HOW MANY TIMES, ON that previous journey, had I stood just there - in the Ascalon's narrow cubiculum, fugue creches lining either wall - and just looked at her?  How many hours?  How many days in those nineteen years?

Only then most of Oliva's men slept alongside her, or across and further down.  Twenty-five creche chambers lined either wall, each bank canted back from the central aisle so that the sleepers half-stood, half-reclined in violet fluid.  More than half the creches stood empty, the white rest mats cleaned, clamps and hoses at the ready.  Oliva's men had all clustered toward the near end of that long, narrow hall, side by side and ready to cycle in and out when the time came for them to change shifts every two years.

They'd let her stand alone - as she had before - in the farthest corner on the port side, nearest the bulkhead and the hatch that led through to the upper airlock to the small ship's dorsal hull.

I would join her, soon.  Just another week or so, a month at most.  I wanted to set my thoughts in order, to prepare myself for all that was to come.  For Nessus.  For the Magnarch.  For my gilded cage at Maddalo House again.

She looked so peaceful, tethered in her creche.  Her long, dark hair floated about her face like a shadow, like a shroud.  How black the tattooed lines of her clan saylash stood out against her pale flesh, sharp and cold!  Almost dead she seemed - as indeed she was - preserved not at all unlike the eyes and heart and brain of my grandmother in their canopic jars.  Reaching up, I used the warm blade of my hand to smear away the frost that so obscured her, revealing her more clearly, and found myself remembering another voyage.

From Berenlike, To Edda, long ago, with Urbaine's worm chewing through her brain.

My heart had lived in my mouth that whole voyage.  Those long years, The Demarchists had saved her life, but they could not heal her, could not banish the daimon that haunted her mind.  I remembered how they had studied her under ice, then awakened her.  How her left hand tried to strangle her, to put out her eyes.  How she had bitten her tongue, and scratched her face almost so badly as Dorayaica scratched mine.

Always her left hand, the hand that bore the markings of her tribe.

The left hand.  Darkness.  Damnation.  Sinister, in the Latin.

But they had saved her, those doctors of the Demarchy.  They had given her back control of herself.  They could not stop her having the impulses Urbaine's worm had put in her, but they'd made it where she could stop them.  Then they'd taken her from me, locked her in a prison they called a hospital.  For their safety, they said.  For fear her daimon would infest them.  In the end, they had threatened to kill her.  Reformatting, they'd called it - they never called anything by its right name, like the Lothrians - always sanitized it, whited over horror as lime whitened the tombs of the patricians on the hills beyond Meidua.

Still I remembered seeing her again, when Crim and I had found her in that Tavrosi prison, her white smock stained red, her left hand clutching the knife she had wielded to slay her jailers.

She had freed herself before we could reach her.

My reflection beside her face in the glass smiled to recall.

"Karras told me I'd find you in here," came the by-then-familiar, almost lilting voice, and looking up I saw the figure of Hector Oliva emerge through the portal at the far end of the long hall.  We'd been underway for just about a month by then.  Valka had gone under only a handful of days before, and I was myself not long for the waking world.  I had lingered only to take the time to draft reflections on our time on Colchis, to prepare for my return to Nessus, and to familiarize myself with the new wrist-terminal I'd purchased from a vendor on Front Street our last night in Aea.  Valka and I had enjoyed a private dinner on the garden terrace above a restaurant in the city - under Dorr's watchful guards, naturally - and after, we'd been permitted to walk the streets with sonic measure of anonymity, and I had at last replaced the terminal I had lost with my capture on Padmurak.

When I did not reply, Oliva said, "Are you ready to go under the ice?"