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"That remains to be seen. Now, give me your hand." The kappa rinsed her fingers beneath a nearby tap, then took Lunae's hand and began to swab at the bloodied holes with a leaf torn from one of the plants.

"Does this hurt?"

"Not very much. Kappa, I don't understand why that woman—that Kami—even noticed me. Is it because of this—thing I am supposed to be? A
hito-bashira?"
Her hand was growing cold.

"Perhaps."

"What is a
hito-bashira?
I have been told so often that this is what I am, but my memories tell me nothing and I can't find the word in any of the data-tablets. Even—" Lu-nae stopped, not wanting the kappa to know that she had looked in places forbidden to her. But she'd had no choice, she had to find out. Limbo is being born in a bag, nursed by dragonfly and spider and toad.

"But it has been explained to you, has it not? You are to be a woman-who-holds-back-the-flood."

"But, nurse, I don't understand what that means.
Which
flood?"

"Ask the Grandmothers," the kappa said, as she had answered so many times before. She bound Lunae's hand with a creeper-bandage.

"But they just tell me to ask Dreams-of-War, and she tells me to ask them, or you. I go round and round in cir-cles. Why will no one answer me?"

"Perhaps because it might hinder your development," the kappa said.

"I am old enough!" Lunae replied hotly.

The kappa's mouth creased, then split open like a melon to reveal a flash of pink, shiny tongue. "You are nine months old, grown far more swiftly than a normal child. I am a hundred and twenty, and people still won't tell me anything."

"But—" Lunae began, then stopped, for what she had been about to say was:
That's different
.

Dreams-of-War would have approved, she knew, but she still did not feel that it was right for there to be one rule for the kappa, so old and wise, and one rule for herself. Perhaps the kappa was right; perhaps she really was too young. Maybe that was simply the way the world worked. She had witnessed it only from afar, heard snatches of sound from the inside of a litter. Who was she to question the workings of the societies beyond the weir-wards of the mansion? And yet she could not help but question.

The kappa seemed to take pity on her, for she said, "You'll know when the time is right. Have patience. Enjoy your ignorance while it lasts."

This suggested the knowledge would not make her happy, but it only made Lunae feel more eager to learn. The kappa stepped back from the skins with an air of sat-isfaction. "That, at least, is one task finished for today"

"Why do the skins have to be kept moist?" Lunae asked.

"So that they can grow, of course. Though most of these will have to be pruned back, returned to the mulch." The kappa gave a gusty sigh. "A pity. But they are too small and spindly."

"Are we plants, then?" A strange thought. She pictured herself rooted in soil, reaching up toward the hazy sun.

The kappa gave her a lipless smile. "Of course not. You are a made-human."

"And a
hito-bashira"
Lunae said with resignation.

"Just so. There. By this evening, your hand should be healed. And now, the Grandmothers wish to see you." The kappa fixed her with a round eye, green as moss. She pat-ted Lunae on the arm." I know you find them a little alarming, perhaps. That is only to be expected. They are ancients, and as such, they do not behave like you and me. It is their right. But you should have no fear. I am sure they love you, in their own strange way."

Lunae would have died rather than tell anyone, even the kappa, that the reason she did not want to visit the Grandmothers was not simply fear, but revulsion. If she revealed this to the kappa, however, sooner or later the Grandmothers would travel inside the kappas skull and find the knowledge nestling inside the nurse's simple thoughts like a moth in a chrysalis, all curdled toxic soup. The thought of the Grandmothers gaining such knowl-edge was enough to make Lunae grow cold, for she knew, without understanding precisely how, that the Grand-mothers would punish the kappa and not herself. And she did not want to see the kappa punished.

She sighed. Sometimes it was as though the old kappa was the child, to be protected and sheltered, and she the nursemaid. If she told anyone of her feelings about the Grandmothers, it would have to be Dreams-of-War, and her Martian guardian had a frustrating habit of appearing to ignore such pieces of information, only to store them up and deploy them when one was least expecting it. Lunae would simply have to keep her feelings to herself.

It was a long way from the inner chamber to the Grandmothers' room, and the kappa was unable to move quickly. Lunae, as always, wondered whether the kappa had originally been intended to perform household tasks, or whether she had been bred for another purpose entirely.

