Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  I turned and met my own stare in the metal wall of the teahouse. This was an old place, and the metal was spotted and stained: my skin looked mottled, as though I’d fallen ill. But apart from that you’d never have known, for I looked the same: white face, grey eyes, long black hair. All monochrome, with no colour in me except the stain on my soul. And I looked more like Shorn than I’d have liked, too – her ageing self, gaunt and hunched into her woes.

  I wanted to stay here in the tea-house, amongst the steam and the murmured conversations, with the old-fashioned spine trees in pots by the door, signs dating from the last century advertising different kinds of tea, and the burnished metal walls reflecting us all. The conversations were all about the war – about some news report that last night, on the sacred night of Ombre, the heretic matriarchy of Caud had launched an attack on Winterstrike and we had responded with an assault of our own, some new weapon developed by our dedicated scientists and unleashed only at the most extreme provocation.

  The murmurs were cynical. I didn’t believe it either. And I had other things to worry about. I had to go where Leretui had gone, and the only thing I could think of was that, somehow, impossibly, Leretui had gone to the vulpen. That meant the mountains, and as I had told my sister, the mountains in winter were no place for anyone human. At that thought, the geise snapped my head forward so that I gave a small muffled cry and people looked at me out of the corners of their eyes and started talking to one another a little too loudly. Time to get out of the tea-house. I stood, in a flurry of coat-tails, slapped a few coins down onto the table and went through the door into the icy air.

  The geise, I was finding, had not only taken a piece of my soul. It had a soul of its own, and also its own voice, with which it was starting to whisper and prompt: a thin, reptilian hiss.

  ‘Remember,’ the geise said. ‘Remember.’

  And all at once, I did remember: riding in the gliding carriage towards the theatre with Leretui and my cousin Hestia, over fifteen years ago now. I couldn’t remember what the play was – some mind-numbing piece which Alleghetta had insisted we go to see – but I had a small, sharp, recollection of looking out of the window of the carriage and seeing a group of women dressed as demotheas, or perhaps not dressed up at all, but demotheas themselves. Vulpen were the Changed, and so were the mythical demotheas, and even though the years of the Thousand Cults of the Age of Children were centuries gone, the remnants of those cults remained. And there was one place where the records were to be found. A place I knew very well.

  These days, the Temple of the Changed stands on the very edge of the great crater of Winterstrike. Its fall into the crater itself was predicted every year due to erosion and lack of funds, but somehow the Temple survived, like a tottering drunk, staggering but not falling. A bridge led from it to the fortress where I carried out my own ceremonial duties; where I had rung the Ombre bell. In the undamaged turret of the fortress were kept records: ancient texts and inscriptions dating back to the Age of Children, detailing lost races and antique technologies, vanished abilities that were now no more than myths.

  I was thinking of a defenceless girl’s sudden ability to vanish from a locked room, leaving defiance and mockery behind her. Something had happened to Leretui during the course of that half-free night of Ombre, and I needed to know what it was. The fortress was not open to the public, but I wasn’t an ordinary citizen: I had access.

  It was mid-afternoon when I made my way back to the fortress, but the light had already begun to fade and the first of the street-torches had been lit along the Grand Avenue, flaring and hissing into the sleet. The tea-houses were doing a roaring trade all the same, and there was a stream of shoppers going in and out of the state stores, using hoarded savings for the holiday discount, carrying off electrical goods and bags of clothes. Normally I avoided this part of the city at the festivals; Alleghetta had always told us that it was common to seek discounts and had stuff ordered, usually at much greater – and pointless – expense. Thinking of this, I had a sudden desire to rush into the nearest state store and buy lots of cut-price unnecessaries, but the geise, perhaps fortunately, was pushing me on.

