A whisper in his ear: "Name, Turtle. Origin: Alien, species uncertain, probably Ku. May be an artifact. No other data available."

"Curious," WarAvocat mused aloud, watching the old Deified. Why was Gemina reticent about what was troubling them?

— 18 —

Simon Tregesser was playing lord of thunders to distract himself. It was not working. For two weeks that thing in the tank had been useless. Half the time it was comatose, the other half it might as well have been. It said nothing that made any sense.

When a thing like that was terrified out of its mind...

He did not want to think about it. But when he put it out of mind, Noah slipped in.

Noah had been missing too long. Something must have happened. That bitch Valerena! Next time he killed her he would make it permanent. Lupo said Blessed showed promise.

He hurled thunders and lightnings with renewed fury. The whole damned universe was out to frustrate him. XII Fulminata! What the hell? Was some malign force ranged against him?

That was his most secret fear. That somehow someone or something was using him the way he used so many others.

A small red pin light came on. He was tempted to ignore it. But no one pestered him with trivia. Hardly anyone but Lupo and Noah bothered him at all. Neither of them wasted time.

"Who was that? What do you want?"

"Noah, Lord."

"Where the hell have you been? Get down here." He flung lightnings like spears for near misses as Noah swooped down the vast empty cavern. His laughter pounded the walls.

Unperturbed, Noah drifted to his perch.

Disappointed, Tregesser let the uproar die. The damned illusion caster was a waste. Nobody but Lupo and Noah saw his productions. You could not impress either with a black hole big enough to gobble galaxies.

"All right, Noah. What have we got?" Echoes chased themselves around the vast hollow.

"Valerena tried Lupo Provik before she left."

"Again? The woman shows no imagination."

"I'm not sure she's witless. And the boy is no moron. He knew the effort was pointless and understood why."

"Where have you been?"

"Tregesser Prime. There were implications to Valerena's behavior that intrigued me. She deserved a closer inspection."

Tregesser Prime. In the Canon catalog it was designated P. Benetonica 3. The Tregessers rejected that name, and as much else of Canon as they could.

"And?"

"As I said, this Valerena may be dangerous."

"Get to it, Noah."

"She has several Others in development. She has a Banat-Marath team installed in her castle. Her security is tighter than usual."

"Interesting. Why a crew of Others? Why not have Lupo produce them?"

"I also caught a hint that she may have obtained the control cues for the Simon Tregesser Other."

Tregesser might have been drilled by one of his own lightning bolts. His speaker crackled for half a minute before he managed, "Indeed?"

"How she could have managed that escapes me, Lord. It seems unlikely. Yet my snooping—nobody pays attention to an artifact—convinced me something is going on. I've put together a scenario. It contradicts none of the known facts and ties the behavior of several individuals into a unified field."

Simon growled. Noah's manner could be frustrating. But neither threats nor rewards could change him. "Lay on, Noah. I don't think you can shock me more than you already have."

"Assume one of the earlier Valerenas enlisted one of the Directors. Plausible?"

"Probable. They're all vampires. They'd go for my throat in a second."

"Assume that Valerena made a mistake and you directed a changeover. Our hypothetical Director would not have to know about Provik's lab to realize he was dealing with a different Valerena. She wouldn't know things she should."

"Still plausible. This Director might tell her she was a replacement. That she was an Other. Hell. She must be terrified that we have a hold on her. We don't, do we?"

"No. You decided that was the lesser evil in the long run, where the welfare of the House was concerned. You directed Provik to produce replacements without controls. If he put them in, someone might learn about them."

"So there's a chance we've been dealing with the same Valerena through what we thought were several changeovers while she's been having Banat-Marath make Others she can sacrifice."

"Exactly, Lord."

"It hangs together, Noah. But what has she been doing with the replacements?"

"I wouldn't care to speculate."

"You wouldn't? Maybe I shouldn't, either. I might not want to know." Tregesser pondered a moment. "This doesn't upset me as much as you might think, Noah. It tells me my offspring isn't as stupid as I'd feared. But it's still a step from explaining the central mystery."

"Mystery, Lord? What mystery?"

"The sense of what she's doing. Her motivation. What is it? I'm clinging to life with broken fingernails."

"If you'd send to House Troqwai..."

"I won't have it. They're jackals." Not true. He did not want to die. He would have been happy with a platoon of Troqwai's phantoms hovering. But not here. "A little patience and the whole thing will drop into her lap. So why risk everything, repeatedly, trying to rush it? That isn't rational."

"That's easy." From where Noah stood it was easy to see. "She hates you. She has only one way of expressing that hatred. Take everything you have: life, property, and power."

Again Tregesser might have been struck by his own lightning. "But she's my daughter!"

"Emotion played no part when you removed your father? That was unadulterated concern for the House?"

Tregesser snapped the lie. "Of course! I know what it is. She wants to steal my victory. She wants to be remembered for breaking the Guardships."

"You really think so, Lord?"

"I know so, Noah. Get out of here!"

"As you will. But why would she want to take that, too?"

Lightnings crisped the air around Noah. He banked, sideslipped, even looped. Those lightnings were thrown in earnest.

— 19 —

Valerena lay on a couch in an open-air pavilion atop a small mountain on the Isle of Ise in Tregesser Prime's tropics. The structure was a replica of another of pre-Canon times, according to a memorial plaque. She did not care. For her history began with the conception of Valerena Tregesser.

Nobody cared about the Go Wars anymore, anyway. They would be forgotten if the Guardships were not still around.

Blessed settled into a canvas chair. "The artifact should have reached your father by now." He raised a tube to his eyes, turned a portion of the barrel.

"Must you play with that thing all the time?"

He pointed the tube at her, ran the tip of a finger across a heat sensitive surface. A symbol appeared inside. This one was Valerena Prime. "They say the pattern is never the same twice. I'm checking."

"Have you found a duplication?"

"Not yet. Mathematically, I have to."

He had begun the project a year ago and had identified nine Valerena Tregessers so far.

"Put it away. You do it just to irritate me."

"Will your father do what you want?"

"Of course. He'll rage for a while. Then he'll brood. Then he'll rage again. Then he'll call Lupo Provik."

"You surprised me, Mother. Not in a thousand years would I have believed there was a way to reach him without going through Lupo. How did you find out?"

Valerena concealed a smirk behind a hand. "Each time he summons me he demands a woman. Always younger and more vulnerable. Just to show me how disgusting he can get. One of those women got through alive. She told me all he did was give her to the artifact. And the artifact, unlike Lupo, has wants and needs that Father doesn't fulfill. He had a pleasant stay on Tregesser Prime. All the women he could handle."