Part 3
Queen of the Magi

“It’s been a long time, Dije,” said Lesley. “You’ve had a strange career already.”

“And it’s about to get stranger,” Dije said, smiling faintly. They stood on the scuffed white deck of a starship, alone in an empty room. “This is goodbye forever. Going through the resealed Blockade is a one-way trip.”

“Perhaps not,” Lesley said. “I’ve seen a vision: you and I, older,” Lesley spoke of having a vision in the same tone of voice someone might report listening to a while-you-were-out message on the Will.

“What were we doing?”

“Sparring. I hope, anyway.”

“Fighting with dejes, you mean.”

Dije glanced at the steely basket hilt at Lesley’s belt. He wore the white uniform of a Kirifo Knight, on which a dej looked appropriate. She wore the black uniform of a Magus mercenary, on which a dej also looked appropriate, since her uniform was similar to that of a Tsim Knight; minus, of course, a Tsim badge. Furthering the contrast, there was also the Asterisk forehead tattoo of a Magus, and the twin vertical lines beside the mouth that signified a Lord or Lady with the power of the Noble Gift.

“Yes.” Lesley noticed her gaze flick to his weapon and was pleased that he saw no further trace of fear in her aura. He had taught her well.

Dije shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps you’ll travel to Magi-ta yourself someday. When you tire of the teaching life.”

Lesley shook his head. “Never.”

“Say goodbye to Peyton for me?”

“He doesn’t know you’re a Kirifo, Dije. You said your farewells long ago.”

“Yes. That was a moment of self-indulgence. Of course, keep the secret. Both our secrets.”

“Are you ready to start your own Kirifo Order?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it that.”

“That’s what it will be, effectively. You know there’s still no Will access on your home planet. Though, we can write, of course. You’re sure they’ll let you keep your translation?”

“Sure. It’s ancient Magi history. Totally uncontroversial. I’m more worried about the dej, but thanks to the events on the planetoid, however many years ago that was, I can honestly say I took it away from you.”

Lesley tried to smile; the expression only touched half his face, and looked rather odd. “Spoils of war?”

“Lots of Magi bring home trophies. And it is legal to bring back a weapon, as long as it isn’t military grade. Knives, yes; guns, no. Occasional exotic arms. Though, this is probably going to be one of the most exotic ones. The customs clerks will probably take a vid of it to show their friends.”

“So, the question remains…are you ready?”

“I’m ready, Lesley. No ceremony needed.”

“Then I formally confer on you the rank of Sidyerit. “Eo nir’jep argi odosisudinir esvyj p’birt, Dije.” He spoke in Giserto, the language of the Gisel, who had founded the Kirifo Order. It was a tonal language, with rising and falling intonations. Although this was the standard way to say goodbye, it was also a blessing, and Lesley’s solemnity made it into a hymn.

“The Enlightened One watch over you, too.”

* * * *

The whoosh of escaping air is every spacer’s nightmare. Kerruke had to force open the door of her quarters against vacuum pressure, assisting her physical strength with her magic. She pounded down the corridor and saw an even worse nightmare: one of her twins holding onto the airlock door, the streaks of hyperspace behind him.

She screamed and plucked him from the airlock. Then she hit the door control and closed the airlock doors. They slid closed, the rush of air stopped, and the lights on the airlock controls went green. Vents whirred to refill the corridor with the stale emergency atmosphere.

Kerruke hugged the child tightly to her bosom, shaking in relief. “Piker! You bad boy! Do not open airlocks! Bad, bad, bad!” Kerruke punctuated her words with smacks to the rear.

Little Piker wailed and squirmed.

Then a new and horrible thought occurred to Kerruke. “Where’s your sister? Where’s Piekke?”

The boy cried louder and did not respond. Kerruke closed her green, cat-like eyes, and reached out in magic for her daughter. She found Piekke, safely aboard ship and asleep. Kerruke went back to her quarters, a hand over her son’s mouth to quiet his crying. Piekke right where she was supposed to be: in bed, in the side room that used to be the Captain’s dressing room.

Kerruke carried Piker back out so she would not wake Piekke with her yelling. “You could not have reached those controls. You must have used magic to open the door.”

“Opened it on Carilon. There were trees outside. I only wanted to climb a tree.”

“This is a spaceship!” Kerruke shouted. “It moves around! Sometimes it’s in space!”

“I’m sorry!” he wailed.

“If you ever do anything that stupid again—if you survive that is—I’ll have my men hold you in a suppression field until you’re old enough to be trusted to use magic responsibly. Do you understand?”

He started crying again, and Kerruke felt Piekke wake up behind the wall, responding to her twin’s mood.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Kerruke added in exasperation. “All right, go inside and play nice with your sister. We won’t be living on a ship much longer. We’re following Lady Dije home to Magi-ta. She’s going to take a nice rural Territory, someplace good for raising children, with lots of trees. It’ll be all right.” Her words were meant to be soothing, but her voice still clearly seethed with anger. Kerruke may not have been bent on galactic domination like Dokhon Jux or Emperor Re, but she was still a Magus.

Kerruke put Piker down, and he scampered into their quarters.

In fact, Dije had already selected the Territory she wanted to take, because it bordered on Fruitioner lands, and had few territorial rivals.

Magi Raider docked at the transfer station. Dije, Kerruke and her children, and about a third of the crew, left the ship, towing their possessions behind them telekinetically.

The crew elected a new captain: Imei-Sim Arr, who henceforth went by Lord Captain Arr. He turned pirate, and had much success. His name became a byword and a battle cry; when time bent, and the future became the past, pirates called out his name: “Arr!”

After shuttling down to Kamex Spaceport, the company horsed all their possessions with a rented grav-floater that tended to sputter out and need a magical assist. They knew they were home when they walked along the avenue and saw signs on some of the doors with the white-asterisk, color-reverse of their Magi forehead tattoos, which meant: No Magi Allowed.

The transients’ hotel had a sign posted, too: “Magi in transit from the spaceport may only stay one night in a hotel in Kamex, and subsequently must be gone to a Magitown or a worker’s barracks. Governtist Ordinance 59287-3X72f, subparagraph 298 (revised).” There was a button to press to have a recorded voice read the sign out loud for illiterate Magi.

The hotelier wanted to rent them only one room on account of there being a shortage. Between Dije’s glowering, accompanied by pointedly stroking her cheeks— which called attention to the two tattooed lines on either side of her mouth—and little Piker repeatedly pressing the reading button, the front desk man eventually assigned a room for the women and children: Dije, Kerruke, the twins, and Siaru Ilmars. Then assigned another for the men: Rejak Stron, Zispur Fiex, Danix Nith, Ni Smashlier, and Vil Robious.

Kerruke wanted to help Dije take her new Territory, but there was no one on the planet but her own crew that she would trust with her children, and everyone else wanted to go, too.

Kerruke rented an apartment in a nearby Territory. Kerruke’s crew escorted her to her new home, helping her move in and clean up. They all stored their possessions here, awaiting the move to Dije’s new Territory—or they would be picked up after Dije’s death, should she fail.

Dije went with them as far as the Magitown border, but of course, had to turn back there. For a Magus Lady to enter another Lord or Lady’s Territory was to declare war.

Dije found herself alone on the streets of Kamex as the night came down. She remembered when she had been afraid to walk these streets at night by herself. Those days were long gone. She almost hoped to meet another group of drunken soldiers. She pictured herself turning to face them, showing her cheeks tattoos, and saying, “Think again.” She was so much more than a Magus Lady, although she was in Magi Guard black mercenary fatigues. Magus Lady, Serekh illusionist, Kirifo Master: Dije walked with the smug, possessed confidence of a suicide bomber. Sober men crossed to the other side of the street to avoid her.

She spent the night at a holotheater, watching out-of-date holodramas that had played on Gis when the Serial Killer subcast, in which she anonymously starred, had still been on the Will.

In the morning, she met up with the crew, and they took a slow train to the Sacred Lands. Dije slept fitfully. She gave up about midday and meditated instead.

They rented pack beasts and camping gear. Their trek took them around the edge of the Sacred Lands, taking a full day to reach within an hour of their destination. Here, they decided to make camp for the night.

Dije discovered she was the only one there who knew how to cook. The rest of the former mercenaries only knew how to program a ship’s food synthesizer. Only Dije had ever handled real food, made from farmed ingredients, in a pan over a campfire. Well, of course, she told herself, when would a normal Magus ever go to a Fruitioner festival in the Sacred Lands?

Fortunately, she was not the only one who knew how to pitch a tent. That was well within the military skills of at least half the mercenaries.

Again, Dije had trouble sleeping. She woke up out of a nightmare of liquid bruises splashing onto her, and for a few moments after waking, she still felt something pressing down on her: a breath-stealing weight on her chest; something lying on her, keeping her legs immobile.

When the sensation passed, she sprang out of her sleeping bag, stuffed her feet into her boots and went out into the cold of predawn. She restarted the campfire with a simple thought of acceleration, moving the molecules in the charred wood. She held her hands to the paltry heat and found they were shaking, notwithstanding the cold

There was no mistaking what that nightmare had been about: Purple Tears.

With a burst of angry denial, Dije woke the flames to greater heat. Why is that suddenly bothering me now? It’s been years. I’m just nervous about the fight tomorrow. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m certainly not going to try to go back to sleep now, though. Well, I’m up; I might as well make breakfast.

She got a pan and started heating up some toast. Dije softly hummed a Fruitioner calming song.

The Sacred Lands were mostly farmland, but this area was wooded. The leaves on the gnarled trees were an olive green. The long, tufted grass underneath bore a shocking yellow. The sky was blue. It could almost have been Earth.

No one could accuse the long-dead Emperor Xywanda of picking a bad planet for his exiles. He could be accused of many other things, among them betraying his best troops for nothing more than paranoia, but Magi-ta was a nice world.

This impending duel was what Dije had been preparing for all her life. She was at the height of her power and had advantages no Magus had possessed in centuries. Now that the moment finally approached, she was nervous. The slow, pre-combat adrenalin feed killed her appetite, but she made herself eat the lovely Fruitioner fruits and breads they had bought. This was to fuel her power and honor the Fruitioners who had grown them. She would also be paying respect to their gods—and Hum. My goddess? Had she become that much of a Serekh? Dije shrugged off the question. She had more important things to worry about.

The other mercenaries woke up and wandered by ones and twos to the campfire. Whatever awkwardness they had felt last night about their Lady cooking for them had vanished, and they gladly held out plates for her to flip toast into from the black iron pan.

Dan and Rejak reached the fire together. Dan shoved Rejak out of the way, and Rejak elbowed him back. Suddenly, they dropped their empty plates, held up their palms in magical shoving position and started trying to push each other over with magic.

“Stop it, you two,” Dije ordered curtly.

The two men staggered back from each other’s attacks and then ran at each other like gladiators starting a match. Dan’s hands went around Rejak’s throat; Rejak pulled a knife.

Dije snatched the knife away telekinetically, and magically pushed them away from each other. Then she stepped in between them and held her fingers out, one hand toward each face, in an unmistakable gesture of threat.

“I said, ‘stop it!’”

Dan snarled, but neither man had a taste for the lightning. No Magus did. They both backed off.

“It’s angasine,” Dije said. “From the food and water in port, and on the train. It will pass. The food I’ve bought for us is pure-source, and in my new Territory, we’ll be barely a five-minute walk from open fields. We’ll be able to have farmers deliver pure-source right to us. In the meantime, just try to get ahold of yourselves. We’ve all been off it for years, but try to remember how to deal with it.”

“Of course, my Lady,” Rejak affirmed.

To Dije’s magical senses, he seemed tightly bottled up. Best not to tamper with the lid.

“Yes, Lady Dije,” Dan grated.

Rage boiled off him in black waves, like campfire smoke. Dije could see it easily in his aura, but she ignored it. She could not ask her followers to control their feelings, only their actions; they were Magi, not Kirifo.

Dije dropped her hands and went back to the campfire. “Burned the toast,” she said. “Here.” She tore the burned piece in half and telekinetically sailed one-half to each man. “The bitter taste of pointless rivalry. No, you don’t have to eat it. I’m not your mother.”

Dan threw down his piece, stomped on it, and then stalked off into the woods.

Rejak tore a chunk off his piece of burned toast and tossed it to a small mammal scampering around the trees. “You don’t resemble my mother at all, Lady Dije. She’s a first class, farting beikro, and a deathstick addict.”

“Ah. You hate her. Well, at least she did one thing right.”

“I’d trade away half my power for that—that peace you seem to have, my Lady.”

“Truly?”

“Yes.”

“Good, because that’s what it takes. Make no mistake, the Rubo-giptuvor is stronger. It’s just a miserable way to live.”

“I’ve thought a lot about what you’ve taught us, my Lady. About the Light, and about the Flow. I have no talent for illusion at all, but after you take your Territory, I’d be honored if you would have me as your Kirifo apprentice.”

Dije nodded softly. “And you will be. This is what I’ve come home for—to give my people a choice. Someday, we may even be able to admit that openly. For now, we speak of the Kirifo only among the crew.”

“Of course, my Lady.”

After breakfast, they doused the campfire. Then they left their camp and animals behind, taking only what they needed for combat.

The border was a cold wash across Dije’s magical senses.

The role of Dije’s gang was to prevent the other gang from interfering in the duel between the Lord and Lady. They found cover, took up firing positions, and waited.

It was not long before the Lord came out to defend his Territory. His men formed a semi-circle behind him. He stepped out and raised both hands, but did not call the lightning, yet. He waited for his opponent to come within traditional dueling range.

Dije walked forward, raising her hands, too. Instead of magical lightning, she called a black fog that coalesced into snakes.

A spike of fear went through Dije’s opponent, which made his magic stronger. The Lord cast his lightning.

