Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  LIZ WILLIAMS

  WINTERSTRIKE

  TOR

  To Veronica, Ken and Trevor

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ONE

  Essegui Harn — Winterstrike

  The coldest night of the year in Winterstrike is always the night on which the festival of Ombre is held, or Wintervale if you are young and disdain the older dialects. The Matriarchy knows how to predict these things, how to read the subtle signatures in snowdrift and the length of icicles, the messages formed by the freezing of the breath upon the air, the crackling of the icy skin of the great canals.

  In the centre of Winterstrike, Mars’s first city, in the middle of the meteorite crater that gave the city its name, stands the fortress: a mass of vitrified stone striped as white as a bone and as red as a still-beating heart. It has a shattered turret, from some long-forgotten war, in which verminous birds fight and nest and cry. And on one particular night, at the top of the fortress and on the eve of war, at the summit of another tower so high that from it one could see out across the basalt walls to the dim, shimmering slopes of Olympus, stood a woman. She was surrounded by four glass windows: crimson, white, black, and transparent. She stood before a brazier and beneath a bell. She wore triple gloves: a thin membrane of weedworm silk, then the tanned leather of vulpen skin, then a pair of woollen mittens knitted by a grandmother. In spite of this, and the spitting coals of the brazier, her hands were still cold.

  When the night froze below a certain point, and the signs were relayed to her by antiscribe, she turned, nearly overthrowing the brazier in her haste, and rushed to the windows. She threw them open, letting in a great gust of cold air which made the coals crackle, then struck the bell three times. It rang out, fracturing the chill. The woman ran down the stairs to the warm depths of the tower before the echo had even died. One by one, the coals hissed into silence as the bell note faded.

  This all took place shortly before dawn, in the blue light before the sun rose. The woman was myself, Essegui Harn. The day was that of Ombre. And all Winterstrike could hear the bell, except for one woman, and except for one woman, all Winterstrike answered. I knew that across the city, women were throwing aside their counterpanes, rushing to the basins to wash, and then, still dressed in their nightclothes, running upstairs to the attics of mansions, or to the cellars of community shacks, to retrieve costumes forgotten over the course of the previous year, all six hundred and eighty-seven days of it. From chests and boxes, they would pull masks depicting the creatures of the Age of Children and the Lost Epoch, the long muzzles of cenulae, or the narrow, inhuman faces of demotheas and gaezelles. They would try them on, laughing at one another, then fall silent as they stood, masked, their concealed faces suddenly foolish above the thick nightdresses.

  By Second Hour the robes, too, would have been retrieved: confections of lace and metal, leather and stiffened velvet, scarlet and ochre and amethyst, sea-green and indigo and pearl. Above these, the masks would no longer appear silly or sinister, but natural and full of grace. Then the women of Winterstrike would set them aside and, frantic throughout the short day, make sweet dumplings and fire-cakes for the night ahead, impatient for the fall of twilight.

  After my stint in the bell tower I was in equal haste, rushing back to the mansion of Calmaretto, which lay not far from the fortress. I hurried through the streets, pounding snow into ice under my boots and churning it into powder against the swing of the hem of my heavy coat. I was thinking of the festival, of my new friend Vanity, whom I was planning to seduce tonight (or be seduced by, even more hopefully), of my cousin Hestia, vanished from the city a week ago and rumoured to have gone to Caud.

  I didn’t like to think about that. Caud was gearing up for war, over yet another territorial matter of a disputed sacred site, and given Hestia’s occupation – a matter of some subtle conjecture – that city wasn’t a safe place for her to be.

  But thinking about Hestia was still easier than thinking about my sister. It was difficult not to think of her, especially when the walls of Calmaretto rose up before me: black weedwood, glittering with silver and frost. The tall arched windows were covered by heavy drapes, ostensibly to keep out the cold but in reality to conceal the house from the eyes of the peasantry, which, to my mothers Alleghetta and Thea, meant most people.

  When I reached the main entrance I did not hesitate but put my eye to the haunt-lock. The scanner glowed with blacklight, an eldritch sparkle, as the lock read my soul-engrams through the hollow of my eye. The door opened. I stepped through into a maelstrom of activity.

  Both my mothers were shouting at one another, at the servants, and then, without even a pause for breath, at me.

  ‘. . . there is not enough sugar and only a little haemomon? Why didn’t you order more?’

  ‘. . . Canteley’s best dress has a stain, she refuses to wear it even under her robes . . .’

  ‘And Jhule cannot find the tracing-spoon anywhere!’

  Thea started to wheeze and put a plump hand to her heart. Alleghetta’s proud face became even frostier with contempt. She’d had her hair done for Ombre and it laced her head in a series of small, tight curls as if she was wearing a helmet; Thea, on the other hand, had chosen a loose, piled-up style which did not do a great deal for a round countenance. Her hair was starting to descend.

  ‘Do stop fussing, Thea!’ Alleghetta snapped.

  Thea’s mouth turned down, heralding tears.

  It was always the same. My head started to pound. I said, ‘What about Shorn?’

