s shoulders said that the huntress thought her mad to provoke the male so, that she would get them all killed for nothing.

Fleetingly, Marika wondered why she did provoke almost everyone who ever challenged her.

“We shall see.” The tradermale gestured.

Marika felt an odd tingling, like that she experienced around high-energy communications gear. Something electromagnetic was being directed at her. She spotted a tradermale in the background aiming a boxlike device her way.

She dived down inside herself, through her loophole, snagged a ghost, and slammed it into the guts of the box. She twisted that ghost and compressed it into an ever more rapidly spinning ball, all within an instant. She watched it shred wires and glass.

She came back in time to watch the box fly apart, to hear the technician’s startled yelp. He raised a bleeding paw to his mouth.

Fingers strained at triggers. The leading tradermale betrayed extreme distress. “You see?” Marika demanded.

“Hold it! Hold it there!” someone shouted from the distance. Everyone turned.

More males were running along the airstrip. In a moment Marika realized why one seemed familiar. “Bagnel,” she said softly. Her spirits rose. Maybe she would escape the consequences of her own stupidity after all.

The instant she began to see hope, she started worrying about the consequences that would follow the report that would reach the cloister. There would be a complaint, surely. Tradermales were said to be militant about their rights. They had struggled for ages to obtain them. Their organization was by-the-rules where those were concerned.

Marika was mildly amazed to discover she was more afraid of Dorteka than she was of this potentially lethal confrontation.

A few tradermale weapons sagged as they awaited those approaching. Tension drooped with them. Grauel and Barlog relaxed, though they did not lower their weapons.

Bagnel rushed up, puffing. “Timbruk, what have you got here?” He peered at Marika. “Ha! Well! And I actually thought of you when they told me. Marika. Hello.” He interposed himself between Marika and the male he had called Timbruk. “Can we have a little relaxation here, meth? Everybody. Put the weapons down. There is no call to get anyone hurt.”

Trimbruk protested, “Bagnel, they have trespassed . . . ”

“Obviously. But no harm done, was there?”

“Harm is not the point.”

“Yes. Yes. Well, Trimbruk, if they need shooting we can do that later. Put the weapons down. Let me talk. I know this sister. She saved my life in the Ponath.”

“Saved your life? Come on. She is just a pup. She is the one who . . . ?”

“Yes. She is that one.”

Trimbruk swallowed. His eyes widened. He looked spooked. He stared at Marika till she became uncomfortable. Twice his gaze seemed pulled toward a group of buildings at the north end of the field. Each time he jerked it back to her with sudden ferocity. Then he said, “Relax, brothers. Relax. Weapons on safety.”

Marika said, “Grauel, Barlog, stand easy. Put your weapons on safe.”

Grauel did not want to do it. Her every muscle was tense with a rigidly controlled fight-flight response. But she did as she was told, though her eyes continued to smolder.

Barlog merely heaved a sigh of relief.

Bagnel did likewise. “Good. Now, shall we talk? Marika, what in the name of the All did you think you were doing, coming in here like that? You cannot just walk in like you own the place. This is convention ground. Have they not taught you anything over there?

“I know. It was stupid.” She stepped closer, spoke more softly. “I was just wandering around, exploring. When I saw the airships I got so excited I lost my head. I forgot everything else. I just had to look. Then these males . . . ” She broke off, realizing she was about to make accusations that would be unreasonable and provocative.

Bagnel was amused. But he said, “Did you have to be so . . . I see. They have taught you—taught you to be silth. I mean, the way silth here understand being silth. Cold. Arrogant. Insensitive. Never mind. As they say, silth will be silth. Timbruk. It is over. There is no need for you here now. This is to be forgotten. No record. No formal protest. Understand?”

“Bagnel . . . ”

Bagnel ignored him. “I owe you a life, Marika. But for you I would have become meat in a nomad’s belly more than once. I repay a fraction of the debt here. I forgive the trespass.” In soft humor, he added, “I am sure your seniors would have a good deal to say to you if they heard about this.”

“I am sure they would. Thank you.”

Timbruk and his males were stalking away, some occasionally glancing back. Except for the male who had tried to use the box. Despite his wound, he was crouched over the remains, prodding them with a finger, shaking his head. He seemed both baffled and disturbed.

“Come,” Bagnel said. He started toward the buildings through which Marika had made her dash.

She asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I am assigned here now. As assistant security chief for the enclave. Since I did such a wonderful job as security officer at Critza, they awarded me a much more important post.” His sarcasm was thick enough to cut. Marika could not determine its thrust, though. Was he his own target? Or were the seniors who had given him the job?

“That was what you were doing up there? I always had a feeling you were not a regular wander-the forests-with-a-pack-on-your-back kind of tradermale.”

“My job was to protect the fortress and manage any armed operations undertaken in the region of its license.”

“Then you were in charge of that hunting party you were with the first time we met.”

“I was.”

“I thought old Khronen was in charge.”

“I know. We allowed you think so. He was just our guide, though. He had been in the upper Ponath all his life. I think he knew every rock and bush by name.”

“He was a friend of my dam. At least as near a friend as she ever had among males.”

Bagnel, daring beyond belief, reached out and touched her lightly. “The memories do haunt, do they not not? We all lost so much. And those who were never there just shrug it off.”

Marika stiffened her back. “Can we look at the small aircraft on the way to the gate?”

Bagnel rewarded her with a questioning look.

“The crime is committed,” she replied. “Can I compound it?”

“Of course.” He altered course toward a rank of five propeller-driven aircraft.

“Stings,” Marika said as they approached. “Driven by a single bank nine-cylinder air-cooled radial engine that develops eighteen hundred meth power. Top speed two hundred ten. Normal cruising speed one sixty. Not fast, but capable of carrying a very large payload. A fighting aircraft. Who do tradermales fight, Bagnel?”

“You amaze me. How did you find out? We fight anyone who attacks us. There are a lot of wild places left in the world. Even here in the higher Tech Zones. There is always a demand for the application of force.”

“Are these ones here for the push against the nomads?”

“No. We may reoccupy our outposts if the Reugge manage to push the nomads out, but we will not help push.”

“Why not? The Brown Paw Bond suffered more than we did, if you do not count the packs. Posts all along the Hainlin . . . ”

“Orders, Marika. I do not pretend to understand. Politics, I guess. Little one, you picked the wrong sisterhood at the wrong time. Strong forces are ranged against the Reugge.”

“The Serke?”

“Among others. They are the most obvious, but they do not stand alone. That is off the record, though. You did not hear it from me.”

“You did not tell me anything I did not know. I do wonder why, though. No one has bothered the Reugge since they split from the Serke. Why start now?”

“The Reugge are not strong, Marika, but they are rich. The Hainlin basin produces a disproportionate amount of wealth. Emeralds out of the Zhotak—those alone might be reason enough. We Brown Paw Bond traders have done very well trading junk for emeralds.”

Marika harkened to younger days, when tradermales had come into the upper Ponath afoot or leading a single rheum-greater, exchanging a few iron tools, books, beads, flashy pieces of cloth, and such, for the clear green stones or otec furs. Every year Dam’s friend Khronen had come to the Degnan packstead, bringing precious tools and his easy manner with pups, and had walked away with a fortune.

The Degnan had been satisfied with the trades. Emeralds were of little value on a frontier. Otec fur was of more use, being the best there was, but what it would bring in trade outweighed its margin of value over lesser furs.