Dije took the blast, and her serpents struck him, their poisoned fangs sinking into his arms, his throat, and his face. He fell to the ground in a fit, but he cast lightning back at Dije again.

Dije returned the lightning this time, finishing him off before he figured out how to counter the poison while he was in a weakened state. A wisp of smoke rose from his corpse.

The end of the duel was a sudden absence, like the wind falling away from a sail. Dije gasped in the shocking silence.

As one, the Lord’s former gang sank to their knees before her.

“The lost art of illusion,” one whispered.

Another prostrated himself. “Spare us, Lady! We will serve the Lady of Illusion. I am Ziss Indarkos. I pledge myself to you, and to the power of the Lost Art.”

“Rise, Ziss Indarkos,” Dije said, using a courtly gesture that she had seen Lesley use. “I am Dije Kun, Magus Lady, and Initiate of the Serekh. That power I will teach to any who will follow me.”

Ziss stood up. “Then many will follow you, Lady.”

Over the next few weeks, Dije moved into the old Lord’s house, consolidated her position, met with the important people of the village, and integrated her gang with the existing local gang. It was not exactly a smooth transition of power; Ziss and some of the others clamored to become her students in the art of illusion, but naturally, they resented Kerruke and her crew as the new insiders.

There was also the matter of the business operations. Dije simply took over the previous Lord’s role as the recipient and redistributor of what amounted to a tax on local businesses.

The former Lord of this Territory had been involved in the slave trade. He had encouraged the commons of the village to sell off excess children, and he had re-dealt them to a quasi-official trading house run by Governtists in a nearby starport. He had even occasionally dealt in Magi children—which was highly illegal—slaves with magical powers being a bad idea all around. The former Lord had gotten commoners to pretend to be their parents.

Dije and Kerruke spoke about it in private, in the wood-walled room that served Dije as an office.

“There’s a lot of grumbling going on about the end of the slave trade,” Kerruke said. “The former Lord’s men have to divide a smaller pie with a larger group.”

“I know there’s trouble brewing there,” Dije said. “But I have a plan for it: Kasenth.”

Dije had encouraged the villagers, Magi and commons alike, to regard illusion as a kind of wealth, even opulence. She had begun introducing a philosophy she had been working on for some time, as she had traveled with Kerruke’s crew. It came out of her love for Fruitioner folk music, and her repulsion toward the useless things she had tripped over on Orpheum. She called it, Kasenth: resource-neutral entertainment. The word was an outgrowth of the folk dance, Kasenthios. When Fruitioners said Kasenth, they meant things associated with folk music and dance, including certain types of food, clothing, and so forth; a sense of comradery and fun; all the things one might encounter at a Festival, outside of the actual ceremony. Dije extended it to include any live music, or any sort of entertainment one did not have to buy.

Kerruke’s brows rose. “You’ve set a fashion in Serekh hair braiding, but that’s more popular with the commons than Ziss and the rest of the former gang. And even with my—your gang.”

“Your crew,” Dije said. “It’s okay. They are your crew. Don’t worry, Kerruke. Kasenth is only half of the plan.” Dije bent forward and whispered into Kerruke’s ear.

* * * *

Lesley took the bound and printed physical book that was his copy of Dije’s translations of Magi fairy tales and early Magi history, along with the coded message he had just received, and opened the door of his office.

The redheaded freckle-faced kid, who was Will’s most basic avatar, asked him, “Where are you going, Lesley? Aren’t you going to read your message?”

Lesley closed the door behind him and walked along the corridor. The Kirifo Temple on Gis was made of local crystal, pale blue and translucent, and the walls glowed with power. That was a psychological reaction to a simple optical phenomenon of outside sunlight refracting through the crystalline lattice, of course. Though, to Lesley’s magical senses, the Kirifo Temple really did glow with power, the power of all the Kirifo minds within it. His was the most powerful of all, but no mind contained in a body could rival of the omniscience of the Will.

Not quite omniscience. Lesley went down three levels, and passed a flat artwork, behind glass, hung a wall. Will’s face reflected there, from no source Lesley could see. Will had his head cocked to one side, questioningly.

“I can keep a secret, you know,” Will whined, like the small boy that his avatar resembled. “I’m keeping incredible secrets right now. Some of them are about you.”

Lesley kept walking. “Like what?” he asked under his breath.

“That would be telling.” Will manifested a holographic avatar in the hallway. It was a Gisel warrior this time, complete with glittering white skin, glossy black hair, devil horns, and blood red armor of an ancient design; exactly the way the Gisel had appeared when making war on Earth during the disastrous year of first contact a thousand years ago. “But here’s a hint,” Will said. “Esedy ts’myo nir.”

“What still will be?” Lesley asked. The compound word was a special case of the Giserto past-and-future tense meaning: was still is, Enlightened One grant, will continue to be.”

Now Will was all in white flowing robes like a grand boubou, with a hat that turned into a half cape. “Inshallah.” Will shrugged.

Lesley shook his head. “Yeah, yeah.”

The white robes grew taller as the hologram within them took on the shape of an old man with a long white beard. The hat flowed up his back and transformed into a pointy grey hat.

“Many are my names, in many countries.”

Lesley opened the door of the Black Room.

“What are you doing, Lesley?” Will asked. Will punctuated his serious question with a joke, as usual, piping in a burst of static and changing his voice to add, “Open the pod b—”

Lesley closed the door. Will’s voice stopped.

The Black Room was not really black; it was walled in a cream colored fiberboard, at odds with the ethereal look of the rest of the Temple. This was the most rare of all places in the Empire: a place where Will could not go. A jammer room.

Lesley opened the book and began laboriously transcribing Dije’s message.

* * * *

It was Festival time in the Sacred Lands. Kerruke was braiding crystals and silver ribbons into Dije’s hair. The twins played noisily outside, under a tree.

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Lady Dije?” Kerruke asked.

“I can pull this off, Kerruke.”

“But why? I mean, what will you gain?”

“I’m not sure, yet. But I know this is something I need to do. I can feel it.”

Kerruke finished the braid and started doing up the buttons on the back of the green dress. Her fingers brushed the small of Dije’s back and hesitated.

“Can you sense it, Kerruke? Life.”

“I feel it. You used the Legacy Sample.”

“Yes. We’re going to be relatives. Your children and mine, half-siblings.”

“Last night?”

“Yes.”

“That would explain…I felt a strange tangle of emotions coming from your new house, my Lady.”

“Yes. The Legacy Sample is a complicated matter, especially for me. When I realized what the mechanics of using it would be, it was a difficult moment. I want my child to be as strong as possible. I intend to raise her in the Light, in the Kirifo way. That way she won’t have access to the quick and easy power of Black Magic. She’ll need natural gifts to compensate.”

Dije could not pass her own border without inviting an attack from a neighboring Lord, but she did not have to go out into the Sacred Lands to speak to the Fruitioners. Dije went up onto the roof of Kerruke’s house, which was on the edge of the village near the forest, and had a view onto the farmland beyond.

It was evening when the circle would be gathering for the dance and ritual. Dije cast an illusion of light; a soft glow, like a moon path on water. It was a road, leading from the ritual grounds to the village. She knew at least some of the Fruitioners would follow it. With her illusion set, Dije climbed down the ladder to wait.

She noticed Ni watching her descend as he held the ladder.

“Hey Ni, you’d better not be looking up my skirt.”

Ni looked away immediately, slightly pale. Fear radiated off of him, to Dije’s magical senses.

Dije sighed. These men had not followed her here out of love, rather out of respect for her fighting ability, mastery of illusion, and—from the perspective of her own people—her downright evil ways against her enemies.

No, Dije thought. They had not really followed her at all. Kerruke had followed her, and they had followed Kerruke.

Dije took a seat just inside her border, at the end of the glowing path, and dismissed her gang. She created some additional illusions: flowers growing under her feet and behind her, and a wavering vision of some bright landscape, with the village still visible through it. It was precisely the way an avatar of the Spring Goddess was supposed to appear, according to the songs and art.

It took about an hour before the first group of Festival-goers arrived: three men and two women in brown robes. When they saw Dije, one of the men sank down to the ground in awe. The others came forward a few steps.

Dije stood up and paced toward them. Flowers appeared at her feet as she walked.

“Plohe?” One of the women asked, naming her the Goddess of Spring.

“In her image, do I walk,” Dije responded, consciously using the archaic phrasings of song. “Blessings upon you.” She raised her hands, sending golden light over the five Fruitioners; twinkling like stars, and floating like sparks from a fire.

“Goddess-channel,” one of the men said. “We thank you for your blessings.”

“Who are you?” asked the woman who had spoken before.

“I am Dije. I am Lady, and Sidyerit, and Priestess of the Dream. I am a devotee of Hum.”

One of the Fruitioners inhaled, half gasp and half meditative breath.

“This is an illusion, then?” asked one of the men.

Dije made a butterfly appear on her hand, its blue wings flashing like dichroic glass. The Morpho butterfly flew to the woman, who held out a hand and let the butterfly land on it.

“It’s real.” The brown-robed woman laughed. “I can feel its little feet.”

Dije smiled. “It is illusion that is more than illusion. It is the gift of the Dreaming Goddess. To you, she gave this gift long ago. You gave it to us, and we lost it. I have found it again, and I give it back to you. I welcome all who wish to come to me. I will teach any who have the talent. On this spot, I will make a shrine to Hum; let all who wish to honor her bring offerings.”

“We will,” promised the woman. “By dawn, every Fruitioner in the Sacred Lands will know of this miracle.” She backed down the glowing path, and the other four went with her. The butterfly took flight and fluttered into the trees.

Dije maintained the path-light for another half an hour. She ordered the crew to bring out the stones they had prepared. With magic, it did not take much effort to stack them into the shape of a covered, open-air chapel, with an altar inside. Dije asked Kerruke to assign the watch. All those who had learned illusion, Magi and village commoner, had an assigned part of the day to maintain the illusion of a butterfly floating above the altar.

By morning, the altar was covered with small trays of food and flowers, gold and silver jewelry, small whittled art objects, and folded paper covered with poetry. By evening, the whole village square was filled with like offerings. The twins’ contribution, an inside-out cat, was quietly removed when they weren’t looking.

The offerings disappeared at sunset. Those who were there made a huge, collective ‘oooh’ sound; even the ones who knew that Dije had simply turned them invisible.

“Hum has accepted the offerings!” one of the Fruitioners called out.

A great cheer went up. There was music, dancing, and strobe. The Fruitioners lit multicolored cold-lights and made their way back to their camp.

Then Dije made the offerings reappear, and declared, “Hum has taken the essence of the offering. These physical forms now belong to her illusionists. Eat! Wear gold! Make merry!”

* * * *

The engine room of Magi Raider swirled with blue and green lights. Fish drifted through the air, through the walls, through the engines, and through Ojaste and Dai-Oni. Ojaste’s illusions were insubstantial, wavering and slow-moving. The engines turned into giant anemones; their transparent arms waved languidly in the faint current, reaching toward glittering fish.

One anemone illusion swallowed its caster as Ojaste sprawled across the engine housing. Despite the evidence of her eyes and mind, the cold metal was a solid support underneath her.

Waves lapped the ceiling in time to the rhythm of Dai-Oni’s dragon-hide flogger. He left his mark on her back, buttocks, and legs, in the form of red welts. The underwater otherworld dissolved into confetti as the undine-illusionist’s mind flowed from deep subspace to something beyond, some place where form had no meaning.

Playtime ended, and Ojaste passed from the Dream of Hum to the dream of flesh: true sleep. She woke up when she heard the ring of boots of the deck.

“I’m tired of you two goofing off everywhere I go,” Lord Captain Arr barked angrily. Imei-Sim Arr usually sounded angry, except after sacking another ship. “Go make yourself useful.”

Dai-Oni started to help Ojaste up, but his brother ordered, “Leave her. I’ll find some use for her.”

Dai-Oni hesitated. Then he muttered something unintelligible and stalked off.

Ojaste levered herself up with a hand on the engine housing. The walls still flickered slightly bluish as her lingering subspace kept the doors of illusion open.

“Can’t stand up, huh? That’s okay. You don’t need to stand up. Kneel. ‘Kneel,’ I said!”

Ojaste slid to the deck and knelt before her Lord.

“Why should my brother get everything? He’s not the Lord and Captain around here. Please me, woman.”

“I’m your brother’s girlfriend,” Ojaste protested.

“That’s an order!”

“Yes, My Lord,” Ojaste whispered. She did as ordered, weeping.

Dai-Oni came back in. Perhaps he had planned to help Ojaste, but if so, he abandoned all such thoughts at the sight.

“Hey!” Dai-Oni magically shoved Ojaste away from Captain Arr. She crumpled to the floor crying and vomiting.

“You have something to say?” the Lord sneered.

“No,” Dai-Oni grated. He stomped over to Ojaste, picked her up by the hair and dragged her out. He hauled her down the corridor and she scrabbled on the deck plates, naked and weeping.

He stopped beside a door. “You farting little cheat.” He opened the door using the keypad.

“He’s my Lord,” Ojaste cried. “What was I supposed to do?”

Dai-Oni tossed her into the airlock. “See you how like being left out in the cold.” He closed the door.

The outer lock cycled.

Ojaste tried to open the inner door with a magical push; Dai-Oni had thought of that, and was blocking her.

Her fear became a mist. The fog hung heavy, feeding off the remaining small pockets of real air as the airlock completed its pumping. She pounded on the door, and found the surface wet.

“The fog,” Ojaste whispered. “Illusion that is more than illusion.”

In awe and dawning hope, Ojaste traced the outline of a door in the wall between the two airlock doors. She stepped through just as the outer door opened. Ojaste closed the door of illusion behind her.

She was in the hold, and she curled up behind a cargo canister. There was a barrel was between her and the door, in case anyone came in. With the concealing fog, Dai-Oni probably thought he had succeeded in spacing her. She could hide here until the ship made planet fall, or locked onto a station.

