The guard was fuddled for a moment. Then he brightened. “A title, mistress. It denotes his standing with the brethren.”
“It has nothing to do with his job?”
“No, mistress. Not directly.”
“I see. Where does a kentan stand with regard to others? How high?”
The guard looked unhappy. He did not want to answer, yet felt he had to conform to orders to deal with her hospitably.
“It must be fairly high. You are nervous about him. The year has treated Bagnel well, then.”
“Yes, mistress. His rise has been...”
“Rapid?”
“Yes, mistress. We all thought your last visit would cause him grave embarrassment, but...”
Marika turned away to conceal her features. A photograph graced the wall opposite the desk. It had been enlarged till it was so grainy it was difficult to recognize. “What is this place?”
Relieved, the guard came around his desk and began explaining, “That is the brethren landhold at TelleRai, mistress.”
“Yes. Of course. I have never seen it from this angle.”
“Marika?”
She turned. Bagnel had arrived. He looked sleek and self-confident and just a bit excited. “Bagnel. As you see, I’m behaving myself this time.” She used the informal mode without realizing it. Grauel and Barlog gave her looks she did not see.
“You’ve grown.” Bagnel responded in the same mode. His usage was as unconscious as Marika’s.
Grauel and Barlog bared teeth and exchanged glances.
“Yes. Also grown up. I spent the summer in the Ponath, battling the nomad. I believe it changed me.”
Bagnel glanced at the guard. “You’ve been grilling Norgis. You’ve made him very uncomfortable.”
“We were talking about the picture of the Tovand, kentan,” the guard said.
Bagnel scowled. The guard retreated behind the barrier of his desk. He increased the volume of the sound accompanying the display on his screen. Marika was amused, but concealed it.
“Well,” Bagnel said. “You’re here again.”
Grauel and Barlog frowned at his use of the familiar mode.
“I hoped I could look inside the aircraft this time. Under supervision, of course. Nothing secret seems to be going on now. The fighting ships and the big dirigibles are gone.”
“You tease me. Yes, I suppose we could look at the light aircraft. Come.”
As they stepped outside, Marika said, “I hear you’ve been promoted.”
“Yes. Chief of security. Another reward for my failure at Critza.”
“You have an unusual concept of reward, I’d say.”
Grauel and Barlog were displeased with Marika’s use of the familiar mode, too.
“I do?” Bagnel was amused. “My superiors do. I haven’t done anything deserving.” Softly, he asked, “Do you need those two arfts hanging over your shoulder all the time?”
“I don’t go anywhere without Grauel and Barlog.”
“They make me nervous. They always look like they’re planning to rip my throat out.”
Marika glanced at the huntresses. “They are. They don’t like this. They don’t like males who can or dare do more than cook or pull a plow.”
He gave her a dark look. She decided she had pushed her luck. Time to become Marika the packless again. “Isn’t this a Seifite trainer?” She indicated an aircraft standing straight ahead.
“Still studying, are you?”
“Always. When I can get anything to study. I told you I plan to fly. I have flown three times, on darkships. Each flight left me more convinced that flight is my tomorrow.” She glanced at several males hurrying toward them. Grauel and Barlog interposed themselves quickly, though the males were not armed.
“Ground crew,” Bagnel explained. “They see us coming out here, they expect us to take a ship up.”
The males slowed when they discerned Marika’s silth garb. “They’re having second thoughts,” she said.
“You can’t blame them, can you? Silth are intimidating by nature.”
“Are they? I’ve never seen them from the outside.”
“But you grew up on a packstead. Not in a cloister.”
“True. And my pack never mentioned them. I was silth before I knew what was happening.” She made the remark sound like a jest. Bagnel tried to respond and failed.
“Well?” he asked. “Would you like to go up? As long as you’re here?”
“Can you do that? Just take off whenever you want?”
“Yes.”
“In cloister we would have to have permission all the way from the senior.” She climbed a ladder to the lower wing of the aircraft. “Only two places. No room for Grauel and Barlog.”
“Unfortunately.” Bagnel did not sound distraught.
“I don’t know if they’d let me.”
“You’re silth. They’re just —”
“They’re just charged on their necks with bringing me back alive. Even if that means keeping me from killing myself. They don’t trust machines. It was a fight just getting to come here again. The idea wasn’t popular at the cloister. Someone made a protest about last time.”
“Maybe another time, then. When they understand that I don’t plan to carry you off to our secret breeding farm.”
“What? Is there such a place? Oh. You are teasing.”
“Yes. We recruit ragtag. Especially where the traditional pack structures still predominate. A lot of the Brown Paw Bond youngsters came out of the Ponath.”
“I see.”
Each spring newly adult males had been turned out of the packsteads to wander the hills and valleys in search of another pack willing to take them in. They had had to sell themselves and their skills. Thus the blood was mixed.
Many, though, never found a place. A pack did not need nearly as many males as females. Marika had not wondered much about what had become of the unsuccessful. She had assumed that they died of exposure or their own incompetence. Their fates had not concerned her, except that of her littermate Kublin, the only male for whom she had ever held much regard.
