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more the ghost beckoned. I followed the rust-red figure through the labyrinth, through tunnels swimming with
unknown forms: women with the heads of coyu and aspiths, creatures that might have been men. I ignored the weir-wards, careful not to touch them. Sometimes the ghost grew faint before me and I was
beginning to suspect why this should be. I could hear no signs of pursuit, but that did not mean that none were following. The scissor-women could be deadly in their silence.
    At last we came to a door and the warrior halted. In experiment, I closed down the array and she was no longer there. I put it on again, and she reappeared.
    ‘You’re no ghost,’ I said. She was speaking. There was still no sound, but the words flickered across the screen.
    She was not conversing. The words were lists of archived data: skeins of information scrolling down. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘What are you?’
    As I watched, I realized that I had not been entirely correct. She was not a ghost of a warrior at all. She was the ghost of the library itself, the cached archives that we had believed to be
destroyed, and that the Caud Matriarchy, in their ignorance, had not managed to find. And intuition told me that she hadn’t been pointing to the ruined data cases at all, but to the little
round sphere amongst them that still sat in my pocket.
    I knew what I had to do. I hastened past the warrior and pushed open the door, kicking and shoving until the ancient hinges gave way. I stumbled out into a frosty courtyard, by a frozen
fountain. The mansion before me was dark, but something shrieked out of the shadows: a weir-form, activated, of a woman with long teeth and trailing hair. She shot past my shoulder and disappeared.
I heard an alarm sounding inside the house. But the array had a broadcasting signal and that was all that mattered. I called through to Winterstrike, where it was already mid-morning, and
downloaded everything into the Matriarchy’s data store, along with a message. The warrior’s face did not change as she slowly vanished. When she was completely gone, I shut down the
array, hid it behind a piece of broken stone, and waited. The scissor-women were not long in finding me. They took me back to the Mote, to a different, smaller cell, and there I remained.

 
    THREE
Essegui Harn — Winterstrike
    My mother Alleghetta turned the colour of ice when I told her what I’d found, there in Shorn’s chamber on the morning after Ombre.
    ‘Gone? What do you mean, “gone”?’
    ‘Missing. Absent. Not there.’
    Tui’s missing?’ That was Canteley, wide-eyed from the doorway. Alleghetta spun like a serpent coiling, hissed, ‘Go away.’
    Canteley did as she was told; I heard her panicky footsteps pattering down the passage. If she’d overheard, then I doubted the news of my sister’s disappearance would remain a secret
for long among the servants: they had their own way of finding out about things, information channelled through the weir-wards and whispered along corridors. Secrets permeated the air of Calmaretto
like incense.
    ‘How?’ Alleghetta didn’t care about Shorn’s well-being, that much was plain. Bad enough my sister’s name had been taken away from her, bad enough she had to be
confined, but worse yet that she might have vanished somewhere into Winterstrike and then, I could see it in my mother’s face, there would be no controlling the situation.
    Next moment, Alleghetta confirmed these thoughts. ‘I’m to assume a position in the Matriarchy in less than two weeks! This could jeopardize everything.’ Her face was contorted.
It had been bad enough when Shorn had first been disgraced: Alleghetta had been expecting a call to the Matriarchy council then, and they’d not unnaturally postponed it. She’d spent the
last year worming her way back in, and now this had happened. I could almost sympathize with her. Almost. ‘How?’ she asked again.
    ‘I don’t know, Mother. I have no