  Immediate, tense silence. My mothers stared at me, then at one another.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘You know very well,’ I said. I was speaking too loud, too fast, despite my best efforts, but I couldn’t help it. ‘You have to let her out. Tonight.’

  Upstairs, in the windowless heart of Calmaretto, my sister Shorn Harn sat alone. Her birth name was Leretui, but she had been told that this was no longer her name: she had been shorn of it, and this verb was the only name she could take from now on. She would not know that it was the day of Ombre, because the sound of the bell rung by her sister, myself, had not penetrated the walls of Calmaretto. Nor would she be able to witness the haste and bustle outside in the street, the skaters skimming up and down Canal-the-Less, because she was not allowed to set foot in a room which had windows. She was permitted books, but not writing materials or an antiscribe, in case she found a way to send a message.

  At this thought, my mouth gave a derisive twist. There would be little point in composing a message, since the one for whom it would be intended could not read, could not be taught to read, and was unlikely ever to communicate with someone literate. But my mothers would not countenance even the slightest possibility that a message might be sent, and thus Shorn was no longer allowed to see our little sister Canteley, as Canteley was young
enough to view the scenario as romantic, no matter how many times our mothers had impressed upon her that Shorn was both transgressor and pervert. Shorn was occasionally permitted to see me, since I pretended to be of a similar mind to our mothers.

  I usually only put my head around the door once a week, though Shorn found it difficult to estimate the days. Even so, I think she was surprised when the door hissed open and I strode through, snow falling in flakes from my outdoor coat.

  ‘Essegui?’ Shorn turned her head away and did not rise. She looked older than she was: not a surprise, given what had befallen her. She could have been my own age, a full five years older. Her long dark hair, a clone-mark of Alleghetta and Calmaretto, streamed down her back and I could tell that she hadn’t bothered to brush it for several days; it had knotted into locks. For a moment, I longed to sit behind her and comb it through, as we’d done when we were children. Her face, so like my own and those of Alleghetta, Hestia and Canteley, stretched white over its bones like snow on broken ground. Blue shadows had pooled in the hollows of her eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ Shorn said, dully.

  ‘Ombre falls today. I’ve told our mothers that you are to be allowed out, when the gongs ring for dusk.’

  Shorn’s mouth fell open to reveal her silver-latticed teeth, an affectation Alleghetta had insisted she adopt when our mothers were still trying to marry her off. She stared at me.

  ‘Outside? And they agreed?’

  ‘They hate it. But it is your last remaining legal right, ancient custom, and they have no choice.’

  Shorn said, slowly and disbelieving, ‘I am to be allowed out? In the mask-and-gown? Tonight? This is mockery.’

  I leaned forward, hands on either arm of the chair, and spoke clearly. ‘Mockery maybe. Understand this. If you use the mask-and-gown as a cover to flee the city, our mothers will go to the Matriarchy and ask for a squadron of scissor-women to hunt you down. The city will, of course, be closed from dusk onward, and they will know if anyone tries to leave. Or if anything tries to get in.’

  ‘I will not try to leave,’ Shorn whispered. ‘Where would I go?’

  ‘To that which brought you to this plight?’

  Shorn gave a small, hard laugh like a bark. ‘I repeat, where indeed?’

  ‘True enough. To the mountains, in winter? You would die of cold before you got halfway across the Demnotian Plain. And the mountains themselves, what then? Men-remnants would tear you to pieces and devour you before you had a chance to find it.’ I grimaced. ‘Perhaps it would even be one of them. I’ve heard that all women look alike to them. And that’s without taking into account factions from Caud. We could go to war very soon, you know. Everyone thinks so.’

  War with Caud?’ Shorn looked disdainful. ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘Some dispute over Mardian Hill. They were holding talks, but it just escalated. If war does break out, you’d be best off here in Winterstrike, in spite of—’ In spite of everything.

  Shorn lowered her gaze. There was a moment’s silence. ‘I should reassure you, then, that I will not try to escape.’

  There is a mask waiting for you,’ I told her, then turned on my heel and went through the door, leaving it open behind me.

  I did not expect her to leave the chamber immediately. She must have been dreaming about this day ever since the evening of her imprisonment, six hundred and eighty-seven days ago. Ombre then was like every other festival for her, a chance for fun and celebration. She did not expect to meet what stepped from under the bridge of the Curve.

  The mask was one that I remembered from our childhood: the round, bland face of a crater cat. It was a child’s mask: for the last few years, Canteley had been wearing it. Now, however, it was the only one left in the box. I watched as Shorn pulled the gown – a muted grey-and-black brocade – over her head and then, slowly, put the mask on. The cat beamed at her from the mirror; she looked like an overgrown child, no longer the woman they called the Malcontent. She twitched aside the fold of a sash, but the box was empty. There was no sign of the other mask: the long, narrow head, the colour of polished bone, mosaiced with cracks and fractures. She searched through the draperies.

  ‘You won’t find it,’ I told her. She did not reply.

  As we turned to go downstairs, a gaezelle danced in through the door.

  ‘Tui, is that you? Is it?’ The gaezelle flung her arms around Shorn and held on tight.

