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novice Marika always jumped to the attack? She hasn't been doing that since
she got older. That antique factor in your quarters that time was right."
"You're so old now? About to turn into one of your Ponath Wise meth? Eh? Eh? I
know. You attacked even when you didn't know what you were attacking. Yes, I
remember that Marika very well. She was a fool, sometimes. I think I like
today's Marika a little better."
"Fool. That Marika made things happen. This Marika just sits around reacting.
Mainly because she has been too cowardly to take what she knows to be
necessary next steps. Before Kiljar finally gives up dying and actually yields
up her spirit to the All-which may not happen for another century, the rate
she's going, always going to die tomorrow and going on for another year-and
maybe leaves the Redoriad Community in the paws of somebody less sympathetic,
I'm going to learn the ways of the gulf and the Up-and-Over. I am determined.
I will defeat fear, learn, then go hunt those who would destroy us."
"Marika, please understand when I say I don't approve. I don't think... "
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"I know, Bagnel. And I appreciate your concern." Marika close her eyes. For
several minutes she did nothing but relax, comforted by his presence. Much of
their friendship remained tacit, undefined by confining words.
"Bagnel?"
"Yes?"
"You have been a good friend. The thing we mean and wish when we use the word
friend. The best... Oh, damn!"
Bagnel was startled. Marika so seldom used words like damn. "What is the
matter?"
"There are things I want to say. That should be said, for the record. But I
can't pry out the right words. Maybe they don't even exist in the common
speech."
"Then don't try to say them. Don't look for them. I know. Just relax. You need
rest more than talk."
"No. This is important. Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to
make them concrete. Like in some of our silth magics, where the name must be
named before the witchery can be." She paused a time again. "If we had been
anyone but the meth we are, Bagnel. Anyone but silth and brethren, southerner
and packsteader... "
He touched her paw lightly, diffidently, actually squeezed it gently for a
second, then hastened out of the cubicle.
Marika stared at the cold white door. Softly, she said, "They might have made
legends." She could recall him having touched her only once before, for all
they had been in close contact for so many years. "We will have to make them
for them, for they will never be."
He had dared, at last. And fled.
One did not touch silth.
She had touched him once, before she had known him, atop a snowy ridge as they
stared down upon the nomad-gutted remains of the place he had called home. It
had been his responsibility to defend that place, and he had failed.
Silth did not show fear. Ponath huntresses did not show fear. Neither did
either weep.
Marika wept.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I
For the first time in nearly six years Marika put the mirror project out of
mind-though she debated with herself many days before admitting that it could
get on without her there trying to run everything herself.
Kiljar allowed her to draft whomever she wanted from among the Redoriad
dark-faring Mistresses of the Ship. She took the best as her instructresses.
She went up into the dark, out into the deep, and drove herself to exhaustion
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again and again, learning the Up-and-Over. She pushed herself as relentlessly
as she had when she was younger, and she regained some of the enthusiasm that
she had had then. She forced herself to learn the guile and craft that were
needed to placate or elude the great darkness lurking at the edge of the
system, waiting for no one knew what, filled with a hunger so alien it was
impossible to comprehend.
"While we perceive them in countless ways they are all much the same, what you
call ghosts," Kiljar said. Not once in all her years had Marika encountered
another silth who called them that. Most called them those-who-dwell. A very
few did not believe in them at all. "The farther from the world's surface you
get, the larger they are, and fewer, till out in the gulf you find the rare
black giants.
"Most of us do not worry about what they are or why. We just use them. But
there are those sisters, seekers after knowledge, who have been debating about
them for centuries. One popular hypothesis about their distribution says that
they feed upon one another, like the creatures of the sea, larger upon
smaller, and the largest are least able to withstand the distortion of space
that occurs near large masses. The perceived size gradient does run right down
to the surface here, each ghost seemingly pushing as close as it can. The
feeding theory would say for safety from larger ghosts and because if they get
closer they might catch something smaller.
"I do not accept an ecological-feeding hypothesis myself. I have been silth
more years than you care to imagine and never have I witnessed one ghost
preying upon another. And I know for a fact that the gradient, while generally
true, will not hold up to close examination. Among the several thousand forms
ghosts take there are those who refuse to follow theory. Even out near the big
black there are several different small forms. I have seen them. Ones no
bigger than my paw flashed about in swarms of millions.
"The hypothesis of our age, perhaps growing out of brethren disbelief in
anything not subject to measurement and physical analysis, not yet widely
accepted but becoming more so, is that they do not exist at all. This
hypothesis says they exist only mentally, as reflections of silth minds trying
to impose patterns upon the universe. The hypothesis makes of them nothing
more than symbols by which powers entirely of the mind are able to manipulate
the universe. This hypothesis would have it that silth trained that way could
do everything the rest of us can without ever summoning those-who-dwell."
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