Junk, Bagnel called the trade goods. And he was right from his perspective. Arrowheads, axe heads, hoes, hammers, rakes, all could be manufactured in bulk at little cost in Maksche’s factories. One emerald would purchase several wagonloads here. And books, for which a pack might save for seasons, were produced in mass in the city’s printshops.

“Is that why the Ponath is kept savage?”

Meth, with the exceptions of tradermales and silth, seldom moved far from their places of birth. Information did not travel well in the mouths of those with an interest in keeping it close. How angry Skiljan would have been had she known the treasures she acquired for the pack cost the traders next to nothing. She would have believed it robbery. Just another example of innate male perfidy.

“Partly. Partly because the silth are afraid of an informed populace, of free movement of technology. Your Communities could not survive in a world where wealth, information, and technology traveled freely. We brethren would have our troubles. We are few and the silth are fewer still. Between us we run everything because for ages we have shaped the law and tradition to that end.”

They walked around the fighting aircraft. Marika found its presence disturbing. For that matter, the presence of Dawnstrider was unsettling. Trade in and out of Maksche did not require a vessel so huge. There was more here than met the eye. Maybe that explained Timbruk’s hostility.

“The Sting’s main disadvantage is its limited range when fully fight-loaded,” Marika said, continuing with the data she had given earlier.

“You are right. But where did you learn all that, Marika? I would bet only those of us who actually fly the beasts know all you have told me.”

“I learned in tapestudy. I am going to be a darkship flyer. So I have been learning everything about flying. I know everything about airships, too.”

“I doubt that.” Bagnel glanced back at Dawnstrider.

“But those craft . . . ” Marika indicated several low, long, ovoid shapes in the shadow of a building on the side away from the city. “I do not recognize those.”

“Ground-effect vehicles. Not strictly legal in a Tech Four Zone, but all right as long as we keep them inside convention ground. You came close to catching us using them that time you first met me.”

“The noise and the smell. And Arhdwehr getting so angry. Engines and exhaust. Of course.”

“Every brethren station has a few for emergency use. Mainly for hurried getaways. You remember the odd tracks going away from Critza? Where I said some of our brethren got out? Ground-effect vehicles made those. They leave a pretty obvious trail in the snow.” He went on to explain how the machines worked. Marika had no trouble grasping the concept.

“There is much I do not yet know, then,” she said.

“No doubt. There is much we all do not know. Let me give you some advice. Try to consider the broader picture before you let impulse carry you away again.”

“What?”

“There is a great deal of tension between the Brown Paw Bond and the Reugge right now. Our factors not only refused to help reclaim the provinces overrun by the nomad, they would not lease the fighting aircraft the Reugge wanted. I do not pretend to understand why. It was a chance for us to sweep up a huge profit.”

“I see.” Marika considered the fighting aircraft once more. It was a two-seat, open cockpit biplane with two guns that fired through the airscrew, four wing-mounted guns, and a single gimbal-mounted weapon which could be fired rearward by the occupant of the second seat. “I would love to fly one of those,” she said. The tapes mentioned capabilities that could be matched by no darkship.

“It is an experience,” Bagnel agreed.

“You fly?”

“Yes. If there was trouble and the aircraft had to be employed, I would be a backup flyer.”

“Take me up.”

“Marika!” Grauel snapped.

Bagnel was amused. “There is no limit to her audacity, is there?”

“Marika,” Grauel repeated, “you exceed yourself. You may be silth, but even so we will drag you back to the cloister.”

“Not today, Marika,” Bagnel said. “I cannot. Maybe some other time. Come back later. Be polite at the gate, ask for me, and maybe you will be permitted entrance—without all this fuss. Right now I think you had better leave before Timbruk goes over my head and gets permission to shoot you anyhow.” Bagnel strode toward the gateway buildings. Marika followed. She was nervous now. There would be trouble when she got home.

Bagnel said, “I do not think your sisters would be upset if Timbruk did you in either. You still have that smoky look. Of the fated outsider.”

“I have problems with the silth,” Marika admitted. “But the most senior has given me her protection.”

“Oh? Lucky for you.”

They parted at the gate, Bagnel with a well-wish and repeated invitation to return under more auspicious circumstances.

Outside, Marika paused to scan the field, watched Bagnel stride purposefully toward distant buildings. Her gaze drifted to those structures in the north. Cold crept down her spine. She shivered.

“Come. We are returning to the cloister right now,” Grauel said. Her tone brooked no argument. Marika did not protest, though she did not want to go back. She did have to cling to the goodwill of Grauel and Barlog. They were her only trustworthy allies.

Chapter Seventeen
I
Marika went from the gate to her tower, where she sat staring toward the tradermale compound. Several dots soared above the enclave, roaming the sky nearby.

Grauel came to her there. She looked grim. “Trouble,” she said.

“They have registered their protest already? That was fast.”

“Not that kind of trouble. Home trouble. Somebody got into our quarters.”

“Oh?”

“After we turned in the weapons they gave us, we went up to clean up. My rifle was gone.”

“Anything else?”

“No. The Degnan Chronicle had been opened and moved slightly. That is all.”

“The most senior should spend more time here instead of talking about spending more time here.”

Marika had noted that in Gradwohl’s absence she was treated far more coolly. She wished that most senior would move into Maksche in fact as well as name. Despite declarations of intent, she just visited occasionally, usually without warning.

“I will not tolerate invasions of my private space, Grauel. No one else in the entire Community has to suffer such intrusions. Back off and give me a few minutes of quiet.”

She slipped down through her loophole and cast about till she found a ghost she thought sufficiently strong. She took control and began roaming the cloister, beginning in places she thought were most likely to reveal the missing weapon.

Finding it took only minutes. It was in the cloister arsenal, where some sisters argued it belonged anyway. A pair of silth were dismantling it.

Marika returned to flesh. “Come.”

“You found it? That quickly?”

“It is not hidden, actually. It is in the arsenal. We will take it back.”

“And I was right there a few minutes ago.”

The arsenal door was closed and locked now. Marika had no patience. Rather than scratch, wait, ask permission to enter, and argue, she recalled her ghost and squeezed it down as she had done when she had destroyed the electronic box belonging to the tradermale. She shoved the ghost into the lock and destroyed the metal there.

That made enough noise to alert the silth inside. They peered at her with fear and guilt when she stalked into the room where the parts of Grauel’s weapon were scattered upon a table. One started to say something. Marika brushed her soul lightly with the ghost. “Grauel. Put it back together. You. Where is the ammunition? I want it here. Now.”

The sister to whom she spoke thought of arguing, eyed Marika’s bare teeth, thought better of it. She collected the ammunition from a storage box. After placing it upon the table, she retreated as far as the walls would allow. She choked out, “The orders came from Paustch. You will be in grave—”

“Ask me how much I care,” Marika snapped. “This is for you to remember. And perhaps even share. The next meth who enters my quarters without my invitation will discover just how vicious a savage I really am. We invented some truly fascinating tortures to get nomads to tell us things we wanted to know.”

Grauel cursed under her breath.

“Is it all there?”

“Yes. But they have mixed things up. It will take me a few minutes.”

Marika used the time to glare at the two sisters till they cringed.

She heard Grauel slam the magazine home and feed a round to the chamber. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Grauel said, sweeping the weapon’s aim across the silth. Her lips pulled back in a snarl that set them on the edge of panic. “I do suppose I should thank them for cleaning it. They did that much good.”

“Thank them, then. And let us be gone.”

