"Someday I will have a darkship all my own. I will have it painted all in black," she said to no one in particular. "So it can't be seen at night. And we will add Degnan symbols to those of the Reugge."

"The tradermales could still follow you with their radar," Grauel said. "And silth could still find you with the touch."

"Even so. Where are they? Do their rituals take so long? Barlog, where are your weapons? We don't go anywhere without our weapons." She herself carried the automatic rifle and revolver captured in the Ponath. She carried a hunting knife that had belonged to her dam, a fine piece of tradermale steel. She never left her quarters unarmed.

Grauel still carried the weapon Bagnel had given her during the siege of Akard. It remained her most precious treasure. She could have replaced it with something newer and more powerful, but she clung to it superstitiously. It had served her well from the moment it had come into her paws. She did not wish to tempt her fates.

Barlog was less dramatically inclined. Marika often had to remind her that they were supposed to be living savage roles. Marika wanted other silth to perceive them as terribly barbaric. It amused her that those with the nerve sometimes asked why she did not wear ceremonial dyes as well as always going armed.

She never bothered telling them that the daily dyeing of fur was a nomad custom, not one indigenous to the Ponath. For all there had been a deadly struggle of years, most of the Reugge could not understand the difference between Ponath and Zhotak meth.

There was a chill bite to the morning wind. It made her eager to be up and away, running free, riding the gale. Someday she wanted to take the darkship up during a storm, to race among growling clouds and strokes of lightning. Other Mistresses thought her mad. And she would never be able to try it. The bath would refuse to participate. And they had that right if they believed a flight would become too dangerous.

Marika had worked long and hard to develop and strengthen her natural resistance to electromagnetic interference with her silth talents. But in her more realistic moments she admitted that even she would be overwhelmed by the violent bursts of energy present in a thunderstorm. Flight among lightnings would never be more than a fantasy.

Barlog came hustling back armed as though for a foot patrol against the nomad. She even carried a pod of grenades. Marika ignored the silent sarcasm, for the bath appeared at the same time, each with her formal greeting for the Mistress of the Ship. All bath seemed to be very much creatures of ceremony.

Each of the bath was armed as a huntress. They knew Marika's ways.

They did not like serving with her, Marika knew. But she knew it was nothing personal. The Reugge bath did not like any of the Reugge Mistresses of the Ship. It was part of their tradition not to like anyone who held so much power over their destinies.

"Positions," Marika said.

"Food?" Grauel asked. "Or have I guessed wrong? Will it be a brief flight?"

"I brought money if we need it. Board and strap, please."

The bath counted off the ready. "Stand by," Marika called, and stepped onto her station. Unlike the bath, she often disdained safety restraints. This was one of those times when she wanted to ride the darkship free, in the old way, as silth had done in the days of slower, heavier wooden ships.

"Be prepared!"

Marika went down inside herself, through her loophole, and sent a touch questing. Ghosts were scarce around the cloister. They did not like being grabbed by silth.

She knew the cure for that. A whiff of the touch, like the sense of one of their own calling. A lure laid before them and drawn slowly closer. They were not smart. She could draw in a score at a time and bind them, and reach for another score.

The grand court was aboil within a minute with more ghosts than any other Mistress could have summoned. There were far more than Marika really needed to lift and move the darkship. But the more there were, the safer she would be. The more there were, the farther she could sense and see through that other level of reality. And the higher and faster she could fly-though speed was determined mainly by her ability to remain aboard the darkship in the face of the head wind of her passage.

She squeezed the ghosts, pressed them upward. The darkship rose swiftly. Grauel and Barlog gasped, protested, concerned for her safety. But Marika always went up fast.

She squeezed in the direction she wished to travel. The titanium cross rushed forward.

She rose as high as she dared, up where the air was cold and rare and biting, like the air of a Ponath winter, and maintained control of the ghosts with a small part of her mind while she gazed down on the world. The Hainlin was a wide brown band floating between mottled puzzle pieces of green. From that height she could not make out the flotsam and ice which made river travel hazardous. The dead forests of the north were coming down, seeking the sea. She glanced at the sky overhead, where several of the smaller moons danced their ways through the sun's enfeebled light. She again wondered why the tradermales did nothing to stay the winter of the world.

