Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  ‘Well?’ I whispered, looking up at the warrior. ‘Do you approve?’ But the warrior’s face did not change. ‘I don’t think I should even be trusting you,’ I added. The warrior’s only reply was to fade. Typical.

  I debated whether to leave, but the situation was too urgent. Keeping a watch out for the scissor-women, I collected a further assortment of documents, switching on the antiscribe at infrequent intervals to avoid detection. I did not see the ghost again. Eventually, the sky above the ruined shell grew darker and I had to depart, stowing the handfuls of documentation away in my coat as I did so. They rustled like dried leaves. Then I hurried back to the tenement to examine them more closely.

  The ghost might have given me a helping hand, but it wasn’t much of one. The data cases themselves were damaged beyond repair, unreadable, and if they’d once contained vital information, it had been lost. Among the cases, however, I found something strange: a small round object like a vitrified egg, gleaming black as coal. The same size as my finger joint, it had a hole through the centre. A memento of Caud, I thought, a souvenir. I considered stringing it on the chain around my neck that held my fake identity chips, but in the end I tied it onto a loose thread in an inner pocket instead and forgetting about it, sought sleep.

  The knock on the door came in the early hours of the morning. I sat up in bed, heart pounding. No one good ever knocks at that time of night. The window led nowhere, and in any case was bolted shut behind a grille. I switched on the antiscribe and broadcast the emergency code, just as there was a flash of ire-palm from the door lock and the door fell forward, blasted off its hinges. The room filled with acrid smoke as the lock quickly began to melt. I held little hope of fighting my way out, but I swept one of the scissor-women off her feet and tackled the next. The razor-edged scissors were at my throat within a second and I knew she wouldn’t hesitate to kill me. Wounds flickered across her face in a ghastly display of silent communication.

  ‘I’ll come quietly,’ I said. I raised my hands.

  They said nothing, but picked up the antiscribe and stashed it in a hold-all, then made a thorough search of the room. The woman who held the scissors at my throat looked into my face all the while, unblinking. At last, she gestured. ‘Come.’ They bound my wrists and led me, stumbling, down the stairs.

  As we left the tenement and stepped out into the icy night, I saw the flayed warrior standing in the shadows. The scissor-woman who held the chain at my wrists shoved me forward.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Her voice was harsh and guttural. I wondered how often she actually spoke aloud.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She grunted and pushed me on, but as they took me towards the vehicle I stole a glance back and saw that the ghost was gone. It occurred to me that it might have led the scissor-women to me, but then in the library, it had helped me, or had seemed to. I did not understand why it should do either.

  They took me to the Mote, the Matriarchy’s own prison, rather than the city catacombs. This suggested they might have identified me, if not as Hestia Mar, then as a citizen of Winterstrike. That they suspected me of something major was evident by the location, and the immediacy and nature of the questioning. Even Caud had abandoned the art of direct torture, but they had other means of persuasion: haunt-tech and drugs. They tried the haunt-tech on me first.

  ‘You’ll be placed in this room,’ the doctor on duty explained to me. At first, with a shock, I thought I was looking at Gennera. This woman looked more like a majike than a proper doctor: the tell-tale symbols hanging from her pierced ear lobes, the faded mark of a tattoo visible underneath her greying hairline. Black science, for a world in which what had once been superstition was now fact, and much of that illegal. Even Caud had standards, however often they’d violated them. But then again, Winterstrike was supposed to have standards, too.

  ‘The blacklight matrix covers the walls. There is no way out. When you are ready to talk, which will be soon, squeeze this alarm.’ She handed me a small soft black cube and the scissor-women pushed me through the door.

  The Matriarchies keep a tight hold on the more esoteric uses of haunt-tech, but all will be familiar with the everyday manifestations: the locks and soul-scans, the weir-wards which guard so many public buildings and private mansions. This chamber was like a magnified version of those wards, conjuring spirits from the psycho-geographical strata of the city’s consciousness, bringing them out of the walls and up through the floor. I saw dreadful things: a woman with thorns that pierced every inch of her flesh, a procession of bloated drowned children, vulpen and awts from the high hills with glistening eyes and splinter teeth. But the Matriarchy of Caud was accustomed to breaking peasants. Quite apart from my natural abilities and the training I’d had to develop them, I’d grown up in a weir-warded house, filled with things that swam through the air of my chamber at night. I was used to the nauseous burn that accompanied their presence, the sick shiver of the skin. This was worse, but it was only a question of degree. Fighting the urge to vomit, I knelt in a corner, in a meditational control posture, placed the alarm cube in front of me, and looked only at it.

