"Stars beneath my feet," she whispered.
The darkship dropped through feeble clouds and turned out over a desert, an environment familiar to Marika only from photographs and tapes. There were no deserts in those parts of her own world that she knew. She realized that she had no broad, eyewitness familiarity with her native planet. She knew only a long, narrow band running from the Rift through the Ponath, Maksche, TelleRai, and on south to Ruhaack. She had seen perhaps a thousandth of her world. And now she was stalking the universe!
Toward the sun, Marika. Two points to your right. Can you feel it?
Yes.
This world felt nothing like her own. It felt incredibly empty, lonely. Her touch rang hollow here, except in one very well-defined direction, sharp as a knife stroke. She pushed the darkship forward, through a wind she found unnaturally warm even at that high altitude.
Barren mountains rose above the horizon. They were bizarre mountains, naked of vegetation, worn by the wind, each standing free in a forest of stone pillars. Some reached five hundred feet into the air, striated in shades of red and ocher, and each wore a skirt of detritus that climbed halfway up its thighs.
She found the cloister without further aid from her tutor. It lay atop one of the pillars. It was a rusty brown color, built of blocks of dried mud made on the banks of a trickle of a river running far below.
Sisters came into the central courtyard as the darkship slowed, hovered. They peered upward. Marika let the darkship settle.
"Welcome to Kim," her tutor said once the darkship had grounded. "We will rest for a day before we start back."
Marika stepped down onto alien rock, hot rock, under a sun too large and bright, and shuddered. She was here. There. Upon a starworld. The pup who had shivered in the chill wind licking the watchtower at the Degnan packstead and had stared at the nighttime sky, had achieved the impossible dream she had dreamed then.
She watched Grauel and Barlog dismount, their fur on end, their weapons gripped tightly, their eyes in unceasing flickering motion. They felt the strangeness too. They felt the absence of the background of unconscious touch that existed everywhere at home.
Marika met Redoriad silth whom she did not remember five minutes later. They asked questions about the homeworld, for their cloister was off the main starpaths and they had little news. She and the Mistress answered, but she paid little heed to them or what she said. She was unable to get over the fact that she had done what she had done.
Marika did not sleep much during the time set aside for resting. Her curiosity was too strong once the impact of achievement began to lessen. She spent hours learning everything she could about the world.
That was not much. The silth had little commerce with the natives, who were very primitive and had nothing to offer in trade. The Redoriad maintained the cloister on Kim only as a means of enforcing their claim upon the planet and as an intermediate base from which further starworlds could be explored and exploited.
II The homeworld flashed into .being. Very good, Marika's tutor sent. Almost perfect this time. You will do, Marika. You will do. You need to study your stars now, so that you can recognize them from any distance and angle. Then you will be ready to roam on your own.
Do darkships get lost?
Sometimes. Not so much anymore. The sisterhoods do not do much exploring these days.
Why not?
In the early days the voidfarers visited more than ten thousand stars and found little worth finding. There is little out there. Certainly little that can be profitably exploited. Nevertheless, in ten thousand stars there has been enough found that the few silth with the star-faring skill are kept quite busy. It has been a generation since anyone has had time for exploration.
Except for the Serke.
Perhaps. They found something, certainly.
Did they not, though.
Marika had her next step already planned. A thorough search of everything salvaged from the Serke before their disbandment. Somewhere in the records there might be a clue-though no one had yet found it.
The homeworld swelled, and with it a feeling of welcome, of returning to where she properly belonged, as the unconscious touch-world of all meth gradually enfolded her. She looked back at Grauel and Barlog, but could not see their faces. She sent a tendril of touch drifting over them, found them relaxed, pleased, almost comfortable. Out on the world called Kim they had been nervous and irritable all the time.
The darkship settled into the court of the new Redoriad cloister. There Marika's tutor immediately took her leave, heading for Mistress's quarters without a backward glance. As she rose to go on to her own cloister Marika wondered what new rumors would be spread about her now.
Hardly had she settled into the Reugge landing court, dismounted, formally thanked her bath, and begun soothing Grauel and Barlong, when Edzeka of Skiljansrode appeared. She hastened toward Marika with a portentious step.
"Something is wrong," Grauel said. "Bad wrong. Else she would not have come out of her den."
The joy had gone out of Barlog too. "I have an awful feeling, Marika. I do not think I want to hear this. Whatever it may be."
"Then go. It is time you took a ceremonial meal with the voctors anyway. Isn't it?"
Both huntresses gave her looks that suggested she was mad for saying they should leave her.
"Edzeka. What are you doing here? You look grim."
"A nasty problem, mistress. Very nasty."
Marika dismissed everyone else who had gathered around, who took it as a slight. She did not care. Never would she let herself fall into the manners and stylized forms of silth relationships. "Trouble at Skiljansrode?"
"Major, perhaps, mistress. The prisoner Kublin has escaped."
Marika did not permit her feelings to show. "How did this happen? And how long ago?"
"Shortly after you departed for the stars. Or maybe just before. It is not absolutely certain yet. There is some evidence he chose that moment to move specifically because you would be out of touch. There were copies of intercepts at his workstation mentioning you going out. We have not pinned down his time of escape because it came during his off-hours. When not at his workstation he remained in his cell, even if offered an opportunity to move around."
"I see. How did he manage it? Who was lax?"
"No one was lax, insofar as I could determine. He did it with the talent. There is no other explanation that will accommodate the facts, though not all of them are clear yet. Several voctors were injured or slain, and their injuries are all of the sort caused by one who wields the talent. It was the failure of those voctors to report that alerted us to the fact that something unusual was happening. We first thought someone had gotten in from outside, it making no sense for a prisoner to attempt escape. It was a while before someone noticed he was absent-by which time we did at least know that no one had come in from outside."
"A search is being made, of course?"
"Every darkship we could lift. I myself came here aboard a saddleship so no bath would be wasted on the carrying of a message. I thought you would want this reported directly, without it passing through the paws of anyone else."
"Thank you. That was thoughtful. How is the search progressing?"
"I do not know. I have been here awaiting you. Not well, though, I fear, else someone would have followed to tell me he has been recaptured."
"He will be difficult to take if he has been honing wehrlen's skills all this time." Already Marika had begun consulting a mental map. These days Skiljansrode lay far up in frozen country. It would be a long walk for anyone, getting from that packfast to country where one could live off the land. Almost impossible even for a skilled nomad huntress accustomed to the ways of the frozen wastes. Due south would be both the shortest and easiest route.