Zufa Cenva

Zufa Cenva, who died in 164 BG, was the long-standing Supreme Sorceress of the Sorceresses of Rossak and one of the most powerful telekinetics her order ever produced. A stern and uncompromising woman, she devoted her life to the war against Omnius and the thinking machines during the Butlerian Jihad, and bound the Sorceresses ever more tightly to the cause of the human worlds. She was the mother of the brilliant Norma Cenva and of Ticia Cenva.

Rise to Supreme Sorceress#

Zufa rose to the rank of Supreme Sorceress at a relatively young age, owing in no small part to telekinetic abilities that were formidable even among the women of Rossak. Those powers, paired with an intense hatred of the thinking machines, drove her to sustain the Sorceresses' fervent involvement in the League of Nobles and their protracted war against Omnius. She regarded the conflict as the only matter of true consequence and held insignificant nearly everything else, including her own personal relationships.

War against the thinking machines#

Around the time of the Battle of Zimia, the Sorceresses developed a form of psychic attack capable of killing any brain, including the disembodied minds of the cymeks. The weapon filled a gap left by the Scrambler web, which harmed only gelcircuitry rather than living cognition. Zufa trained young Sorceresses to throw themselves into battle as weapons, obliterating cymeks together with themselves in the discharge. Having produced no heir she considered useful, she came to regard these apprentices as her own daughters, and she described herself as dying each time one of them was killed.

Family and the breeding program#

Zufa had little early success in producing the desirable female heir her order prized. Her first child to survive was Norma, who possessed extraordinary intelligence but was born stunted and physically unlike the Rossak ideal. A staunch supporter of the Sorceresses' breeding program, Zufa continued to seek out only male partners with exemplary genetics in hope of producing a daughter. Her most famous partner, though not her first, was the entrepreneur Aurelius Venport, with whom she tried for several years to conceive; for reasons never determined, their children did not survive. The failures, combined with Zufa's cold temperament, gradually eroded their relationship, though Venport maintained an unspoken affection for her while she treated him with bitterness as a frivolous man.

Zufa treated Norma with the same disdain, viewing her appearance and her lack of telekinetic power as an embarrassment, and the girl was shunned and punished in turn. Norma's escape came through her closeness to Venport, who quietly approved and paid for her passage to Poritrin after Zufa refused Tio Holtzman's invitation. Even as Norma became central to numerous critical inventions, Zufa still saw her as a failure. Her opinion changed only after Norma was biologically transformed during her capture by the Titan Xerxes, and Norma's later marriage to Venport, though it first caused Zufa confusion and anger, eventually brought mother and daughter closer than they had ever been.

The conception of Ticia#

After meeting the League's Grand Patriarch, Iblis Ginjo, Zufa became convinced of his latent genetic abilities and suspected that his ancestry lay not on Earth but on Rossak. Seeing him as an ideal mate, she conceived a child by him whom she named Ticia. Ticia would in time succeed her as leader of the Sorceresses.

Death near Ginaz#

While returning with Venport from Salusa Secundus, their vessel was intercepted by Beowulf and other neo-cymek rogues. The ancient cymek Hecate moved her asteroid ship to swallow their craft in order to protect them, but Zufa, believing the encounter hostile, destroyed all three beings with a massive discharge of mental energy. Many more perished when Hecate's vessel plummeted into the nearby planet of Ginaz.