Lunae and the kappa walked along dim corridors, passing the familiar demon-swarming tapestries that the Grandmothers had brought from the volcano lands. They depicted figures of legend: the moon-spirits of the lunar craters; the great Dragon-Kings who, it was said, had risen from the depths of the oceans when the Drowning first be-gan, to help humans hold back the surging tide.

"Nurse, where do you come from?" Lunae asked.

It had never occurred to her to ask this before and she felt faintly embarrassed by it, as though the kappa was too much a part of the furniture even to have such an ordinary thing as an origin. But the kappa only smiled and said, "I come from the north, just like those tapestries. From the Fire Islands, the lands of the change-tigers."

"Where are the Fire Islands, exactly?" Lunae won-dered aloud, but even as she spoke, her buried memories were bringing forth an image of a scattered chain beyond the water-ringed summits of Fuji and Hakodate, beyond Sakhalin. Then memory supplied her with a name:
Ischa
. This was the word that Lunae next spoke.

"Yes," the kappa replied. "I am from the clan-warren of Hailstone Shore, near Ischa, the southernmost town of the Kamchatka chain." Her head swiveled around. "It is the only land left in that region of the world. All else has gone, under flood and fire."

"Why did you come to Fragrant Harbor?" Lunae asked.

"I was sent here. I had no choice."

"Do you miss your home?"

"If I did," the kappa said, still smiling, "would you ask the Grandmothers to send me back?"

"I could try," Lunae ventured, but she already knew what the answer would be. To the Grandmothers, as to Dreams-of-War, the kappa was no more than a useful thing. They would no more consider her desires than they would consider the wishes of a household kettle. The kappa said nothing more, but Lunae knew that she under-stood.

The shadowy corridors, each lit only by a single lamp, were comforting and familiar. When they reached the pas-sage leading to the Grandmothers' room, however, Lunae's heart began to beat faster, lumping along beneath her ribs.

The kappa paused outside the Grandmothers' door.

"Wait," she said, then pressed her wrinkled palm against the lock-release and hobbled inside. Lunae fidgeted in the hallway, impatience mingling with reluctance. She wanted the meeting to be over, to leave Cloud Terrace far behind.

The kappa reappeared at the doorway and surveyed Lunae with a nervous, rheumy squint. "They say you are to come in."

Mars

Yskatarina stood upon legs of iron and glass, artificial feet planted firmly on the old stone floor. Her hands rested on each side of a window, from which she gazed out across the Crater Plain. Used as she was to the dim vaults of Nightshade, the brightness of Mars hurt her eyes. She reached up and touched the setting of her eyeshade, turn-ing it to maximum. The light made her feel bleached and weak; for a moment, she hated the need that had brought her to Mars. Then guilt kicked in once more. Elaki had re-quired it, and Elaki must be obeyed. Conflict whispered inside her head, tearing at her. But now that she was so far away from Elaki, it seemed both easier and more difficult to think. Resentment was growing alongside the love.

The Animus had been left outside the Tower, at the Matriarch's insistence.

"It is a male," the Matriarch had said with palpable disgust. "We cannot allow it inside."

Yskatarina had acquiesced with a semblance of grace, but she did not like it. It was as though her shadow had been torn from her, leaving her exposed in the light. She longed to return to the ship, but first there was business to be done.

From here, at the height of the Memnos Tower, one could see as far as the great conical summit of Olympus. The plain shimmered in the afternoon light, giving the im-pression of desert heat, but Yskatarina knew this to be de-ceptive. It was winter now in this northern region of Mars, with frost in the mornings in the shadow of the rocks and a bite to the air. She did not know what caused the shim-mer, but she suspected some manner of force-defense. The Tower had been well guarded from ancient times. If she looked down, she could see the glazed crimson bricks of the wall, bare of lichen and moss.

Beside her, the Matriarch, dressed in red-and-black, exuded a satisfaction as chilly as the day.

Yskatarina glanced aside at the Matriarch's moon-face: the tight, pursed lips, the pale eyes embedded in bags of flesh, the moles that scat-tered the skin like ticks. She set her gaze once more upon the Crater Plain.

"You see?" the Matriarch said. "This is the first and last of the old fortresses, save only for the ruin in Winterstrike. Our ancestors built it in the days of the Age of Children, to guard against their enemies."