She wiped her eyes. Her hands were shaking, but she no longer felt any fear. Wonder, even joy, welled up inside her. She was alive, and she was free—truly free; she had mastered the art of illusion that Lady Dije had taught her; no one and nothing could stop her now.

She made herself invisible and tentatively padded out into the hallway. No one was about. She made her way to the wardroom and went to the snack cooler. She turned up her nose at the beer. It would be a bad idea to take her edge off. She decided on juice and some kind of mild bready thing.

Then the wardroom door opened, and she melted back behind the refrigeration unit, holding to invisibility.

It was Dai-Oni and Imei-Sim.

“She was mine. Mine,” Dai-Oni repeated. “You’ll never have her now.”

“She is nothing. Kill her if you wish, but we are brothers. I had hoped you would achieve breakthrough. Lady Dije showed us that two Lords can live and work together on the same ship,” Lord Captain Arr replied.

“You were trying to enrage me so I would ennoble myself?”

“Of course. Your continued development is my highest priority, dear brother.”

Dai-Oni sighed. “It didn’t work, but I understand. I’m glad to stay, and to serve on your ship, my brother, my Captain, my Lord.”

“I’ll hire you another submissive, at our next port of call. And one for me.”

“Good thinking. A pair of sisters, perhaps?”

“Sounds good.”

Ojaste waited for them to leave. She took her snacks and climbed up into the access tunnel, staying there until Magi Raider docked. Then she jumped ship.

* * * *

Dije felt the intrusion in the middle of the night: a crackling magical presence across her border and a troop behind him. It was her neighboring Lord coming to challenge her.

Kerruke! Get the men up! To battle! Dije ordered.

Dije threw on clothes, fastened her dej to her belt and shuffled outside, rubbing her eyes.

Her gang came pouring out of the houses in the lane and formed up behind her. She changed her shuffle to a lordly stride. Dije summoned an illusion of herself and sent it to take the first strike from her rival.

The other Lord’s lightning shredded the illusion on contact. Dije was not concerned. The doppelganger had made the other Lord expend energy without harming her, and had shown her his fighting style. Dije walked out to meet him.

“It was true what he said!” her enemy taunted. “Your illusions are just a trick, a holoprojection!”

For answer, Dije summoned her serpents. A hydra-headed snake-beast struck at him, but he dispelled the illusion with another cast of lightning. Then Dije and her opponent cast lightning at each other. For a long moment, they stood motionless; sizzling light popped around them, raising smoke off of each other.

Dije felt the life within her shriek in wordless panic. She reinforced the shields around her womb, but her enemy sensed her intent and shifted his attack. His lightning burned out the walls on which the umbilicus was attached, and they sloughed. Dije felt it go: a sharp and terrible pain. She cried out; the small mass of cells that would have been her baby pleaded for protection, and then—as its soul rose up in death—for revenge.

Dije screamed again, all the pain and grief transmuted to rage. She was the very fury of every mother animal. Her cry shook the foundations of buildings in front of her, and they collapsed. Stone pulled apart from stone, with a roar and a great cloud of dust. A whole block of the enemy’s section of the village fell in, crushing villagers in their beds.

The power of the Rubo-giptuvor flowed through her, filling the sudden emptiness within. Dije reached out with magic and grabbed rubble, sending a hail of plastered granite at her enemy.

The Lord turned them aside with a casual gesture and renewed his lightning attack.

With a shock, Dije realized that even in the depths of the purest and darkest hate she had ever felt, her enemy was stronger in magic than she was. She abandoned magic and reached for the Flow. Responding to her emotions, the Flow pounded down like a waterfall. Dije created an illusion that was more than illusion: a dagger at his back, with as much physical reality as butterfly feet. She stabbed him, and he made an odd little gasp. Pink froth appeared on his lips. He fell, but he was not quite dead yet. He raised his hands from the ground, trying to summon the noble gift.

Dije staggered forward, bent over with her left hand to her middle, leaving a trail of blood. She reached the Lord just as he managed to summon a last feeble spark and send it to her.

She let it pass through her, just one more meaningless pain in the swirl. She was glad she did not need to draw a weapon. The surprise of the dej could wait for another time. Her illusion-dagger was still stuck in her enemy’s back. Dije kicked his arm out of the way and stomped on his chest, burying the knife in his heart.

The light went out of his eyes, and his soul coalesced around him like ground fog. He nosed over the dagger, but it was not solidly real enough to serve as his long home. Instead, he drifted toward one of his followers and encapsulated himself in a jeweled pendant hanging from the former pirate’s neck.

The rival Lord’s gang bowed silently, but in a tentative way. They were obviously not sure Dije was going to survive.

“Kerruke! I’m miscarrying. I’m miscarrying the Legacy Child!”

Kerruke rushed out to Dije and helped her stand upright. Kerruke called to her former crewmen, “Get a transport!” Then, she turned to the bowing, defeated gang, “A Vurgh! Is there a Vurgh in this Territory?” Dije’s own Territory had none.

“Yes,” one of the men responded, perhaps deciding to ingratiate himself with his new ruler. “This way.”

Kerruke hoisted Dije up telekinetically and followed. Dije’s gang came with her, except for Rejak, who had already dashed for the village groundcar. Soon, he drove up in it, and they loaded Dije aboard.

She moaned softly, closed her eyes and used a Kirifo pain control technique. When the groundcar stopped, Kerruke got an arm under Dije’s shoulder and helped her wobble toward the Vurgh’s home and office.

He was waiting for them inside, grinning evilly. “At last. I knew you would come. That fool Lord has served his purpose, and brought you to me.”

Dije and Kerruke both stood still in shock.

“Now, vengeance will be mine,” said the Vurgh. He reached for Dije with magic, preparing to do something with his gift that was anything but healing.

“Dokhon Jux!” Dije croaked.

“Yes. Your archenemy. And here you come to me, half alive. Ah, I see the Kirifo demon seed is gone already. Too bad. I wanted the pleasure of killing your monster myself.”

Jux paced forward, gathering power. Dije felt like she was coming apart, and she knew she probably was; he was doing something to her at the molecular level.

Kerruke started to pump herself up in magic, preparing to strike at Jux, but Dije linked to her and directed, No. Wait. Let him come closer.

Jux reached for Dije’s body with both hands, as a sculptor reaches for clay.

Suddenly, he had no hands.

The sudden white light and the rushing water hiss registered simultaneously with the falling hands. Jux yelled and gestured with his stumps at Dije’s midsection. Then she swung the dej up and across, cutting off his head.

The instantly cauterized neck did not spurt blood. The head and body fell separately to the floor with a thump and a crash.

Dije closed down the dej and fainted. She came to, briefly, in the sputtering groundcar, long enough to tell Kerruke she was going into a healing trance.

When she woke up, she found that someone had cleaned her up and gotten her into a nightdress. There was a bottle of water, with the Fruitioner flower seal on it, within reach on the nightstand.

Dije blinked. Someone had replaced her plain nightstand with an elaborately carved wooden table. Some villager had made and given her a gift, without even waiting for her to wake up to receive it so that she could be grateful and bestow favors. It was the last thing she expected.

In her initial grief, she had pulled down a whole row of houses, killing the innocents inside, and then she had capped her achievement by beheading the town’s only doctor. Yet someone here—someone besides Kerruke and her crew, who had no skill at any honest craft—cared about her. Dije started to cry.

Once she started, she couldn’t stop. She cried for herself and her lost daughter, as well as the unnamed lives ended. She even cried for the invading Lord, because Dokhon Jux had duped him.

She cried until she couldn’t breathe, and then fell into a troubled sleep.

* * * *

Ojaste hesitated outside the opulent ironwork gate. This was the address, all right. What would Rene be doing living here? Perhaps she had found a place as a maid.

Ojaste stepped up to the intercom and allowed the mini holocam to scan her face. She told the bot, “I’m looking for Rene?”

The gates swung open. Ojaste walked across manicured lawns and through an intricate knot garden. The carved alabaster front door opened as Ojaste mounted the marble steps, and Rene ran out in a swirl of blue silk.

“Ojaste! Ojaste!” Rene embraced her, squealing in delight. “Come in, come in! I’ll have your things brought in, did you park your groundcar on the street?”

“I have no things,” Ojaste said. “I was lucky to escape with my life.”

“I see there’s some story here,” Rene said. “You can tell me all about it inside.” She turned and snapped her fingers at a person-shaped bot wearing clothes. “Have tea brought to the second parlor.” Diamonds flashed on Rene’s neck as she moved in the sunlight.

Rene led Ojaste through the museum-like house, and the two women settled into brocaded chairs in a cozy sitting room.

“How did you end up here?” Ojaste asked.

“The Worzes adopted me. It was like a fairy tale!”

A uniformed maid-bot brought tea and little snacks with a silver tea service, poured for the ladies, and then left them to their conversation.

“Earth fairy tale, or Magus fairy tale?” prompted Ojaste.

“Turns out, Mr. Worze was a fan. A fan of my acting.”

“Oh.”

Rene shrugged. “At least I wasn’t a slave anymore. Though Mrs. Worze had not known, and when she caught us, she hit him over the head with a vase—crystal, a delicate thing. It shouldn’t have been fatal, but it was. There was a dreadful investigation. Mr. Worze’s rec room had a Will blocker, and Will couldn’t tell what happened. They said she would have to testify to what he was doing when she killed him, or she’d go to prison. She went out and ran her flyer into a building. So, I’m an orphan now.” Rene made a circular gesture, taking in everything around her. “This is mine, now. All the locals either want a piece of me or think I must have arranged it all somehow, being a low-class whore.”

“Oh, Rene, how terrible!”

Rene sighed. “It could be worse. If you have to be miserable, at least you can be miserable and rich.”

Ojaste quirked an ironic smile. “There is that.”

“Oh, Ojaste, you have no idea how nice it is to talk frankly with someone! Do stay, at least for a while.”

“Thank you. I will. I have nowhere else to go, actually, except maybe out on another job. I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet.”

“So what’s your tale?”

Ojaste related her break with the pirates, not bothering to censor the story to remove the pornographic bits, considering they were unlikely to shock Rene.

Rene gave a whole floor of her mansion over to Ojaste’s use. The two women went through Rene’s closets and produced a suitable wardrobe for Ojaste. They spent a few days relaxing, chatting and catching up. Then the conversation turned to their mutual acquaintance, Lady Dije. They decided to try to call her on the Will.

It turned out the Lady’s village did not have a Will receiver, but they settled for a patched-in voice-only transmission. So, they did not see Dije looking pasty and ill.

Rene told her tale of woes and riches, and Dije contributed her share to the gossip fest. Finally, Ojaste related her story again.

“He was my Lord. What was I supposed to do?”

Dije reassured her, “There was nothing else you could have done. If you wish, serve me, now.”

“I wish. Yes. Yes, my Lady.”

“Good. I have a feeling I’m going to have something for you to do, out there in the wide galaxy. I’m not sure what yet. I don’t really have visions, just magical promptings. I always know what the right action is; I just never know why.”

Since Dije had no rival neighbors now, ruling a village surrounded by Fruitioner farmland on one side and an uninhabited mountain on the other, it was a surprisingly easy matter to smuggle her out. Members of her gang who knew the art of illusion undertook to maintain a cord of cold all around her border, as if she were still inside it.

Dije disguised her face with illusion, and wore a robe left as an offering at Hum’s Shrine. The Governtist scientist who met with her did not have even a tidbit of the Vurgh’s gift, but he had always wished. That was why he had studied scientific medicine.

His interests went beyond science, and when he heard of the Lady of Illusion from a Fruitioner patient, he was intrigued. He had contacted her, just at the right time. He could not go to a Magi-ruled village; he was a Governtist. Someone from the government might be watching, and would call his loyalty into question. One of Dije’s Fruitioner students in the art of illusion came to him, to instruct him. Now, Dije had come to him for help.

“Well?” Dije asked.

“I’m afraid you were right. There is no way to restore your fertility, but we have the facilities here to combine your somatic cells with the Legacy Sample and grow a child for you in a gestational replicator. It’s much safer, and more controlled, than a natural pregnancy.”

Dije nodded. “I was afraid of that.”

“These gene scans you have of yourself and your donor are very complete, and very helpful, with the most desirable traits flagged—a most ingenious computer program. With the technology here, I can go further than selecting the best chromosome pairs. If you like, I can purify and enhance the desired traits.”

“Oh? How?”

“For example, I see from these gene patterns that the male donor had one parent with an incredibly strong magical talent, and one parent with no talent at all. I could remove the influence of the mind-blind parent, and cause your child’s magical talent to resemble his strong grandparent.”

Dije inhaled a calming breath. Was it possible? Not just get Lesley’s strength—get Emperor Re’s?

“How close to the grandparent can you make the child?”

“As close as you wish. A near clone is possible. I presume you will want to include some of your own genetic structure?”

“Yes, of course. Some. Let’s look at the program, and I’ll show you what I want.”

* * * *

With her print book and a blank sheet of pressed tree parts, Dije wrote to Lesley in the book code: “I’ve recruited Fruitioners to learn Illusion, and magically talented Brights to join the Bright Squad, which is what I call my secret Kirifo students. I teach Magi, commoners, and even some Governtists. I’ve won a lot of respect. Those who don’t respect me as a teacher, respect me as a warrior. The story of how I destroyed a rival city has grown in the telling. Out there in the wide galaxy, you don’t know how rumor can turn into legend because you can always ask Will to show you the truth. Here, we only have gossip. Magi who have met me, and who did not understand my Kirifo ways, fear me as unpredictable because I can use magic when I’m calm. Magi depend on sensing their enemies’ anger to warn them of an impending strike. All that is fine and in accordance with magic-promptings I’ve received. However, it’s really bugging me to know that I’m supposed to be doing all this, but not know why. I get more and more promptings; some of them are as urgent as the ones I used to get about combat, but I don’t know what effect they’re having when I do them. I have this feeling that something terrible is about to happen, but I have no idea what. I have to know. I have to open my inner eyes to the Dream. I have to have some Dream. I have to do the Dream ritual. Send me some. I’m ready.”

