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depending on their particular speciality. My sister had been water-sensitive, but though we came from the same litter, I didn’t share that. I was drawn to metal: I could smell it in the
earth like the dinner cooking. I’d taken a lot of people to the metal lines, and they’d mined them, too. The town was famous for it: bracelets and cuffs, earrings made out of the
darksilver substance. I never used to wear it – it interfered too much, in what I was seeking. But now, the time of my dying, it did not matter and I wore a ring of it in my ear and one on my
finger. Vanity perhaps, in a woman so old, long past any attraction to men or her own sex, and yet it felt good to wear it, after so much denial. In my youth I’d been considered a beauty, but
that doesn’t matter when you grow old. I still had a sharp enough wit and a readiness to laugh and that makes men look past the face. Make them laugh enough and you’ll keep them, whilst
beauty fades and grows quiet. But this wasn’t a time for wit or beauty. I was alone, the town silent behind me, the mountains ahead. I turned my back to my home and went on.
    By noon, I had already reached the foothills of the Otrade. It was slow going, with the tracks obscured by snow and the rocks slippery with ice, but I was in no hurry. I took it step by step,
until I reached a stone outcrop, jutting high above the valley, and then I stopped and finally looked back.
    By now, my breath was wheezing in my chest and it hurt. I didn’t know whether this was a premonition of the sickness that would, eventually, kill me, or simply a sign of age.
    The satahrach had not been clear about the nature of my death, saying simply that he had looked into my lungs with the aid of the fire and that they were diseased, gone beyond any help his herbs
might give me. But I already knew the truth myself. I’d woken too often in the night, my breath rasping, my throat tightening as though a hand had closed around it, the nightmare sense of
something huge and heavy crouching at the end of the bed. I dimly remembered being a very small child, and feeling the same sensation, although since we retain so little of our childhoods, I
thought I might be making this up. I remembered more than most, after all. Whatever the case, I didn’t speak of this to anyone except the satahrach. I did not want the clan’s pity nor
its care. No fuss. Someone in the family always fusses and nothing annoys me more. So I endured the night terrors as best I could, took the herbs that the satahrach gave me, and gradually,
as they failed to work, accepted that the time of my death was at hand. And now I was here, in the high cold hills, looking forward to it, because I would be with her again.
     
SIX
P LANET : M USPELL (V ALI )
    Inside the cell, I had time to think, but my thoughts circled like the white birds around Glyn Apt’s head. The image of Idhunn’s body was never far away: it
was as though I could glimpse it out of the corner of my eye, a bloody jumble. Who killed you, Idhunn? I asked her spirit. Was it the Morrighanu? It must have been; I just did not believe
Glyn Apt. Why slaughter her so violently? To paralyse us, to shock us, send the hive that was the Rock into chaos and mayhem while all the time that great warship was riding up, hidden under its
stealth capacities, making ready for its crew to stroll in and club us down like sealstock pups. Idhunn’s death came as one more blow, one more tragic bead on the necklace that was my
life.
    Mondhile. Nhem.
    I could not decide which had been worse. On Nhem, I’d killed the Hierolath. I’d used the seith, while he was raping me. An extreme measure for a female assassin, but I thought I
could handle it, take control of the situation, own it. And then Mondhile, and torture at the hands of Frey and the Mondhaith girl Gemaley.
    But I’d been raped before, by my own brother, and survived. And I had handled the events of Nhem and Mondhile, taken control of them,