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like beetles. Is that how the men think? I hope I’ll never know.
    I wait, here in the bell tower, until twilight rolls down from the mountains and the bowl of the sky above my head glows with light, and then fades. Below me, the lights start to come on,
smouldering at first. Sea-burn lamps, from the weed gathered from the shore, stinking of the sea. A few candles, rarer, made from the casings and the shit of the wax grubs that are found in the
cool places between the rocks. Light is rare here, but we don’t mind the dark. Those lamps won’t burn for long, as people do the last few night tasks, then go to bed. I wait until the
efreets spiral up from the temple chamber in a great dark cloud, flit shrieking past my head on their stretched bone wings, hunting insects. I wait until the air grows cool, and then I go back down
through the hushed temple, with that unhuman golden gaze upon my back, to my own small room, and there I sleep.
     
FOUR
P LANET : M USPELL (V ALI)
    When I next woke, it was to see Glyn Apt watching me from the other side of the cell field. The data stream was back and her birds were whirling around her head in a snowy
cloud.
    ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Glyn Apt said, politely enough but with an undertone that suggested it was an order, ‘about the selk.’
    ‘I’ve told you all I know,’ I said. I thought she was referring to the ones in Hetla.
    ‘I’m more interested in your theories,’ the Morrighanu said. ‘About the selk, and about what the vitki are doing with them.’
    I laughed. ‘You might almost persuade me that you care. I’m more interested in your own plans for the Rock. How about a trade?’
    It was Glyn Apt’s turn to laugh. ‘I’ve already strip-mined your brain, Skald girl. Not much of a choice, is it?’
    ‘You’ve raided my memories. I’m not sure you can get me to spill my thoughts so easily.’ Bravado, it’s true. The seith field can protect you from only so much and
I’d already had the seith ripped from me. Not during the rape on Nhem – I’d killed a man with it there. But later, during Gemaley’s attack on me, the seith had been no help
at all: the Mondhaith girl had torn it into shreds and tatters. Perhaps Frey had taught her vitki tricks. And perhaps not.
    ‘You killed my leader,’ I said. ‘Why should I help you any more than I have to?’
    Glyn Apt’s pointed black eyebrows went up. ‘Is that what you think?’
    I stared at her. ‘Who else?’
    ‘We gained access to this fortress when you were down in the hallway, not before. We’ve killed only one member of the Skald and she went down fighting. I can prove it to you, if you
like. But we didn’t kill Idhunn Regnesdottir.’
    ‘Then who the hell did?’
    ‘Tell me what you think about the selk,’ Glyn Apt repeated, ‘and I’ll tell you what I think about Idhunn’s murder. How about that for a trade?’
    ‘Very well,’ I said after a pause. ‘I believe that what the vitki are doing to the selk in those tanks is directly related to the war effort.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘To isolate the switch within their genes that causes their sentience to be seasonally switched off, and create a virus which mimics it, to infect those of us of the Reach. To render us
unsentient.’ If she was closer than she claimed to the vitki, then this wouldn’t be news. And if that was the case, then she must be aware that I already knew. If Glyn Apt didn’t
know – well, that might be knowledge she could use, and which might make her better disposed towards me. Some hope.
    There was a long silence. I could not read Glyn Apt’s expression. After a while, she said, ‘I read your report to your leader – that was what Frey was doing on Mondhile,
wasn’t he?’
    ‘Yes. He hadn’t got very far, luckily for us. I wasn’t long behind him. The people there undergo periods where they are unsentient, like the selk. They look human, but
sometimes their self-awareness, their consciousness, falls away and