The ship. Don’t—I repeat do not—try anything with the ship until you’ve pacified kephalos. A loyal ship won’t kill you even inadvertently.

  How long will this take? Optimally, three to four days. Probably triple that. Congratulations. Come see me when you have a little time. We’ll whip up some sort of celebration. And you can tell me about Kell’s downfall and why Shareem isn’t Shareem any more.

  Shareem’s Dome

  Hastily erected shacks on a dusty rutted flat outside the ground entrance to the dome. A few children, both kinds, orpetzh and galaphorze, played together in the dust, watched over by a galaphorze female and an orpetzh naish, sitting side by side on low chairs, chatting together as Aleytys flew over, working on something too small for her to see.

  Inside the dome: noise and bustle compounded as Harskari directed the work, reshaping house and gardens to suit her tastes. Aleytys landed on a dusty saucer, the dome opening automatically as she approached to let her through.

  She stood in the lock feeling battered by the indescribable cacophony, the whiny rasp of saws; syncopated hammer raps; shouts from the galaphorze swarming over the house, the orpetzh teeming across the land; earthmoving juggernauts growling, grunting, clattering as they reshaped the surface; drills biting into the earth; backhoes laying pipe. Energy and excitement were thick as the noise—as if some huge beast long dormant had suddenly waked to vigorous life.

  Aleytys smiled. It begins, she thought. Vrithian is changing. She stepped from the lock and began walking toward the small section of Shareem’s house that Harskari had left intact, circling around an orpetzh spading a flowerbed, then a squad planting an irregular line of small bushes with smoky blue-gray leaves, jumped aside at the squawk of a horn and the cheerfully obscene shout of the galaphorze driving a lumber sled toward a knot of carpenters just visible behind three huge old trees Harskari had exempted from destruction when the rest of the garden was swept away. When she finally reached the door, she flattened her hand on the call plate and smiled with relief as the door slid open. As she had a handful of times before, she said, “Ah, Lampos, how goes the transformation?”

  The damascened android bowed, the movement making his tracery shimmer. “With noise and verve, anassa,” he answered as he always did.

  “Where is she?”

  “In the bookroom, anassa. Loguisse also.”

  “Well …” She was both irritated and amused. “That will save me some traipsing.”

  She stood in the doorway watching them. They were too engrossed in what they were doing to notice her. Loguisse had finally found someone to talk to. Once she’d gotten over her shock and skepticism, she was excited by Harskari’s history and fascinated with that ancient science she impatiently refused to call sorcery. Harskari’s people had worked more by instinct and intuition than by any rigorous development of theory, and Loguisse was immersed in an attempt to provide what she considered proper mathematical descriptions of the forces and conditions Harskari described and illustrated. The two women argued endlessly and with much passion over things Aleytys acknowledged to herself she’d never comprehend. And Loguisse threw herself into the remodeling of the house and gardens with a ferocity nearly equaling Harskari’s.

  The closeness between Harskari and Aleytys might never have existed. Aleytys was still uneasy when she saw her mother’s body walking about; she found it disturbing, rather like watching a zombie prance on its coffin. Shareem’s spirit … soul … persona … whatever … was gone. There was nothing of her mother left, yet when she saw her mother’s flesh vibrant with life, she could not come to terms with her mother’s death. She could not grieve. That loss, that pain, was sealed up inside her until she was bloated with it, about to explode if she couldn’t find relief. She drew her hand across her brow, then smiled. “Looks like you’ve got half of Guldafel working here,” she said.

  The two women broke off what they were doing, looked around at her, startled. Harskari set her stylus down, wiped her palms with a handkerchief she pulled from the cuff of her sleeve. “Lunchtime already? Or are you early?”

  “Lunchtime. And more than time. I see I’ll have to tell Lampos to make sure you eat something now and then.”

  Harskari laughed. “Yes, Mama.”

  Loguisse gave Aleytys a quick welcoming smile. “Just as well we hire them. There’s been an influx of refugees from Agishag the last several years, and Guldafel’s economy is showing the strain. Apparently Hyaroll has cancelled all contact with the outside. The uplands of Agishag are reverting to desert.”