Gradwohl might not have been present in Maksche, but her paw was firmly felt. Darkships began arriving, bearing Reugge whose accents seemed exotic. They paused only to rest and eat and further burden their flying crosses. Some of the darkships lifted so burdened with meth and gear they looked like something from the worst quarters of the city.

“Everyone that can be spared,” Barlog said as she and Marika and Grauel watched one darkship lift and another slide in under it. “That is the word now. The cloister is to be stripped. They have begun soliciting workers from the city, offering special pay. I would say the most senior is serious.”

There had been some silth, at the evening meetings Marika attended, who had thought Gradwohl’s plans just talk meant to form the basis for rumors that would reach the Serke. Rumors that would make that Community chary of too bold interference. But the lie had been given that view. The stream of darkships was never ending. The might of the Reugge was on the move, and impressive might it was.

Mistresses of the Ship could be seen in the meal halls almost all the time. Bath—the sisters who helped fly the darkships from their secondary positions at the tips of the shorter arms—sometimes crowded Maksche silth out of the meal lines. Scores seemed to be around all the time. Marika spent all her free time trying to get acquainted with those bath and Mistresses. But they would have little to do with her. They were an order within the order, silent, separate beings with little interest in socializing and none in illuminating a pup.

Three small dirigibles, contracted to the Reugge before the Brown Paw Bond elected not to support the offensive, appeared over the cloister and took aboard workers and silth and construction equipment. The cloister began to have a hollow feel, a deserted air. A shout would echo down long, empty halls. No one was there to answer.

The dirigibles would all make for Akard, which the most senior wanted rebuilt and reoccupied. It would become the focal point of a network of satellite fastnesses meant to interdict any nomad movements southward.

“I do not think she realizes how many nomads there are,” Marika told Grauel. “Or really how vast her northern provinces are. All that might is not a tenth enough.”

“She knows. I believe she is counting on the nomads having spent the best they had in the past few years. I think she expects it to be a job of tracking down remnants of the real fighting bands, then letting next winter finish the rest.”

“I think she would be wrong if that is the basis of her strategy.”

“So do I.”

“We shall see, of course. Let us hope the answer is not savages in the cloister.”

The early reports from the north told of a big harvest of nomads, of kills far more numerous than anyone expected. The numbers caused a good deal of uneasiness. They implied other numbers that might prove troublesome. For everyone agreed that there would be a dozen live and concealed nomads for every one dead.

II
The dream was a nightmare Marika had not known for several years, but it was old and familiar.

She was trapped in a cold, dark, damp place, badly hurt, unable to call for help, unable to climb out.

The dream had tormented her every night since her return from the tradermale enclave. She had told no one, but Grauel and Barlog sensed that something was torturing her.

Marika wished she could go visit Braydic. The last time the dreams had come, soon after her arrival at Akard, following the destruction of the Degnan packstead, she had shared her pain with the communications technician. Braydic had been unable to interpret the dream. Eventually, she had agreed it must be Marika’s conscience nagging her because the dead of the Degnan pack had not gone into the embrace of the All with a proper Mourning.

After the return of the dreams, she had asked Grauel and Barlog where they stood in regard to that unsettled debt.

“We can do nothing now,” Barlog told her. “Someday, though, we will take care of it. Perhaps when you are important and powerful. The score is not forgotten, nor considered settled.”

That was good enough for Marika. But meantime she had to endure the horror of her nights.

Dorteka wakened her from this dream. She was early, but Marika was too fuddled to realize that till after they had been into their gymnasium routine for some time. “Why are we up so early?” she asked.

“We have new orders, you and I. We are headed north.”

“Up the river? To chase nomads?” Marika was astonished. It was the last thing she expected.

“Yes. The great hunt is in full cry. The most senior is sending everyone who has no absolute need to remain. She sent a note saying that means us especially.”

Just last evening word had come round that the most senior had ordered all patrolling darkships to destroy any meth they found upon the ground. They were to operate on the assumption that no locals had survived. No mercy was to be shown.

“What is it all about, mistress?” Marika asked. “Why is Gradwohl so determined? I have heard that winter may not break this year, at least in the upper Ponath. That the ground will remain frozen. No crops could be planted there. So why fight for useless territory?”

“Someone exaggerated, Marika. There will be a summer. Not that it matters. We are not going to send settlers into the Ponath. We are simply validating our claim to our provinces. In blood. Gradwohl is leading us in a fight against the Serke, and this is the only way we can battle them. Indirectly.”

“Why are the Serke so determined, then? I am told wealth is the reason. I know about the emeralds, and there is gold and silver and copper and things, but nobody ever did any mining up there. It is a Tech Two Zone. There must be some other reason the Serke risk conflict.”

“Probably. We do not know what it is, though. We just know we cannot allow them to steal the Ponath. Them or the brethren.”

“You think the reason the tradermales will not help us is because they want to steal the Ponath, too?”

“I expect the Brown Paw Bond would stand with us if they could. We have been close associates for centuries. But higher authority may have been offered a better cut by the Serke.”

“Could we not impose sanctions?”

Dorteka appeared amused by her naiveté. “Without proof? Wait. Yes. You know, and I know, and everyone else alive knows what is happening. Or we think we do. We suspect that the brethren and the Serke Community have entered into a conspiracy prohibited by the conventions. But no Community extant will act on suspicion. The Serke have Bestrei, and flaunt it. As long as the Reugge cannot present absolute and irrefutable proof of what is happening, no other Community faces the disagreeable business of having to take sides. They would rather sit back and be entertained by our travails.”

“But if the Serke get away with this, they will be a threat to everyone else. Do the other orders not see that? Armed with all our wealth, and Bestrei besides . . . ”

“Who knows what is really going on? Not you or I. The other sisterhoods may be in it with the Serke. There are ample precedents.”

“It all seems silly to me,” Marika said. “Will Grauel and Barlog be able to go with me?”

“I am sure they will. You are a single unit in most eyes.”

Marika glanced at her instructress, not liking her tone. She and Dorteka tolerated one another because the most senior insisted, but there was no love between them.

Marika, Grauel, Barlog, and Dorteka, with their gear, boarded a northbound darkship about the time Marika should have begun her mathematics class. The bath, before going to their places at the tips of the short arms, made certain the passengers strapped themselves to the darkship’s frame. All gear went into bins fixed around the cross’s axis.

Marika paid much more attention to the darkship and its operators this trip. “Mistress Dorteka. What is this metal? I have seen nothing like it before.” It seemed almost invisible when probed with the touch.

“Titanium. It is the lightest metal known, yet very strong. It is difficult to obtain. The brethren recover it in a process similar to that they use to obtain aluminum. They fairly rob us for these ships.”

“They make them?

“Yes.”

“I would think it something we would do for ourselves. Why do we let them rob us?”

“I am not sure. Maybe because to argue is too much trouble. We do buy them, I think, because their ships are better. We have been buying them for only about sixty years, though. Before that most of the orders made their own. There was a lot of artistry involved. Most of those old darkships are still in service down south, too, around TelleRai and the other big cities.”

“What were they like? How were they different? And what do you mean, buy? I thought the tradermales only leased.”

“Questions, questions, questions. Pup . . . They do not lease darkships. We would not let them get away with that. In some ways they have us too much in their power now.

“The old ships are not much different from those you have seen. Maybe smaller, generally. They were wooden, though. A few were pretty fanciful because they were seen as works of art. They were pawcrafted from golden fleet timber, a wood that is sensitive to the touch. The trees had to be at least five hundred years old before they could be cut. They were considered very precious. The groves are protected by a web of laws even now. So-called poachers can be slain for even touching a golden fleet tree.