“Well? Up? Or another time?”
Marika felt a longing so intense it frightened her. She was infatuated with flight. More than infatuated, she feared. She was obsessed. She did not like that. A weakness. Weaknesses were points where one could be touched, could be manipulated. “Next time,” she grated. “Or the time after that. When my companions have learned to relax.”
“As you wish. Want to sit in it? Just to get the feel?”
And so it went, with Marika getting a look at every ship on the field, including the Stings. “Nothing secret about them,” Bagnel assured her. “Nothing you’d understand well enough to tell our enemies about.”
“You have enemies?”
“A great many. Especially in the sisterhoods. Like that old silth — what was her name? Gorry. The one who wanted us thrown back to the nomads when we came to Akard asking help. Like all the other dark-faring silth have become since we joined the Serke and Redoriad in their interstellar ventures.”
“What?” Why had that not been in the education tapes? “I was not aware of that. Brethren have visited the starworlds?”
“There are two ships. One is Serke, one is Redoriad. The silth move them across the void. The brethren deal on the other end.”
“How is that possible? I thought only specially trained silth could stay the bite of the dark.”
“Special ships. Darkships surrounded with a metal shell to keep the air in. Designed by brethren. They put in machines to keep the air fresh. Don’t ask me questions because that’s all I know. That is another bond entirely, and one we have no contact with.”
“And the other sisterhoods are jealous?”
“So I gather. I don’t know all that much. The Brown Paw Bond is an old-fashioned bond involved in trade and light manufacturing. Traditional pursuits. The only place you could get the kind of answers you want would be at the Tovand in TelleRai. I
tell you, the one time I saw that place it seemed more alien than the Reugge cloister here. Those are strange males down there. Anyway, I was telling about the Serke and the Redoriad. Rumor says they asked the brethren to help them with their star ventures. That could be why the Reugge have become so disenchanted with the Serke.”
“Don’t fool yourself. The disenchantment did not begin with us. The Serke are solely responsible. There’s something in the Ponath that they want.” She studied Bagnel closely. He gave nothing away.
“The brethren won’t go back to Critza, Bagnel. I thought you said trade was lucrative up there.”
“When there was someone to trade with. There isn’t anymore.”
“Nomads?”
“What?”
“They’re getting their weapons somewhere. They were better armed than ever this summer. They shot down two darkships. There is only one source for firearms.”
“No. We haven’t sold them weapons. Of that I’m certain. That would be a self-destructive act.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“They had to get them from you. No one else is allowed to manufacture such things.”
“I thought you said the Serke were behind everything.”
“Undoubtedly. But I wonder if someone isn’t behind the Serke. No. Let’s not argue anymore. It’s getting late. I’d better get home or they won’t let me come again.”
“How soon can I expect you?”
“Next month maybe. I get a day a month off now. A reward for service in the Ponath. As long as I’m welcome, I’ll keep coming here.”
“You’ll be welcome as long as I’m security chief.”
“Yes. You owe me, don’t you?”
Startled, Bagnel said, “That, too. But mostly because you break the tedium.”
“You’re not happy here?”
“I would have been happier had the weather never changed and the nomads never come out of the Zhotak. Life was simpler at Critza.”
Marika agreed. “As it was at my packstead.”
III
“Well?” the most senior demanded.
Marika was not sure what to say. Was it in her interest to admit that she suspected Bagnel had been given an assignment identical to her own?
She repeated only what she thought Barlog and Grauel might have overheard. “Mostly we just looked at aircraft and talked about how we would have been happier if we had not had to leave the Ponath. I tried to avoid pressing. Oh. He did tell me about some ships the dark-faring Serke and Redoriad had built special so the brethren could —”
“Yes. Well. Not much. But I did not expect much. It was a first time. A trial, You did not press? Good. You have a talent for the insidious. You will make a great leader someday. I am sure you will have him in your thrall before long.”
“I will try, mistress.”
“Please do, Marika. It may become critical down the path.”
“May I ask what exactly we are doing, mistress? What plans you have for me? Dorteka keeps telling me —”
“You may not. Not at this point. What you do not know you cannot tell anyone else. When it becomes tighter tactically... When you and I and the Reugge would all be better served by having you know the goal and able to act to achieve it, you will be told everything. For the present, have faith that your reward will be worth your trouble.”
“As you wish, mistress.”
Chapter Nineteen
I
I t was the quietest time of Marika’s brief life, at least since the years before the nomads had come to the upper Ponath and destroyed. The struggle continued, and she participated, but life became so effortless and routine it fell into numbing cycles of repetition. There were few high points, few lows, and each of the latter she marked by the return of her nightmares about her littermate Kublin.
She could count on at least one bout with dark dreams each year, though never at any time predictable by season, weather, or her own mental state. They concerned her increasingly. The passing of time, and their never being weaker when they came, convinced her that they had little to do with the fact that the Degnan remained unMourned.
What else, then? That was what Grauel, Barlog, and even Braydic asked when she did at last break down and share her distress.
She did not know what else. Dreams and reason did not mix.