  Change, Aleytys thought. Ah well, it was never going to be all sweetness and laughing. “He said don’t call him again the last time I saw him.”

  Loguisse looked austere. “All this interference with Vrithli lives, it’s nonsense. Harskari agrees with me. We’ll guard our borders and leave the rest.”

  “I thought you simply weren’t interested in your Vrithli.”

  Loguisse grinned. “That too.”

  Lampos came to the door. “Archira, lunch is served. In the hall where you wished.”

  Harskari shoved her chair back and got to her feet. “Now that I think about it, I’m starved. Did we eat breakfast?”

  “Not that I remember.” Loguisse followed Harskari across the room. “We started to, I think, but we got into the similarity equations and …”

  “No wonder I’ve got this hole in my middle. The tribulations of a bo …” She glanced at Aleytys, broke off. “Coming, Lee?”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Seems to me you invited yourself.”

  “So I did.”

  Aleytys angled the knife across her plate, set the fork beside it. “I had a reason for inviting myself.”

  “And we’re supposed to ask what it is?”

  “No need to stir yourselves. I’m off.”

  “What?”

  “This evening. Ship’s tested enough and I… I can’t wait any longer.”

  “Avosing.” Harskari sighed. “Don’t hope too much, Lee.”

  “I don’t, but I’ve got to know.” She lifted her glass, tilted and rotated it so the last half inch of the golden wine slid across the bowl, leaving a faint film behind. “I’m taking some of Kell’s nastier warbots. Them and me …” She managed a brief smile. “We can take on anything.”

  “And if Grey’s dead?”

  “I don’t know. Yes I do. I’ll go back to Wolff for a while no matter what I find on Avosing. I … I need it … I need the people there. And maybe Canyli can find a really horrendous Hunt for me. Take my mind off.”

  “Coming back here?”

  “In a while. When doesn’t matter, does it? The one thing I’ve got plenty of is time.”

  Arkadj On Brephor

  Vrithian

  WITNESS [7]

  A SHIPMASTER FROM ARKADJ

  My name is Polado Barrega. My ship is the Marespa. home port Veikro, part sail, part steam. My crew are all Arkadjonk. I won’t have slaves on a seagoing ship; it brings more trouble than it’s worth, and if you think I’d take on a Fosporat or a Yashoukki, let me tell you I wouldn’t trust one of them within a cable of my ship. I used to have a Fospor linguist, but I found he took bribes and screwed me bad a couple times, so the next time we go out, he don’t come back; some haddyronk are thanking me for fresh meat. Since then I have learned enough of this and that to do my own bargaining, though Yashoukkim are all over the place like fleas and the Suling Lallers are getting hard to figure. The undying there are drawing in, trying to shut honest merchants out of Suling waters. You can still get into the harbor at Obattar, though you get more stares than offers and you got to have the patience of a sneglok and you got to have connections, and that I got. But it’s getting hard, yah, I tell you, it’s enough to turn an honest man crook. Don’t know what’s happening, but seems to me the undying are getting touchier than ever, and it’s making the randts that run things so itchy you can’t tell where they’ll jump. Slangstra, it’s hard enough in ordinary times to keep my ship fueled and make a stinking little profit so I can feed my kids and lay aside for my old age. Yashouk traders and Fospor merchants everywhere these days undercutting you; those rotten little luggers can’t carry a load of spit but there they are, promising, promising, half the time they’re pirates on the side, a land-trader’s lucky they don’t take his skin and sell that. Then you get home and find some Fospor naftiko anchored in your own port skimming off the cream while you get tangled up in paperwork until it cost you a fortune in silver to cut through it and he gone before you finish and half the time he kill the market for your best goods. Slanstro-damned Fospor, weren’t for the undying, I’d get together with Toricas and Gestang and lay a hard hand on Tropagora and put the fear of Salanggor into those godless squeeze-pennies and sneaking cheats. Days like this, I think I’m going to burn to ash from the inside when I think about Yashoukkim and Fosporain and what they’re doing to me. Salanggor curse them, those undying. I know they been here since my granda’s granda was a nit, and his granda too, but anytime some hardworking merchant makes a change here and there just to make things a little easier, they stomp him. Hasn’t never been a war, no matter how bad things get. Smash an honest man but don’t give shit about pirates; they can burn villages and sink ships and who gives one holy damn about it? They just don’t want men feeling free, that’s all, they don’t want men ignoring them, the shitheads; they want to play with us like dolls, that’s it, they look down here and watch us and laugh. They don’t care what we think. They don’t care how much we try. But if we start doing what we want to do, it’s foot on the neck, face in the mud and breathe how you can. I could go up to one of them and say I want to kill you, I could go up to haddyr-face Hrigis and say I want to peel your skin off a strip at a time and feed it to you, I want to chop you into bait and catch a hold full of fish with you. And she’d laugh in my face and tell me to lick her feet and I’d be on my belly licking. Yah, I tell you. And the bloodsuckers who run us, they’re worse, the Vennor and Vannish and the leeches in the government sucking us dry and eating the meat off our bones. No, I’d never talk this way to their faces, not them, those vipers are too poisonous and too scared, they’d have me dead between one breath and the next. And I can’t do one thing about it, no one can, because those parasites are backed by the undying, yah, the undying prop them up and let them go on draining us, stealing the breath out of our throats. But what can a man do? Live by his wits and scrape around the tangle of paperwork. Smuggle what he can and get what he can for the rest. I think of the undying and there’s a fire in my belly. I think of them watching, they’ve come strolling by and betrayed me with a grin more than once, I think of them watching and I wonder what it would be like to live where there were no undying, to go about your days without some demigod peering over your shoulder. I wonder. Oh yah, I wonder.

