Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  The area around the Gate was surrounded by boarding houses, congregating there to deal with the mass of travellers. I went into a store and bought a makeshift journey pack for myself and then, after some effort, I found a room at the third boarding house I tried and took up residence. It was a dingy chamber, at the back of the house but with an angled view of a slice of canal. The rug, thrown onto bare boards, sent up puffs of dust whenever I trod on it and a thin yellow trickle came out of the tap above the basin. But it was still better than Calmaretto. I thought grimly of Canteley, still under the sway of our mothers. But sometimes it seemed to me that Canteley had done better than either Leretui or I.

  Every time I thought about Leretui, it filled me with dismay. My little sister, whom I’d failed to look after. When we were growing up, it had always been Hestia and I and Leretui against our mothers: ranged against Alleghetta and Thea and my aunt Sulie, three against three. And now I’d let Leretui slip away. I shoved those thoughts aside.

  Next door, there was a tea-house that served basic meals. Trying to keep myself muffled up in a shawl, and attracting as little attention as I could, I chewed my way through a tasteless Plains buffalo steak, my stomach finally allowing me to keep food down. I was certain that it was the distance from my home that permitted this. I bought a flask of tea and took it upstairs to the chamber, then drank it as the lights of the ships glowed down the canal and a red gibbous moon rose over the summit of the Great North Gate.

  I watched the newscasts obsessively, seeing from another angle the collapse of the bridge, the segment falling into the snow. I did not see a small dark figure running across the floor of the crater: it was too shadowy, too black, and this came as a considerable relief. Blame of Caud was freely expressed, by a variety of commentators.

  When I finally checked my personal antiscribe, the screen held several messages, all of them bearing the stamp of Calmaretto. I deleted each one without reading it. But there was one message with an unfamiliar stamp. If Leretui had managed to contact me, perhaps from a public ’scribe . . . I clicked the message open.

  I expected to read a few lines. I didn’t expect a channel to open up. A moment later, I was staring into the face of the majike.

  I jerked back. My hand slammed down onto the control panel but nothing happened. The majike gave a thin grin.

  ‘It won’t work. Nice to see you again, Essegui. I’m glad you’re all right. I’ve been worried about you.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘I know you’re angry. I can understand why. I can’t tell you that what we did was for your own good, Essegui, but it was for the good of your sister. You want to find her, don’t you? Where do you think she is?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her stare was almost hypnotic, but it wasn’t that which made me add, ‘The records spoke of the Noumenon. People used to disappear and reappear at will.’

  The majike’s gaze sharpened. ‘So they did. I can give you some help, Essegui, if that’s where you decide to go.’

  ‘Well, what do you think? Do you know where she’s gone?’

  ‘I would say,’ answered the majike, ‘that the Noumenon is a very good choice. I’ll arrange for you to have help. Now. You’re at the North Gate, aren’t you?’

  ‘How did—’

  There’s a pilgrimage leaving in the morning,’ the majike continued serenely, without giving me time to finish my question. ‘Link up with it and you’ll find that they take you with them. Once you’re out on the Plains, we’ll try and arrange transport to the Noumenon. Well done so far, Essegui. I’m pleased with you.’

  Then she ended the connection and I was left staring at the blank screen of the antiscribe. It was a moment before I realized that her approval had affected me and then, angrily, I sought my bed.

  I dreamed of burning buildings until just before dawn.

  EIGHT

  Hestia Mar — Caud

  Caud was in chaos. Perhaps with the destruction of the Mote and the occupation of its excissieres, the Caudi had decided to explore just how much anarchy could be perpetuated in a single night. I met bands of women running to and fro in their nightgowns, like flocks of shrieking geese. A gang of children looted an engineering store with silent efficiency. On the main canal, onto whose banks I was ejected by the crowd like a cork from a bottle, it seemed that someone had stolen a boat: quite a large one, probably a cargo ship come up from the Small Sea. The sails were rattling up and I could see fighting breaking out on the deck. Someone hit someone else over the head with a large jug. It was all rather like watching a play, although I think that my recent escape from imprisonment and a bloody death may have made me a little light-headed.

  The canal seemed to be running higher than normal, slopping up and over the stone balustrade that kept the walkway from the water. I squinted downstream, trying to see. A girl in a trailing crimson veil sprinted past me, holding up her skirts as she ran; I recognized her for one of the acolytes at the Temple of Sem, one of the older cults of Caud. The veil gave me a start, however, reminding me as it did of Gennera. The girl was shouting something that I did not catch, in a strong local dialect. Moments later, an excissiere clawed her way up the balustrade on a rope thrown from a boat and ran after the acolyte.

  I would never know, I thought. As long as they left me alone. If I was going to get out of Caud in a hurry, then the canal seemed like my best option. With all the chaos on the waterfront, the chances of an escaped prisoner being spotted seemed relatively remote, although I did not know how much there was to connect me with the prisoner who had, by default, been implicated in the murder of an excissiere. The scissor-women were said never to give up, if the matter concerned the death of one of their own. I repressed a shiver, as much to do with fear as with cold, but there was plenty of the latter. My clothes were winter gear, of course, but I’d lost my heavy coat in the Mote and now wore only a tight underjacket. The icebreakers had only recently swept the canal, as they did every evening, and the blocks of shattered ice bobbed and buffeted against the balustrade and the side of the boats. Striding along the riverbank, I scanned the water, looking out for symbols. Eventually I found what I was looking for: a painted eye, an ancient sign, denoting on this world a craft from the shores of the Small Sea. It was pulling out; I could see a figure on the deck, hauling at a rope.

