Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  ‘No. I thought someone might see me. Maybe later, when the weedwood grows to cover the water – it’ll only be another week or so before they’re in full leaf. I went to the winter garden instead.’ I hid. But I didn’t have to tell Essegui that.

  ‘Hestia! Where have you been, wicked child?’

  ‘Sorry, Aunty.’ Alleghetta was angry – she would have loved to have Sulie Mar’s daughter serve tea in her own drawing chamber, and that was largely why I’d hidden from the tea party – but there were limits to how much annoyance she could express: Mother’s position in the Matriarchy saw to that. I think, if I had been the child of a lesser person, Alleghetta would not have permitted her daughters to associate with me: not after I’d shown what I could do. Soul-stealing is a majike ability, not appropriate for a Matriarch’s child. But my mother was who she was, and so Alleghetta swallowed whatever distaste she might have felt. Now, she contented herself with a sour scowl instead and told us all to go and play.

  Essegui and I, drawn by a single thought, wandered down to the canal bank, followed by Leretui a few steps behind. Tui always was a dreamy child, the sort of kid who won’t tell you what she’s thinking, but just shakes her head instead and looks down at the ground, scuffs her feet. Essegui and I left her alone, for the most part, but she trailed after us anyway, as if compromising between her own company and that of other children. From this now-perspective, I could see the first faint seeds that had led to her becoming shorn of her name, but as a girl, I thought nothing of her relative muteness. We were all different, after all.

  Essegui squinted up into the mirror of the afternoon sky. ‘We could take the boat, you know.’ We’d had this conversation before, and would have it again. Together, she and I ducked underneath the fronds of weedwood, staining our hair with bright strands of pollen so that we were tiger-coloured, and stared down the Curve.

  This was the richest quarter of Winterstrike and at that time I’d barely known anything else: sheltered children, my cousins and I, carefully nurtured and with the prospect of suitable marriages and ceremonial duties and respectable civil service careers lying ahead of us. That afternoon, I did not have any inkling that either my own life or Essegui’s – or, spirits knew, Leretui's – would take the same form as Canal-the-Less: a straight shining line and then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the long sweep of the Curve, throwing us all off the track of our lives like a skater hurled too swiftly past a turn.

  But then the windows of the mansions caught the sun, reflecting it back across the water, and the canal, too, shone. A small boat, a taxi-gondola, glided up the bend of the Curve and broke the water into a thousand sparkling shards. All the world was lost in light. Behind the towering peaks and gables of the mansions, I could see the mountains, a distant shadow, with Olympus’s improbable cone seeming as high as the stars.

  Then, as Essegui and I were gazing longingly at the boat belonging to Calmaretto – a long thing with a curling moon-bow prow and sleek lacquered sides – Leretui cried out. I didn’t realize at first what it was: I thought a bird had made some sound from the trees. Essegui and I turned just in time to see Leretui fall, crumpling in slow motion to the emerald grass.

  Tui!’ Essegui shouted. She scrambled up the slope to her sister’s fallen form and I was close behind. Now, in the Mote in Caud, I felt a sense of wonder at the memory: had this really happened, or was I inventing it, some weird response to the haunt-torment? I didn’t recall this – but even as the thought came to me, something stirred at the back of my mind and I thought: yes, this was real. But Leretui had fainted before, and afterwards, too – I remembered a dance at which she’d passed out, blaming the heat or too much Tharsis wine, an occasion at a picnic in the Great Park. And, yes, this had been the first of those fainting fits, I remembered it properly now.

  We reached Tui and Essegui dropped to her knees beside her sister. ‘Tui, wake up!’

  Leretui’s head lolled and her eyes rolled upward in her head, flashing the whites. She was whispering.

  ‘What’s she saying? Is she ill?’ Essegui wailed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I snapped. ‘Get me some water.’

  Essegui ran up to the garden tap and filled the bowl that was kept beneath it. When she brought it back, we slopped it as carefully as we could over Leretui’s white face. The whispering was still going on, a murmured litany that I could not grasp. Then she said, quite clearly, ‘We can help you.’ I looked down into her face and her eyes went quite dark, bloomed over with a glaze of light. Leretui blinked.