She would, one day. She had mapped out a plan. As soon as she had garnered sufficient power ... She mocked herself. She? A benefactor? Grauel and Barlog would be astonished if they knew what she had in mind.

Well, yes. She could be. Would be. After she had clambered over scores of bodies, of sisters, of whoever stood in her path. But that was far away yet. She had to concentrate upon the present. Upon the possibilities the Serke-brethren conspiracy presented. She had to get back to them, to sound them out. There might be more there than she had thought.

IVMarika followed the Hainlin for a hundred miles, watching it broaden as two mighty tributaries joined it. She was tempted to follow the river all the way to the sea, just to see what the ocean looked like. But she turned southward toward the Topol Cordillera, not wishing to anger anyone by trespassing upon their airspace. She was not yet in the position of a Bestrei, who could fly wherever and whenever she wished. That lay years in the future.

Quietly, she admonished herself against impatience. It all seemed slow, yes, but she was decades ahead of the pace most silth managed.

The Topol Cordillera was a low range of old hills which ran toward TelleRai from the continent's heart. The airspace above constituted an open, convention corridor for flights by both the sisterhoods and the brethren. The hills were very green, green as Marika recalled from the hills of her puphood. But even here the higher peaks were crowned by patches of white.

The world was much cooler. The waters of the seas were being deposited as snow at an incredible rate. "And it need not be," she murmured. She wondered that meth could be so blind as to miss seeing how the ice could be stopped. Never did she stop persisting in wondering if they did see, know, and do nothing because that was to their advantage.

Whose?

The tradermales', of course. They were the technicians, the scientific sort. How could they help but see?

Who would hurt most? The nomads of the polar regions first. Then the pack-living meth of remote low-technology areas. Then the smaller cities of the far north and south, in the extremes of the technologized regions. The great cities of the temperate zones were only now beginning to catch the ripple effect. They would not be threatened directly for years. But the silth who owned them and ruled from them drew their wealth and strength from all the world. They should try to do something, whether or not anything could be done.

Ordinary meth would direct their anxieties and resentments toward the sisterhoods, not toward the brethren, who were careful to maintain an image as a world-spanning brotherhood of tinkerers.

The real enemy. Of course. Always it added up when you thought in large enough terms. The brethren pursued the same aim as the rogues. Secretly, they supported and directed the rogues.

Then they had to be broken. Before this great wehrlen came out of the shadows.

Her ears tilted in amusement. Great wehrlen? What great wehrlen? Shadow was all he was. And break the brethren? How?

That was a task that could not be accomplished in a lifetime. It had taken them generations to acquire the position they held. To pry them loose would require as long. Unless the Communities were willing to endure another long rise from savagery.

The mistake had been made when the brotherhood had been allowed to become a force independent of the Communities. The attitude that made it unacceptable for a sister to work with her paws had become too generalized. The brethren's secrets had to be cracked open and spread around, so silth-bonded workers could assume those tasks critical to the survival of civilization.

Her mind flew along random paths, erratically, swiftly curing the world's ills. And all the while the darkship was driving into the wind. The world rolled below, growing greener and warmer. Ghosts slipped away from the pack bearing the darkship. Others accumulated. Marika touched her bath lightly, drawing upon them, and pushed the darkship higher.

The Cordillera faded away. A forested land rolled out of the haze upon the horizon, a land mostly island and lake and very sparsely inhabited. The lakes all drained into one fast watercourse which plunged over a rift in a fall a mile wide, sprinkled with rainbows. The fall's roar could be heard even from that altitude. The river swung away to Marika's left, then curved back beneath her in a slower, wider stripe that, after another hundred miles, left the wilderness for densely settled country surrounding TelleRai. TelleRai was the most important city on the continent, if not on the meth homeworld.

The silth called this continent the New Continent. No one knew why. Perhaps it had been settled after the others. None of the written histories went back far enough to recall. Generally, though, the cities on other continents were accepted as older and more storied and decadent. Several were far larger than TelleRai.

The outskirts of the city came drifting out of the haze, dozens of satellite communities that anchored vast corporate farms or sustained industrial enclaves. Then came TelleRai itself, sometimes called the city of hundreds because its fief bonds were spread among all the sisterhoods and all the brethren bonds as well. It was a great surrealistic game board of cities within the city, looking like randomly dropped pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, with watercourses, parks, and forests lying between the cloisters.