Dije closed the book and leaned back from the table. She shifted uncomfortably on the overstuffed divan. She was long past the first few weeks of pain and weeping after losing her daughter, but her body never seemed quite right afterward.

“Well. I’m as secure in my Territory as any Lord has ever been; my borders don’t touch any other Lord’s domain; the caves are coming along as a fortress.”

“Are you sure you won’t change the front entrance, Lady Dije?” Kerruke asked. “The bugs crawling on a hill of rock-bat dung are rather disturbing to some people.”

Dije smiled crookedly. “The front is supposed to look like a natural cave, which it is. Leaving the native ecology intact is good camouflage. Besides, it contributes to my reputation among the Fruitioners.”

“As a dung-cave dwelling madwoman?” Kerruke asked.

Dije laughed. “As an avatar of their gods. As you well know.”

“So, what’s the plan?”

“Take this letter to the usual transmit dump. Lesley will find a way to get me what I need.”

“And what is it that you need, Lady Dije?”

“Dream.”

“You dream a lot.”

“Loritril.”

“Oh. Gah! That’s right, the Kirifo use that stuff. Ick. Why didn’t you do it while you were at the Temple?”

“I thought about it, but I only thought about getting a good high. I was an addict when I arrived at the Temple. The risks didn’t seem worth it—not just to get high—not even when I really needed something, anything. Now, I’m ready to use it for what they call it on the street when you can get it: Enlightenment in a Pill.”

“Ah. That makes sense.” Kerruke looked over her shoulder to make sure only the crew and the Bright Squads were in earshot. “So you’re going to do the Dreaming in the Cave ritual. A Kirifo Knight rights wrongs, heals the sick and fights evildoers; a Kirifo Master lives in a cave and has visions?”

Dije snorted. “Something like that.”

Kerruke took the message to a visual narrowcast rig in the closest city. She paid in sacrificed Fruitioner gold and shooed the shopkeeper out before bringing the paper out of her Serekh-style decorated bag. She sent a photostatic-image of her message to an agent on Msha, who sent it on through several other transfer points.

Laboriously, Lesley decoded it in the Black Room, writing on rice paper in beet juice. Then he ate it.

* * * *

Ongreya set Old Pointy down in the yard of a large building with a fence around it, isolated from the nearest city by hundreds of kilometers of impassable desert. She assumed human form and started up the Psy Healer subcast.

Uniformed security men tried to stop her. They were used to bullying the helpless, and only had injectors full of drugs for weapons. Ongreya was a Kirifo. She did not even have to fight them, only ignite her dej, and they fell back before her. She herded them into one of the many cells and locked them in.

She found the human in his cell: strapped down to his bed, lying in his own waste, his skin festering. His eyes rolled whitely.

Ongreya shut off the dej and approached the bed.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m Ongreya the Psy Healer. Your pain called out to me across the stars. I can help you.”

“That’s what they all say,” replied the man.

“Perhaps, but I’m different. I’m like you.”

“I see through you, Changeling.”

“Yes, but what are you, really?”

“The spawn of hell.”

Ongreya made a clucking sound. “You’re only repeating what you were taught, but it’s things like that making them keep you here.” She unfastened his restraints, put an arm under his shoulders, and helped him sit up.

“But they were right. Things happen around me, or they did, before the drugs. The drugs keep it under control.”

She helped him stand up and then supported him as she walked him down the hallway toward the bathroom. “If you’re so broken, why do they keep you like that?”

“They keep everybody like that.”

“What sorts of things happen around you?”

“Things move. Change. When I dream, it happens. They thought I did it on purpose, but I didn’t! I never wanted to turn things over and play stupid pranks. I was so afraid!”

“Yes, tell me about that,” Ongreya encouraged, exerting a touch of her power.

“Afraid all the time. To be found out. Then I was. Isolated. Quarantine. Witch! Witch! Witch!”

The man shrieked and pushed away from her, but Ongreya caught him with magic before he could fall down. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

The man sobbed, bending over with his hands over his face, but he allowed her to guide him to the bathroom. She helped him step into the water shower and adjusted the spray for him. Once he was inside, he automatically turned his filthy back to the water and let it clean him, although he winced and hissed as the spray touched bedsores.

Ongreya searched a bit and found a blanket to wrap him up in after he dried off. “How old were you when you were shunned?”

“Don’t know. Long time. Long time ago.”

“Why do you say ‘witch’? Did they call you that?”

He screamed and started beating his fists against the wall.

Ongreya made no attempt to stop him. Instead, she entered a meditative state and reached out with magic. She used a Kirifo technique to purge the psychoactive drugs from his system.

Gradually, he ran down. Then he slid to the floor, sitting with his shoulder propped against the wall. “I can feel you,” he whispered. “Everything turned real again. You got rid of the drugs somehow.”

“Yes. So you see, I am like you: a Kirifo.”

“Demon,” he said, but oddly without emotion.

“Tell me: why would you believe those who would lock up a child for having a talent? Why do you continue to believe in their views of our kind? Surely you can see they are not the good guys.”

“Everybody else believed them. They went off to their new world, to form a Colony, and I was locked up here.”

“Yes, but because you are insane, not because you have the potential to learn to use magic.”

“Am I nuts?”

“Yes. You are. That’s not your fault. You were kept away from all companionship from a young age. The last thing you need is more isolation, in your cell. I can’t provide the experience of socialization that you need to make your way in the galaxy, but I can heal your mind of its hurts. All you have to do is drop your shields and let me in.”

“How do I do that?”

Ongreya gave her standard speech and began his healing.

After a few minutes, he sighed and said, “I do feel a little better, I think. But I don’t feel like a new me.”

“You have a longstanding, and complicated, problem. It may take days, or even weeks, to heal you fully.”

“They’ll never let you stay here that long. I know you don’t belong here. You came through the door with your dej lit. You broke in here.”

“I can break back out, too. Normally, I don’t take passengers in my ship, because there is only one acceleration couch. I established that rule back before I became a Kirifo. Now, I can fly and use magic to keep you floating inside the ship at the same time. Now, I can take a human passenger because I can keep the g-forces from crushing you by using magic to counteract them.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

Ongreya took him to another planet, healed him, and sent him off on a passenger liner bound for Gis and the Kirifo Temple. Then Ongreya went to the Colony to check on the Colonists.

She landed Old Pointy at Jimenez’s Repair Yard. By the time she exited her ship, a human was waiting for her. He had on mechanic’s overalls, but with a homemade-looking fur cape around his shoulders. It had a bare spot and looked sickeningly real.

“Yes, ma’am! How can I serve you today?”

“Just refueling,” Ongreya said, starting down the ladder.

His face fell. “If you didn’t land for repairs, then maybe you might be interested in the local wood crafts?” He eyed the ship dubiously; all too aware it was no cargo vessel.

“I am here about Quarantine.”

“Oh. Oh!” His expression went from eager to serve to some other eagerness, some terrible need. “How did you find out about that? The committee doesn’t allow any transmissions, and most of the ships that land here aren’t interested in our local problems.”

“I spoke to a survivor.”

“The isolated one? So he speaks now?”

“He’s fine, now. Well, sane, anyway. I am a Psy Healer. I healed him.”

The repairman stuck out his hand as she reached the ground. “Thank you. Don Jimenez, at your service.”

“Ongreya.”

When she turned around to shake hands, his eyes glinted when they saw the dej at her belt. “That’s not all you are. It’s about time. Come with me.”

He set off through the woods, and Ongreya followed. She walked in that way she had of gliding across the ground without bobbing her head too much because she was subcasting.

The trees looked a little like Earth pines, but instead of dark green, they were a shocking hot pink.

They came out into a clearing. The pink trees gave way to clear sky, as pale as pure mead. Bands of a ringed planet hung huge and off-kilter in the sky.

Don took her to the Wire to show her Quarantine. The Wire was a fence around a shed. “Seven children live in there. They used to have caretakers from the Colony, until the older children kicked them out.”

Ongreya called out, “Children! I am Ongreya the Psy Healer. Come out to the Wire and speak with me!”

There was no answer.

Ongreya exerted her power. “Come out of the shack and speak with me! I can help you!”

“Go away!” came a child’s voice from inside.

“They are strong in magic. They have strong shields, and they’re reinforcing each other,” Ongreya explained, as much to her subcast subscribers as to Don. “We’ll have to show them that I can be trusted first.”

She and Don went back to his shipyard and found Jen hanging around. Jen was one of those average people who did not look any particular way: not light or dark, not short or tall; pleasant looking, in a personality-free, personal-grooming-device-ad-page-layout kind of way.

Ongreya could not help but smile as Don and Jen started arguing; she loved to subcast confrontation. Her viewers would eat it up. Ongreya did not even have to exert her power to make the two humans start really getting to the heart of their problems, at great volume.

Don yelled, “If only you’d had the guts to stand up for Maria, I would have married you. We could have had a good life together. Anytime up until Reverend Chuck had the Quarantine Camp put up, we could all have just left. I could’ve gotten a berth on some space line as ship’s engineer, and I’m sure you could have learned some useful skill, too.”

“I have a useful skill: I’m a teacher.”

“Who would trust you with their kid? Besides the idiot Colonists.”

“I’m a good teacher!”

“You’re a terrible mother!”

“You did this, Don! I was keeping Maria safe. Nobody knew what she was. You outed her!”

“She wouldn’t have to hide anyplace but here!”

Ongreya did not exert her power to get them to calm down and let her heal them. This was not a rift she was called to heal. This was going out on the Kirifo subcast.

Jen screamed some words that the general audience broadcasters wouldn’t allow on their shows, then stormed off.

“What now?” asked Don, “Cut open the wire with your dej and rescue the children?”

“Kirifo don’t steal children from their parents. Not even bad mothers like Jen. It’s forbidden. In the days when the Kirifo first started accepting humans, right after the Magi and the Serekh were exiled, there was a push to force all magically talented humans into the Kirifo Order, whether they wanted to go or not. Emperor Xywanda decreed that this was what had ruined the Serekh—when they tried to absorb all of Earth’s telepaths—so he forbade it. And he was right.”

“What will you do, then?”

“I will contact the head of my Order. He will know what to do.”

Ongreya went back into her ship to talk to Lesley and replayed her subcast for him.

“I have the perfect solution. You’re right, Kirifo don’t steal children. But Magi do. Wait there and keep a lid on things. Then you’ll have quite a show,” Lesley said.

Lesley contacted Dije, and Dije contacted Ojaste at Rene’s mansion.

Dije ordered, “I want you to rescue the children, and that mechanic, too. Make an example of the Colonists, but leave some alive. To testify. You know, Ojaste, the Kirifo say that Gisel myth has it that when Hop-fejeptim comes, time will be bent and the future will become the past. Ages from now, I want men to fear She will come, and the Lady will steal their children. Steal them, and take them to a land of magic, power and illusion, never to return. When all the planets of this galaxy have crumbled to dust, and all lands and tongues have changed, we will remain branded in the psyches of mankind as a fearful myth. I foresee it, in magic. They will fear even to name us, and will call us the Good Folk, hoping not to anger us. They will know us for Powers beyond their imagining, as the Fey who steal children. No mere mortal can tell whether the Fey he meets on the road belongs to the Bright Court or the Dark. All will fear our power; all will fear the coming of She.”

“It will be as you order, my Lady. So we become elves, in truth, then. They used to call us elves, you know; people of Mars slave descent, I mean.”

“People with these eyes,” Dije said. “Green, with slit pupils—like a cat—to see in the dark. The thousand Magi, made to order. Tall and thin boned, from being gestated in the light gravity of Mars. I know. I used to sit around watching historical dramas as a child, too.”

* * * *

Ojaste told Rene, “A little girl needs me. Her name is Maria. She’s been kept in a shed behind barbed wire since she was eight because she’s different. I must save her.”

Hugging Ojaste, Rene said, “You can use my yacht. You’re my only real friend, Ojaste. Everyone else I know only loves me for my money. I would never stand in the way of your work. I needed you once, and you helped me. Go on.”

Ojaste landed the star yacht next to Old Pointy. Ongreya had the Kirifo subcast going out as soon as she saw the yacht coming in. She filmed Ojaste gathering up the colonists and the quarantined children in a big grassy area between the landing field and the hot pink woods. It was a sunny day. Birds were singing. It was perfect weather for a picnic.

“All right, all of you. You are here for judgment,” Ojaste said.

Jen pleaded with the Council, “We could use more hands. Why can’t we let the witches out to help with the harvest?”

The leader of the quarantined children, a teenage boy, decided, “Why should we help you? I hope you all starve.”

“Where’s Maria?” Don asked.

“She can’t walk. You know she has the Nerve Wasting,” the boy replied.

“That’s curable,” Ojaste objected.

“Why would they waste their precious resources on medicine for us? We’re only witches,” the boy leader explained.

“You know it’s not like that. That boy, Roger, has healing powers. Why doesn’t he cure her?” Reverend Chuck spat.

The boy leader snarled. “Because thanks to you, he hates his own power too much to use it. Just like Maria does, and half the children in there. That’s what you’ve been trying to do all along: stunt our growth, and twist our powers against ourselves. Some of us grew up in the meantime. Now we know our enemy, and it isn’t our power; it’s you. I hate you!”

The boy leader lifted his hand, and Reverend Chuck’s hair caught on fire. Reverend Chuck jumped up and grabbed someone’s fur cloak to pat the fire out.

“I knew it! You Kirifo are pure evil!” Reverend Chuck turned to Ojaste. “You can’t deny it now! There’s your proof for your damned judgment! Judge yourselves, high and mighty Kirifo!”

