Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  I’d never been to Earth. I’d never been anywhere. I’d like to visit our sister world someday, and maybe I would, I told myself defiantly, once this whole thing was settled. I had dreams that went far beyond Winterstrike. But I had the sense of walls closing in, all the same.

  I put the picture-book back in the bookcase and stood. My leather skirt rustled as I walked across the room: I remember thinking how quiet it was. I thought, again, that I needed to get out of Calmaretto, find a tea-house somewhere and sit down. I’d always liked the day after Ombre itself. No one was working, and a pallidly festive atmosphere still remained without the need for preparation. We’d always had the traditional post-Ombre meal of fricasseed carp, but the servants had leftovers and I envied them that – I had no idea why all this was going through my mind as I shut the door of Shorn’s chamber behind me and locked it (force of habit), then descended the long staircase to the hall. Maybe I had some inkling of what was to come, intuition starting to jangle like the Ombre bell.

  I hoped to avoid both my mothers and creep out of the house. For a moment, this seemed possible. I’d felt guilty about leaving Canteley to face Alleghetta, but as I came down the stairs I heard her light voice calmly reciting the Litanies and realized that she had been put in the schoolroom as usual with her governess and that lessons were in progress: not a normal occurrence for a festival period, but I could see why my mothers might have insisted upon it. I doubted that the governess was pleased, though.

  Then, as I stepped onto the black and red tiles of the hallway, Thea came out of the parlour. Her plump face looked tight and strained, which under the circumstances, was hardly surprising.

  ‘Essegui, dear,’ she said, and I was immediately on guard. ‘Would you step in here for a moment? There’s something we need to talk about.’

  I sighed. So Alleghetta, having unexpectedly failed, had set Thea on me. I’d always been able to talk my way round Thea, to some extent, but Thea had always been better at making me feel guilty. She did disappointment rather well, also helplessness. ‘All right.’ I could hardly plead some other engagement.

  I followed her into the parlour and the world caved in. My memories of what followed are jumbled and fragmented, but what I do recall is this:

  A small woman rising from the overstuffed chair to the right of the doorway. A crimson veil billowed down from her coil of hair, her eyes were like black pebbles in a waxy face. I saw a necklace of bones around her neck, polished until they gleamed in the firelight, bracelets of bone around her wrists. Her ears were pierced and a tattoo the colour of iron spiralled out over her forehead. She raised a metal rattle and shook it in my face. Thea gasped. I saw letters streaming out from the rattle, glowing scarlet against the panelled walls of the parlour, and at once my whole attention was engaged in trying to read what they said. Then my vision went dark and there were only the letters, congealing into what I thought were words, but not in any language that I could understand. There was a dreadful sense of wrongness about it: this was haunt-tech of some kind, I knew that from the burning-juniper smell and the electric tingle up the back of my neck, as though I’d walked into hostile weir-wards, but much worse. Weir-wards are designed to disable, not to suck your soul out through your eyes – and that made me think of Hestia. Not all of my soul, only a fragment, but I saw it go, a thin finger of light blasting past and coiling down like quick smoke into a small metal box.

  The box closed with a snap. I caught a glimpse of the parlour, of Thea’s horrified face and Alleghetta’s triumphant one. Then, hollowed, my sight pinpointing down into a black tunnel, I slid to the floor.

  A thousand stars sparkled against a painted ceiling, and by degrees, I realized where I was: lying on the divan in the parlour. My head was pounding like a drum. Thea was sitting on a stool by my side, with a cloth and a bowl of water. There was the faint smell of vomit over the perfumed wood of the fire, but no trace of it when I squinted down at myself; one good thing about wearing leather, I suppose, is that it makes you easy to clean off. The movement, however, sent a spear of pain through my head and I collapsed back, groaning.

  The majike says that it shouldn’t last long,’ Thea assured me, anxiously. She leaned forward and I could smell alcohol on her breath, the cheap sherry that was supposed to be odourless, but wasn’t.

