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"Will Dreams-of-War be punished?" Lunae asked hes-itantly.

"I do not know."

"What was that person? Was it one of the Kami, do you think?"

"Hush," said the kappa, in a whisper like the sea. She helped Lunae into bed and folded the covers around her.

Lunae did not remember falling asleep, but suddenly, she was dreaming. She stood in a cavern of red stone. Smoke filled the air, causing the sunlight to become uncer-tain.

"Where am I?" Lunae asked into nothing, and a voice said, "Why, this is our home. Don't you know it?"

Lunae turned to see a woman shrouded in layers of in-digo veils. She could not see the woman's face, and yet she was strangely familiar. The woman came to stand by her, and whispered secrets into her ear in an unknown lan-guage. Lunae knew they were secrets, for the woman smiled and put a finger to her veiled lips, looking around her with theatrical covertness. The woman's voice was like the wind, a sighing rustle in the reeds.

"Who are you?" Lunae asked.

"Don't you know?" the woman said again.

Lunae frowned, and the woman swept the veils aside. She was looking into her own face, perhaps twenty years older, the eyes hollow and filled with dreadful things.

"No," Lunae said, and stepped back.

"I've been here for such a long time," the woman-who-was-herself said. "But now you're here to take my place, and everything will be all right." Before Lunae could utter a word of protest, she began to fade, until there was nothing left except darkness and silence.

The next morning, Lunae awoke to find Dreams-of-War pacing the room. The Martian woman's armor bristled; her footsteps crackled on the floorboards as though some kind of electrical field had been acti-vated. Dreams-of-War's face was as set as an angry marble statue.

Lunae sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Dreams-of-War spun to face her.

"We will be leaving tomorrow. You have your wish." Dreams-of-War's mouth compressed and Lunae realized the reason for her apparent anger: Dreams-of-War did not like to fail. Lunae wondered whether her guardian re-sented the fact that her charge had succeeded in the re-moval of the assassin, where she herself had not, and a sudden, curious emotion flooded through her, a kind of elation. It was, however, swiftly followed by dismay. She realized that Dreams-of-War would not take kindly to ef-forts to reassure her.

"Where are we going?" she asked. Best to focus on the practicalities; Dreams-of-War was generally good at those.

"A safer place than here. The Grandmothers have deemed it best that you are not informed."

Dreams-of-War's eyes had narrowed into that
don't ask questions
look that Lunae knew so well, but this time she thought of the assassin's face as she spirited it out of the room, out of the world and beyond. She rose to her feet, looked her guardian full in the face, and said, "Tell me."

Dreams-of-War's gaze did not falter or fall. It was like staring down a well. But after a moment she said calmly, "Very well. We go to the Fire Islands, to the place where the kappa comes from."

"For how long? And how will we get there?" Lunae asked, excitement causing the words to spill out one over the other like beans from a jar.

"How long depends. I have ordered a litter to fetch us at noon tomorrow and convey us to the harbor. It is the earliest that could be arranged."

"What am I to take with me?" Lunae asked. The prospect of leaving Cloud Terrace was unsettling, but swiftly overcome by excitement. She longed for tomorrow to come. Otherwise, she felt, the Grandmothers might change their minds, or Dreams-of-War might decide that she would be safer here.

At once, there seemed a thousand possible obstacles to the actuality of leaving.

"I have asked the kappa to prepare suitable traveling attire." Dreams-of-War looked Lunae over with an ap-praising eye. "A pity we are not on Mars. Then you could fight for armor."

"Did you fight for yours?" Lunae asked, wide-eyed. Dreams-of-War gave a small, grim nod of satisfaction.

"Of course."

"How many women did you have to fight?"

"Five, in the final rounds. Twelve, before that."

"What happened to them? Did you kill them?"

"No, it is rarely a fight to the death. Four returned to the clan house, to undertake lesser work. One ran off into the heights, and was never heard from again. Perhaps she fell prey to bandits, or men-remnants. I do not know."
Nor greatly care
, Dreams-of-War's expression said.

"I do not know how to fight," Lunae murmured, but suddenly it seemed a fine thing to learn.

