A mark burns on its papery skin, stretched over the bone of its hip, sinuous and winding like clutching hands. Comfortable, like hot wind and the rasp of sand, and though the tower that rises out of the sands is not underground, it feels like home. Qarah's robes brush across the stone of the broad winding ramps that lead up and up. It pauses to peer curiously into the place where Conquest now lives. Not an island (Qarah itself has only faint and hazy memories of the islands), but still marked with the unmistakable stamp of the clan's tastes, ornate and formal. Qarah wrinkles its nose and moves on and up, secretly silently pleased that proud Conquest has been given the lowest floor.

Famine's floor is equally expansive, laid out in pleasing sections: training quarters for soldiers, catacombs for containing playthings, an inviting green oasis for growing things and a room with insect nests. This last makes Qarah's eyes shine with avid interest. It can attend to its beetles here. It may only be ranked a scavenger now, but someday, when it is wise enough, it will be a Sage. It will, and it will become part of the swarm. It must know its insects inside and out, first. It will be patient, and experiment, and learn.

The dens are partially populated, earthen walls concealing nests on nests on nests, the passages between comfortingly narrow. Some have lights within. Many are dark. Qarah steals a candle from a sconce and peers into darkened doorways, one by one. It doesn't know what exactly it is looking for. It will know when it finds it. And it does.

The room's ceiling is arched, its floor sandy; one end is walled off by glass, its resident vines more root than leaf, dormant. They will need care to flourish again. The other end contains an enclosed and nearly empty bathing pool, and above that enclosure, a platform close to the ceiling, accessed by narrow steps along one side. This is the correct room, and Qarah makes a quiet pleased sound and places its candle in the niche beside the entrance, and goes to climb up and arrange one of its shawls on the sleeping platform. It will need more rugs and more candles, and it will need to bring water for the vines, and it will need to construct a small beetle nest within the greenhouse. It has things to find or steal or trade and work to do, and it is happy. Being idle is only pleasant when one has alternatives to being idle.

It wonders, briefly, where the others of its acquaintance have nested, and whether it can find them, but this is a task for later.

---

It trades favors for scraps, finds for shawls, small tasks for pleasing shiny things, and each of its pieces it arranges carefully into place, meticulous. This is a work done over time, as most works worth doing are. Day by day and night by night its home becomes more of a home. From time to time it thinks of cool wet limestone or of a room with a croaking defiant toy, but not often.

It trades drudgework for four beetles, examines them carefully to be sure it has both sexes, and works its hours without complaining (part of the deal). In its nest, it sets up its tiny greenhouse as a habitat. Some of its kind grow vines. It prefers insects. It brings them food and water and nesting material, gets them accustomed to its Fear, and finally, when it has enough, it carefully transfers its oldest, tamest beetles to the hollow below its ribs. The familiar tickle and flutter are comforting, and it spends some time lying quiet in it nest and enjoying the sensation of insect feet.

The rhythms of life in the Tower settle slowly into their age-old patterns. Nothing here is new but the location, and that is as it should be.