“You miscalculate. I’m not a Kirifo; I am a Magus. And you are here to face my judgment.”

Ojaste summoned the lost art. Black coils of darkness formed around her arms, and she released them as a hydra of a hundred heads. They struck all the adult Colonists, except Jen and Don. The Colonists fell and writhed, slowly dying of the poison. Then they were still.

Some of the children screamed and wailed for their dead parents, until Ojaste slapped them and told them to shut up. “You’re better off without them, you fools. They’d be sending you behind the Wire next.”

“She is right,” Ongreya said, picking up a small girl and comforting her. “Most of the children in Quarantine have no magical abilities at all. I’ve been observing you here while I waited for the solution to arrive. Most of those you call witches are only children who guessed what their parents were thinking once too often because they knew them. And said it in public, where Reverend Chuck’s spies could hear; or they won too much at card games because they were good at them, or jumped too high because they were athletic. Is that the kind of life you want; living in fear of luck and talent?”

Ojaste turned to Don. “Come with us. Rene’s yacht could use a ship’s engineer.”

“If you’re taking Maria with you, I’ll come gladly.”

“Yes, yes!” Jen cried. “Maria! I can see my Maria again, at last!” She started to run toward the Quarantine Camp.

Ojaste reached out with magic and tripped her. “No. You’re staying here, all alone, in isolation. As you condemned your daughter to live.”

“No! Please! I didn’t do that, it was Reverend Chuck!”

“Reverend Chuck was one man; old and frail, and entirely without magic. He was no Emperor Re, who could crush his enemies with a thought. The rest of you could have resisted him.”

Jen burst into tears. “I love Maria! Please, let me go to her!”

“Never. I’m here to steal her, you see. Tell them, the She stole your children. Seek for her in vain. I’m taking her to a place of magic and illusion, from which no one ever returns.”

Ojaste and Don took Maria to a civilized world to be cured of the nerve wasting. The disease was halted and eliminated, but the damage it had already done could not be repaired. Except by a Vurgh. They took her to Kamex, to a highly reputed Magi healer, and Maria could walk again. She had to say goodbye to Don, who as an offworlder, not allowed to live in a Magitown. Don got a job repairing ships in Kamex spaceport.

* * * *

One day, when Maria was watching the other stolen children under the tree, playing with Kerruke’s twins, Piekke caught a bird with magic and snapped off its beak. Then Piekke poked out its eyes with its own beak. The other children screamed at her, and one of them went running to Maria to put a stop to it. Maria responded as a Magi mother would: she slapped the crying child’s face and said, “Don’t come running to me about your playmate! If you don’t like what she’s doing, fight her yourself!”

The child only cried harder. Maria roared in frustration at the annoying sound. Reaching out telekinetically, Maria floated the child up into the tree branches, to grab a branch and hang on or fall. The child clung to the branch, wailing even louder.

Dije felt Maria’s anger rise in magic. Maria’s power reached a pitch she had never before achieved.

“You are strong in the Rubo-giptuvor. You have a deep wellspring of hate,” Dije commented.

“My enemy Reverend Chuck is dead,” Maria snapped. “Ojaste killed him. I still hate him, but… it’s not the same.”

“Your enemy, Jen is not.”

“She’s my mother.”

“So her betrayal of you is all the more shocking and horrific.”

“Yes,” Maria whispered. “Yes!” She flattened the building behind her and knocked down some of the people standing nearest to her.

“You are powerful, Maria!” Dije called, over the noise of the whirlwind Maria’s terrible hate was stirring. “This is your moment! Do you want your tattoo now?”

“Yes! Yes! Test me! I am ready!”

“Then fly! Fly on your dust devil!”

The winds whipped around Maria, and she lifted from the ground.

“Good, good! Now reach out to your enemy! Where is she now?”

“My enemy is in despair, weeping in self-pity for being all alone! How pathetic she is!”

“Good, Maria! Good! Now. Magic is Life. Magic is Life, Maria. Live!”

Dije stretched out both hands and caught Maria in a torrent of magical lightning. Maria fell to the ground, screaming.

The other children drew back in fear. Ojaste hushed them. “It’s all right. Sh, sh.”

Then Maria was still. Dije knelt beside her and smiled. “She lives. Bring the tattooist. Alert the caterer and the musicians. There will be a party tonight.” Performing an initiation got easier every time.

Dije wrote to Lesley, sending from a transmit dump in a faraway city, in coded text only, so no voices or faces would be given away: “The most important thing I learned from you was how to let go. To let a student find her own path.”

* * * *

The delivery of little Tinisha to Lesley and Pauletta was only slightly more complicated than the average delivery of any other package to the Temple. She arrived in a climate-controlled air car, accompanied by an attendant from the reproduction firm.

Lesley and Pauletta signed for their new baby and took her to their room.

“Hello, Tinisha,” Pauletta cooed, although the baby was sleeping. She put the girl down in the crib. The nanny-bot began monitoring her breathing and other vital signs.

“You know, people are going to criticize us for naming our daughter a girl’s name since she has the telepath gene and will certainly grow up to be a Kirifo.”

“Let them,” Lesley said. “I hated my name as a kid. Okay, it’s not so bad for the girls. They get to have strong, masculine names like Merle, and Erin, and Toni; names that proclaim leadership and competence, like Alex; or technical savvy, like Jaime; or dangerousness, like Jesse. What do boys get? Sweet little Angel, fairy Morgan, and Dusty—dusty like a forgotten book that nobody ever reads. When I was a child, I promised myself, many times, that I wouldn’t inflict a gender-neutral name on my children. We’re humans. Just because we’re Kirifo doesn’t mean we should try to pretend we’re hermaphrodites like the Gisel.”

“Wow,” said Pauletta. “I didn’t realize you felt that strongly about it. I just thought Tinisha was a pretty name.”

“It is,” Lesley agreed, smiling down on the baby in the white crib. “And she’s a pretty girl. Look, she has your hair.” The small child already had tufts of fine black hair, although it did not come close to rivaling Pauletta’s shiny, wavy pyramid.

“Well, that’s what we ordered, after all.” Pauletta chuckled.

* * * *

Dije’s child was born a few years after Lesley and Pauletta’s. It took many years for the scientist to perfect the genetic engineering because it was a secret project that he could only work on when his colleagues were gone from the lab. He told Dije he feared if any of the other Governtists found out about the Legacy Sample, they would want to nationalize it for government use. He painted a word-picture of an invincible clone army of super-soldiers, very much like the original thousand Magi. Dije agreed. So, the project took a very long time.

No matter how much time and effort had gone into his creation, however, the little bugger was still exasperating when he threw a tantrum. Dije had only herself to blame that he was farting strong.

It took a dozen of her men to suppress him when he tried to pull the house down around her. Even in the suppression field, he still managed to knock things over and break them.

“What have I done, Kerruke?” Dije asked. “He’s bad seed. I should have seen it!”

“He’s two, Dije. All two-year-olds act like that, even normals. Don’t worry so much.”

* * * *

A Magus jogged down a street on Msha, bounding easily over the blowing trash in the light gravity. He paused when he felt an alien mind shout out a greeting from behind a blank wall. Curious, he walked around to the side entrance, into the building, and found himself facing a naked Fii. The Fii was behind a kleero wall, floating in an approximation of its aquatic native environment.

“Coming or going?” the Fii asked.

“Huh?”

“Are you outbound from your world, off to seek your fortune, or returning after completing your adventures?”

“Oh. Why?”

“Which is it?”

“All right, returning, why?”

“Good. I have a small package. I will pay well.” The Fii flippered closer to the wall. “If you return to your world, and do not deliver it, you will incur the wrath of the recipient.”

He snorted derisively.

“Ah,” said the Fii, “but she has more tattoos than you. And many, many followers.”

“Oh.”

“Will. Light on,” commanded the Fii. A light illuminated an alcove in the far wall of the air side of the room. On it was a parcel.

“Shock absorbent case,” the Magus observed. “Airtight. Watertight? Something from your world?”

“Nothing from this pressure could be opened in any atmosphere suitable for humans.”

“Yeah, okay, I get it. What do I put on the customs form?”

“Ah. Enlightenment.”

“En—wait, what?”

“Hallucinogens are legal on Magi-ta, as I understand.”

“Yeah. Sure. Tiny box. This is a one-way trip. Why not import in quantity?”

“That is none of your concern.”

“Fine, whatever. How much you going to pay me?”

* * * *

Dije meditated in a side cavern deep inside her fortress. Only the faintest light and sound came from the workmen setting up living quarters, installing a second backup generator, and stringing more lights to the back entrance a few turns away.

The cave was chill, but not damp. The watercourses that had formed this cave system had been dammed for irrigation long ago.

Her mind floated in magic, much as it would in the Flow. A Vision came to her:

aliens, with too many legs; black, shiny…no, those were not the aliens; those were the ships; the ships that had been called Spider drive vessels; the ships that the Magi had been created to fight; ships that had not been seen in the galaxy for a thousand years; Rimer-u ships.

Dije saw the Rimer-u ships in orbit of Magi-ta. They pushed the Blockade satellites out of orbit, to crash into the ground. Into the cities. Mushroom clouds birthed red infernos in the black shells of buildings; an eternity of dust. Everywhere, the dead. The bodies weren’t rotting because even the microbes had died.

Dije gasped. Her awareness snapped back to the cave, and the present time. “The End of the World,” Dije whispered. This was what she was doing it all for. This was the reason for this fortress. The End of the World was coming.

* * * *

In the emptiness of space, a vast number of shiny black ships turned together, like remotes all responding to the same controller. The Rimmy invasion arrived on the edges of the galaxy. They came around the first sun, and a few ships split off to bear down on one isolated ball of rock orbiting that ordinary yellow star.

The rest of the invasion fleet went on toward the heart of the galaxy, leaving a small rearguard at the first star system they had encountered on the way in.

The small rearguard hit Magi-ta first. They had meant to strike without warning, but the Magi had had a warning, from Dije’s vision. The invasion force took up orbit for the duration.

The Rimer-u destroyed both the Blockade and the cities, by tipping the orbital Blockade satellites down into the atmosphere: a rain of hell. The orbital weapons platforms struck the ground with the power of E = mc². Ashes flew on the wind, blotting out the sun. Magi-ta was cratered like a moon.

* * * *

Lesley was in a Raven fighter. The Raven was not a cold envelope of steel around him, but a rather quiet presence, like an old hunting dog. Like the Vri warships of the last Rimmy war, a thousand years before, the Raven was a bio-construct. It was self-healing, and in some sense, partially self-aware. As such, it was a vessel that a Kirifo Knight like Lesley could sink into and wrap himself up in with his magic. Many warriors throughout history had said their weapons were an extension of themselves. A Kirifo’s Raven really was.

Lesley flew a rollercoaster course toward the enemy. The black ships were out there, although he could not yet sense the terrible screaming presences described in the ancient texts. Ravens flew all around him. They did not have literal feathers, but for a moment, Lesley could almost see the wings reflecting in a terrestrial sunlight. The spider ships glinted far off in space, reflecting stray light from far-away stars, pale horses of death.

His mind cawed, and the mind of his wingman responded in kind; harsh cries, like the battlefield birds of a war god. He could see the spider ships with his eyes now, although his ship’s sensor screen showed nothing but confetti. He ought to be coming into telepathic range any moment. Soon, he would hear the enemy singing with an unbearable beauty.

Hits scored on the spider ships. They returned fire, in a deadly barrage of white light, taking out several Ravens. Lesley came around for another pass.

Then Death came. Minds shouted together, lives beyond count: human, animal, insectoid, even the germs, all dying together.

Lesley felt the death of Magi-ta. He slipped out of link with his wingman for a crucial second. The spider ship he was targeting was not hit, and it destroyed one of the Ravens. Lesley did not waver. He re-established the link and took the spider ship out on the next pass. He did not stop to wonder what planet had been destroyed or ruined by the Rimer-u.

Lesley flew so close to a spider ship that he could see its individual legs, each tapering to a sharp point. Why couldn’t he sense the ships and the pilots in his mind? Lesley extended his telepathic senses as far as they would go. His attention drifted away from his controls for a moment.

The spider ship fired, and pain spiked through Lesley. It was not his own; it was coming through his mental link to his wingman. Lesley closed down his mind and returned fire. He scored a hit at point blank range, and the spider ship came apart. Lesley flew right through the wreckage, debris bouncing off his ship’s shields. He still could feel nothing from the Enemy.

Where was the sense of the death of the Enemy ship? Where was the scream of the pilot in his mind?

This was the moment the Kirifo Knights had been preparing for, a thousand years. The last time the Rimer-u had appeared in the galaxy, the Enemy’s mental bond between ship and pilot had been their only weak point. The inferior technology of a previous age had only been able to destroy a spider ship by concentrating the fire of several attacking ships. The only way to coordinate it had required slowing down the Enemy’s reaction time by disrupting the ship-pilot connection using telepathic jamming, which had been done by the Kirifo Knights of that era. Every generation of Kirifo since then had preserved the technique faithfully, waiting for the day that the Enemy would return for the last time. Hop-fejeptim would return to lead the people of the galaxy to victory against them. The Raven fighters belonging to the Kirifo Order were intended to deliver telepaths close enough to disrupt the spider ships so that Imperial capital ships standing ready out of Enemy range could close and fight to a victorious finish. It wasn’t working.

Lesley cleared the debris field and signaled his fellow Kirifo. “I can’t sense them. Can anyone sense them?”

A chorus of replies followed, all in the negative.

“Jean. Chris. Casey. Sidney. Dana. Lynn. Robin.” He called off the names of the strongest telepaths in the Order, other than himself. “Get close and latch on. Go into full trance, and try to connect with the Enemy minds. Wingmen, protect your leaders.”

