then made her way sulkily back. She had not even had a proper chance to try out the new teeth.
Dreams-of-War returned to the present with a start. Shadow-space was fading back into deeplight as the Eldritch Realm slid away. She felt it pass through her soul as it left, a cold burn followed by a nausea that was closer to revulsion than motion sickness.
Earth and Fragrant Harbor lay ahead.
CLOUD TERRACE
CHAPTER 1
EARTH
8 MONTHS LATER . . .
Lunae was in the tower room of Cloud Terrace, a chrysalis in her hand, when Dreams-of-War came to find her. The chrysalis rested velvet-light against Lunae’s skin, a woven parcel too large for her childish fingers to close all the way around. She sat cross-legged on the window seat, looking out over the jumbled tenements as they stretched down from the Peak toward the harbor. Her Grandmothers still used the old names for the city: Hong Kong, Fragrant Harbor, the City of Sails. She tested each one on her tongue, staring down into the late-afternoon shadows between the immensity of the tenements.
Across the water, at the edges of High Kowloon, the crimson sign of the Nightshade Mission burned through the haze, casting a glitter over the sea. A junk was coming in from the east, the filament sails turning in a glare of gold to catch the wind. Lunae thought she glimpsed its dragon figurehead and imagined it gliding over long-drowned lands, coming into port beneath the volcanoes of the north.
Far above the horizon, the maw of the Chain arched upward: the initial segment of the Earth-Mars pathway. Even in daylight, Lunae thought she could identify incoming ships as the maw turned, but it was hard to see through the smoky air, so she looked back to the chrysalis in her hand.
There was a sudden twitch inside her head. Beyond the window, the view changed: a darker day, with the red sign of the Mission flickering through fog. Farther east a great lamp glowed, warning ships away from the walls of the fortress-temple of Gwei Hei. The chrysalis, too, shifted and altered. A silk-moth now sat upon Lunae’s palm, beating iridescent wings.
Lunae’s mind twitched again. The chrysalis was back, as tightly wrapped as before. The afternoon sunlight flooded in. Lunae smiled, but then a voice behind her said, “And what do you think you’re doing?”
Lunae jumped. Dreams-of-War stood in the doorway, her armored hand tapping impatiently against the lacquered wood. Lunae looked up into her guardian’s icy green glare.
“Nothing.”
“What’s that you’re holding?” Dreams-of-War strode across the room, steel-shod feet clicking on driftwood boards, razor teeth glistening wet in a sudden shaft of sunlight. Her wan hair flowed down her back, unbound today, suggesting that her guardian must be in a relatively good mood. Enboldened, Lunae held up the chrysalis. It rested in her palm, innocent, untransformed.
“I found it under the windowsill. It will be a silk-moth one day.”
“So it will,” Dreams-of-War said, seemingly appeased, then added, “one day. You are not to exercise your talents, except at the beginning and end of your lessons. I’ve told you before—the Grandmothers have insisted upon it. Do you understand?”
Lunae nodded. “I understand.” Then she added, reluctantly, “I’m sorry.” There had been a time, not long ago, when she had obeyed her guardians without question, but recently the restrictions placed upon her had begun to chafe. No point in asking for forgiveness, though. Dreams-of-War did not believe in it. It was not, she had said, a Martian concept.
Lunae looked up at her guardian. The armor, as green and iridescent as an insect’s carapace, flowed over the Martian woman’s skin, covering everything except Dreams-of-War’s angular face and her hair. A dragonfly-Samurai, Lunae thought; rows of needles bristled from Dreams-of-War’s breastplate like viridian thorns. Her mailed hands were demon-clawed.
Once, Lunae had woken with a toothache and, unable to locate her nurse, had sought out Dreams-of-War instead. She had often wondered whether her guardian even slept, but sure enough, when she stepped into the red lacquer room at the far end of the eastern wing, there was Dreams-of-War, lying on the bed, neck resting on an iron pillow. Her arms were crossed austerely over her breast and she was still wearing her armor, like some ancient statue. Lunae could not help wondering whether the armor provided some kind of support system; certainly Dreams-of-War never seemed to remove it, and she had never joined Lunae in the bathing chamber. This was perhaps a relief. Lunae thought that it would be disturbing to see her guardian naked. She imagined Dreams-of-War as cold and pale, with flesh as hard as marble. Surely she was never as vulnerable as the unraveled contents of the chrysalis.
Dreams-of-War had told her that the armor was old and that it marked her as a member of the Memnos Matriarchy. When Lunae had been able to access her buried memories, she had learned of the women of the Memnos Tower—the current rulers of Mars and Earth. She learned how they had taken pity on the weakness of humans and created the kappa and other creatures to serve the people of Earth.
Her guardian’s words echoed in her mind: “The Martians have always been superior. It is, after all, we who colonized Earth thousands of years ago. My ancestors come from the ice palaces of the far south; they roamed the snow-seas in far prehistory.”
Now Dreams-of-War reached out a spiny hand and, careful not to touch Lunae’s face, took a strand of hair between her fingers. Lunae squinted down, surprised, for Dreams-of-War had long ago expressed a dislike of intimate contact. The dark red threads glistened against the Martian woman’s fingernails, the armored hand changing, becoming spidery and delicate.
“I’m glad you understand me,” Dreams-of-War said. “You are nine months old, almost grown. Soon you will be a woman. You are old enough to obey instruction without mutiny.”
“I do the best I can,” Lunae protested.
“You do tolerably well, at that. But you must do better, and that means practicing restraint.” Dreams-of-War squatted on armored heels until she was level with Lunae’s gaze. The armor flowed smoothly to accommodate the movement: needles retracting, joints shifting.
Lunae shifted uncomfortably on the window ledge.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s just—how am I ever to grow and learn if I am not allowed out of the house?”
She had seen little even of the harbor, except glimpses from the heights of Cloud Terrace and through the spy-eyes that the Grandmothers had installed in the streets between the tenements of the Peak. Lunae spent hours in front of the oreagraph, watching everyday life pass before the spy-eyes. She knew that the Grandmothers would forbid this if they knew, but Dreams-of-War had once caught her in front of the oreagraph and had turned away without saying a word. Later, she had devoted a lesson to the workings of the oreagraph: ostensibly a theoretical study, but Lunae took it for approval nonetheless.
From the altered perspective of the spy-eyes, the mansion in which Lunae now sat resembled a wrecked vessel, a sprawling black mass of uneven wings and curling gables, pagoda-roofed, as though cast up by some impossibly high tide. Cloud Terrace was a vulture-house, she thought, with the Grandmothers squatting at its heart.
On the rare occasions that Lunae had been taken down into the streets of the Peak, beyond the weir-wards of Cloud Terrace, she had been