Dreams-of-War said, with grudging approval, "It seems you have your own methods of dispatch.

However, if you wish to learn more conventional means, I will teach you. But for now, you will have to wait."

Earth

Yskatarina paced the long veranda of the house, look-ing out across the estuary. The Animus crouched in a dark corner, half-concealed in a tumbling mass of jas-mine.

"It has not yet returned," she said into the empty air. "It is very late."

"Perhaps something has delayed it," the Animus mur-mured.

"Perhaps. But it should have been back by now, bringing the
hito-bashira
with it. I'll contact its war-madam." Yskatarina slapped the rail, splintering the wood. "Still nothing from the Mission, either. Let me look at the antiscribe." She began to unscroll the little device.

Traces of ancient woes showed in the foliage that sur-rounded the ruin; the flowers of the jasmine emitted a faint, unpleasant glow once the sun had gone down.

Everything seemed sticky, as though the air itself exuded a resin. Yskatarina's clothes and hair were matted with it, and it crept into the joints of her artificial limbs. As she had lain awake that night, staring into the perfumed dark-ness, she wondered whether it was not a product of an ob-solete chemical weaponry, after all, but simply curdled hate, seeping from the walls of the mansion and fastening upon herself, Elaki's almost-child. From what she knew of the relationship between Elaki and her long-lost sisters, it seemed all too plausible an explanation. The newly formed hollow within her head had never seemed so com-forting.

The ruin was very different from Tower Cold, from Memnos, and yet it still seemed to have some of the same atmosphere, a miasma of wrath and disappointment. Yskatarina and the Animus were camping out in the shat-tered, fire-blackened courtyard, sleeping amid weeds in the hazy sunlight of the day, waking once the comforting night had fallen, to plot and plan.

"What are you going to do if the assassin does not re-turn?" the Animus asked from his place beneath the jas-mine. She could smell him beneath the strong, sickly scent of the flowers: the odor of fungal musk, the odor of Night-shade. "Will you hire another?"

"I will take steps. I have spoken to my aunt. Elaki is not pleased. She demands results." Yskatarina shrugged. "She is old, querulous. I have honeyed her with promises, which she chooses to believe."

Yskatarina stretched, bal-ancing on sleek plastic. There was such delight in being able to criticize.

In the scrub at the edges of the veranda, something moved. Yskatarina looked sharply up from the antiscribe. "What was that?"

The Animus uncoiled himself, centipede swift, and flowed over the side of the veranda. There was a brief thrashing in the bushes. The Animus emerged, bloody.

"Now there is nothing there."

Yskatarina went to the railing of the veranda and peered over. Something large lay on its side, twitching. She saw the dull gleam of too-large eyes, a gaping hole where the mouth should have been.

Yskatarina frowned.

"Was that human?"

"Once," the Animus said thickly.

The night air seemed suddenly bitter, the salt harsh against Yskatarina's skin. The taste of Tower Cold was metallic inside her mouth. For a moment, it was as though the hollow in her head had become filled.

It felt like an in-vasion. She shivered once, and turned back to the antiscribe.

An hour later, she sat back in disappointment, star-ing down at the antiscribe. "The assassin has disappeared. I've been searching for it for an hour now. There is no sign."

"How so?" the Animus asked, puzzled. "Has someone removed its tracking device?"

"The tracker is hardwired into its nervous system. You could not remove it without removing the whole of its neural network. I suppose that's one possibility."

"What are others?"

Yskatarina spread her hands. "That it is no longer on Earth. But that isn't possible. The trace just winked out, from one moment to the next. Even if you put the thing in one end of the Chain and shot it out of a maw, there would still be a gradual decrease as it entered shadow-space and then the Eldritch Realm. Where has it gone?"

The Animus, wisely, was silent. Yskatarina rose and walked to the end of the veranda, but this time she did not stop. Treading carefully, she walked down the rickety steps, half-eroded with mold, and down the cliff path to the shore of the Yellow River estuary. Neon vegetation glowed, sickly with colors that shifted in the moonlight. She should have felt more comfort in the darkness, she thought, but this was nothing like Nightshade, nothing like Tower Cold. She could feel the weight of Earth press-ing in against her, all the guilt and pain of that ancient cra-dle.