Lesley spared barely a thought for the life of his wingman, snuffed out in the battle. There would be more losses before this fight was over. He swung around, picked out a target and destroyed it. Then he picked another; Lesley destroyed the enemy ships, one by one.

* * * *

The space station was huge and mostly modern. Only a part of it had originally been a Blockade satellite. It hit like an asteroid, sending up a mushroom cloud that could be seen from space. The dust didn’t clear for a year. Kamex Spaceport was blasted to atoms.

The orbital weapons platforms, which the Galactic Empire had modified to act as Blockade devices and installed to plug up the holes in the Blockade, were modern and relatively small. They still pocked the ground with craters. Where one hit, old trees fell outward from the blast like a crop circle for a hundred kilometers around.

The original Blockade satellites were ancient. They were nuclear powered. Some of them burned up in the atmosphere, spreading radioactive fallout over the whole planet. Some detonated on the ground, leaving glowing glass holes where cities once were.

A Rimer-u spider ship overflew the Sacred Lands on a survey mission. The living ship and the Rimer-u inside it did not see the lush green below them; they saw only the same blasted wasteland everywhere else on Magi-ta. The illusion was complete down to the way the dust blew in the wind of the spider ship’s passage.

Dije’s Fruitioner illusionists protected the Sacred Lands—farms, forests, and wild places—and all else from the Rimer-u.

In the Winter of Ash, illusionists hid the land and everything in it: the wild animals in the forest, the farmers in the fields, and the artificial sun, which the best illusionists—those who could create illusion that was more than illusion—maintained to keep photosynthesis going in the fields and forests. The shield illusion was a complicated and exhausting illusion, requiring the combined strength and skill of all the remaining Fruitioner illusionists. It was their sacred task to protect the Sacred Lands. They left the fighting and killing for others, but they knew they could not maintain the Sacred Lands forever unless the Rimer-u were defeated. The Fruitioners followed Lady Dije even more fanatically than the Magi. For the first time in their history, the Fruitioners understood the concept of holy war.

* * * *

The spider drive ships swept through the galaxy, unstoppable. They came to the home of the Kirifo, and the Empire, circling its blue-white star.

Gis, mother world of the Gisel, glowed pale blue in space. It was not light reflected from the star, but the glow of the city lights of the night side, shining through buildings of translucent crystal, like the Kirifo Temple.

Imperial Navy ships of the line screened the Enemy from Gis, sending out Raven fighters as before. This time the Enemy had adapted. Not only could Lesley not sense the Rimer-u minds, his fighter’s weapons fire went right through the Rimmy ships as if they were not even there, without doing any damage.

Lesley sank into the Flow and checked for illusion. The Enemy ships were not illusion. They did not exist in the Flow any more than they existed in magic. Yet, clearly they existed in physical reality; their weapons destroyed spacecraft all around. Ravens, capital ships, even unarmed civilian ships fleeing Gis local space were being picked off systematically.

Lesley’s Raven could find no purchase for its claws, no soft underbelly to rend with its beak. Lesley still could not sense the Enemy with his mind. It was like fighting a phantom.

The Imperial Navy threw everything it had at the Rimer-u. The spider ships sliced through them like a dej through a curtain.

The spider ships slowed, stopped. They took up positions around Gis. They fired.

All the life on Gis cried out in Lesley’s mind. He heard the soft, grey wail of the pearl oyster on the shoreline, and the caustic scream of the baltor mar parasite within it. He caught the wavering shape of the dalshon framed against the sky, coming to harvest the pearls. He saw the flash through the villager’s eyes, felt the shuck bucket drop from a nerveless grip onto the sand. He felt each life, as distinctly as that, all the millions of them.

Lesley screamed, unable to block the death cries from his mind. Then he cried out again at the terrible silence within.

Gis was completely destroyed. The rubble pitched through space like pool balls struck by an unimaginable cue.

Someone tried to link with Lesley, but he could not accept a telepathic link right then. A moment later, he heard someone say his name over the comm. It repeated. It repeated again. Finally, he responded. It was Stanchion, one of the capital ship captains, telling him to get his Ravens back aboard their mothership.

Lesley reoriented on the battle and checked the scope. Kirifo Ravens were breaking off from close engagement. Only one of the Enemy ships the Ravens had latched onto was showing obvious damage.

A random “hey!” came over the Raven flight channel. Drawn by the urgent mind-shout that went with it, Lesley turned his attention to the planet-cracker being drawn up from behind the Rimmy fleet. The machine was a giant ring, emanating white light. The Rimer-u warships were towing large pieces of Gis toward it, and releasing them to travel a ballistic course through the ring.

One of the Ravens tumbled out of control, right in the ring’s path. It was Jean; the hybrid was Lesley’s nephew, and their mind was familiar to him. Jean’s Raven fell through the ring. Jean’s mind went out of the universe.

Lesley thought Jean was dead, but a moment later, he heard Jean’s voice over the comm: “Fleet? Ravens? Damienne?”

Damienne’s voice: “I can’t feel you!”

“Me either.”

“All Ravens back to their motherships,” Lesley ordered. He flew ahead, landed first, and waited for Jean. He saw Jean’s ship land with his eyes, but could not feel either Jean or Jean’s Raven with his magical senses.

Jean got out of his fighter, took a few steps, coughed and looked around, bugged-eyed and pale. The expression went with panic, but Lesley could sense no trace of the emotion telepathically. Jean put a hand to their throat and jumped back into their Raven. The human-Gisel hybrid lowered the canopy and put their emergency flight mask on. Their chest expanded visibly.

A helmeted crew member jogged out onto the flight deck with some kind of equipment. A moment later, crew people were swarming Jean’s Raven, doing technical things involving probes and meters.

Damienne, Jean’s sibling, came up to stand by Lesley, watching the bustle. Like Lesley, they still wore a white Kirifo flight suit. Damienne’s hybrid skin was even whiter, glittering with Gisel chitin. Devil horns rose from a short black fro.

“What’s wrong with Jean?”

“That’s a good question,” Lesley said. “Let’s find out.”

* * * *

Dije did not come through the Sacred Lands to get back from the battle into her underground cave fortress. The natural cave entrance opened on the Sacred Lands, but the hidden back entrance came through bare rock and hard radiation. Every time she led her forces out to do battle with the Rimer-u, they all had to decontaminate when they returned.

Dije slumped in a chair as the decon team worked on her and her men. The resistance fighters had run out of technological decontamination gear weeks ago, but Magi and members of the Bright Squads had picked up the slack. They did not have to be Vurghs to strip the radioactivity from flesh and equipment; they only had to still the radiation in a variation of a magical technique to reduce temperature, adapted for the needs of the times.

“We’ve got to hit them on the other side of the planet next time,” Dije said to no one in particular, thinking out loud. “We can’t draw attention to our location by making too many local raids.”

“Didn’t there used to be more of the decon team, Lady?” Ojaste mumbled tiredly.

Dije shrugged; she left staffing to Kerruke, so she could concentrate on strategy and learning as much about the enemy as possible. All too soon, even with decon, she would reach the point where she could no longer leave the caves and Sacred Lands very often. Then she would have to turn the fighting over to others. She wanted a visceral feel for her enemy by then.

One of the decon team answered, “We had to send some people up to the airlocks. That’s what we’re calling the areas where we take in refugees to the Sacred Lands. People try to bring the damnedest things with them: pictures, toys—useless crap. We pile it up and tell them they can come back for it when they learn to decon stuff themselves. We don’t have the energy. This team is as overworked as the Vurghs.”

When decon was over, Dije dismissed her company to find food and rest and healing. She went directly to the command center, staggering tired and munching on a stale dinner roll that happened to be handy.

Kerruke was amidst a hive of activity. Desks and computer screens were arrayed around a center stalactite pillar. Kerruke looked up when she entered. “What did you learn?” That had become almost a ritual phrase with them.

“I think it’s worse than we thought,” Dije replied, plopping down on a station chair that would have been at home on a starship. “The Rimer-u aren’t just blocking magic…they don’t exist in magic. It’s not like a Shadowsnake bubble or a suppression field. They just aren’t there. They’re less substantial than Flow illusions, which do affect them, by the way. At least we have that much.”

“I don’t understand,” Kerruke said.

“I don’t either. I don’t see how they can be alive and not be part of Giptuvor, but they aren’t. Illusion can affect them because illusion affects reality. Create a strong enough illusion of a rock, and you have a rock. Pick up a real rock with magic, and you can throw it at them. But you can’t touch them with magic. Not their bodies, and not their minds. They just aren’t there.”

“How can we fight something like that?” Kerruke muttered, careful not to let her despair carry too far in her voice or in magic.

“We still have magic; we can still affect the things around them. We have the art of illusion, and we have guns.” Dije made a face. She knew the technological weapons were not going to last much longer.

“My Lady,” Kerruke said a little louder, changing the subject, “we received a communication for you. The coded signal.”

“Ah. Good. Pipe it down to my quarters, and send a meal to me.”

Dije did not look at the transmission until she had washed and eaten. The book code was tedious to work with, and she felt stupid-tired. Even before she had gone out with the fighters, she had felt like her brain had exploded and left little brain bits all over the command center. There was so much to learn, and think of, and plan.

The communiqué from Lesley was short and blunt. The Rimer-u had destroyed Gis, and the Church of God Post-Apocalypse was hunting the Kirifo down wherever they went.

“We need a safe place to send the Kirifo children, to hide. Someplace the Rimer-u would never think to look for them.”

Dije coded back: “Don’t send them here. The Rimer-u have taken the planet. This will be our last communication. I have to stop using the hypercomm transmitter to keep the Rimer-u from finding our base.”

It had been a near thing, just a few days ago. One of the refugees in the airlock zone had refused decon. At first, the decon team thought he was just crazy from mental trauma. There was plenty of that going around. So, they sent a Fruitioner to talk to him; one of the volunteers who was not a powerful enough illusionist to help disguise the Sacred Lands, and who just did whatever needed doing. The Fruitioner had tried to soothe the poor man, and had looked at him in the Flow to get an idea of his mental state—he wasn’t there. The Fruitioner had called over one of the magic-users…and the man did not exist in magic. The man who was not there, who suddenly attacked and killed many poor refugees. When he was finally brought down, his dead body reappeared to the defenders’ magical senses, and they pulled off his tunic, revealing—a human. A human with the green, cat eyes of a descendant of Mars slaves, just like the average Magus. No one knew what a Rimer-u looked like, but surely this infiltrator must have been a servant of the ancient enemy, not an actual Rimer-u.

When Dije heard about it, she had made sure all the airlock teams had at least one powerful magic user with them, either Magi or Kirifo. She had made a speech—a telepathic speech—sent mind-to-mind, and relayed to the commons and Fruitioners who could not hear her. She was doing that a lot these days.

It was time for another speech, and then she was going to sleep for a week. Well, probably not, but she certainly felt like sleeping for a week. Only, she was too busy.

* * * *

“Lesley? Are you with us?” It was one of the admirals or generals in this meeting. They were a mix of the species of the Empire; all different shapes and sizes; some sporting fur or feathers, and others in various types of environment suits. They were gathered around a grey, oval modern table in the white briefing room of a battleship.

“Peyton,” Lesley said. “I just felt him die.”

The Gisel in the white robe and oxygen mask, standing behind Lesley, stepped forward off schedule, asking, “How?”

“Peyton was the Kirifo assigned to be the telepathic blocker of the Rimmies on a warship that stood between the Enemy and the Hssthisian homeworld. He could not detect the Rimer-u’s minds, or disrupt their connections to their ships. The ship he was on was destroyed. He died.” Lesley explained wearily.

“Why were we still using that tactic?” the masked figure asked.

“Inertia, I suppose,” Lesley said. He turned to address the assembled military leaders. “Magic and telepathic blocking doesn’t work this time. The Rimmies have learned, and have done something to themselves to makes themselves immune.”

“Forgive me, Sidyerit,” said a Gisel warrior in red armor, “but you are stating the obvious. What are we to do about it?”

A human, a woman of the Imperial Race, said, “This is the time when Hop-fejeptim is supposed to return to lead us and time will be bent, but no deus ex machina has appeared.”

“Perhaps something else has appeared, though,” said Lesley. He gestured, and the masked figure came forward again. Jean wore a Kirifo robe and a dej. Everyone in the room instinctively edged back from them; uncomfortable, although they did not know why.

“I can sense them,” Jean said.

“How did this happen?” asked the Gisel.

Jean looked away, so Lesley answered for him. “His Raven got sucked into one of the machines that the Rimer-u process planetary rubble through. We still don’t know exactly why, or how, or what they use the stuff they process for exactly. Whatever it was, when Jean popped out the other side, they could sense the Rimmies in magic. But no one else. Normal minds and magical senses have become closed to them.”

“He can hear their thoughts? Know their plans?”

Jean shook his head. “I don’t understand their language or their minds. They’re very different from ours. I can disrupt their telepathic connections with their ships and other machinery, like we could the last time they appeared.”

One of the human admirals rubbed his hands in glee. “Then we must make efficient use of this new weapon. Go, for the command structure. End the war in one fell swoop.”

* * * *

Raymond woke her up with a steaming cup of something or other, soup perhaps. His Fruitioner tutor and protector, a pleasantly ugly woman who was always smiling, except at funerals, hovered behind him. Even here, in the heart of the fortress, she was prepared to turn him invisible if anything threatened him.

Ray smiled cheerfully as Dije sipped the soup. He was such a sweet boy, but she worried about him growing up during this terrible war. She was away from him so much that he was largely raised by the Fruitioners out on his tutor’s farmstead, and that was just as well.

Dije had once thought Lesley turned his students so he could have the pleasure of saving them. Now, she wondered if the Rubo-giptuvor was in his genes. Ray showed no leanings in that direction at all, but his half-siblings—Kerruke’s twins—were the terror of the base.