  After an hour, my keepers evidently grew tired of waiting. The blacklight matrix sizzled off with a fierce electric odour, like the air after a thunderstorm. From the corner of my eye, I saw things wink out of sight. I was taken from the chamber and placed in a cell. Next, they tried the drugs.

  From their point of view, this may have been more successful. I can’t say, since I remember little of what I may or may not have said. That aspect of haunt-tech is supposed to terrify the credulous into speaking the truth. The mind-drugs of the Matriarchies are crude and bludgeon one into confession, but those confessions are all too frequently unreliable, built on fantasies conjured from the psyche’s depths. When the drug they had given me began to ebb, I found my captors staring at me, their expressions unreadable. Two were clearly Matriarchy personnel, wearing the jade-and-black of Caud. The scissor-women hovered by the door.

  ‘Put her under,’ one of the Matriarchs said. She sounded disgusted. I started to protest, more for the form of it than anything else, and they touched a sleep-pen to my throat. The room fell away around me.

  When I came to my senses again, everything was quiet and the lights had been dimmed. I rose, stiffly. My wrists were still bound and the chains had chafed the skin into a raw burn. I peered through the little window set into the door of the cell. One of the scissor-women sat outside. Her armour, and the few inches of exposed skin, were silent, but her eyes were open. She was awake, but not speaking. There was no sign of the majike and I was grateful for that: she’d probably have been able to tell what I was up to. I knocked on the window. I needed the guard’s undivided attention for a few minutes and the only way I could think of to do that was by making a full confession.

  ‘I’ll talk,’ I said, when she came across. ‘But only to you.’

  I could see indecision in her face. It was never really a question of how intelligent the scissor-women were; they operated on agendas that were partially programmed, and partly opaque to the rest of us. Her voice came through the grille.

  ‘I am activating the recording device,’ she said. ‘Speak.’

  ‘My name is Aletheria Stole. I am from Tharsis. I assumed another identity, which was implanted. I came here looking for my sister, who married a woman from Caud many years ago

  I continued to speak, taking care to modulate the rhythm of my voice so that it became semi-hypnotic. The scissor-women had programming to avoid mind control, but this was something else entirely. As I spoke, I looked into her pale eyes and glimpsed her soul. I drew it out, as I had done so many years before, when I was a child and playing with my cousins Essegui and Leretui. Leretui had been the harder of the two, I remembered, and I remembered wondering why, since of the sisters she was the weaker-willed. Odd, to think of that now in the depths of the Mote, but I needed something to distract my conscious attention while my preternatural abilities operated,
and nostalgia was preoccupying enough.

  The excissiere’s soul spun across the air between us, a darkling glitter . . . Leretui on the lawn of Calmaretto, her soul halfway out of her body, and I recalled that it had a peculiar taste, bitter as aloes and stinging inside my head, so that I’d dropped it like a fumbled ball and Leretui had sunk back into the grass, staring at me with an oddly malicious triumph. Essegui had been much easier and I’d got into trouble for that. You’re supposed to give stolen souls back; I’d kept hers for a while, watching her walk jerkily around the lawn with no one behind her eyes. Eventually a dawning conscience had prompted me to return it, but by then my aunt Alleghetta had noticed something amiss and swooped . . .

  Here came the scissor-woman’s soul, like something crawling out of a burrow. The door was no barrier. I opened my mouth and sucked the soul in. It lay in my cheek like a lump of intangible ice.

  The excissiere’s face grew slack and blank, just as Essegui’s had done so many years ago, but this time there was no conscience to trouble me.

  ‘Step away from the door,’ I said. My voice was thick, but she did as I told her. I bent my head to the haunt-lock and spat her soul into it, or that is what it felt like. It fled into the lock, tracing its engrams through the circuit mechanisms, grateful to be free of me. The door swung open; I stepped through and struck the scissor-woman at the base of the skull. She crumpled without a sound. My antiscribe was nowhere to be seen. I had not expected it to be, but there was a small communications array sitting on a shelf, a standard model, activated. I snatched it up.