  ‘What—?’ she started to say.

  ‘You fainted.’ Anxiety made Essegui brusque. ‘Are you all right?’

  Leretui frowned. ‘I could hear someone.’

  ‘You’re imagining things.’

  ‘Sometimes people who faint hear ghosts,’ I said. I’ve no idea where I’d got this notion from, only that I believed it in that unreflective way that you do when you’re young – possibly it was something I’d overheard from my mother’s servants.

  Essegui stared at me. ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Why should she hear ghosts?’

  They’re all around,’ I faltered.

  ‘No, they’re not. They’re in the locks and the machines and the clocks. That’s not “all around”.’

  ‘It wasn’t a ghost,’ Tui said. Her eyes were shocked and wide. ‘I don’t know what it was.’

  You’d better come inside and sit down,’ Essegui told her, with a warning glance at me that said, Don't encourage her.

  We didn’t tell Alleghetta, or my aunt Thea – marginally more sympathetic, but only marginally. I think Essegui and I sensed, without discussing it, that we would be blamed for Leretui’s collapse. Neither mother was renowned for being fair, so we kept silent, and Tui said nothing, either. Maybe the ‘malingering’ charge had hit home.

  I watched her closely, all the same, and I knew that Essegui did, too. I was to stay at Calmaretto that night, despite my mild disgrace for failing to appear at tea, and we were taken to a performance of a play, one of the first acknowledgements that Essegui and I, at least, were growing up. But Leretui was allowed to come as well and I wondered, now in the Mote, whether this, combined with her uncertain mood that day, had influenced what was to come: conjured the chancy, dangerous future to her, reeling it in like a fish hooked through the lip.

  Impossible to say. I watched now, from the distant viewpoint of my prison, as those long-ago events unscrolled across the screen of my mind’s eye. I saw us come down the steps of the mansion: it was fully dark now, and the torches flared and sputtered in their holsters all along the front of Calmaretto, sending fractured reflections of fire over the waters of Canal-the-Less. As daughters of the Matriarchy, we were not allowed to make our way on foot through the streets to the theatre like vulgar people, although Essegui and I, at least, would have preferred to do so, perhaps Leretui too. Instead we were ushered into a waiting carriage by Alleghetta. I saw her sweep her skirts around her, revealing her long buttoned boots with their ancestral buckles, swishing into the carriage in a froth of red lace like foam from a bloody sea. Disorientingly, I caught a glimpse of my own face peering out of the carriage window, and then I was back inside its stuffy velvet confines as we came onto the street that paralleled the Curve.

  ‘I trust you’ll enjoy the play,’ my aunt said to me. It sounded more like a threat than a wish. ‘It’s supposed to be rather good – by Benaise, you know.’

  I had no idea who this was. Alleghetta had always had literary pretensions, which she presented with a belligerent air, as if defying one to disagree with her. I mumbled something. Beside me, Essegui fidgeted as she stared out of the window, and Leretui looked simply unhappy.

  ‘Does your mother attend the theatre very often?’ This was embarrassing, for a number of reasons. Mother had no patience with the arts, and in any case Alleghetta, as her own sister, should not have had to ask me.

  ‘No,’ I said, and Alleghetta looked faintly triumphant, as if she’d scored a point.
‘She’s too busy with her official duties,’ I said, unable to resist temptation, and Alleghetta’s expression soured.

  ‘I suppose she finds it fulfilling,’ she said, dubiously. Alleghetta would have loved to have that much power. I did not say what – even at that young age – I thought, which was that my mother’s power had come with a very high price, and crippled her within. I did not want to give my aunt the satisfaction. Instead, I muttered, echoing, ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Look,’ Essegui said suddenly. I think she was trying to rescue me from her mother’s interrogation. ‘Who are they? She pointed out of the window. I looked past her shoulder and saw that we were away from the Curve now and passing the sombre bulk of the official buildings that lined the Great Canal. The water doors had their own magnificence, but these façades, technically the back entrances, were opulently pillared and carved, made of obsidian and Plains red marble: the black bones and red blood of the city. Now, through the window of the carriage, I could see that there were people milling about in front of the columns, dressed in flimsy lace that made them look as insubstantial as spirits. They had spidery hands and their heads were an intricate mass of coils and cones, like many tiny fossils. Their long faces narrowed into muzzles and I saw the glint of their slanted, oval eyes.