As if her thoughts had summoned them, Piker and Piekke came in, no doubt having seen the light in this room and deduced the occupant was awake. Piekke charged in at a dead run and stuffed something into Ray’s pocket. “Here. Hide this.” Then the twins roared out again.

Ray retrieved the object and cried out. “Oh! Poor thing!” It was a small animal, minus its fur and the skin underneath it. It breathed shallowly in his hand.

The Fruitioner woman took it from him gently and used the Flow to take away its pain. “It can’t be saved, dear. I’m afraid all we can do is put it out of its misery.” With a surprisingly economical motion, the woman snapped its neck.

Dije blinked in surprise. It was easy to forget, thinking of the Fruitioners primarily as pacifists, that they were also farmers. They had no problem killing animals and plants on a regular basis, as long as it was done correctly, with respect and kindness. As long as the purity of the Land was preserved.

Kerruke ran in, on the trail of her twins.

“You’re too late,” Ray’s tutor told her. “I’ll dispose of this poor little thing.” Ray followed her out of the room.

Dije set down her soup and gestured Kerruke over to a chair. Kerruke wore Serekh braids, too, but without the black ribbons Dije sported; Dije wondered when Kerruke’s hair had started to go grey.

“There’s no doubt those two are going to grow up to be Magi,” Dije said.

“Well, and so are we,” replied Kerruke. “But magic is Life. I hate it when I see them killing for no good reason.”

Dije scratched at her scalp, where her braids had grown out over the past month. They really needed doing again, but Dije did not have the time. “As a teacher, I’ve found some people lean naturally to either light or dark. My inborn nature is toward the light. That’s how I could find it, here on Magi-ta, when I had no teacher but a holo-news show. Sometimes I wonder just what legacy I’ve sown here, by rewarding my followers with Legacy Samples. I’ve created ties of kinship with you, and with Ojaste; between you and Ojaste; and between you and everyone else who’s used the Sample. That’s all to the good. Family sticks together, no matter how much we might argue and hate each other. But I wonder what I’m doing to the next generation.”

“Nothing but uniting them, Lady Dije,” Kerruke replied. “You were right when you made that first speech, right after the End of the World. I can still quote it.”

Kerruke recited Dije’s speech:

“Magic is life. Cities are nothing. We must save our people. Use the art of illusion to save ourselves, and to save fields and forests, wild lands and farms; places that will save us, feed us, give us air and food and water. And we must fight. The time for self-indulgence is past. We must unite Magi, Fruitioners, Brights, the common people, even those Governtists who are willing to resist the Rimer-u. Together.”

Dije placed a hand on Kerruke’s shoulder, knuckles touching the black Magus uniform, fingers curled back toward herself in the polite way. “My first, best follower. My closest friend.”

In another time and place, the next words out of Dije’s mouth might have been ‘I love you.’ Dije could not afford to risk Kerruke’s friendship in the middle of this war. The old accusation, ‘going curve’, rose in Dije’s mind. She closed off her mind before Kerruke could sense what she was thinking, and let her hand fall.

Then she stood up, pulled on her black jacket, and buckled on her sword belt with the dej hilt attached. “Let’s kill some Rimer-u.”

* * * *

It was good to do something normal for once, Lesley reflected. It was good to remind the Kirifo they were supposed to be primarily healers of the mind, not warriors. Although, this particular subject touched very close to the sorest spots of the war.

He was teaching the memory cap seminar again, but today, his speech here in the blank newness of the hidden Kirifo base did not deal with just-in-case scenarios. This was for members of the public to see and recognize a Kirifo was a risk that was becoming greater every day, with informers taking Church of God Post-Apocalypse credits on every world and station that had a public.

There were a lot of Kirifo in this room, young and old. Lesley had been amazed to discover that Chesley had never taken the memory cap course, and he had summoned this group at once.

There were some non-Kirifo on this base, but Lesley had decided not to ask for volunteers from among them for this. The Kirifo had been stung by too many accusations lately, and he was not about to do anything to sow suspicion among his own best supporters. So the Kirifo were practicing on each other.

Several non-Kirifo were observing, though; among them Pauletta, and of course Chesley’s usual contingent of Tsim bodyguards. In this wartime base, Chesley did not maintain his usual metropolitan flair. Instead, he was going hatless, and sporting baggy, olive drab trousers that clashed with his hastily donned blue dashiki.

All went routinely until he let Chesley into his own mind. He did not expect him to find anything.

“Lesley, there’s something in there.”

“Thoughts, I hope,” Lesley smiled.

“I’m serious. You have a cap.”

“There isn’t supposed to be,” Lesley said. “I’m supposed to be the control.”

“I can’t tell what’s under it, but I can tell—well, the structure… no, it’s more like a texture. Lesley, I think it was placed in here against resistance.”

“You mean against my will? Nobody’s that strong.”

“It was definitely constructed by a female.”

“Um, how long ago? Can you tell? Could it have been Merle, the Kirifo who stole me from our mother?”

“Long, but after you became a Kirifo.”

“Can you see the person who placed it?”

Chesley concentrated briefly. Then he gasped. “It’s a Magus Lady. The tattoos are distinctive. I remember them on Dije. Wait, wait, wait, I think it actually was Dije. Dije grown up.”

“Oh. Then I know what’s under there. Don’t pop the cap. I don’t want those memories back.”

“What is it?”

“The day I wept purple tears.”

“The what? When was this?” Pauletta exclaimed.

“You didn’t know about it? It was all over the KV News, for months. The major channels picked up Ongreya’s Psy Healer subcast. That was how Ongreya came to be my apprentice.”

“Lesley, I can’t believe you didn’t talk to me about this!” Pauletta admonished.

“I thought everybody knew. Please exit now, Chesley.”

“Oh,” said Chesley, “Sure.”

Lesley puts his shields back up. “Sorry, but that incident isn’t something I want to talk about with the whole room.”

“Later, then,” Chesley and Pauletta said in unison.

* * * *

The woman walked. She walked through the stinging dust, through the poisoned air, through the darkness. Walking was a precious gift. She would keep walking until she reached the rumored green land, or until she fell over dead. Her tongue swelled up in her mouth from lack of water. Somewhere along the way, she dropped her weapon and didn’t notice. She had ceased to be aware of the man walking beside her.

She saw something through the haze of dust and pain: a swirl of figures and a shimmer of illusion. Someone caught her arm and led her to a bed. Someone worked some ritual over her, as if washing her hands in her aura. Someone gave her soft food and drink. The green land opened around her. Multiple suns hung in the air below the shield. Birds. There were birds, still. They survived here, as nowhere else on Magi-ta.

The woman slept. When she awoke, she was given more food and was asked to what people she belonged. At first, the question confused her, and she fell back on the identifiers of her childhood. She said, “Witch.”

“That’s right, which?”

“Yes, that’s right, witch.”

“Which people?”

“Yes. The witch people.”

They left her alone for a few days then, to recover her strength and her wits. The man tended to her burns, pouring healing energy into her flesh, but he did not bother with cosmetic treatments. He healed himself first, and then her. They both looked no different afterward, which proved how exhausted he must be, because he liked to play with appearance.

Then someone came to ask her again, and she replied, “Magus.” They nodded as if that had been a test and she had passed. Then they took her to a noisome cave filled with piles of bat dung and dung beetles, and then she was in a military base. The man who had walked beside her through the dust was still at her side.

She saw someone she knew, and called out, “Ojaste!”

Ojaste came to her. Ojaste looked at the bald, starved figure, still covered with radiation burns, although she had been decontaminated, and did not know her.

“It’s me. Maria.”

“Maria! I thought you lived in Kamex. How did you survive?”

“I wasn’t in Kamex. I was in a prison work camp, out away from anything anybody’d want to bomb. This is the prison doctor. He’s a Governtist, but he’s a Vurgh, and I figured you’d need all you could get.”

“You figured right,” Ojaste said. “Welcome. Both of you.”

“Why don’t you do something about all those bugs?”

“Magic is Life. The Lady is trying to save whatever is left of our world’s ecology.”

* * * *

Lesley couldn’t stay in his Raven forever. For one thing, endless maneuvering only used up fuel, and their supply was haphazard at best. For another thing, he knew Pauletta was going to stand around in the fighter bay until he returned, even if she waited all day. He was going to have to say something sooner or later.

So he landed, and hopped down from the cockpit. “You were away on a long Tsim mission when it happened,” Lesley said. “I thought you knew and just didn’t say anything because you could tell that I was okay. Ongreya had already healed me by the time you got back.”

Pauletta gestured toward the man-door into the corridor. Lesley did not need to be a telepath to understand she wanted to go to their quarters and talk. What was it about women and talking? They thought talking solved everything. Well, no, that wasn’t fair; Dije was a woman, too, and Dije thought that hunting down one’s enemies with a small group of mercenaries solved everything.

* * * *

Maria was not the only reunion the wave of refugees brought. Dije felt a sickeningly familiar magical presence and knew that presence had also detected her.

Dije’s mother stormed in. The first thing she did was not to greet her long lost daughter, but to pick up some anonymous crate and throw it at Dije, telekinetically. “Dije! They told me this place is yours. It’s a pigsty!”

Dije gestured and batted the crate aside. “Are you insane? Can’t you see my face?”

“No,” Mrs. Kun said, surprised into softness. “What’s wrong with your face?”

“You can’t see. Were you blinded by the flash?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Kun’s soft mood continued. Dije went to her, and stood close, although they did not embrace.

“How did you survive the destruction of Kamex?”

“I was in a police van, behind an energy shield.”

“Oh. What were you—never mind. I’ll have one of the Vurghs tend to your eyes.”

“What was I arrested for? Trying to buy military arms from an undercover. I was planning to kill my ex-husband.”

“Dad?”

“Right.”

“If you can’t see, how did you judge this place a pigsty?”

“I can smell it. Also, I tripped on things.”

“What you smell is death. Soon enough, we’ll give death back to the unlife, to the Rimer-u. My Kirifo legion is nearly ready.”

“You’re the one behind the Bright Squads? The great Kirifo leader?”

“That’s me.”

“That’s ironic.”

“What is?”

“Your name. You know it’s an old tradition to name a child an anagram of something powerful and frightening, to keep evil spirits away. The most powerful and terrifying thing I could think of was a Kirifo, but all the acceptable anagrams are boys’ names. So, I named you after a fictional group of knights from an old play that sort of reminded me of them.”

“I know. You told me, but we can catch up later. Right now, I’ll go get you a Vurgh. They’re overburdened, treating all the radiation poisoning, so pay it no mind if the one I find you is a little crotchety. They’ve all fallen back on plain old irritation to keep their powers sharp.”

“I understand. Dije? What’s wrong with your face?”

“Nothing. It just has more tattoos than the last time you saw me.”

“Oh. Oh, this isn’t your house; it’s your Territory.”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Oh, sandworms!” There was fear in her voice then. She would certainly never have thrown anything at Lord Thodvexer, and he was her own brother.

“It’s okay. Just stay here, a Vurgh will be along soon.” Dije turned and left.

* * * *

Lesley’s quarters in the new Kirifo base were spare, and there was still a suitcase sitting in the corner.

Pauletta had not unpacked all her clothes yet, but she had unshipped her weapons and had them laid out on the table, checking them one by one. She left her task when Lesley came in, shifting all her attention to him, although she sat poised and patient.

“Right,” he said, flopping down onto the edge of the bed. He tried to think of something to say.

Various small and large energy weapons, edged weapons, and specialized weapons gleamed in neat rows on the cheap plasform table. The one Pauletta had been servicing was a puncture weapon with a spring loaded case, now field-stripped and arrayed for cleaning. Pauletta could have done the work without looking, but she gave all her attention to Lesley anyway. It was one of the things he appreciated about his wife. That, and the dark eyes, the perpetually tan skin, the mass of perfect curls flowing touchably onto her shoulders…it was hard to believe, after all they had built together, that the first thing he had said when he met her was, ‘Will! It’s a woman!’ The omnipresent network had made a good matchmaker after Lesley had given it a chance.

Since Lesley was staring off into space, Pauletta got him back on track. “Lesley, I did hear a rumor about that, after I got back, but I thought it was a false story. The gutter journalists are always making things up about celebrities.”

“Not in this case.” Lesley briefly put a hand over his eyes, as if to hide the telltale stains that had faded long ago. “All these years, I thought I suppressed those memories myself.”

“What happened?”

Lesley made a clapping gesture. “I don’t know. I’m glad I don’t know. However, it came about. I thought—I thought of all the terrible things that have happened, this was the one thing I couldn’t face. I thought I did that to myself. It must have been aboard the ship after she rescued me. That’s where I woke up.”

“So you really were kidnapped by that Purple Tears show?”

Lesley nodded, not meeting eyes.

“If I’d known…”

“If you’d known, what? You wouldn’t have been as free with me? We wouldn’t have had as much fun?”

Pauletta sat down beside him and put her arms around him. “You’re right. However you got to be the way you are, it’s the way you are, and I love you.”

* * * *

Dije’s mother saw her and smiled.

“Red eyes! What have you done to her?” Dije shouted.

The Vurgh from the prison said, “I’ve got to have some fun.”

Dije was tempted to blast him, only her mother could see, and Maria had been right: they needed all the Vurghs they could find. Dije spun and stalked off to the command center to think of new ways to kill the enemy.

“Call the—Lady.” The Magus of the watch in the command center had just been about to alert her, apparently. Dije directed her attention to the battle monitor.

Ni Smashlier and his team had encountered a Rimmy patrol in the Sacred Lands. Having a battle in the middle of the illusion was not easy for the Fruitioner Illusionists to cover up, but it was an absolute necessity. Better to lose a team, than the secret of the existence of clean land. So Dije’s first priority was illusionists, not reinforcements. She sent a pair of illusionists to do their smoke and mirrors number at the site of the battle.