“Every frame member and strut in the old ships was individually carved from a specially selected timber or billet. The way I hear, a shipbuilder sister might spend a year preparing one strut. It might take a building team twenty years to complete a ship. No two darkships were ever alike, unlike these brethren products. These things are plain and all business.”

All business maybe, but hardly plain. This one was covered with seals and fanciful witch signs that, Marika suspected, had something to do with the Mistress and her bath.

“You say those old ones are still around?”

“Most of them. I have seen some in TelleRai that are said to be thousands of years old. Silth have been flying since the beginning of time. The Redoriad museum at TelleRai has several prehistoric saddleships that are still taken up once in a while.”

“Saddleships?” Here was something she had missed in her search for information on flying.

“In olden times that sort of silth who today would become a Mistress of the Ship usually flew alone. Her ship was a pole of golden fleet wood about eighteen feet long with a saddle mounted two-thirds of the way back. You would find the Redoriad museum interesting, what with your interest in flight. They have something of everything there.”

“I sure would. I will find out about it if I ever get to TelleRai.”

“You will get there soon enough if Gradwohl has her way.”

“Then I suppose the reason for buying metal ships is because that is easier than making them.”

“No doubt.”

“Are there any artisans left? Sisters who could build darkships if necessary?”

“I am sure there are. Silth are conservative. Old things take a thousand years to die. And about darkships there are many still devoted to the old. Many who prefer the wooden ships because the golden fleet wood is more responsive than cold metal. Also, many who feel we should not be dependent upon the brethren for our ships.

“The brethren keep taking over chunks of our lives. There was a time when touch-sisters did everything comm techs do now. Their greatest bragged that they could touch anyone anywhere in the world. That far reach is almost a lost art now.”

“That is sad.”

The darkship was fifty miles north of the city already. Ahead, Marika could just distinguish the fire-blackened remains of a tradermale outpost. Kharg Station. It marked the southernmost flow of nomad raiding for the winter. Its fall had been the final insult that had driven Gradwohl into the rage whence this campaign had sprung. Its fall had come close to costing Senior Zertan her position, for she had made no effort to relieve the besieged outpost.

“I think so, too. We live in the moment, we silth, but many long for the past. For quieter times when we were not so much dependent upon the brethren.” Dorteka eyed the ruins. “Zertan is one of those. Paustch is another.”

The darkship moved north at a moderate pace. After marveling at the view of the plain and the brown, meandering Hainlin, Marika slid down inside herself. For a time she studied the subtle interplay of talent between the bath and the Mistress of the Ship. These were veterans. They drew upon one another skillfully. Fatigue would be a long time coming.

Once she thought she understood what they were doing, Marika began cataloging all she knew about her own and others’ talents. She found what she was seeking. She returned to the world.

“Dorteka, could we not make our own metal darkships? Assuming we want to produce the ships quickly? We have sisters who could extract the metal from ore with their talents. It could not be difficult to build a ship if the metal was available.”

“Silth do not do that kind of work.”

Marika ran that through her mind, looking at it from every angle but the logical. She already knew the argument made no logical sense. She must have missed something because she still did not understand after trying to see it as silth. “Mistress, I do not understand.”

Dorteka had forgotten already. “What?”

“Why should we not build a metal darkship if it is within our capacity? When it is all right for us to build a wooden one? Especially if the tradermales are working against us.” There was some circumstantial evidence that a tradermale faction was supporting the ever more organized efforts of the rogue males plaguing the Reugge.

Dorteka could not explain in any way that made sense to Marika. She became confused and frustrated by her effort. She finally snapped, “Because that is the way it is. Silth do not do physical labor. They rule. They are artists. The wooden darkships were works of art. Metal ships are machines, even if they perform the same tasks. Anyway, we have tacitly granted that they fall inside the prerogatives of the brethren.”

“We could have our own factory inside the cloister . . . ” Marika gave it up. Dorteka was not interested in a pup’s foolish notions. Marika invested in a series of mental relaxation exercises so she could clear her thoughts to enjoy the flight.

The darkship did not pursue a direct course toward Akard. It roamed erratically, randomly, at times drifting far from the river, on the off chance contact would be made with nomads. The day was far advanced when Marika began to see landmarks she recognized. “There, Grauel. What is left of Critza.”

“The tradermales will not be restoring that. That explosion certainly took it apart.”

Bagnel had set off demolition charges in what the nomads had left of the packfast, to deny it value to any nomads who thought to use it later.

“Now. There it is. Straight ahead,” Barlog said as the darkship slipped around a bend in the river canyon.

Akard. Where Marika had spent four miserable years, and had discovered that she was that most dreaded of silth, a strong darkwalker.

The remains of the fortress were perched on a headland where the Hainlin split into the Husgen and an eastern watercourse which retained the Hainlin name. It was webbed in by scaffolding. Workers swarmed over it like colony insects. The darkship settled toward the headland.

It was a scant hundred feet off the ground when Marika felt a sudden, strong touch.

Hang on. We have a call for help.

That was the Mistress of the Ship with a warning so powerful even Grauel and Barlog caught its edges.

Marika barely had time to warn them verbally. The darkship shot forward, rose, gained speed rapidly. The robes of the Mistress and bath crackled in the rushing wind. Marika ducked down through to examine the altered relationship between the Mistress and bath. The Mistress was drawing heavily on the bath now.

The darkship climbed to three hundred feet and arced to the east, into the upper Ponath. A few minutes later it passed over the site of the Degnan packstead, where Marika had lived her first ten years. Only a few regular lines in the earth remained upon that hilltop clearing.

Marika read grief in the set of Grauel’s upper torso. Barlog refused to look and respond.

The darkship rushed on toward the oncoming night. Way, way to her left Marika spotted a dot coming down from the north, angling in, occasionally spilling a crimson flash as sunlight caught it. Another darkship. Then to the south, another still. All three rushed eastward on intersecting courses.

Marika’s ship arrived first, streaking over a forest where rifles hammered and heavier weapons filled the woods with flashes. A clearing appeared ahead. At its center stood an incomplete fortress of logs. It was afire. Huntresses enveloped in smoke sniped at the surrounding forest.

Something black and wicked roiled around Marika. The darkship dropped away beneath her, plunging groundward. The darkness cleared. The Mistress of the Ship resumed control of her craft, took it up. Chill wind nibbled at Marika’s face.

Screams came from the forest.

The second and third darkships made passes while Marika’s turned. Marika went down through her loophole, located a ghost not bearing the ship, and went riding. She located a band of wild silth and wehrlen. They were feeble but able to neutralize the three silth who commanded the besieged workers and huntresses.

A hum past her ear pulled Marika back. The Mistress was into her second pass. Rifles flashed ahead. Bullets whined past the darkship. One spanged against metal and howled away.

Marika dived through her loophole, found a steed, lashed it toward the wild silth. She allowed her anger full reign when she reached them.

She was astonished by her own strength. It had grown vastly during her brief stay at Maksche. A dozen nomads died horribly. The others scattered. In moments the nomad fighters followed.

The darkships began flying fast, low-level circles, spiraling outward from the stronghold, exterminating fugitives. Marika’s Mistress of the Ship did not break off till after three moons had risen.

III
Paustch was in charge of the reconstruction of Akard. She was no friend of that uppity pup Marika or her scandalously undisciplined savage cohorts, Grauel and Barlog. She tolerated their presence in her demesne only a few days.

