The residence of Arilesperas Strigan was barely visible from the air, only a circle slightly more than thirty-five meters in diameter, within which the snowmoss was perceptibly lighter and thinner. I brought the flier down outside the circle and waited a moment to assess the situation. From this angle it was obvious there were buildings, two of them, snow-covered mounds. It might have been an unoccupied herding camp, but if I could trust my information, it was not. There was no sign of a wall or fence, but I would make no assumptions about her security.
After consideration, I opened the hatch on the flier and got out, pulling Seivarden out behind me. We walked slowly to the line where the snow changed, Seivarden stopping when I stopped. She stood incuriously, staring straight ahead.
Beyond this I had not been able to plan. “Strigan!” I called, and waited, but no answer came. I left Seivarden standing where she was and walked the circumference of the circle. The entrances of the two snow-mounded buildings seemed oddly shadowed, and I stopped, and looked again.
Both hung open, dark beyond. Buildings like these would probably have double-doored entrances—like an airlock, to keep warm air inside—but I didn’t think anyone would leave either door hanging ajar.
Either Strigan had security in place, or she did not. I stepped over the line, into the circle. Nothing happened.
The doors were open, both inner and outer, and there were no lights. One of the buildings was just as cold inside as out. I presumed that when I found a light I would discover it was used for storage, filled with tools and sealed packages of food and fuel. The other was two degrees Celsius inside—I guessed that it had been heated until relatively recently. Living quarters, evidently. “Strigan!” I called into the darkness, but the way my voice echoed back told me the building was likely unoccupied.
Outside again, I found the marks where her flier had sat. She was gone, then, and the open doors and the darkness were a message for whoever would come. For me. I had no means to discover where she’d gone. I looked up at the empty sky, and down again at the imprint of the flier. I stood there a while, looking at that empty space.
When I returned to Seivarden, I found she’d lain down in the green-stained snow and gone to sleep.
In the back of the flier I found a lantern, a stove, a tent, and some bedding. I took the lantern into the building I presumed was living quarters and switched it on.
Wide, light-colored rugs covered the floor, and woven hangings the walls; these were blue and orange and an eye-hurting green. Low benches, backless, with cushions, lined the room. Beyond benches and the bright hangings, there was little else. A game board with counters, but the board had a pattern of holes I didn’t recognize, and I didn’t understand the distribution of the counters among the holes. I wondered whom Strigan played with. Perhaps the board was only decorative. It was finely carved, and the pieces brightly colored.
A wooden box sat on a table in a corner, a long oval with a carved, pierced lid and three strings stretched tight across. The wood was pale gold, with a waving, curling grain. The holes cut in the flat top were as uneven and intricate as the grain of the wood. It was a beautiful thing. I plucked a string and it rang softly.
Doors led to kitchen, bath, sleeping quarters, and what was obviously a small infirmary. I opened a cabinet door and found a neat stack of correctives. Each drawer I pulled out revealed instruments and medicines. She might have gone to a herding camp to tend to some emergency. But the lights and the heat being off, and those doors left open, argued otherwise.
Barring a miracle, it was the end of nineteen years of planning and effort.
The house controls were behind a panel in the kitchen. I found the power supply in place, hooked it back in, and switched on the heat and the lights. Then I went out and got Seivarden, and dragged her into the house.
I made a pallet of blankets I found in Strigan’s bedroom, then stripped Seivarden and laid her on it, and covered her with more blankets. She didn’t wake, and I used the time to search the house more thoroughly.
The cabinets held plenty of food. A cup sat on a counter, a thin layer of greenish liquid glazing the bottom. Next to it sat a plain white bowl holding the last bits of a hunk of hard bread disintegrating into ice-rimmed water. It looked as though Strigan had left without cleaning up after a meal, leaving nearly everything behind—food, medical supplies. I checked the bedroom, found warm clothes in good repair. She had left on short notice, not taking much.
She knew what she had. Of course she did—that was why she’d fled to begin with. If she was not stupid—and I was quite certain she was not—she had gone the moment she realized what I was, and would keep going until she was as far from me as she could get.
But where would that be? If I represented the power of the Radch, and had found her even here, so distant from both Radch space and her own home, where could she go that they would not ultimately find her? Surely she would realize that. But what other course would be open to her?