  ‘It’s me. But don’t call me Tui.’ It sounded as though she was spitting. ‘That’s not my name any more.’

  Canteley had grown over the last months: she was almost as tall as me now, though her voice was still as shrill as a water-whistle. I felt as though an icy mass had lodged deep in my throat.

  ‘Are you coming? Essegui said our mothers are letting you out for the Wintervale. Is it true? You should run away, Tui. You should try to find him.’ This last in a whisper.

  ‘I won’t be going away, Canteley,’ Shorn said, but as she said this she looked to me as though the walls were falling in on her.

  ‘Is it true what they say, that the vulpen steal your soul? That they put you in a trance so that you can’t think of anything else?’

  ‘No, that isn’t true,’ Shorn said. She took our little sister’s hand and led her through the door.

  I won’t be going away. But better the devouring mountains than the windowless room, I thought. Better the quick, clean cold. I should never have let our mothers shut her away, but Shorn herself had been too dazed, with grief and bewilderment and incomprehension, to protest. Now, she’d had time to think, to become as clear as ice, and I needed to know what she was planning.

  ‘Canteley, I’ll talk to you later.’ She gave our sister a swift hug. ‘Go downstairs. I’ll join you in a minute.’

  I lingered behind the door, watching through a crack. Once Canteley had gone, Shorn took a pair of skates from the wall and stood looking down at the long, curved blades. Then, holding the skates by their laces, she followed our sister down the stairs, and I followed her.

  They were all standing in the doorway, staring upward: Canteley and our mothers. Of the two, Thea was by far the shorter, and so it must have been Alleghetta behind the demothea’s mask, its white, pointed face wearing a simpering smile. Shorn looked from one to the other before descending. No one spoke. As Shorn reached the last step, our mothers turned and pushed open the double doors that led out onto the steps to the street. Blacklight crackled, a weir-ward shrieked, and winter filled the hallway. The gongs rang out in the twilight, filling the street and the house with sound. It must have seemed very loud to Shorn, used as she had become to the cushioned silence of the windowless room.

  The mothers grasped Canteley firmly by each hand and pulled her through the doors, so decisively that I was the only one who had time to turn and see a flickering twitch of Thea’s head in the direction of Shorn. As for myself, I was wearing a cenulae’s mask: a fragile countenance, painted in green. When I stepped out, I saw the bland cat face smiling back at me. Then Shorn ran, stumbling on unaccustomed feet across the black-and-white mosaic of the hall floor, through the scents of snow and fire-cake and polish, out through the doors and into the street to stand uncertainly in the snow.

  Canal-the-Less, on which Calmaretto stood, was frozen solid and filled with skaters bearing snow-lamps. They wove in and out of one another with insect skill. Shorn, breath coming in short gasps in the cold, was evidently tempted to take the round cat’s face from her own and fling it into the drifts, but she did not, though I saw her hands trembling around her face. She tied on the skates with quivering fingers and lowered herself over the bank of the canal onto the ice. Then she was off winging down Canal-the-Less towards the culvert that leads to the Great Canal. I followed.

  The Canal itself was thronged with skaters, milling about before the start of the procession. Shorn twisted this way and that, keeping to the side of the Canal at first, then moving out to where the light was less certain. The great houses that line
d the Canal were blazing with snow-lamps and torches, mirrored in the ice so that Shorn and I glided across a glassy, shimmering expanse. She was heading for the Curve and the labyrinth of canals that led to the island of Midis and then the Great North Gate.

  Behind us, the crowds of skaters fell away. Ahead, I could see a mass of red gowns, the start of the procession, led by the Matriarchs. Our mothers, not quite so elevated, would be just behind, amongst their peers. A pair of scissor-women sped by, the raw mouths of holographic wounds displayed across the surface of their armour. They were unmasked. Their faces were as sharp as their blades and I flinched behind the mask, until I realized that to them, Shorn was nothing more than a tall child, and not the Malcontent of Calmaretto. But I watched them go all the same, then slunk behind my sister from the Great Canal and into the maze.

  It was much quieter here. The houses along the waterways had already emptied and there were only a few stray women lingering beneath the lamps or the bridges, waiting no doubt for assignations. Shorn skated on, though the long months of forced inactivity must have taken their toll. Even my own calves were burning. I did not want to think of what would befall Shorn if she made it past the North Gate: the vast expanse of snow-covered plain, the mountains beyond. I hoped only that it would be a swift death and that she made it out of Winterstrike. It would be her revenge on the city and on Calmaretto, to die beyond its walls. I knew that this was not rational, but Shorn and I had left reason by a canal bank, a year before.

  In summer, the Curve is lined with cafés and weedwood trees, black-branched, with the yellow flower balls spilling pollen into the water until it lies there as heavy as oil, perfuming the air with a subtle musk. Now, the cafés were cold and closed – all the trade would have moved down the Canal for the night.

  My heart pounded with exertion and memory. It was here, a year ago, on this stretch of the Curve beneath the thin-arched bridge, that something – someone, I corrected myself, angry at my own use of our mothers’ term – had drifted from the darkness to stand as still as snow.