infection after the transformation process, and your limbs were damaged by gangrene. We were forced to remove them.”
“Aunt?” Yskatarina whispered, in fright and shock.
“We will make new limbs for you,” Elaki promised. Her face softened, almost imperceptibly, but there was something behind her eyes that alarmed Yskatarina beyond measure. “Better ones. So do not make such a fuss.”
When Elaki left, Yskatarina stared numbly up to find the Animus above her, in chrysalis form. She reached out for him, before she remembered. He hung in a motionless silver-black shape from the ceiling of the laboratory, depending from a piece of growing bone. After her own experiences, Yskatarina did not expect the Animus to emerge alive, but emerge he did, gliding from the tinsel wreckage of the chrysalis: arachnid, escorpionate, baleful.
Yskatarina knew then that there was nothing she would not do to keep the Animus beside her. Hadn’t they always been together? And after the dreadful experience of transformation, the Animus was the only being on which she could rely.
There was another change, too. Before, Yskatarina had been afraid of her aunt: dreading the touch of Elaki’s pale, plump hands, hating the way her aunt’s great eyes would gaze at her with such chilly calculation. But after the transformation, she also became aware of how much she truly loved Elaki. The feeling overwhelmed her. She sat shivering on the cot, filled with longing, and when Elaki next came to see her, she threw her new arms around her aunt’s shrouded form. Elaki pushed her away, wincing.
“You must learn to operate your limbs with more care, Yskatarina. The servomechanisms are powerful.”
“Thank you, Aunt. Thank you.” But she could not have said what she was thanking Elaki for. It occurred to her, vaguely, that this should have bothered her, but somehow she dismissed it.
When she was well enough to venture forth, Yskatarina and the Animus wandered together through the shadowy passageways of Tower Cold. They learned the secret ways between the walls; they slipped past hidden chambers as Yskatarina’s artificial feet crunched and crackled on the thousand-year-old bones of mice. Concealed behind living tapestries, they watched as the Steersmen Skull-Faces bottled up the canopic jars and dispatched them into the boats that would carry them to the gates, there to be launched upon the Night Sea for their endless journey. They traveled down to the depths, where the mute-kin slaved on the production lines, assembling haunt-devices. They sat for hours above the docking bays as the service ships headed out toward the Chain. They scuttled through the Weighing Chamber, while the mourn-women sang the ancient songs, conjuring—so they said—the spirits of the future dead, untied from the rivers of time. But Yskatarina did not understand what they meant by that, and when she asked her aunt, Elaki only laughed and said that the mourn-women were filled with superstitions and nonsense. The only places Yskatarina and the Animus did not go were the haunt-laboratories of Tower Cold, sealed behind horrifying weir-wards, open only to Elaki.
And it was the Animus who learned with Yskatarina, upon the eve of her nineteenth birthday, that it was to be her task to seek out one girl from the teeming billions of Earth and Mars and the inner worlds. To seek her out and slay her.
CHAPTER 3
MARS
Two days before her departure for Earth, Dreams-of-War left the Memnos Tower and made a short journey across the Crater Plain to Winterstrike, in order to register her departure documents, undergo a necessary modification, and take a medical assessment for her suitability to withstand the temporal forces of the Chain. This last was merely a formality; Dreams-of-War was in excellent physical shape. She knew, however, that at least once a week some luckless passenger was found shriveled and wizened at the end of a voyage, ruthlessly aged by the forces that governed travel within the confines of the Chain.
It was, after all, a form of haunt-tech, and thus little understood except by the technicians of Nightshade and presumably by the Kami who had given it to them. It was alien and could not be trusted, at least if you were Dreams-of-War. The only piece of haunt-tech with which she was prepared to deal was the armor, and that only because its previous occupant had been such a great warrior. And while Dreams-of-War trusted the armor’s spirit, it still occurred to her to wonder whether this was wise.
She further distrusted the prospect of the modification that she was about to undergo—more alien tech—and she did not care much for Winterstrike, either. The city was ancient, dating back before even the Lost Epoch. Its black-and-crimson mansions and narrow streets were a testament to its age: basalt, iron, stone—old materials for an old city. The more recent buildings rose up around the edges, etched metal towers and turrets connected by hanging bridges.
Dreams-of-War took a rider, crammed with standing passengers, in through the southern gate of the city, past the clan holdings and mansions, and finally past the sunken fortress of the meteorite crater that had given Winterstrike its name. She looked neither right nor left, though when the rider rumbled by the great lip of the crater, her head involuntarily turned and she gazed into the pit: a caldera of garnet stone, pockmarked with holes and rifts. The fortress rose up at its center, a place of shattered spires, half-ruin, half-home to the city’s dispossessed, of which there were many.
The fortress was a grim place, but better this, thought Dreams-of-War, than the Crater Plain and the mountains. There, the ordinary women who were not warriors would not fare well against the men-remnants: the hyenae and vulpen and awts. Better they remain here, living off the verminous birds that infested the pits of the crater wall.
The fortress passed by; Dreams-of-War once more stared ahead. This long, winding street, fringed with engine shops and child-supply emporia, was the road to the spaceport. She would be coming this way again tomorrow, in the cold early light, to take a ship for the Chain and Earth: the city known as Fragrant Harbor. She had been told little enough about her mission. There was a child, it seemed, and the need to guard her.
Dreams-of-War had done her best to find out more, by devious routes she disliked pursuing, but she had failed. This in itself was disquieting. Memnos only bothered to keep closemouthed about those secrets that were a danger to the bearer, and they had seen fit to tell her nothing. Thoughtfully, Dreams-of-War jostled her way to the front of the rider as it approached the next stop, and stepped down onto the street.
The medical evaluation was carried out in a Matriarchy building: a weedwood-and-basalt tower behind thick walls. Dreams-of-War sensed the prickling discomfort of weir-wards over the exposed skin of her face as she walked through the gate, but she passed through without incident. Inside, she presented her credentials, but it seemed that they were already expecting her. A woman wearing a doctor’s robe and high red hat ushered her through a hushed corridor into the black light chamber. The doctor’s hands had been modified, Dreams-of-War noted; a scalpel blade shone briefly beneath one fingernail.
“You’ll have to take that off,” the doctor said, barely glancing in the direction of Dreams-of-War.
“Very well.” Dreams-of-War stood at the center of the room, before the flickering glitter of the black light matrix. “Armor!”
The armor flowed smoothly from her body, forming for a moment the gaunt figure of its previous owner. “No, that won’t be necessary. I don’t want to talk to you. Just keep out of the way.”
She watched as the armor folded itself into a small, curdled sphere, no bigger than her fist. It struck her, somehow, as sad. She glanced down at her own exposed skin. Tattoos covered her arms and breasts: spirals, spikes, the mathematical gematria of Memnos. The small child-markings were a faded indigo around her wrists.
“And that,”