  The Grand Avenue stretched before me, pointing to the towers of the civic buildings and the circular walls of the Matriarchy, arrow-straight. To my right – through what had ceased to be sleet and was now snow, falling in huge, soft flakes – I could see the bell tower above the roofs. It struck me that I should like to be able to turn back the clock, to be standing there once again, tolling the bell for Ombre and a different outcome. I turned towards its shadowy height, ducking under a sodden red awning down a side alley. The further I walked, the older the city became: massive walls of ancient marble, pitted with bullet holes and fire strikes, dovetail-jointed in the old manner and so finely done that even now you could not have slid the blade of a scalpel between them. The walls reared up, with windows that were no more than slits high above me, set deep in angled sills. Defensive fortifications, now used for public housing, but the Matriarchy had made no effort to make them less fortress-like. Wise, under recent circumstances. I passed along the alley and came out onto the banks of a narrow canal: one of the secret waterways of Winterstrike. A woman was driving a sledge along the silvery ice, invisible beneath a broad-brimmed hat. She did not look up and I, not wishing to be seen for reasons that I did not fully understand, melted back into the wintry shadows and slipped along the canal, hugging the wall.

  Over a little arched bridge I came into a district smelling strongly of food. Someone was frying batter-cakes in a pan of hot oil and the odour cut through the numbness of the winter air, comforting and greasy. Apart from the tea, I’d last eaten at breakfast and I was hungry, but I didn’t think I’d be able to keep anything down. Instead, I walked quickly on, down further alleys and snickets running between the fortress walls, until an insistent, rhythmic banging caught my attention and I realized that I was close to the Temple: someone was beating a gong. My heart started to beat in time with it and so did the whisper of the geise, though this time I could not understand what it was saying. I felt as though I’d become a seamless whole with the rest of the world and that world had contracted down to this single hammering pulse. A moment later, I came out into the plaza that led to the crater.

  It looked like the surface of some distant moon, an expanse of stone that was pitted and holed with meteorite strikes. Cracks ran along its length, spreading outward from the crater. They could have covered it, rendered it anew, but the Matriarchy preferred to remember this single greatest disaster in the city’s history.

  At the far end of the plaza, I could see the Temple of the Changed towering up through the falling snow, its façade mottled to a fleshy pink by winter. The gong had stopped but it seemed to me that its reverberations continued, striking out the hour across the city and pulling us all in its wake. Beneath my booted feet, the surface of the plaza was icy, the snow that had been melted by last night’s torchlit procession, to mark the start of Ombre, had pooled and frozen. I had to keep my head down in order to retain my footing and was at the steps of the Temple almost before I knew it. I looked up. Two pillars marked the entrance, so coiling and curling with entwined figures that it was difficult to distinguish them from one another, but all of them were representations of the Changed themselves, mythical and real, mainly coyu and aspith, but a few demotheas, cenulae, sultrice, also. Stylized representations of DNA spirals wound amongst them, celebrating difference.

  They were the last remnants of the Age of Children. They were supposed to be the future of the human race: created by a cult that had originated here in Winterstrike and which held diversification to be the final product of evolution. Earth had its own peoples: the kappa, the moke, the kajari, and many more. It hadn’t really worked. Genetically unstable, often physically frail, the majority of the Changed failed to thrive.

  Movement between the pillars attracted my attention. Someone was watching, someone who did not want to be seen any more than
I did, but who did not have the skill to remain unobserved. I turned, pretending that I was heading past the Temple, and slipped along the steps in the snowy shadow of the left-hand pillar. I came up behind the watcher. She was hunched against the stone, clinging to it as if it could protect her from the cold.

  ‘Hello,’ I breathed. She jumped, and stood shaking. I looked down into a long-muzzled face, the eyes human and sad, the skin covered in a faint fawn down. Her hands were unnatural, the fingers oddly jointed. If the aspith had been engineered for some particular purpose, I could not imagine what it might have been: animal genes seemed to have been thrown into the mix at random, or perhaps selection had bred into particular traits. I half expected her to wring her hands. She was dressed in the customary red of the cult, her hair concealed behind a veil. It reminded me of the majike.