  Discovery was soon made. I heard a cry behind me, feet drumming on the ceiling above. I headed downward, reasoning that in these old buildings the best chance of escape lay in the catacombs below. When I reached what I judged to be the lowest level, I ducked into a chamber. I found the warrior’s ghost before me. Her flayed face wore a grim smile. My guardian spirit, I thought.

  ‘Where, then?’ I said aloud, not expecting her to respond, but once more the ghost beckoned. I followed the rust-red figure through the labyrinth, through tunnels swimming with unknown forms: women with the heads of coyu and aspiths, creatures that might have been men. I ignored the weir-wards, careful not to touch them. Sometimes the ghost grew faint before me and I was beginning to suspect why this should be. I could hear no signs of pursuit, but that did not mean that none were following. The scissor-women could be deadly in their silence.

  At last we came to a door and the warrior halted. In experiment, I closed down the array and she was no longer there. I put it on again, and she reappeared.

  ‘You’re no ghost,’ I said. She was speaking. There was still no sound, but the words flickered across the screen.

  She was not conversing. The words were lists of archived data: skeins of information scrolling down. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘What are you?’

  As I watched, I realized that I had not been entirely correct. She was not a ghost of a warrior at all. She was the ghost of the library itself, the cached archives that we had believed to be destroyed, and that the Caud Matriarchy, in their ignorance, had not managed to find. And intuition told me that she hadn’t been pointing to the ruined data cases at all, but to the little round sphere amongst them that still sat in my pocket.

  I knew what I had to do. I hastened past the warrior and pushed open the door, kicking and shoving until the ancient hinges gave way. I stumbled out into a frosty courtyard, by a frozen fountain. The mansion before me was dark, but something shrieked out of the shadows: a weir-form, activated, of a woman with long teeth and trailing hair. She shot past my shoulder and disappeared. I heard an alarm sounding inside the house. But the array had a broadcasting signal and that was all that mattered. I called through to Winterstrike, where it was already mid-morning, and downloaded everything into the Matriarchy’s data store, along with a message. The warrior’s face did not change as she slowly vanished. When she was completely gone, I shut down the array, hid it behind a piece of broken stone, and waited. The scissor-women were not long in finding me. They took me back to the Mote, to a different, smaller cell, and there I remained.

  THREE

  Essegui Harn — Winterstrike

  My mother Alleghetta turned the colour of ice when I told her what I’d found, there in Shorn’s chamber on the morning after Ombre.

  ‘Gone? What do you mean, “gone”?’

  ‘Missing. Absent. Not there.’

  Tui’s missing?’ That was Canteley, wide-eyed from the doorway. Alleghetta spun like a serpent coiling, hissed, ‘Go away.’

  Canteley did as she was told; I heard her panicky footsteps pattering down the passage. If she’d overheard, then I doubted the news of my sister’s disappearance would remain a secret for long among the servants: they had their own way of finding out about things, information channelled through the weir-wards and whispered along corridors. Secrets permeated the air of Calmaretto like incense.

  ‘How?’ Alleghetta didn’t care about Shorn’s well-being, that much was plain. Bad enough my sister’s name had been taken away from her, bad enough she had to be confined, but worse yet that she might have vanished somewhere into Winterstrike and then, I could see it in my mother’s face, there would be no controlling the situation.

  Next moment, Alleghetta confirmed these thoughts. ‘I’m to assume a position in the Matriarchy in less than two weeks! This could jeopardize everything.’ Her face was contorted. It had been bad enough when Shorn had first been disgraced: Alleghetta had been expecting a call to the Matriarchy council then, and they’d not unnaturally postponed it. She’d spent the last year worming her way back in, and now this had happened. I could almost sympathize with her. Almost. ‘How?’ she asked again.

  ‘I don’t know, Mother. I have no idea.’ I sank down onto the tapestry-covered seat that formed the central point of the parlour and looked down at my ungloved hands. Against the folds of my long leather skirt, the rough nubs of bone buttons, my hands looked very smooth and pale, almost unreal. Almost inhuman. I thought of clawed fingers reaching out to take Leretui’s hands, snatching her life and her name. I wished Hestia were here: Hestia would know what to do.