During those days Marika wangled a couple of patrol flights with the Mistress on whose darkship she had come north. The Mistress was not being sociable or understanding of the whims of a pup. She respected Marika’s darker abilities and hoped they would help her survive her patrols.

No contact came during either flight.

On her return from the second venture, Marika found Dorteka packing. “What is happening, mistress? Have you been recalled?”

“No. We have been assigned the honor of establishing a blockhouse directly astride the main route from the Zhotak south into the upper Ponath, somewhere up near the Rift.” The look she gave Marika said much more. It said this was an exile, and that it was all Marika’s fault because she was who and what she was. It said that they were being sent out into the wilderness because Paustch wanted her both out of her fur and into a difficult position.

Marika shrugged. “I would rather be away from here anyway. Paustch and her cronies persist in aggravating me. I am long-suffering, but under the circumstances I might eventually lose my temper.”

Dorteka first tilted her ears in amusement, then came near losing her temper. “This hole is primitive enough. Out there there will be nothing.”

“The life is not as hard as you imagine, mistress. And you will have three experienced woodsmeth to show you how to cope.”

“And how many nomads?”

Marika broke away as soon as she could. She did not want to argue with Dorteka. She had plenty of firm enemies already among those who had power over her. Dorteka would never be a friend, but at present she could be counted upon for support as an agent of the most senior.

She was pleased to be assigned to a blockhouse garrison. It meant a respite from the grinding silth life, with all its ceremony and all the animosity directed her way. She did not enjoy that, though perforce she must live with it.

Next morning a school of darkships lifted Marika, Grauel, Barlog, Dorteka, and another eight huntresses and ten workers across the upper Ponath. The assigned site overlooked the way that had been both the trade route with and invasion route for the nomads of the Zhotak. Marika did not anticipate any real danger from nomads. She believed the savages all to have left the Zhotak long since. The vast majority should be looking for easy hunting far to the south of the upper Ponath.

“Dorteka. The nomads have lived hard lives ever since I have been aware of their existence. The Zhotak was a harsh land even before the winters worsened. Before they became organized, the raids they made were all acts of desperation. Now that they are fighting everywhere, all the time, they do not seem so desperate.”

“What are you driving at, pup?” They had just landed at the site, a clearing on a slope overlooking a broad, meadowed valley. There was a great deal of snow among the trees on the opposite slope yet.

“In the past they did not have time free from trying to get ready for the next winter to spend their summers attacking and plundering. Now they have that time. To me it would seem their problems getting food have lessened. But I do not see how that could be. They are hunters and gatherers, not farmers. The winters have wiped out most of the game animals. So where are they getting food? Besides from eating their dead?”

“From the Serke, I suppose. I do not know. And I do not care.” Dorteka surveyed the valley, which Marika thought excitingly beautiful. “I do not see why we bother fighting them for this wasteland. If they want it so badly, let them have it.”

She was in a mood. Marika moved away, joined Barlog and Grauel, who were helping the workers unload supplies and equipment.

“We will need some sort of barrier right away,” Grauel said. “I hear there are still a few kagbeasts in these parts. If so, they would be hungry enough to attack meth.”

“I saw some snarltooth vines just west of here as we were coming in,” Marika said. “Drive stakes and string some of those with some briars from the riverbank down there. That will do till we get a real palisade up.”

“Grauel and I will work out a watch rotation. We will need big fires at night. Do we have permission to harvest live wood if there is not enough dead?”

“If necessary. But I think you will find plenty of deadwood. The winters are killing some of the less hardy trees already.”

The outpost had to be built from the ground up. The task took a month. That month passed without incident, though on a couple of occasions Marika sensed the presence of strange meth on the far side of the valley. When she grabbed a ghost and went to examine them, she found that they were nomad scouts. She did not bother them. Let them prime themselves for falling into a trap.

Marika was unconcerned for her own safety, so unconcerned she sometimes wandered off alone, to the distress of Grauel and Barlog, who tracked her down each time.

Marika often joined in the physical work, too. She found it a good way to work out the frustrations she had accumulated during her months in Maksche. And in labor she found temporary surcease from concerns of the past and future.

This close to the Degnan packstead she could not help thinking often of the Mourning she owed. But there were no nightmares. Could that be because of the work? That did not seem reasonable.

After a time most of the southern huntresses joined the work, too, for all of Dorteka’s disapproving scowls. There was nothing else to do but be bored.

The workers appreciated the help, but did not know what to make of it. Especially of a silth who actually dirtied her paws. Marika suspected they began to think well of her despite all the rumors they had heard. By summer’s end she had most of them talking to her. And by summer’s end she had begun consciously trying to cultivate their affection.

Dorteka refused to do anything but tutor Marika. That assignment she pursued doggedly, as if motivated mainly by an increasing desire to get the job over with. Their relationship deteriorated as the summer progressed, and Marika steadfastly refused to be molded into traditional silth shape.

Though the summer gave Marika a respite from her concerns and fears, she did spend a lot of time thinking about the future. She approached it with a pragmatic attitude suitable for the most cynical silth.

The only attack came soon after the blockhouse was complete. It was not a strong one, though the savages thought it strong enough. They cut through the snarltooth vine fencing and evaded the pit traps and booby traps. They used explosives to breach the palisade. Distressed, Dorteka reached out to Akard with the touch and asked for darkship support.

Marika obliterated the attackers long before the one ship sent arrived.

She deflected and destroyed the attackers almost casually, using a ghost drawn from high in the atmosphere. She had learned that the higher one could reach, the more monstrous a ghost one could find.

Afterward, Dorteka shied away from her the way she might from a dangerous animal, and never did get over being nervous when Marika was close.

Marika did not understand. She was even pained. She did not need Dorteka’s friendship, but she did not want her fear.

Was her talent for the dark side that terrible? Did she exceed the abilities of other silth by so much? She could not believe that.

Soon after the first snowflakes flew, a darkship arrived bearing winter stores and a replacement silth. Marika and Dorteka received orders to return to the Maksche cloister.

“I am not going,” Marika told Dorteka.

“Pup! I have had about all of your insubordination that I am going to stand. Get your coat on and get aboard that ship.” Dorteka was so angry she ignored Grauel and Barlog.

“This is the last darkship that will come here till spring, barring a need for major support if the blockhouse comes under attack. Not so?”

“Yes. So what? Do you love these All-forsaken woods so much that you want to stay here forever?”

“Not at all. I want to go home. And so do these workers.”

That caught Dorteka from the blind side. She could do nothing but look at Marika askance. Finally, she croaked, “What are you talking about? So what?”

“These meth were hired for the season. They were promised they would return home in time for the Festival of Kifkha. The festival comes up in four days. And no transportation has been provided them yet. You go ahead. You go south. You report to the most senior. And when she asks why I did not come back with you, you tell her why. Because once again the Reugge Community is failing to live up to a pledge to its dependents.”

Dorteka became so angry Marika feared she would have a stroke. But she stood there facing her teacher in a stance so adamant it was clear she would not be moved. Dorteka went inside herself and performed calming rituals till she was settled enough to touch someone at Akard.

The workers went out next morning. From all over the upper Ponath they went, with an alacrity that said that Gradwohl herself must have intervened. Before they left, two workers very quietly told Marika where they could be reached in Maksche if ever she needed them to repay the debt. Marika memorized that information carefully. She had Grauel and Barlog commit it to memory too, protecting it through redundance.