  ‘Demotheas!’ Leretui breathed.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ her mother snapped. ‘They are in costume, you silly girl.’

  ‘Why?’ Essegui asked, casually, as if to defuse the sting of Alleghetta’s words. ‘It’s not Ombre.’

  Alleghetta gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Of course not. There are festivals other than Ombre; it is simply that you have not been old enough to attend them. This is one of them, although it is not widely observed, I must admit.’

  ‘What’s it called?’ Essegui asked.

  ‘Phantome. It is supposed to honour the ancient non-human dead.’

  Essegui frowned, watching the procession of demotheas form a slow, vague order. ‘I thought demotheas were supposed to be a myth, nothing more?’

  There is some evidence that they actually existed,’ Alleghetta said grudgingly, ‘although it isn’t certain. Our ancestors created so many things, here in this very city. Some lived and were real – coyu, aspiths – some did not. Gaezelles, for instance, died out long ago, but were revived in the labs after the fall of the Memnos Matriarchy.’ Her tone became didactic.

  ‘But the men-remnants are real, aren’t they?’ Leretui’s voice was startlingly shrill. ‘The vulpen, the hyaenae, the awts? They exist, don’t they?’

  For a moment, I thought Alleghetta might slap her. ‘Of course they exist, but it is not seemly to speak of such things.’

  Essegui nudged her sister in the ribs. ‘Shut up, Tui.’

  Leretui subsided, gnawing her lip. The carriage moved on, leaving the demotheas behind. We reached the theatre and sat through the play, which was about political matters and was dull: a propaganda piece against Caud, dealing with Mardian Hill. In retrospect, one could see the seeds of war even then. I wanted to be out on the streets, chasing demotheas that were as sinister and elusive as moths, or back at Calmaretto, messing about with the boat. Beside me, Essegui and Leretui appeared equally bored, but Alleghetta sat with her hands gripping the sides of her chair and a fire burned in her face.

  That night, in the room that I shared with Essegui, something woke me. I lay for a moment, staring into the shadows, not quite sure where I was until I remembered. On the other side of the room, Essegui lay in a foetal heap. There was no sign of anything amiss, but my senses were jangling. Then it came again, the creak of a floorboard from the passage outside the room.

  Very quietly, I got out of bed and went to the door, opening it a crack. Down the hall, which was lit by a single sconce, there was a whisk of movement just before the stairs. I wasn’t sure what it was that I had seen: a servant, perhaps, or maybe one of the weir-wards activating itself as a moth or beetle blundered past. The weir-wards at Calmaretto were highly strung: Alleghetta was either paranoid, or thought that a high level of security created an impression of importance. Either way, I had become accustomed to the wards in my mother’s house and I slipped out of the bedroom, leaving Essegui still curled around her dreams, and down the hallway. A very old rug, rather grand but now somewhat worn, scuffed under my feet and I nearly fell. The sound of my elbow striking the wall seemed very loud in the night silence of the mansion and I bit down on a curse. Ahead of me, going down the stairs, footsteps speeded up. I knew where the wards watched, and where they originated. I ducked and dodged along the hallway, taking more care this time, and when I reached the top of the stairs I looked back to a peaceful hall. Whoever ran ahead of me on the staircase obviously knew similar tricks, for the stair, too, was silent. I went down it and found myself out in the torchlit main hall. A breath of wind stirred the drapes by the front door and when I followed it into the parlour, I found that one of the long doors that led to the lawn was open.

  Back along the veranda, back down the steps, retracing the path through the weedwood trees to the banks of Canal-the-Less. Leretui was standing on the very edge of the canal, with her hands outstretched. In her long summer nightgown, she looked like a spirit herself: conversing with someone who stood, impossibly, at the very centre of the canal.