  The majike? You hired someone who does black science?’ I couldn’t believe they’d gone this far from respectability. I think it was really only then that I realized that Alleghetta was actually mad. ‘Why?’ But I already knew. Something was missing, some piece of me. Some piece of my soul, snatched out and now trapped in the majike’s box.

  ‘It was Alleghetta’s idea, not mine.’ Thea had always been quick to blame her spouse; it did not make for peace. Or respect. ‘She told me that you’d refused to help – surely you understand the seriousness of this? We could lose all manner of positions, it’s been bad enough already. Alleghetta is to join the council in a fortnight’s time – surely you’d thought about that? She said that if you would not help, you must be made to.’

  ‘So you’ve done – what? Put me under a geise? A compulsion?’

  I didn’t need to ask. I could feel it, a nagging insistence, lodged deep inside my head. A geise. An ancient word for a hyper-hypnotic suggestion, exchanged for a fraction of my essential being.

  I could find another practitioner, get it removed. But even if I managed to find one, I’d have to pay and I did not have the money. I wondered how much it had cost my mothers to have this done, in all manner of ways.

  ‘It was Alleghetta’s idea,’ Thea said again. But now that I seemed to be on the mend – with the pain ebbing, I was able to sit up – I thought I detected a trace of smugness in her face. Alleghetta’s idea,’ I said bitterly, ‘but your agreement. You pair of canal-side bitches.’

  Thea flinched. ‘There’s no need—’ she began. But I was on my feet and bending over her, trying to ignore the smell of sherry.

  ‘When this is over,’ I said, ‘When I’ve found Leretui – and I promise you this will happen, are you satisfied now? – we won’t be coming back. I’ll work passage on a soul-ship and take her to Earth. You can take Calmaretto, and the inheritance. Canteley can have my share. But you won’t be seeing either of us again.’

  Thea’s small mouth worked. But from the doorway, I heard the rustling of skirts. Alleghetta stood in the entrance to the parlour, teeth like bone as she said, ‘And that will be a very good thing.’

  Interlude: Palace of the Centipede Queen, Malay, Earth

  ‘Madam?’ Shurr hesitated at the entrance to the chamber, but there was no reply from within. Her head lowered, she shuffled into the chamber, one hand masking her eyes so that she could, at least, pretend to have seen nothing. Segment Three slid back inside her sleeve as she did so, also observant of the niceties. This was ancient protocol rather than modern pragmatism: the Queen had ways of dealing with true traitors and Shurr was a born-retainer, bonded to the Queen’s clan from birth. Even though this Queen had been in office for no more than a few years, Shurr had never questioned her own loyalty, although she did remember the old Queen with a trace of nostalgia: the parades and processions about Khul Pak, the seemingly endless masques and masquerades. This Queen was more private, devoted to less public pleasures, but she had treated Shurr with consideration and for this, Shurr was grateful.

  Now, looking neither to right nor left, she made her way across the chamber, memory supplementing the lack of what she did not allow herself to see. The chamber was old, separated by columns of stone and intricately carved wooden screens, with draperies hanging between them. Although Shurr had been visiting this chamber since she herself was a child, there were parts of it that she still had not seen: it occupied the entire fourth storey of the Palace of Lights, and that had been built before the Flood had swept over the eastern lands of Earth. As she stepped across the mosaic floor, blue daylight poured over the tesserae, casting pools and spangles of fire. Shurr blinked as she came out
onto the terrace and glanced quickly and covertly around her. There was still no sign of the Queen. Shurr put her hands on the wooden railing and peered down into the courtyard below. A fountain plashed, sending a breath of coolness upwards. Segment Three’s pincered head slipped out of Shurr’s sleeve and the long body slid part-way along the balcony, claws ticking on stone.

  ‘Back, back,’ Shurr murmured and the centipede did so. There was a tickle of protest inside her head. For a moment, she saw the garden below through Segment Three’s faceted gaze: a multi-layered hunting ground, filled with moths and beetles, frogs and small birds.