She meant to use those workers someday.

She had plans. During that summer she had begun to look forward in more than a simpleminded, pup-obsessed-with-flying sort of way. But she was careful to mask that from everyone. Even Grauel and Barlog remained outside.

“Will your holiness board her darkship now?” Dorteka demanded. “Is the order of the world arranged to your satisfaction?”

“Indeed. Thank you, Dorteka. I wish you understood. Those meth may be of no consequence to you. Nor are they to me, really. But a Community can only be as good as its honor. If our own dependents cannot trust our word, who else will?”

“Thank the All,” Dorteka muttered as Marika began strapping herself to the cold darkship frame.

“Such indifference may well be the reason the cloister is having so much trouble keeping order in Maksche. Paustch is determined not to do right and Zertan is too lazy or too timid.”

“You will seal your mouth, pup. You will not speak ill of your seniors again. I still have a great deal of control over how happy or miserable your life can be. Do I make myself understood?”

“Perfectly, mistress. Though your attitude does not alter the truth a bit.”

Dorteka was furious with her again.

Chapter Eighteen
I
In most respects Marika had attained the knowledge levels expected of silth of her age. In many she had exceeded those. As she surpassed levels expected, she found herself with more and more free time. That she spent studying aircraft, aerodynamics, astronomy, and space, when she could obtain any information. The Reugge did not possess much. The brethren and dark-faring sisterhoods clung to their knowledge jealously.

Marika had a thousand questions, and suspected the only way to get the answers was to steal them.

How did the silth take their darkships across the void? The distances were incredible. And space was cold and airless. Yet darkships went out there and returned in a matter of weeks.

She ached because she would never know. Because she was stuck in a sisterhood unable to reach the stars, a sisterhood that might not survive much longer.

To dream dreams that could not be attained, that was a horror. Almost as bad as the dreams that came by night.

The nightmares resumed immediately upon her return to Maksche. They were more explicit now. Often her littermate Kublin appeared in them, reaching, face tormented, as if crying for help. She hurt. She and Kublin had been very close, for all he was male.

Most Senior Gradwohl had shifted from TelleRai to Maksche in fact as well as name while Marika was in the north. Four days after Marika’s return, the wise ones of Maksche, and many others from farflung cloisters of the Community, gathered in the ritual hall. Marika was there at Gradwohl’s command, though she had not as yet seen the most senior.

After a few rituals had been completed, Gradwohl herself took the floor. Meth who had accompanied her from TelleRai began setting up something electrical, much to the distress of Zertan. They tried to argue that such should not be permitted within the holy place of Maksche.

Gradwohl silenced them with a scowl. It was well-known that the most senior was not pleased with them. Though she remained outside the mainstream of cloister life, Marika had heard many rumors. Most made the futures of the Maksche senior and her second sound bleak.

The device set up projected a map upon a white screen. Gradwohl said, “This is what the north looked like at its low ebb, last winter. The darker areas are those that were completely overrun by savages.

“Our counterattack seems to have caught them unprepared. I would account the summer’s efforts a complete success. We have placed a line of small but stout fortresses up the line of the Hainlin, running from here to Akard. A second line was gone in crosswise, here, roughly a hundred miles north of Maksche. It runs from our western boundary to the sea. Each fastness lies within easy touch of its neighbors. Any southward movement can be detected from these, and interdicted with support from here in Maksche.

“Akard is partially restored. It now forms the anchor for a network of fastnesses in the Ponath. They will allow us to maintain our claim there without dispute. A small fleet of darkships based there will thwart any effort to reduce the fastnesses. Work on Akard should be completed next summer.

“Next summer also, I hope to begin squeezing the savage packs from the north, south, and east, giving them no choice but to flee west into the territories of our beloved friends the Serke. Where they may do more evil than they have done. The Serke raised them up like demons. May they suffer as a witch whose demon breaks the ties that bind.”

Gradwohl scanned the assembly. Nearly a hundred of the most important members of the Reugge Community were present. No one seemed inclined to comment, though Marika sensed that many disapproved of Gradwohl and her plans.

“As strength goes,” Marika murmured. Gradwohl was getting her way only because she was the strongest of Reugge silth.

“Also next spring we will begin restoring several brethren strongholds that will be of use to us. Especially the fortress Mahede. From Mahede it will be possible to mount year-round darkship patrols and up the pressure on the savages even more.”

Gradwohl tapped the screen with a finger. Mahede lay halfway between Maksche and Akard. She used a claw to draw a circle around Mahede. It was obvious that circles of the same size centered upon Akard and Maksche would overlap, covering the entire Hainlin rivercourse north of the city. The Hainlin was the main artery of the northern provinces.

“Meantime, this winter we will continue hunting the savages the best we can, with all the resources we can bring to bear. We must keep the pressure on. It is the only way to beat the Serke at their own game.”

Several senior silth disagreed. A murmur of discontent ran through the audience. Marika scanned faces carefully, memorizing those of her mentor’s opponents. They would be her enemies, too.

In the course of the discussion that followed, it began to appear that those who opposed Gradwohl’s scheme did so principally because it interfered with their comfort and their abilities to exploit their own particular demesnes. Several seniors of cloisters complained because they had been stripped of their best silth and, as a result, were having trouble maintaining order among their workers. Especially among the males.

The pestilence of rebellion was spreading.

“I suspect our problems with workers are the shadows of the next Serke move against us,” Gradwohl said. “It is unlikely that they expected me to collapse under pressure from the savages. The northern packs were expendable counters in their game. So will our workers be. But we will deal with that in its turn. The most critical task facing us is to make sure the northern provinces are secure no matter what troubles plague us elsewhere.”

“Why?” someone demanded. The shout was anonymous, but Marika thought the voice sounded like that of Paustch.

“Because the Serke want them so desperately.”

Once the grumbling faded, Gradwohl expanded somewhat. “I see it this way, sisters. The Serke appear willing to spend a great deal, and to risk even more, in order to wrest the north from our paws. They must have very powerful reasons for their behavior. If they have reasons, then we have reasons for taking every measure to retain our territories. Even though we do not know what they are.

“But I will find out what they are. And when I do, you will be informed immediately.”

More grumbling.

“While I am most senior none of this is subject to debate. It will be done as I have decreed. In coming days I will speak to each of you individually and have more to say at that time. Meantime, this assembly is adjourned. Senior Zertan. Paustch. I wish to speak to you immediately. Marika. I want you to remain here. I will call upon the rest of you as I have the opportunity.”

That was a dismissal. Silth rose from stools and began drifting out. Marika studied the groups they formed, identifying alliances of interest. She heard several seniors grumbling about being tied down at Maksche when they had problems at home demanding immediate attention.

Paustch and Zertan left their stools and moved forward to face Gradwohl. Marika remained upon her stool in the shadows, well away. The Maksche senior and her second did not need to be reminded of her presence.

Gradwohl said, “Mildly stated, I am not pleased with you two. Zertan. You are walking close to the line. Your problem is plain laziness compounded by indifference and maybe a dollop of malice. I will be here for some time now, watching over your shoulder. I trust my presence will lend you some incentive to become more ambitious.

“Paustch. For a number of years you have been the true moving spirit here in Maksche. You have been responsible for getting done most of what has gotten done. It is my sorrow that most of that has been negative. I have in mind several directives that you carried out to the letter but managed to sabotage in spirit. I cannot shake the feeling that I have clung too close to TelleRai since becoming most senior. My paw should have been more evident in the outlying cloisters.