Only then did she look around for what sort of support she could send to Ni. No ground forces could reach him in time—since Ni was far up past the lake, on the opposite side from the fortress—and the nearest ground troops were border guards who must not be drawn off from securing the airlocks.

Dije wanted to send air support. The trouble was, she was limited to the weapons she had been able to stockpile before the End of the World, and that meant only things that either had been legal or available on the black market. Aircraft had not been among those things.

“What am I thinking?” Dije mumbled. “Illusion that is more than illusion. I can send anything.” However, she could not cast illusions way over there from in here. She ticked down the list of illusionists who were powerful enough to project illusions with the weight of reality. Most of them were already busy at vital tasks.

Well, there was the Temple butterfly keeper—a Fruitioner, and therefore a pacifist. Though, the Fruitioners had accepted Dije’s contention that the Rimer-u were unlife, so that was all right. A teenager, but no younger than Dije had been when she had gotten her tattoo, and, in any case, this was war. So, that was sort of all right. The only thing was, the girl had never been able to make a substantial illusion of anything except a butterfly.

Might as well try, thought Dije. No one else could reach Ni in time to make a difference.

* * * *

Ni Smashlier clung to the Enemy patrol craft. The landscape was going by very fast, a couple of hundred feet below. Ni picked up a large rock, telekinetically, and crashed it into the underbelly of the airship. The ship wobbled, and then the pilot rolled it upside down, trying to shake Ni off. Ni grabbed the boulder and tossed it into the engine’s air intake.

A mighty crunch shook the Enemy craft. Bits sailed out the back of the engine. Then it plummeted toward the ground.

“Oops,” Ni said. “I didn’t think this through.”

The ground was coming up very fast. He didn’t know how to use his telekinesis to levitate. Ni composed his mind and prepared to leave the world of flesh behind him.

At the last moment, he felt a sharp tug on the back of his bright green tunic. He was carried up into the air, away from the grey pieces of the crashing patrol craft, away from the dust plume and the small tan rocks bounding into the air along with the shrapnel. Was this Ascension?

Ni felt something solid under his legs and instinctively slid forward to grip with his knees, like riding horseback. There was someone in a brown Fruitioner robe in front of him.

A giant blue wing beat beside him. It shimmered in the light of the illusory sun: blue butterfly wings.

Ni caught his breath. He looked forward again. This time, he noticed the two enormous antennae in front of the rider in the robe, longer than a dej and curled on the ends. The massive wings beat, propelling them up above little copses of trees and the plough-rowed hills of farmland.

Ni rode back to the village. After he and the girl had dismounted, a steady stream of village children came up to the butterfly to gaze at it, although none of them were quite brave enough to pet it.

Dije took the excuse of the victory to have a celebration outside the caves in the Sacred Lands. There was music, wine, and food. All kinds of people were there: Magi, Fruitioners, Kirifo, commons, and even former Governtists, like the prison doctor.

Dije made a speech out loud for once, although it was still rebroadcast telepathically, to those who had to stay at the margins to keep the shields, illusions, and guns up, as well as man the airlock stations.

“There are no unimportant people on Magi-ta, now. We’re all in this together. No more murdering, raping, slaving; no more territorial wars. We are all on the same side, united against the Rimer-u.”

This announcement was met with scattered clapping from the commons and Fruitioners, mixed with shocked stares from the Magi. The Kirifo generally looked shocked as well; this was only natural, as most of the Dije’s Kirifo were Magi.

Dije described Ni’s great victory, and how the Bright Squads were the bright hope of Magi-ta. The Kirifo Knights chanted, “Ni! Ni! Ni!” For the whole rest of the party, the Knights could not get enough of hailing their leader’s name.

While the Knights said ‘Ni,’ the Fruitioners melted into the forest in pairs to perform fertility rituals. The Magi and commons drank and smoked strobe. When the Fruitioner couples started to come back to the main party, they got the commoners and even some of the Magi to dance with them.

Dije looked out over the scene in what passed for happiness in those times; a kind of intensely focused, blitzed enjoyment; deliberately walling off the future, and the worries that came with it.

Kerruke looked relaxed for once. Someone else was taking care of the twins today. Not a Fruitioner, like the family that took in Ray; Kerruke’s twins would ride right over such peaceful people. No, the twins’ babysitter was none other than Maria. She was hideous, bald, cruel, and more than a match for their antics.

Ojaste looked wistful. Dije opened up her Force senses and sampled the emotions radiating from Ojaste. What she encountered was a physical longing that was almost hunger, almost lust, almost the need for strobe, but none of those things. Dije recognized it instantly because she remembered feeling like that herself, long ago. Ojaste wanted to play.

Dije had not played since returning to her own people because she could not both lead and submit. She suddenly realized she could feel the incredible subspace high again, by proxy, through Ojaste. If she were in link with Ojaste.

Ojaste.

My Lady?

I know what you desire. You desire subspace.

Yes. I miss it, but I don’t miss Dai-Oni. He was a… jerk.

You don’t have to censor your thoughts with me, Ojaste. Do you want to play?

Ojaste’s eyes widened as she realized what Dije was asking. Yes. Yes.

“Come here, Ojaste,” Dije said aloud, beckoning her. As Ojaste walked over, Dije cleared the table with a gesture and patted the wooden surface.

Ojaste grinned, shucked out of her black fatigue jacket and hopped up on the table, settling comfortably on her stomach with her arms folded up under her chin.

Dije pulled Ojaste’s tank shirt up, accessing her back. Kerruke, Ni, and some of the other old members of Kerruke’s crew noticed the play preparations and gathered around to watch.

Dije looked around for something to play with. There wasn’t much there but a wooden spoon, and that didn’t really appeal to Dije. She pulled off her sword belt, detached the dej and set it aside on the bench. Then she wound up the extra length of the belt until she had a good section. Her first smack was not tentative or light, but it did not crack the way she wanted it to. Dije tried again, and this time heard a nice snap, which left a triangular red tip mark on Ojaste’s back from the stiff leather belt tip.

Ojaste sighed and settled down further. That was the way. Dije smacked her again, and the crack sounded perfect. Satisfied with her technique, Dije opened herself fully to the mindlink with Ojaste, and let her arm go on automatic. The sensations were exquisite.

Then Dije eased out of the link and watched Ojaste from outside. She kept just enough of the mindlink going to be sure Ojaste was enjoying herself, but Dije found that when she had lost her taste for subspace to a badger-lizard long ago on Gis, the change had been permanent. She no longer wanted what Ojaste wanted.

She remembered wanting it and knew exactly what to do. This was just for Ojaste now, and for any of the people watching who could derive some pleasure from it.

More Magi crowded around to watch. Some of the other peoples watched, too.

Many of Ojaste’s Magi friends linked with her, and they sank together into subspace. The party noise ceased; all was silence and light. Then there was the music: no instrument of the world but some cosmic melody below or beyond normal senses. The galaxy opened out, turned inside out. There were rivers and still spaces, sound and caesura, light and shadow, all in some entire whole, some asymmetrical order just out of the grasp of human understanding. It was perfection; it was Light; it was Life; it was magic. It was Goddess.

It was just another high. From outside, to Dije it all seemed—illusory. Dije knew perfectly well how powerful the mind could be. Perhaps Ojaste really was seeing a true vision, despite getting there on overloaded neurotransmitters.

Ojaste still lay on the table, eyes half closed, with an expression of pure pleasure on her face. She was breathing slowly, as if in deep meditation. Her upper back was red.

Dije ran her hand over the inflamed skin. It was hot. She pulled ice to her hand with magic, out of the barrel keeping the drinks cool. Dije applied the ice to Ojaste’s back, letting it melt as she slid it across the welted skin.

Ojaste hmm’d a deeply satisfied sigh.

Dije wished she could teach Ojaste to lose her taste for this, too. If she tried to teach the lesson that she herself had learned from the animal, perhaps by throwing Ojaste into a sparring match right now and showing her how weak she was, it would only make Ojaste hate her. It would teach her nothing. It might make Ojaste stronger in the Rubo-giptuvor, making Dije a good Magi leader by the old standards, but Dije hoped to set new standards.

* * * *

Jean snicked a new canister of their special air mix into place on their mask and stuffed it into the cargo pocket on their flight suit. They inhaled inside their Raven, glad to be free of the emergency oxygen mask while mindlessly running through the preflight by long habit.

The emergency masks were not intended for long-term use. Jean had been sleeping in it. Jean rubbed their nose just because he could, even though it did not actually itch right that moment.

The mask’s seal left a red imprint all around their otherwise snow-white face, showing that Jean was not a Gisel, despite appearances, and that their sparkling skin was not the glassy armor of Gisel chitin. A flaw in the geneticists’ design, no doubt; Jean knew their and Damienne’s hybrid skin had been intended to be as strong as a Gisel’s. Their body mass had been carefully calculated to gain the strength of a Gisel skeleton, along with a human’s ability to float in water. That was another thing that had not quite worked out the way the designers intended.

Jean launched.

The Raven made all the right noises, and all the physical sensations were there: the sudden acceleration, the bright pulse of the engines on high output, the moment when Jean’s eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness outside the mothership’s fighter bay, and the stars spreading out before him.

None of it felt real. Jean could not sense the life essence of the Raven, or the minds of their fellow pilots. Not even Damienne’s, although their wingmate’s ship was so close that Jean could make out; discretely small, just forward of the cockpit; the white spiral of the argent-on-sable Imperial flag against the Raven’s black paint job.

Jean was still in the galaxy, but they were no longer of it. Now, Jean was like the Rimer-u. Those, Jean could sense. The Rimer-u were up ahead. Their minds became clearer to Jean with every parsec they traveled toward them.

Suddenly, Jean saw an image in his mind of a rock-like alien presence turning in their direction. The Rimer-u were aware of Jean.

Rimer-u? That was a Giserto word. A Gisel warrior’s term for an enemy, nothing more.

Jean heard a sound, beginning at the edge of his senses: an insectile kind of sound, all sharp edges. The sound became louder, gaining meaning and levels and honeycombs of association: Skkk.

Skkk, Jean answered within. For one moment, they felt the hive mind beckon. The Skkk were Jean’s people now, who had never truly had a people before. Jean opened to them, and they opened to Jean.

Then Jean struck.

He sought out the frequency of the telepathic bond between Skkk and ship. No mere thread of thought, it was like a thick, complexly knitted yarn, soft and yielding in Jean’s grip, but surprisingly tough to rip apart. So Jean did not rip. Jean scrambled it, reaching into the strands and stirring until it was a hopelessly tangled mess.

Jean spoke aloud: “Success. Go.”

The Ravens scattered, moving out of the way of the guns from the capital ships. The ships of the line surged forward and fired both beams and torpedoes. The Enemy ships exploded in green balls of balefire, like fairy lights in the darkness.

Jean felt them, the Skkk. Felt them call out plaintively; felt them die; felt the beckoning. The welcoming hand extended toward Jean and fell away. They heard the sound grow dim, like the wail of a man fallen off a cliff. The sound stopped.

Debris dotted space, a silent accusation.

“Woohoo!” Damienne’s voice came over the comm. “Good job, my brother! They’ll be pinning a medal on you for sure.”

Brother, Jean thought. They were no one’s brother now. Never had been. Brother was a term for gendered beings. Damienne was confused, longing for a normalcy that would never come. Jean knew the truth. They were alone in the galaxy, neither human nor Gisel, but not truly Skkk either. Jean was a singular being, meant for a singular destiny. Jean would take the resources of the Skkk, meant for Jean alone, and would rule these unreal beings that called themselves by the names of former compatriots: Damienne, Kelly, and Lesley. Those creatures were not real, having neither minds nor life-force that Jean could sense, but the unreal beings could provide all that Jean needed to find pleasure in the galaxy. Jean would lead them to a great military victory, and dispose of the unreal being calling itself Chesley. Then they would be the Galactic Emperor. That would fill the emptiness inside.

* * * *

The day was turning fine and hot as the farmer jogged down the lane. He was undoubtedly wearing Fruitioner brown, but was so mud-caked, the color of his tunic and trousers were not immediately apparent. He looked like he had gotten into a wrestling match with a prize-fighting boar hog, and lost.

The last few wisps of cool morning mist rose from the little river off to the left. He quickened his pace when he caught a glimpse of clashing city neon colors through orchard boles ahead on the main road.

The peasant ran up to the three Kirifo on the road. “My good Sirs! Are you the Knights who say ‘Ni?’”

“Ni! Ni!” responded one of the knights.

“Oh good!” said the commoner, pointing back across his fields. “Please come kill the giant snake!”

The Knights followed the farmer to an open meadow where a tree-topping black serpent feasted on the remains of domestic livestock. When the snake saw the new prey, it coiled and struck, but was no match for Kirifo. One of the Knights ignited his dej and cut off the snake’s head.

The snake flopped down in the field, and the peasant rejoiced, thanking the Knights. The Knights, sensing radiation, decontaminated the snake carcass.

The peasant invited all his neighbors to eat fried snake, and they all got new snakeskin boots and coats. The local cobbler even made snakeskin boots for the Kirifo and the Magi. Some of the Magi came down to the village to have entire outfits made of snakeskin, paying the peasants well for them.

Everyone was happy, except Dije, even though she loved her new black snakeskin bodysuit. She wanted to know where the snake came from. “A giant snake. Who made it?”

“No one, my Lady, it is not illusion,” replied Tereboon, who was a Fruitioner and Dije’s best student of illusion. Even the Fruitioners and commons had taken to calling Dije by her title.

Dije turned to Kerruke. “Send someone to investigate the giant snake problem. I want to know where it came from, and if there are more of them.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

* * * *

For the first time, when Dije’s forces infiltrated the compound, they did not find themselves fighting human-looking beings or anonymous tank vehicles. This time, they saw the Rimer-u, without tanks or flying ships.