  ‘You’re supposed to be a machine,’ Shurr said, not without affection. But that was the whole point: Segment Three had been grown, after all. And Segment Three did not possess true consciousness, although sometimes it came to her in dreams, and Shurr wondered then. The beasts belonging to the Queen were quite different, of course.

  Shurr watched as a party of kappa made their way across the gravel to the kitchens, their squat bodies and hairless heads glistening with moisture in the heat. They carried baskets filled with market produce and were chattering with animation, but Shurr was too far up to hear what they were saying. Beyond the heavily guarded walls of the Palace, Khul Pak stretched out as far as the white line of the harbour, shimmering in afternoon warmth. The smell of galangal, ginger, sewage and salt drifted by, and the distant sound of tuk tuks and river traffic. Above, a military ortho-copter skimmed over the city, too low, amphibious wings arching out beneath the rotor blades in preparation for its landing in the harbour. An ordinary afternoon, Shurr thought, placid in her accustomed place, but then a voice behind her spoke.

  ‘Shurr?’

  Shurr turned, bowing low. She could see the Queen’s feet: bare and stained with ochre spines. This Queen, though obviously vat-grown, must have had Ropan genes somewhere in the mix, given the pallor of her skin: like milk, or the moon.

  ‘Madam?’

  ‘I was sleeping,’ the Queen said. ‘You may look up now.’

  Shurr did so. The Queen wore her customary harness; information-loaded and singing up the haunt-lines of supple leather. The enemies of the Palace of Light claimed that this inherited costume was made of human skin; Shurr dismissed this, but it was not an impossibility. A necklace of shark’s teeth circled the Queen’s throat. Her dark hair was braided with orchids; her plum-dark eyes were bright with amusement and perhaps stimulants.

  ‘Shurr,’ the Queen purred. Within her sleeve, Shurr felt Segment Three stir in recognition; she tapped her arm sharply, to keep it within. But the spirit of the old Queen’s segment was also moving: arching up and over the Queen’s head in spectral angularity. The Queen reached up and brushed a hand over nothingness.

  ‘Still awake, Shurr,’ the Queen said softly. ‘You see?’

  Shurr remembered it living, had seen it kill. The old Queen had been more ruthless than this one, or seemed so. Sometimes Shurr thought that it was simply that the new Queen could not be bothered. She bowed her head again, before the ghost.

  Tell me,’ the Queen said. ‘What’s happening below?’

  Shurr knew that this meant the laboratories. ‘I had a status report late yesterday. It was forwarded to you.’

  The Queen gave a fluid shrug. ‘I haven’t looked yet.’

  The new segment is almost ready.’

  The Queen’s carefully inscribed eyebrows rose. ‘Oh, is that so? Then we need to start preparing for our journey.’

  ‘I’ve already done so,’ Shurr said. ‘Against the eventuality.’

  ‘Good,’ the Queen said. She looked in the direction of the balcony, where the sky was beginning to change to green. ‘You can see it very clearly, when night comes. Like a tiny crimson eye, sparkling back at you. I look at it through the telescope sometimes. I wonder what’s there.’

  Shurr knew that the Queen was not referring simply to the cities and plains of the red world, and an old cold desire rose inside her throat. For a moment, she could not speak, then she said, ‘Ancestries.’

  ‘Oh,’ the Queen said softly, ‘I certainly hope so.’

  Later that evening, Shurr made her way back to the Palace through the marketplace. Corrugated iron awnings rattled in the sea wind; the air smelled of heat and sweat. Shurr walked quickly, glancing to either side at mounds of spice and poisons, at medicines and black-market haunt-circuitry that hummed and whistled as she passed. People got out of her way, were careful not to jostle her, and Shurr felt Segment Three’s watchfulness, encased within the flimsy hollow of her sleeve. She kept her veil over her face all the same, a mark of pride rather than modesty. Halfway down the market aisle, she felt the slight nip of the centipede’s pincers into the flesh of her arm and then the message came: Return at once. Bitterness flooded into her mouth, a signal of emergency, and Shurr’s steps quickened, slippers tapping on the concrete floor of the market. Soon she was out of the building and hastening along the quay, past the rattling sampans and the bulk of a huge liner coming in, one of the deep-sea vessels on a rare inshore visit for replenishing. Its shadow passed over her as she hurried, blotting out the aquamarine sky and the prickle of the stars, but she remained conscious of the eye of the red planet, as though it watched her from the heavens, promising change.

