life. She traveled down canyons of meat, over bloody rivers, across bridges made of sharpened bone and tough neural fiber, withered as old whips. Beneath, there was a boil of fire: an inner, private hell. Things clung to the cliffs like ghosts, winged yet spectral. They were horribly familiar, and as one of them looked up, Yskatarina saw its shadowy head change. Her own face looked back at her, and then it was the visage of the Animus, then both at the same time. Something within her shrieked in protest.
Shuddering, she let the vision pass by and glided on. And at last she saw Elaki sitting on a crag with her feet tucked up beneath her. Yskatarina slipped down to stand beside her aunt.
Elaki showed no sign that she saw Yskatarina. Under the tapering cowl her face was at first withered and old, and then it smoothed out into fetal vacuity.
“Aunt?” Yskatarina said. “What is wrong?”
But Elaki only muttered and mumbled, tearing with toothless gums at a long bloody shred.
“Is that my love for you?” Yskatarina asked. She reached out and snatched at the shred, but Elaki shrieked and tore it away. She held it at arm’s length, then clutched it to her. Her eyes were wild; she roared with panic.
“Give it to me!” Yskatarina cried, and reaching out she struck her aunt in the face. Elaki’s cheek tore open, revealing a shadowy hollow behind a fountain of stinking blood.
“Give it to me! You took my limbs. You would take my Animus! I owe you nothing.”
Elaki’s arms flailed. Yskatarina grasped the shred and pulled. It lengthened with unnatural elasticity, until Elaki and Yskatarina stood in a tug-of-war on either side of the crag. The recesses of Yskatarina’s imagination gaped below, the caverns and oceans of the unconscious mind. She did not like the things that she saw within; they disgusted her.
Once more she glimpsed the beings that clung to the sides of the cliff, but now the fire was gone and the place in her vision was bleak and cold and dark. It looked like Nightshade, the region known as the Sunken Plain. The creatures howled and cried and she felt their attention turn toward her: hungry and desperate, a bitter yearning for life and blood and flesh. Their need reeled her in, she understood what it was like to be thus disembodied. She felt herself begin to shiver and melt.
Then a black-winged shape with a scorpion’s tail slid out of the abyss, its eyes glowing with trust. With the last of her strength, Yskatarina ripped at the shred and tore it from Elaki’s grasp. Elaki withered into a twist of smoke and blew away, but Yskatarina felt herself falling backward into pain, which opened with nauseating willingness to let her in.
CHAPTER 2
EARTH
We have made the arrangements,” the Grandmothers informed Dreams-of-War. “You will leave as soon as can be arranged, by junk.”
“What, on a public ship?”
“Of course not. We have hired someone loyal to Memnos, you will be relieved to hear. But the ship is up-coast at present, and must return. We do not yet know when.”
“I am, indeed, relieved,” Dreams-of-War said. “I should not trust an Earth-owned ship, given the presence of the Kami here.”
The Grandmothers snorted. “You are arrogant, like all Martians. You are like cats—you all consider yourselves superior, and with even less justification. In the matter of the Kami, you know nothing and are doubtless mistaken in what you think you know. Now go. Make sure that you keep a close eye on the girl.”
Dreams-of-War left, seething.
Once inside her own chamber, she stood looking out across the early morning harbor, grinding one armored fist into the palm of the other. She had not known that it would be like this when she had joined the upper echelons of the warriors of Memnos. She had been so proud. It had been the culmination of her youthful military career, and yet it wound down to this: a series of petty slights and insults from two twisted old women. If it had not been for the ensuing humiliation, Dreams-of-War would have resigned her commission and returned to Mars.
But then, there was also Lunae. Dreams-of-War remembered the conversation that had taken place after her emotional modification.
“You have no choice,” the Matriarch had told her as they sat together in the highest tower of Memnos, looking out across the white-and-russet winter plain. “You will need it for her protection.”
“But I’ve never loved anyone,” Dreams-of-War protested. “Only human remnants who remember the days when they were bloodbirthers feel such natural love for their children.” Love was a contaminant, utterly apart from the purities of sisterhood, battle, and duty. She found a strong repugnance for the feeling, but the Matriarch had been right.
Dreams-of-War recalled standing beside the kappa in the growing-chamber, trying not to get too close to this stout toad-woman who seemed to have little sense of personal distance and who was continually attempting to pat Dreams-of-War in misplaced reassurance. She remembered watching the growing-bag in revulsion as it bulged and writhed. It reminded her of her own birth, and Dreams-of-War found that distasteful.
As soon as the squirming, grublike thing had been released from its pod in a shower of fluid, however, the small sore place within her had clicked like a switch of pain, and she knew immediately that she would die to protect the infant. It was most vexing, and she resented it with a passion, but there it was. It got in the way of all manner of things; it made her life a worry and a misery, and for the first time she was conscious of a real fear with which she had no adequate means of dealing. As soon as her duties were discharged, she told herself, she would return to Memnos, go back beneath the black light matrix, and have the whole package of inconvenient emotions surgically changed.
Now she turned her back on the city and sat down on the metal bed. The cinnabar walls of the room reminded her of Mars, as though she might glance through the window and see the Crater Plain stretching before her, Olympus towering on the horizon. The sudden longing-for-place was yet another feeling to be despised. In a fit of irritation, Dreams-of-War said aloud, “I need to talk to you! Separately.”
Slowly, gliding across her skin, the armor left her body and crept across the floor like a serpent. When the gleaming tongue reached a shaft of sunlight, it began to rise upward, hardening, reassembling itself piece by piece. Clad only in the rubbery black underharness, Dreams-of-War watched until the armor stood before her, waiting.
Dreams-of-War hesitated. Of all the aspects of her marvelous armor, this one was the most disquieting to her. And it was so because the armor incorporated something that was unnatural, alien, something that had originated with the Kami. Haunt-tech.
It was difficult to separate a warrior from her ghost-armor, for armor became the warrior. Both formed part of a fighting machine. If one died or malfunctioned, the other had a tendency to follow. Yet if the wearer were knocked unconscious, the armor would take over. Dreams-of-War had once woken to find herself pounding across a Martian plain, the legs of the armor pumping while she dangled useless within it. Dreams-of-War knew that she had become overdependent on the armor, and despite its comforts, she did not like the realization. It had been easier when she had relied on nothing but the underharness and a gutting knife, hand-fighting men-remnants in the heights.
“What, then?” the armor said, echoing through the chamber.
“I ask Embar Khair to stand before me,” Dreams-of-War said. The armor flowed, glittering, the helm snapping up