  I started to say her name but it died upon the air. The thing that stood there was a demothea, and now that I was looking at it, I realized just how unlike it the women in costume had been, how human their movements were. The demothea was dancing, its limbs contorting and flowing at wholly unnatural angles. In the torchlight, its eyes flared a bright brief gold and its flimsy garments billowed out behind it across the water, skeins of material swirling as if in a great wind, though the summer night was humid and still. Leretui took a little step forward and tottered on the brink of the canal. The demothea reached out a long, long hand and beckoned her further yet; I saw its pointed, smiling face upraised, an expression incapable of human interpretation. All this came to me later, glimpsed from the far-away perspective of the Mote: as a young girl, I felt only panic and fear. I called out, ‘Leretui!’

  The demothea abruptly vanished. I thought Tui was going to fall into the canal; she gave a faint cry and clawed at the air. I don’t remember rushing forward to catch her, but suddenly we were both sprawling on the canal bank and the water was rocking up beneath my face. I edged quickly back. There were said to be things living in the canals, coming up to the surface at night. Leretui sat in a huddle on the damp grass, shaking.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked her. ‘What were you doing? But she shook her head and would not answer. I took her by her fragile shoulders and hauled her to her feet and we both stumbled up the steps and through the open door. I expected the shriek and whirl of the wards, the running feet of servants, but there was nothing and no one. Calmaretto was quiet. I bundled Leretui up the stairs and into bed, telling her that on no account was she to stir until morning. She gave a mute, unhappy nod; she seemed half asleep already.

  As I turned to close and lock the door to her bedroom, a hand fell on my shoulder. I must have jumped a foot in the air.

  Aunt—’

  ‘It’s me,’ Essegui hissed. ‘What’s going on?’

  I felt myself go limp with relief. I pushed past her into our own room, sank down onto the bed and told her everything. She listened, frowning, and when I had finished she said, ‘Well, something’s the matter with her, that’s for sure. I’ve heard of people being haunted, though not like this.’

  ‘But where will it lead?’ I asked. Somehow, I knew that neither Essegui or myself would be repeating this conversation to my aunts.

  And Essegui said, with what from the distance of my time in Caud seemed so bitter a hindsight, ‘Nowhere good for her, or us.’

  FIVE

  Essegui Harn — Winterstrike

  I could not look away from the contents of the teacup, swirling like a little galaxy. Trivialities seemed to grip me with an unexpected fascinat
ion. On the way to the tea-house, in my stumbling trying-to-be-dignified flight out of Calmaretto, I’d become intrigued by a flashing red neon sign on the side of a building, had stood staring at it with my mouth open for some minutes before the suspicious, curious stares of a couple passing by had brought me to my senses. Was this what it was like to have a piece of your soul gone missing? To be a little bit less than human, to become entranced by human things? I remembered how my cousin Hestia had stolen my soul once, years ago on the lawn of Calmaretto. Hestia had done it just to see if she could, and I didn’t recall much about the experience itself, only a bright blankness, as if I was walking into the sun. Later, they told me that I’d stumbled around as if drunk, or bewitched, but I just didn’t remember that part of it. The Matriarchy had begun to take an interest in Hestia after that, to Alleghetta’s fury.

  I still couldn’t believe that my mothers had done this to me. If I’d thought it would do any good, I’d have tried to reason with Thea, but I knew how far she was under Alleghetta’s thumb. She might regret what had happened, but she wouldn’t do anything to stop it – just sink further into the sherry, most likely.

  I had no doubt that the geise was working. My sister’s disappearance, until recently, had been a source of sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and it still was, except that now everything had fused into a nagging compulsion, driving me on through Winterstrike. It took a considerable effort of will to force myself to stop, to sit down, to drink tea and warm my numb hands.

  And the ironic thing was, I’d have done it anyway. I’d have gone after her without the geise on me, and if anything would hold me back beneath its lash, it would be the lack of my mothers’ trust.

  When I looked up from the cup, everyone else looked away. I must have been muttering to myself. Or maybe the geise was visible, in the way that you sometimes looked at people staggering through the streets and knew that there was something wrong with them. There was a lot of it about, these days. Black science. Majikeise. Whatever you wanted to call it.