Lanefenuu walked slowly, the gravity of the decisions that must be made weighing her down. Her sleeping chamber was small and dark and had been designed to be more like the interior of an uruketo than a room in a city. The light came from phosphorescent patches and there was a round, transparent port in one wall that looked out onto a cunningly lit design of a seascape. Lanefenuu seized up a water-fruit and half drained it, then settled back onto her resting board. There were two other boards for visitors, one against the rear wall, one near the entrance. Lanefenuu signed Vaintè to use the one at the entrance.

“Speak,” Lanefenuu ordered.

“I shall. I shall speak of the Daughters of Death. Do you know of them?”

Lanefenuu’s great sigh was not one of despair but of unhappy awareness. “I know of them. And from what Erafnais told me, I was sure they were her other passengers. And they are now free to spread the poison of their thoughts in warm Yebèisk. What are your feelings about these creatures?”

This simple question opened the well of hatred that Vaintè kept sealed within her, let loose the flood. She could not stop it or control it. Her body and her limbs writhed with all the shapes of disgust and loathing, while only inarticulate sounds emerged from her throat as her teeth ground together with enfoamed rage. It took long moments to get her body back under control and only when it was still and motionless again did she dare to speak.

“I find it hard to express my hatred of these creatures in any rational manner. I feel shame at my display of uncontrolled rage. But they are the reason I am here. I have come to tell you of their perversions, to warn you of their danger if you did not know already, to ask you if they and their mind-venom have reached sea-girt Ikhalmenets yet.”

“They have—and then they haven’t.” Although Lanefenuu sat solid and firm, there was more than a suggestion of dissolution and death in the way she spoke. “I learned of these creatures long ago. I determined then that their sickness would not spread here. Ikhalmenets is called sea-girt with a reason, for our young are born here and stay here and no fargi come from other cities. Our uruketo are our only contact with the world. And what they bring here I know of at once. Some of these Daughters of Death have come and have been returned without touching a foot on land. This can be done with those of no rank.”

“Yet a Yilanè goes where a Yilanè goes,” Vaintè said, wondering, for free passage was like the air one breathed, the water one swam in, and she could consider no other possibility.