She did see Braydic occasionally now. The comm technician was less standoffish now it was certain Marika enjoyed the most senior’s enduring favor.
Studies. Always there were studies. Always there were exercises to help her expand and increase her silth talents.
Always there were frightened silth distressed by her grasp of those talents.
Years came and went. The winters worsened appreciably each seasonal cycle. The summers grew shorter. Photographs taken from tradermale satellites showed a swift accumulation of ice in the far north. Glaciers were worming across the Zhotak already. For a time they would be blocked by the barrier of the Rift, but sisters who believed themselves experts said that, even so, it would be but a few years before that barrier was surmounted and the ice would slide on southward, grinding the land.
It never ceased to boggle Marika, the Serke being so desperate to possess a land soon to be lost to nature.
The predictions regarding the age of ice became ever more grim. There were times when Marika wished she were not in the know — as much as she was. The world faced truly terrible times, and those would come within her own life span. Assuming she lived as long as most silth.
Grauel and Barlog were inclined to suggest that she would not, for she never quite managed to control her fractious nature.
The predictions of social upheaval and displacement, most of which she reasoned out for herself, were quite terrifying.
Each summer Marika served her stint in the north, from the time of the last snowfall till the time of the first. Each summer she exercised her ability to walk the dark side, as much as the nomads would permit. Each summer poor Dorteka had to endure the rustification with her, complaining bitterly. Each summer Marika helped establish a new outpost somewhere, and each summer the nomads tried to avoid her outpost, though every summer saw its great centers of conflict. She sometimes managed to participate by smuggling herself into the strife aboard a darkship commanded by a pliable Mistress.
Gradwohl’s strategy of driving the nomads west into Serke territories seemed slow in paying off. The savages clung to Reugge lands stubbornly, despite paying a terrible price.
The Reugge thus settled into a never-ending and costly bloodfeud with the savages. The horde, after continuous decimation through attack and starvation, no longer posed quite so serious a threat. But it remained troublesome because of the rise of a warrior caste. The crucible of struggle created grim fighters among the fastest, strongest, and smartest nomads. Composed of both male and female fighters, and supported by ever more skillful wild silth and wehrlen, it made up in ferocity and cunning what the horde had lost in numbers.
Gradwohl’s line of blockhouses north of Maksche did succeed in their mission. The final southward flow crashed against that barrier line like the sea against an uncrackable breakwater. But the savages came again and again, till it seemed they would never withdraw, collapse, seek the easier hunting to the west.
As the nomad threat waned, though, pressure against the Reugge strengthened in other quarters. Hardly a month passed but what there was not some incident in Maksche involving rogue males. And that disease began to show itself in other Reugge territories.
But none of that touched Marika. For all she was in the middle of it, she seemed to be outside and immune to all that happened. None of it affected her life or training.
She spent the long winters studying, practicing, honing her talents, making monthly visits to Bagnel, and devouring every morsel of flight-or space-oriented information Gradwohl could buy or steal. She wheedled more out of Bagnel, who was pleased to help fill such an excited, eager mind.
He was learning himself, turning his interests from those that had occupied him in the Ponath to those of the future. His special interest was the web of communications and weather satellites the brethren maintained with the aid of the dark-faring silth. The brethren created the technology, and the silth lifted the satellites aboard their void-faring darkships.
Marika became intrigued with the cycle and system. She told Bagnel, “There are possibilities that seem to have escaped everyone.”
“For example?” His tone was indulgent, like that of an instructress watching a pup reinvent the wheel.
“Possibilities. Unless someone has thought of them already and these ridiculous barriers against the flow of information have masked the fact.”
“Give me an example. Maybe I can find out for you.”
It was Marika’s turn to look indulgent. “Suppose I do have an original thought? I know you tradermales think it unlikely of silth, but that possibility does exist. Granted? Should I give something away for nothing?”
Bagnel was amused. “They make you more a silth every time I see you. You’re going to be a nasty old bitch by the time you reach Gradwohl’s age, Marika.”
“Could be. Could be. And if I am, it’ll be the fault of meth like you.”
“I’d almost agree with you,” Bagnel said, his eyes glazing over for a moment.
Those quiet years were heavily flavored with the most senior’s favor. With little fanfare, initially, Marika rose in stature within the cloister. In swift succession she became a celebrant-novice, a celebrant-second, then a full celebrant, meaning she passed through the stages of assistanceship in conducting the daily Reugge rituals, assistanceship during the more important rites on days of obligation, then began directing rites herself. She had no trouble with the actual rituals.
There were those who resented her elevation. Of course. Traditionally, she should not have become a full celebrant till she was much older.
Each swift advancement meant someone else having to wait so much longer. And older silth did not like being left behind one who was, as yet, still a pup.
There was far more resentment when Gradwohl appointed Marika junior censor when one of the old silth died and her place among the cloister’s seven councillors was taken by the senior censor. Zertan was extremely distressed. It was a cloister senior’s right to make such appointments, without interference even from superiors. But Zertan had to put up with Gradwohl’s interference or follow Paustch into exile.