  Vrithian

  on the oblique file [4]

  KEPHALOS TO SUNCHILD: Kell is dead. Hours, no more, before Hyaroll goes.

  SUNCHILD TO WILLOW: Kell is dead. Time is now. Now the bow, now the anointed arrows.

  SUNCHILD TO BODRI: Kell is dead. The time is now. Now the herds, the helpers. Fetch them.

  Sunchild flitted away to wind in an elaborate gavotte with kephalos, a dance around the strictures that bound it. Kephalos was not to notice what it knew was happening.

  Willow watched Sunchild streak down the hillside. For a moment she sat very still, then she got onto her feet with a swift surge of her small body. “Otter hunts,” she sang. “Otter hunts in me. Watch, my children, watch, Otter hunts.” Still singing, she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled into her hut. The bow and arrows were wrapped in a fine cloth Sunchild had brought her, the stoppered gourd of poosha sat beside the bundle. She gathered these and backed out, clicking her tongue in the rhythm of her song.

  Bodri came trundling into the camp. Humming her song, Willow straightened, stared. She hadn’t seen ol’ beetle for more than half a Minachron. He’d changed. The garden on his back was gone, replaced by a mosaic of mosses. “What what?” she said.

  “I will start a new garden when the effort seems worthwhile,” he said.

  “Your piece part, ol’ Bug. You get us in?”

  “Had better, hadn’t I? Ah Willow, sweet Willow, trust me, I have indeed worked out a way. While Sunchild keeps kephalos occupied, with its consent, of course, we enter through the kitchen.”

  Willow looked skeptically at him. “You climb wall, bang door down?”

  “No, Whisper in my heart, I walk through both doors.”

  “And what do ironheads be doing?”

  “You’ll see. It’s time we went.”

  They went quickly down the mountainside, down the footpath they’d used many times to reach the gardens or the lake, left the path and circled to the back of the house where a high stone wall shut in the kitchen garden. Bodri stopped Willow and drew her into the shade of a lod-bush, making a grating, gnashing sound of pure irritation.

  “What? what?”

  “Lazy skelos, they were supposed to have the herd waiting … ah! There. Look.”