I do not belong here. I was born on the system's edge.

But her ancestors had come from this world; they haunted her down the DNA line. Their whispering had grown louder ever since the ship had docked at the Kita Hub. She did not know how long she would be able to bear it. Suddenly she longed for Tower Cold, for the famil-iar sights of the mourn-women preparing the canopies, for the shadows beyond the tower's portals.

But she did not long for the Elder Elaki. There were still things for which to be grateful.

Behind her, she heard the rustle and hiss of wings. The Animus spiraled lazily down the side of the cliff with dactylate ease, waiting with his customary cour-tesy for her to set foot upon the estuary shore before alighting.

The shore was a mess of black sand and brackish creeks, sliding down the face of the bluffs, to seep into the sea. It smelled of death. Ancient things occasionally washed up to lie putrefying upon the sand until rotting down into skeins of cartilage and pools of flesh. Even the carrion birds left them alone, as if they were cursed. There was one here now, perhaps twenty feet in diameter. Impossible to tell what it had been. There were the suckered ropes of squid, the long tendrils of man-o'-war, a long, feathery neck ending in a spatulate head. A great dark eye stared hopelessly upward.

Ignoring the smell, Yskatarina poked the thing with her toe. It wobbled for a moment, then was still.

She thought of all unnatural things, of the Animus, and her-self. It would all come to this one day: the flesh melting down into noxiousness.

Restless and alarmed, she marched back to the ruin to see if there had been any word from the assassin or from the Mission. To her annoyance, there was not.

But there was a message.

The settlement was perched high on the edges of a cliff. At some point, the sea had sheared it away, so that where there had once been houses and a temple, there was now only a jumble of ochre rock marked by a few ragged posts, and a wooden platform that had once formed the temple's main entrance.

Yskatarina stood in the cold wind from the sea, wrapped in black fur. She had chosen to wear gloves for this appointment, not wanting her hands to be noted too closely. Her face was half-hidden by a hood and the eye-visor.

Behind her, at the entrance to where the temple had once been, stood a demon with a curved and upraised sword. Its lips were stained with blood, which Yskatarina knew to be real. The Animus had whispered this to her in the moments before Yskatarina had sent him away to circle in the cloudy upper air above the island.

Now, she waited for her appointment to come, patience swiftly running out. The being, a kappa, was already late, yet it had been the one to approach her, had left that dis-quieting message on the little antiscribe. First the disap-pearance of the assassin, then the Mission's silence, and now this… She had again arranged for more creatures to be sent, but she did not hold out hope. The denizens of Cloud Ter-race would be on their guard.

She had told them to strike at the Martian first. With Dreams-of-War out of the way, the Grandmothers could be more easily dealt with. And Lunae herself was just a girl, despite her powers.

Yskatarina had formed her own opinions of the peo-ple known as the kappa, involving timidity, inferiority, lack of real will. She knew little enough about them. They were the dregs of Earth, the remnants of ancient error. Yet how had they known where to find her? How had they ob-tained her coordinates? It did not accord with the image of an underclass.

Impatient, she roamed about the platform, then turned to see that the kappa was finally here, waddling and wheezing across the platform toward her. Yskatarina felt a rising distaste. Old error, yes, but so were the gaezelles of the Martian plain… She could not help but make comparisons.

"Sorry, sorry," the kappa panted. "There was delay, the storms…"

"This doesn't concern me," Yskatarina said.

"Of course, I understand…"

"My time is limited. I need information." Yskatarina looked down into a bland yellow gaze. "In your message you spoke of a ship, sent from Mars to Earth, one hundred years ago. A ship that Nightshade believes may contain the details of a secret project, to breed a creature called a
hito-bashira
. And how did you find me?"

"As to finding you, the place where you are staying is known to us from the old days. We keep a watch. And we do know of an ancient ship," the kappa said, "but not of its exact location."

Briefly, Yskatarina closed her eyes. "Then do you know who
does
have this information?"

"Come with me," the kappa said. She turned and began waddling toward the entrance to the former tem-ple. With a glance up at the Animus, Yskatarina fol-lowed.