“I will no longer tolerate undermining and backstabbing by subordinates. To that end, you will be transferred to TelleRai immediately. A courier darkship will be leaving at dawn. You will be aboard. When you reach TelleRai, you will report to Keraitis for assignment to duties there. Understood?”

Her entire frame shaking with rage, Paustch bowed her head. “Yes, mistress.”

“You may leave us.”

Paustch drew herself up, turned, marched out of the hall. Marika thought she might become trouble unless Gradwohl made further moves to neutralize her malice. Unless by its very nature her new assignment placed her where she could do no harm.

Gradwohl turned to Zertan once Paustch was outside. “Do you feel a spark or two of wakening ambition, Zertan? Do you feel you can become more productive?”

“I believe I do, mistress.”

“I thought you might. You may go, too.”

“Yes, mistress.”

Only the sounds of Zertan’s slippers disturbed the silence of the hall. Then she was gone, and Marika was alone with the most senior. Silence reigned. Lamplight set shadows dancing. Marika waited without fear, without movement.

Finally, Gradwohl said, “Come forward.”

Marika left her stool and approached the most senior.

“Come. Come. Not to be frightened.”

“Yes, mistress.” Marika slipped into the role she assumed with every superior, that of simplicity.

“Marika, I know you, pup. Do not play that game with me. I am on your side.”

“My side, mistress?”

“Yes. Very well. If you insist. How was your summer?”

“A pleasant break, mistress. Though the Ponath is colder now.”

“And going to get a lot colder in years to come. Tell me about your day on the town.”

“Mistress?” The debacle in the tradermale enclave had slipped her mind completely.

“You visited the brethren enclave, did you not?”

“Yes, mistress.” Now she was disturbed.

Her reaction was not well concealed. Gradwohl was amused. “You had quite an adventure, I gather. No. No need to be concerned. The protest was an embarrassment, but a minor one, and a blessing as well. Am I right in assuming that the male Bagnel is the male we brought out of Akard?”

“Yes, mistress.”

“And you are on friendly terms? He kept the fuss to a minimum.”

“He thinks I saved his life, mistress. I did not. I was saving myself. That the others were saved was incidental.”

“The fact is seldom as important as the perception, Marika. Illusion is the ruling form. Shadow signifies more than substance. Silth always have been more fancy than fact.”

“Mistress?”

“It is not important whether or not you made an effort to save this male. What signifies is his belief that you saved him. Which in fact you did.”

Marika was puzzled. Why the interest in Bagnel?

“You have been away for a while. Living in rather primitive, difficult circumstances. Would you like another day on the city?”

Yes, she thought excitedly. “I have studies, mistress.”

“Yes. I hear you have added your own regimen to Dorteka’s.”

“Yes, mistress. I have been studying flying, space, and—”

“When do you sleep?”

“I do not need much sleep, mistress. I never have.”

“I suppose not. I was young once, too. Are you learning anything?”

“There is not much information available, mistress. Most paths of inquiry lead to dead ends where tradermales or other Communities have invoked a privilege.”

“We will find you fresh sources. About this Bagnel.”

“Yes, mistress?”

“Will he accept a continued friendship?”

Warily, Marika replied, “He invited me to return, mistress. He told me I should ask for him, and he would see that there was no trouble.”

“Excellent. Excellent. Then go see him again. By all means.”

“Mistress? What do you want?”

“I want you to cultivate him. The brethren are supporting our enemies for reasons we do not understand. It is not like them to compromise their neutrality. You have a contact. See more of him. In time you might learn something to help us in our struggle with the Serke.”

“I see.”

“You do not approve?”

“It is not my place to approve or disapprove, mistress.”

“You have reservations then?”

“Yes, mistress. But I cannot say what they are exactly. Except that the thought of using Bagnel makes me uncomfortable.”

“It should. We should not use our friends. They are too precious.”

Marika gave the most senior a calculating look. Had she meant more than she had said? Was that a warning?

“Yet at times greater issues intervene. I think Reugge survival warrants pursuit of any path to salvation.”

“As you say, mistress.”

“Will you pursue it? Will you cultivate this male?”

“Yes, mistress.” She had decided instantly. She would, for her own purposes. For information she wanted. If some also fell the most senior’s way, good. It would keep the cloister doors open.

“I thought you would.” The most senior’s tone said she knew Marika’s mind. It said also that she was growing excited, though she concealed it well.

Perhaps she could read minds, Marika thought. Some silth could touch other minds and steal secrets. Was that not how a truthsaying worked? And would that not be a most useful talent for one who would command an entire unruly Community?

“I will tell Dorteka to let you out whenever you want. Do not overdo it. You will make the brethren suspicious.”

“Yes, mistress.”

“There is plenty of time, Marika. We will not reach the time of real crisis for many years yet.”

“Yes, mistress.”

Gradwohl again expressed restrained amusement. “You could become one of the great silth, Marika. You have the proper turn of mind.”

“They whisper behind my back, mistress. They call me doomstalker and Jiana.”

“Probably. Any of us who amount to anything endure a youth filled with distrust and fear. Our sisters sense the upward pressure. But no matter. That is all for today. Unless there is something you want to discuss.”

“Why do we not make our own darkships, mistress? Why depend upon tradermales?”

“Two answers come to mind immediately. One is that most sisters prefer to believe that we should not sully our paws with physical labor. Another, and the one that is more close to the honest truth, is that we are dependent upon the brethren in too many other areas. They have insinuated tentacles into every aspect of life. If they came to suspect that we were trespassing on what they see as their proper rights, they might then cut us off from everything else they do for us.

“There is an ecological balance between male and female in our society, as expressed in silth and brethren. We are interdependent, and ever more so. In fact, I suspect an imbalance is in the offing. We have come to need them more than they need us. Nowadays we would be missed less than they.”

Marika rose. “Maybe steps ought to be taken to change that instead of pursuing these squabbles between Communities.”

“An idea that has been expressed often enough before. Without winning more than lip service support. The brethren have the advantage of us there, too. Though they have their various bonds and subbonds, they answer to a central authority. They have their internal feuds, but they are much more monolithic than we. They can play one sisterhood against another.”

“Find ways to split them into factions,” Marika said from the doorway. And, “We built our own ships for ages. Before the tradermales.”

Gradwohl scowled.

“Thank you, mistress. I will visit Bagnel soon.”
II
Grauel and Barlog were beside themselves when Marika announced another expedition to the tradermale enclave. They did everything possible to dissuade her. She did not tell them she had the most senior’s blessing. They gossiped. She knew, because they brought her snippets about the Maksche sisters. She did not doubt but what they paid in kind.

The huntresses became suspicious soon after they left the cloister. “Marika,” Grauel said after a whispered consultation with Barlog, “we are being followed. By huntresses from the cloister.”

Marika was not pleased, but neither was she surprised. A silth had been set upon by rogue males not a week before her return from the upper Ponath. “It’s all right,” she said. “They’re looking out for us.”

Grauel nodded to herself. She told Barlog, “The most senior protecting her investment.”

“We’ll be watched wherever we go,” Marika said. “We have a friend.”

“One is more than we did have.”

“Does that tell me something?”

“Did you know that we were not supposed to come back from the Ponath?”

“We weren’t?” The notion startled Marika.

“The story was whispering around the barracks here. We were sent out to build that blockhouse behind the most senior’s back. We were not supposed to get out of it alive. That is why Paustch was demoted. It was an attempt to kill us.”

