Book 3 - Ceremony

Book 3 - Ceremony by Glen Cook Page A

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Authors: Glen Cook
Tags: Fiction, Science-Fiction, Fantasy
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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 . . . ”
    “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 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,

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