  ‘Why are you watching me?’ I demanded, but the aspith turned and ran, her veil streaming out behind her like red smoke. She disappeared through a tall open door into an echoing space that was barely warmer than the plaza outside. I followed the sound of her footsteps, the hem of her skirts rustling against the stone floor like wind in the branches. Far ahead, along the rows of columns, I could see daylight once more, as if the other side of the Temple was open to the crater.

  I ran after the aspith past rows of columns – there seemed to be far too many more of them than was necessary to support the roof, and each one depicted a different race. Nightmarish faces glared out at me and I was sure one of the columns represented the vulpen. A long, beak-like skull snaked from top to bottom of the column, as if looking down its nose at me. All at once I felt that the carvings had eyes. The back of my neck prickled with chill. A little scatter of what looked like hail eddied over the floor, blown in from the direction of the crater.

  The aspith whisked around a corner and I’d been right, for the Temple did lie open at the far end. Past the bulk of the fortress, I could see the opposite walls of the crater, with the dark hollows of the maze of dwellings visible even through the snow. I could see lights, which looked as though they were floating.

  The aspith was nowhere to be seen. I stood in an echoing hall, its walls mirrored like the old stained metal of the tea-house, and casting a fragile light across the black stone floor which sent my reflection, also white and black, spinning into infinity. The fanciful thought came to me that if I could step into one of those reflections and disappear, so much the better.

  Disappearing. Leretui, I thought. Oh, Shorn.

  It was now almost completely dark, the torches flaring through the sleet across the plaza. Snow starred the tall windows that separated the front façade of the hallway from the outside world; it was marginally warmer in here, but I still kept my coat securely buttoned. I had plans to stay the night in the fortress, perhaps in the tower room, where at least I felt safe. But my mothers would know to look for me there: safety was an illusion. Wild beasts would not have dragged me back to Calmaretto and I thought my presence might prove a liability to one of my friends. I had the odd sensation that the whole world was changing around me, some projected but unrealized future in which this really was the condition of the human race, and that if I walked outside now to the cold plaza, I would find a different city.

  I’d wasted enough time on the aspith. I left the Temple and went out onto the plaza, feet scuffling in the drifts of snow that were building up against the steps. The bridge to the fortress lay on the opposite side of the plaza, reaching out over the crater pit. It was a route I’d taken dozens of times, ever since my majority and the days when I’d first been assigned my duties in the bell tower. I’d won the role by birth, not through any merit on my own behalf, but I still thought it was the closest that Alleghetta had come to being proud of me. Now, as I approached the gate, I was filled with a queasy unease, thinking of the aspith, that unlikely spy, and whether Calmaretto might have sent someone after me, to bring me home by force. But there was no one waiting for me at the gate and my other fear, that the majike’s black work would have altered my soul-engrams to the point where I’d be unreadable by the matrix of the gate, proved similarly unfounded. The mechanism scanned my eye and I felt the familiar tickling deep inside my head. Then the gate swung open. I stepped through onto the bridge.

  The fortress always seemed to be a place of extremes. When you were on the bridge itself, the winds tore at you, snatching at hair and hood and whipping coat and skirts around you. I always hurried at this point, afraid of being snatched up by the wind and blown into the dark pit of the crater. But once I reached the other side – traversing the iron railings, each side with its spindly statue of the fortress spirits, my feet beating on iron – the sound was abruptly cut off. I looked back down the shadows of the bridge to the gate, and once again, no one was watching.

  No one that I could see, at any rate. Again I put my eye to a mechanism and again it spoke to my soul, opening the main doors to the fortress. I was glad to shut the night and the weather behind me and step into the empty, echoing corridor that led, ultimately, to the bell tower. All metal and stone, a red floor, punctuated with black and white tiles. Above, the ceiling was fashioned in an ancient style, representing feathers like smooth black wings. I don’t know how this conceit had originated. Bronze lamps lit the corridor with a subtle glow and ahead, stairs led up to the bell tower. There was no elevator, though they had certainly possessed the technology: interminable academic speculation suggested various explanations, all of them esoteric, most to do with the journey of the soul. For me, it was workplace and sanctuary, nothing more. But I pretended a mystical leaning, if questioned. It was politic.