  As she came through the side gate, she saw that the Palace of Light was quite dark, apart from a dim lamp gleaming in the Queen’s chambers. She hurried through the door and Khant came out of the shadows. Segment Five was coiled around his throat like a necklace of bone.

  ‘They’ve found her,’ he said, whispering.

  Shurr stared at him. ‘What? Are they sure?’

  ‘They seem quite certain. I had the call mid-evening. The daughter of a noble house.’

  Shurr instinctively bowed her head. ‘Of course. She would be.’

  ‘But there are problems.’

  Shurr repressed a smile. Of course. There would be.

  ‘What kind of problems?’

  ‘The girl in question has gone missing. She was mistreated by her family, imprisoned, has disappeared.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Shurr said. ‘All the more reason for us to rescue her.’

  FOUR

  Hestia Mar — Caud

  Locked once more behind the cell door in the Mote of Caud, I started to hallucinate. I don’t know, now, whether this was a belated result of the haunt-torture or simply fatigue. I say ‘hallucinate’, but I didn’t see anything that I’d never seen before. The visions that came to me were more like flashbacks, images of childhood from an adult’s point of view. I didn’t seem to have any control over them, only a distant capacity to reflect. It was distracting, at least, but I could have done without it. I wanted to focus on getting out of there, not indulge in warmly fuzzy memories.

  They weren’t particularly nostalgic ones, however. One moment I was lying on the filthy floor of the cell, and the next I was standing on the sloping lawn that led down to the bank of Canal-the-Less. It was evening, golden with summer, and the blossoms of the weedwood trees periodically exploded in the heat, sending showers of glistening pollen streamers down into the garden, dappling the immaculate grass. At the bottom of the slope, the water of the canal, too, was gilded: it looked solid enough to walk upon, a shining molten glaze. I knew what I’d see if I turned around and sure enough, there it was: the weedwood mansion, the home of my cousins. Calmaretto.

  As I stared at this familiar sight, three figures came out onto the veranda. In winter, which was most of the year, the veranda was enclosed behind thick glass panels, etched with seasonal scenes, but now the panels had been thrown open to let some air into the house, so that the steps that led down to the garden were visible behind the lacing of foliage and so were the people who stood upon them. The adult was my aunt, Alleghetta Harn, and the two smaller figures were Essegui and Leretui, my cousins. Esse was the taller of the two, already rangy in her traditional black-and-bone, a ceremonialist’s colours. But Tui was a delicate little thing, held in family lo
re to be of a weak constitution. My own mother, Alleghetta’s sister, maintained that this was a myth and that Leretui malingered, in order to get out of her lessons. I have no idea whether this was true. Mother didn’t consider you to be ill unless you were actually on the verge of death, and sometimes not even then.

  Essegui waved. I waved back and she broke away from Alleghetta’s restraining hand – for all that she was being groomed for ceremonial duties, my aunt thought that Esse was unseemly – and ran down the steps to the lawn.

  ‘Hestia! Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you.’ A glance over her shoulder. ‘Mother wanted you at tea.’

  ‘I couldn’t face it,’ I hissed.

  Essegui pulled a face. ‘Don’t blame you. It was just as you’d expect. Lots of stuffy old Matriarchs and Tui and I having to serve cake and not eat any of it. Then the baby started howling. Alleghetta slapped the nursemaid, in front of everyone.’ Essegui’s grey eyes were sparkling wide; she looked delighted, and a bit guilty.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said.

  Well, did you do it? Did you take the boat out?’

  I longed to say Yes; I wanted to impress Essegui, who was a year younger than I. But instead I told her the truth.