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aloud.
    ‘Nothing.’
    She grunted and pushed me on, but as they took me towards the vehicle I stole a glance back and saw that the ghost was gone. It occurred to me that it might have led the scissor-women to me, but
then in the library, it had helped me, or had seemed to. I did not understand why it should do either.
    They took me to the Mote, the Matriarchy’s own prison, rather than the city catacombs. This suggested they might have identified me, if not as Hestia Mar, then as a
citizen of Winterstrike. That they suspected me of something major was evident by the location, and the immediacy and nature of the questioning. Even Caud had abandoned the art of direct torture,
but they had other means of persuasion: haunt-tech and drugs. They tried the haunt-tech on me first.
    ‘You’ll be placed in this room,’ the doctor on duty explained to me. At first, with a shock, I thought I was looking at Gennera. This woman looked more like a majike than a
proper doctor: the tell-tale symbols hanging from her pierced ear lobes, the faded mark of a tattoo visible underneath her greying hairline. Black science, for a world in which what had once been
superstition was now fact, and much of that illegal. Even Caud had standards, however often they’d violated them. But then again, Winterstrike was supposed to have standards, too.
    ‘The blacklight matrix covers the walls. There is no way out. When you are ready to talk, which will be soon, squeeze this alarm.’ She handed me a small soft black cube and the
scissor-women pushed me through the door.
    The Matriarchies keep a tight hold on the more esoteric uses of haunt-tech, but all will be familiar with the everyday manifestations: the locks and soul-scans, the weir-wards which guard so
many public buildings and private mansions. This chamber was like a magnified version of those wards, conjuring spirits from the psycho-geographical strata of the city’s consciousness,
bringing them out of the walls and up through the floor. I saw dreadful things: a woman with thorns that pierced every inch of her flesh, a procession of bloated drowned children, vulpen and awts
from the high hills with glistening eyes and splinter teeth. But the Matriarchy of Caud was accustomed to breaking peasants. Quite apart from my natural abilities and the training I’d had to
develop them, I’d grown up in a weir-warded house, filled with things that swam through the air of my chamber at night. I was used to the nauseous burn that accompanied their presence, the
sick shiver of the skin. This was worse, but it was only a question of degree. Fighting the urge to vomit, I knelt in a corner, in a meditational control posture, placed the alarm cube in front of
me, and looked only at it.
    After an hour, my keepers evidently grew tired of waiting. The blacklight matrix sizzled off with a fierce electric odour, like the air after a thunderstorm. From the corner of my eye, I saw
things wink out of sight. I was taken from the chamber and placed in a cell. Next, they tried the drugs.
    From their point of view, this may have been more successful. I can’t say, since I remember little of what I may or may not have said. That aspect of haunt-tech is supposed to terrify the
credulous into speaking the truth. The mind-drugs of the Matriarchies are crude and bludgeon one into confession, but those confessions are all too frequently unreliable, built on fantasies
conjured from the psyche’s depths. When the drug they had given me began to ebb, I found my captors staring at me, their expressions unreadable. Two were clearly Matriarchy personnel, wearing
the jade-and-black of Caud. The scissor-women hovered by the door.
    ‘Put her under,’ one of the Matriarchs said. She sounded disgusted. I started to protest, more for the form of it than anything else, and they touched a sleep-pen to my throat. The
room fell away around me.
    When I came to my senses again, everything was quiet and the lights had been