  And of course, on this occasion, my shattered soul’s journey would be correspondingly incomplete. I wasn’t going right to the top of the bell tower, but to one of the antechambers that lay halfway up the stairs. These were separated chronologically, their books and records divided according to age: since I was interested in the handful of texts dating from the Age of Children, I would not be climbing very high today.

  This particular chamber was lined in bronze, like the lamps, which lent it a pleasantly warm cast when I sat down and asked the light to come on. There were no windows and I was glad about this: I didn’t want to see beyond the confines of the bell tower. It reminded me too much of what I’d have to do when I got back out there. An ancient antiscribe stood on the central desk, and it whirred into life as I switched it on and input my entry data.

  Some years before, my cousin Hestia had suggested to me that it might be helpful if we manufactured a separate identity for ourselves. This, more than any more tangible evidence, indicated to me that the rumours about my cousin’s profession – supposedly that of young-lady-about-town – had some truth. But we didn’t discuss it. Hestia was as well aware as I of the difficulties of Calmaretto and I’d agreed with her enthusiastically that it might not be a bad plan. I’d even managed to siphon some money into an additional account, under that name: Aletheria Stole, a name that would be redolent of Tharsis to the casual observer, nothing to connect it to the aristocracy of Winterstrike. I suspected that Hestia might use the same name on occasion, as the account fluctuated, though the sums I placed in it remained scrupulously constant under a separate credit heading.

  So Stole was the name under which I entered myself into the antiscribe, and the account details which churned ponderously up fell beneath that heading also. Once entered, I began to scan the system for relevant records. Anything religious could be ruled out – I’d had to survey these records once before for a visiting academic and they had proved opaque in the extreme. I don’t know whether the woman ever made anything of them in the end, though academics can usually generate some kind of theory to cover available data. But there was a handful of texts that referred to battles, and these I brought up on the scanner and studied.

  The first text referred to a journey across the Silent Sea: a catalogue of islands, most of them in all probability imaginary. Interesting, but not apparently of relevance.

/>   The second and third were partial and made little sense: one was a list of curses and the other a list of names. But the fourth was of greater note.

  Mantis. A name that rang a bell, somewhere. She’d been one of the warrior matriarchs in the Age of Children, had vanished from a fortress under siege. There had been no clue to how she had done it: her warriors, once the fortress had fallen, maintained that she had been taken by the spirits of the Crater Plain and stuck to their stories despite torture. Mantis the Mad, who had held and ruled the lands around the area that was now known as the Noumenon, a remote mountain matriarchy that no one knew very much about. A closed, secret place, high in the ragged crags beyond the western Plains.

  That was the only text that had any vague relevance, and I thought this was probably stretching things. I doubted whether Mantis, mad or not, had really disappeared into thin air: more likely she’d bolted down a tunnel or had been done away with by one of her own troops. But one thing did engage my attention, even though I was sure it was still no more than coincidence: the Noumenon was said to be a haunt of vulpen – not, obviously, within the bounds of the Matriarchy itself, but beyond, in the high crags and rifts. Vulpen were said to haunt ruins, and there were a lot of those in this part of the Crater Plain – also dating from the Age of Children. The geise was tugging at me, but I didn’t know how much store to set by that: I didn’t think it had any extra knowledge that wasn’t also possessed by me, and I directed a swift but heartfelt curse in the direction of Calmaretto for saddling me with this additional set of unreliable instincts.

  There were no more records. I closed down the antiscribe, turned off the light, and left the bronze chamber with reluctance.

  My feet nearly took me up the stairs to the bell tower, but I made myself turn away, back down the bronze corridor. It seemed warmer, almost stifling, and I thought at first that this was because I was so reluctant to leave. Then I reached the doors and realized. The bridge was on fire.