Barlog added, “The senior councillors here are afraid of you, Marika.”

“We survived.”

Grauel said, “It is also whispered that nomad prisoners confessed that our blockhouse wasn’t attacked once they found out who the keeper was. You have gained a reputation among the savages.”

“How? I don’t know any of them. How could they know me?”

“You slew the Serke silth at Akard. That has been bruited about all the Communities, they say. The one who died had a great name in her order, though the Serke aren’t naming it. That would mean admitting they were poaching on the Ponath.”

“I love this hypocrisy,” Marika said. “Everyone knows what the Serke are doing, and no one will admit it. We must learn the rules of this game. We might want to play it someday.”

“Marika?”

Grauel’s tone warned Marika that she had come too far out of her role. “We have to play the silth game the way it is played here if we are to survive here, Grauel. Not so?” She spoke in the formal mode.

“I suppose. Still . . . ”

Barlog said, “We hear talk about the most senior sending you to TelleRai soon, Marika. Because that is where they teach those who are expected to rise high. Is this true? Will we be going?” Barlog, too, shifted to the formal mode.

Marika shifted back. “I don’t know anything about it, Barlog. Nothing’s been said to me. I don’t think there’s anything to it. But I will not be going anywhere without you two. Could I survive without touch with my pack?”

How could she survive without the only meth she had any reason to trust? Not that she trusted even them completely. She still suspected they reported on her to curry favor, but to do that they had to stay close and remain useful.

“Thank you, Marika,” Barlog said.

“Here we are. Do not hesitate to admonish me if I fail to comport myself properly.” Marika glanced back. “Any sign of our shadows?” She could have gone down through her loophole and looked, but did not care enough.

“None, Marika.”

“Good.” She touched the fence lightly, examined the aircraft upon the field. Today the airstrip was almost naked. One small freight dirigible lay in one of the cradles. Two Stings sat near the fence. There were a couple of light craft of a type with which she was unfamiliar. Their design implied them to be reconnaisance or courier ships.

She went to the desk in the gateway building. The same guard watched the same vision screen in the same state of sleepy indifference. He did not notice her. She wondered if his hearing and sense of smell were impaired, or if he just enjoyed being rude to meth from the street. She rapped on the desk.

He turned. He recognized her and his eyes widened. He sat up.

“I would like to speak to Assistant Security Chief Bagnel,” Marika told him.

He gulped air, looked around as if seeking a place to hide, then gobbled, “Yes, mistress.” He hurried around the end of his desk, down the hallway leading to the airfield. Halfway along he paused to say, “You stay here, mistress.” He made a mollifying gesture. “Just wait. I will hurry him all I can.”

Marika’s ears tilted in amusement.

The guard turned again at the far door, called back, “Mistress, Bagnel is no longer assistant chief. He was made chief a few months ago. Just so you do not use the wrong mode of address.”

“Thank you.” Wrong mode of address? What difference? Unless it was something the nervous guard had let carry over from the mysteries of the tradermale brethren.

She supposed she ought to examine the relevant data—what was known—if she was going to be dealing with Bagnel regularly.

Time enough for that later. After today’s encounter had shown its promise, or lack thereof. “Grauel, go down the hall and keep watch. Barlog, check the building here, then watch the street.” She stepped around the desk and began leafing through the guard’s papers. She found nothing interesting, if only because they were printed in what had to be a private male language. She opened the desk’s several drawers. Again she found nothing of any interest.

Well, it had been worth a look. Just in case. She rounded the desk again, recalled Grauel and Barlog. To their inquisitive looks she replied, “I was just curious. There wasn’t anything there.”

The guard took another five minutes. He returned to find them just as he had left them. “Kentan Bagnel will be here shortly, mistress. Can I make your wait more comfortable somehow? Would you care for refreshments?”

“Not for myself, thank you. Barlog? Grauel?”

Each replied, “No, mistress,” and Marika was pleased with their restraint. In years past they would have chastised any male this bold.

“You called Bagnel Kentan. Is that a title or name?”

The guard was fuddled for a moment. Then he brightened. “A title, mistress. It denotes his standing with the brethren.”

“It has nothing to do with his job?”

“No, mistress. Not directly.”

“I see. Where does a kentan stand with regard to others? How high?”

The guard looked unhappy. He did not want to answer, yet felt he had to conform to orders to deal with her hospitably.

“It must be fairly high. You are nervous about him. The year has treated Bagnel well, then.”

“Yes, mistress. His rise has been . . . ”

“Rapid?”

“Yes, mistress. We all thought your last visit would cause him grave embarrassment, but . . . ”

Marika turned away to conceal her features. A photograph graced the wall opposite the desk. It had been enlarged till it was so grainy it was difficult to recognize. “What is this place?”

Relieved, the guard came around his desk and began explaining, “That is the brethren landhold at TelleRai, mistress.”

“Yes. Of course. I have never seen it from this angle.”

“Marika?”

She turned. Bagnel had arrived. He looked sleek and self-confident and just a bit excited. “Bagnel. As you see, I’m behaving myself this time.” She used the informal mode without realizing it. Grauel and Barlog gave her looks she did not see.

“You’ve grown.” Bagnel responded in the same mode. His usage was as unconscious as Marika’s.

Grauel and Barlog bared teeth and exchanged glances.

“Yes. Also grown up. I spent the summer in the Ponath, battling the nomad. I believe it changed me.”

Bagnel glanced at the guard. “You’ve been grilling Norgis. You’ve made him very uncomfortable.”

“We were talking about the picture of the Tovand, kentan,” the guard said.

Bagnel scowled. The guard retreated behind the barrier of his desk. He increased the volume of the sound accompanying the display on his screen. Marika was amused, but concealed it.

“Well,” Bagnel said. “You’re here again.”

Grauel and Barlog frowned at his use of the familiar mode.

“I hoped I could look inside the aircraft this time. Under supervision, of course. Nothing secret seems to be going on now. The fighting ships and the big dirigibles are gone.”

“You tease me. Yes, I suppose we could look at the light aircraft. Come.”

As they stepped outside, Marika said, “I hear you’ve been promoted.”

“Yes. Chief of security. Another reward for my failure at Critza.”

“You have an unusual concept of reward, I’d say.”

Grauel and Barlog were displeased with Marika’s use of the familiar mode, too.

“I do?” Bagnel was amused. “My superiors do. I haven’t done anything deserving.” Softly, he asked, “Do you need those two arfts hanging over your shoulder all the time?”

“I don’t go anywhere without Grauel and Barlog.”

“They make me nervous. They always look like they’re planning to rip my throat out.”

Marika glanced at the huntresses. “They are. They don’t like this. They don’t like males who can or dare do more than cook or pull a plow.”

He gave her a dark look. She decided she had pushed her luck. Time to become Marika the packless again. “Isn’t this a Seifite trainer?” She indicated an aircraft standing straight ahead.

“Still studying, are you?”

“Always. When I can get anything to study. I told you I plan to fly. I have flown three times, on darkships. Each flight left me more convinced that flight is my tomorrow.” She glanced at several males hurrying toward them. Grauel and Barlog interposed themselves quickly, though the males were not armed.

“Ground crew,” Bagnel explained. “They see us coming out here, they expect us to take a ship up.”

The males slowed when they discerned Marika’s silth garb. “They’re having second thoughts,” she said.

“You can’t blame them, can you? Silth are intimidating by nature.”

“Are they? I’ve never seen them from the outside.”

“But you grew up on a packstead. Not in a cloister.”