  Alleghetta evidently thought that I was ashamed, for she said, the words as grudging as if they’d been dragged up out of a well, ‘No one is blaming you, Essegui.’

  Not yet, anyway. Alleghetta couldn’t keep the sharpness out of her tone and I knew where that was heading. But in truth, I was not ashamed, simply furious – with Alleghetta and Thea for the former’s continual grasping at crumbs of status and the latter’s weakness, with Canteley for wearing the vulpen mask and bringing the past year so painfully back, and most of all with Shorn, for putting us all in this position in the first place, aligning us like pieces on a game board. It reminded me exactly of that, some strange ancient game where the most significant piece is captured, throwing everything else into shadowy relief.

  I did not want to tell my mother how angry I was. I kept my head bowed, my gaze tracing out the lines of the folded leather, then the buttons and straps of my boots, then the muted colours of the faded rug. I’d sat here as a child, also scolded.

  ‘No one is blaming you,’ Alleghetta repeated, with even less conviction than before. ‘However, Shorn must be found, as quickly as possible before the news spreads. Thea has to look after Canteley and I have my civic duties. You must be the one to find her, Essegui.’

  As if from a long distance away, I hear myself saying, ‘I won’t do it.’ I looked up at last. Alleghetta was frozen in astonishment, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. In fact, I’d surprised myself. I’d often been intransigent in minor matters, and on more major occasions had either acquiesced, or worked around my mothers’ wishes so that a satisfactory compromise was effected: to me, at least. But I couldn’t remember a time when I’d directly disobeyed an order and it seemed that Alleghetta could not, either. She gaped, and then she said, as if to herself, ‘Very well, then.’

  It was my turn to s
tare. Alleghetta turned her back on me and left the room. I thought, ‘I have to get out of here.’ But before I did so, I forced myself up the stairs and back to Shorn’s chamber.

  I half expected, even then, to find her still there, as if the last hour had been a bad dream. But the chamber was empty. The cracked glaze of the mask stared up at me in mute mockery, crumpled up in the folds of the robe. I turned my back on it and went over to the walls, examining them for any traces of exit or ingress. Nothing. I stooped, picked up the corner of the rug, and rolled it up to reveal the worn floorboards. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had some nebulous idea, perhaps, that Shorn had somehow over the course of her year’s confinement managed to tunnel her way out. In the cold light of day, this was a ridiculous proposition – and yet, people had managed to escape from locked rooms before, histories’ worth of it, and it was said that Calmaretto was one of the oldest houses in Winterstrike, built after that ancient terraforming called the Alchemy was complete and the first merchants had come to Mars. Perhaps men had once even lived in the place on which Calmaretto now stood: human men, the antiques, before the Matriarchies had taken over control of the birthing processes and phased them out into what had now stolen Shorn’s heart. A strange idea, to love something that was male, and not human – for like my little sister Canteley, I had no proof and yet I also had no doubt that Shorn did love.

  Shorn’s chamber provided me with no clues as to where she had gone, however. Her original, windowed room had grown up with Shorn, but the aristocracies of Winterstrike are conservative, traditionalist, and they cleave strangely to childhood, perhaps because adult life can be so rigid. Nor did I know why we all seemed to have escaped this process to some degree: Shorn disastrously, myself quietly, my cousin Hestia secretly, and Canteley with a worrying romanticism that might or might not diminish with age. But my mothers had, perhaps in a semblance of pity, allowed Shorn to take some of the fittings of her old bedroom into the windowless room with her. Now, I crouched in front of a bookcase, running my gaze along a young girl’s books: Growing Up in Tharsis, A Cure for Contemplation, Beyond the Crater Plain. Books about history, carefully doctored to conceal inconvenient truths for the young; books about animals, about flowers and stars. A picture-book of Earth, showing the Nine Wonders: the arthropod festivals of Malay, the cities of Altai and Thibet, their towers rising above the waves of the Himalayan Sea, the bird-rich marshlands of Ropa with ruined spires gleaming dully above the waters.