She reached up to touch the phial around her neck, an intricate silver cage, then let her hand fall.

"What kind of enemies were those?" Yskatarina asked, with seeming idleness.

"The forebears of the hyenae and vulpen." The Matri-arch's mouth grew yet smaller and Yskatarina knew that she was thinking of the Animus. "
Males
, in the days when such creatures were commonplace.

Ram-women. Sy-rinxes. The beings that later became what we call the Atro-phied, like the Earthbones."

"I know nothing of these beings," Yskatarina said, tap-ping impatient fingers against the hard carapace of her bodice. "What are Earthbones?"

"A flesh-in-rock. Mounds of moving flesh, merged with the planet."

Yskatarina frowned. "With Mars itself? How is that possible?" She wondered about Memnos mysticism. She did not know a great deal about their beliefs, only that they differed so crucially from Nightshade in their disdain for the male form. Nightshade had little use for supersti-tion, and even less for warrior sects. Those days, according to Yskatarinas mind, should be long gone. But if Mars' rulers chose to play at being primitives, it was not for her to condemn them. All it meant was that they should prove easier to manipulate. She schooled her face into a becom-ing display of interest and turned to face the Matriarch, sending the pleats of her leather kilt swishing against the surface of her legs.

"Terraforming nanotech, mingling with genetic codes. What was once human became inextricably welded to the world. There was a fashion for it, once. Fanatics, psycho-ecologists—who knows? It was very long ago. But surely Nightshade knows more of these things than we do. That is, after all, why you are here."

"I came to honor an old bargain. And to call in an old debt," Yskatarina said.

"Haunt-tech." The Matriarch spoke with a sour twist of the lip.

"Quite so. You have had it now for a hundred years, it and its many ramifications—blacklight, deeplight, the intricacies of shadow-space and entry to the spirit worlds of the Eldritch Realm. We note that you have made good use of it. Armor, weaponry, surveillance systems, ships. Above all, the advantages of the Chain."

"It has proved versatile," the Matriarch acknowledged.

"And now you need further expertise," Yskatarina prompted. "You do not have more than a basic under-standing of it. You cannot develop it further, without the assistance of Nightshade."

"Do not tell her that we ourselves are learning more about haunt-tech and what it can do,"

Elaki had said. "Or that our knowledge has made great strides of late. Pretend to her that we
have always possessed such information."

Yskatarina had stared at her aunt. "Is that not true, then?"

"Haunt-tech is inordinately complex. If we knew a hun-dred years ago what we know now,
then matters would have been a great deal simpler."

Yskatarina frowned. "How so?"

But Elaki had only smiled a cold smile, and said nothing more.

The Matriarchs face grew yet more sour. "That would seem to be so."

Yskatarina smiled. "You received the demonstration versions? You have had time to see what they can do?"

Far out on the Crater Plain, she could see something moving. Reluctantly, she turned the eyeshade down a notch to let in more light, and raised the binocular setting. Something was passing swiftly amid a cloud of dust.

"What might that be, for instance?" Yskatarina feigned charmed surprise.

"You know very well," the Matriarch muttered.

"Why, it is a ghost herd. Of—what?" Long disjointed legs, scarlet from the knee down, as if dipped in blood…

Yskatarina was briefly covetous. "Some manner of mu-tated women?"

"Those are creatures known as gaezelles."

"From the far past?"

"From the Age of Children."

"They are quite beautiful," Yskatarina murmured.

"And almost entirely useless. As are the other haunts and shades that your technology has recently conjured up out of the planet's nanomemories and thin air. Sylph-beasts roam the slopes of Olympus.

Demotheas have been seen in the woods of Elyssiane. Mars has become alive with spirits of old creations—whimsical nightmares, evo-lutionary dead ends. This has never happened before."

"I used the words 'demonstration model.' You surely were not so naive as to think we would give you some-thing of power, straightaway?"

"Your aunt promised to Jaelp Memnos with the gov-erning of Earth," the Matriarch said. "I see no signs that this help, this power, will be forthcoming, and we need it. There are many elements on Earth that seek to break free of Martian control. What remains of the Northern Hemi-sphere is full of war-madams, carving out independent fiefdoms for themselves. We send excissieres, who are ef-fective, but it is a costly and laborious business. I should like to send a permanent subjugating force."