  A small herd of girilk came trickling out of the trees, coaxed along by a pair of six-legs who trotted about them and touched them with stinging feelers if they showed inclination to move in the wrong direction.

  Moving at a lumbering gallop, Bodri crossed the grass to the door in the wall. One of the long thin fingers at the end of a fore-right tentacle slipped through the hole he’d bored through the hard tough wood and touched the latch button. He drew it swiftly back as the gate began to swing open. With a high warbling call he went through the opening, shoving the door as far back as it would go. Willow followed him through, looked back. The girilk were trotting toward her, driven into a honking run by the skelos. She grinned. Sneaky ol’ beetle.

  The kitchen garden was a half acre of cultivated land protected from roaming beasts by a high wall a good three times Willow’s height. Bodri settled himself into a crouch between two rows of peach—trees, waiting for the herd to pass.

  Willow broke away, ran between vine rows and crouched by the trunk of an espaliered pear. She unwrapped the bow and strung it, slipped the strap of the arrow pouch over her shoulder. She thought about nocking an arrow but changed her mind. Keep the hands free until you get close to what you’re tracking, Otter sang in her. Be loose and ready to ride the winds of chance. Bodri and she were creeping up on Hyaroll, down the kephalos wind from him. And kephalos would keep the wind blowing to them as long as they did not harm Hyaroll. When Bodri had finished mixing the right poosha, Willow had proved how benign it was by pricking herself with the point of an anointed arrow, had gone down deep and come swimming out of sleep unhurt. Kephalos would not betray them as long as they were true.

  Bodri came rushing through the vines as silent as thought. She grinned at him, excited and nervous and at the back of her mind weaving a song of this hunt.

  The girilk were munching briskly at some rows of thrix.

  Bodri settled beside her, a mossy hump, head drawn inside his carapace though his antennae curled up and out, quivering in a wind that didn’t exist. She waited, Otter’s ghost watching over her shoulder, his patience entering her, possessing her who had seldom been able to keep still from one minute to the next. She was warm with his presence and quiet now with a hunter’s unending stillness, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the door to open.

  The girilk snorted and crunched placidly down the rows, leaving a swath of kicked-up earth behind them. The skelos were nowhere about.

  The door hissed into the wall and an ironhead came out, a smaller one, more fragile than most she’d seen. It rushed at the girilk, who snorted and shook their heads, danced away from it and began eating in another section of the garden.

  As soon as the door hissed, Bodri’s head came out, and he surged onto his six feet, tentacles held in ready loops before him. While the ironhead was busy with the recalcitrant herd, he moved with a swift and powerful silence up the steps and into the house, charging the other one waiting inside. It stopped what it was doing and stared, then three of Bodri’s tentacles closed around it and the fourth searched over its torso, slid open a panel and twitched a plug loose, killing it for that moment.

  Willow followed him more sedately. While he was struggling with the ironhead, she dipped the needle points of two arrows in the gourd of poosha, nocked one of them and held the second between two fingers of her bowstave hand.

  A tiny patch of gold light flitted into the kitchen, bobbed up and down in front of Bodri, then darted away. Bodri rushed after it, Willow ran after him. They went up and up along a lazily spiraling ramp to a small round room domed with colored glass where the sun came in hot and thick and gold.

  Hyaroll lay face down on a padded table. The ironhead Megathen was kneading his shoulders and back, talking to him quietly. The room was filled with small sounds, distant running water, the hum of insects from some ancient summer evening, the lazy rustle of leaves.

  Willow stepped past Bodri, lifted her bow and loosed the arrow, smiled as it lodged in Old Vryhh’s rump, two fingerwidths buried in the mound of muscle.

  Megathen cried out and reached for the arrow. Hyaroll yelled and started to swing around. Bodri brushed past Willow, almost knocking her off her feet, charged at Megathen, wrapped his tentacles around the ironhead and pulled it away from the table. Willow set herself again, nocked the second arrow, then put it in Old Vryhh’s shoulder, high up in the muscle, taking care to hit a spot where the point wouldn’t do serious damage.