  A cry came from behind me and I turned, to see two excissieres sprinting along the dock wall. A glance over my shoulder showed that there was no one behind me: they were aiming for me. Cursing, I jumped down onto the dockside.

  ‘Over here!’ someone shouted. The figure on the barge was waving.

  ‘Hang on!’ I cried, and fled. I’d changed my accent as I spoke, turning from the clip of Winterstrike to the longer vowels of the Small Sea. ‘Can you take a passenger, mistress?’

  ‘Get on,’ the woman said. I sprang aboard, narrowly missing the water, and immediately the barge pulled out, leaving the excissieres on the dock. They watched for a moment, then I saw them turn and head back. They’d have ways of recognizing the barge, but whether they were in a position to do anything about it remained to be seen.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ The pilot shaded her eyes against the glare of torchlight, looking upward. ‘I’m going as far as Tauk, no further.’

  ‘Good enough,’ I improvised, ‘I’m bound for Sheruk.’ It was the village before Tauk, far to the south of the Crater Plain, and I knew that relations were good between them, unless things had radically changed since I’d last set foot in the Sea Matriarchies. The same could not be said of all the shore towns. The barge itself was a long low thing, bulky and blunt at the prow.

  ‘Came up with a load of seacoal,’ the captain said. ‘This is my own boat, my mother’s before me.’ Easy to believe: she was as squat and blunt-nosed as her vessel. She did not have to tell me that I’d be working my passage. Anyone from the Small Sea would be expected to haul rope and do the same.

  ‘I’ve spent too long here,’ I said.

  The skippe
r laughed. ‘What, been here a day? I came three nights ago, won’t be coming again. I doubt they’ll be able to pay – had to argue for it, easier to wring money out of the coal itself.’

  Things have been difficult here,’ I said. ‘I came two years back. A teacher,’ I added, to her unspoken question. She might not believe me, but I didn’t really care. She’d let me on board and if she’d put any variances in accent down to the long stay in Caud, then that was well and good.

  ‘Who’s your family?’

  Oh damn. But I’d been to Sheruk, at least. ‘Montak.’

  ‘I know of them. Don’t know ’em well except old Rehet. Decent people, so I’ve heard.’

  ‘More decent than this lot.’ I gestured towards the canal bank, as the big barge slowly swung out into the stream. I could hear what sounded like weapons fire. I looked back and up at the broken towers, the flicker of street lighting running up into the hills but full of gaps, like missing teeth. From this vantage point, the once impressive skyline of Caud was a mess. As the barge swung out into the icy canal, I glimpsed the ruined dome of the library, and fingered the sphere in my pocket. I didn’t know how badly the library had been damaged, whether the warrior would reappear. I hoped it hadn’t been terminal, especially since she, or it, had saved my life.

  ‘How long will it take?’ I asked.

  ‘A week,’ the skipper said, adding rather suspiciously, ‘But you’d know that.’

  ‘I came on the train,’ I told her. She swung the tiller out and the barge headed into the string of departing water traffic. Caud fell away, the shouts growing gradually fainter and the lights going out, one by one.

  Interlude: Shurr – Malay, Earth

  The entourage of the Centipede Queen reached the port at dawn, with a coolness in the air and a chewed half-moon hanging low over the harbour. Both sea and sky were a rosy grey in the morning light and Shurr took a deep breath, wondering when, and whether, she’d see Khul Pak again. She had travelled before, to the Rimlands of Cascadia, the islands of the Siberian Sea, but never to another world. Already she had a sensation of immensity, as though the universe was opening up before her and allowing her to slip secretly through.

  The Queen’s litter glided ahead: an enclosed shell on hovering stabilizers, like a coffin or a barque, its sides rendered opaque so that the Queen could look out but others could not look in. It preserved the mystique, the Queen had once remarked, for her not to appear except at the great festivals and, of course, at her ritual marriage, when that took place.

  Shurr looked now at the litter sliding ahead through the morning air and clenched her fists within the folds of her sleeve, making Segment Three slide restlessly up her arm. It had taken a lot of money to persuade the Matriarchy of Winterstrike to sanction this visit and there was still plenty of time for something to go wrong: Shurr could feel trouble ahead, like a fog bank, vague and yet ominous. But there was no sign of it yet. The harbour lay peaceful in the morning light, the great red ball of the sun rising up over the low-rise tenement blocks that ringed the city sprawl and gleaming through the smoke cast up by the industrial units to the north of Khul Pak. Shurr waited as the Queen’s litter was guided down the steps of the quay to a rocking security sampan. Beside her, Ghuan murmured, ‘Not long now before take-off Shurr nodded. It took some getting used to, seeing Ghuan as a woman. The slanting eyes were the same, amusement-filled, and so were the delicate features – the same, and yet different, as if the cocktail of hormones had caused them to blue slightly around the edges. And there was something different in Ghuan’s gaze, too: an unfamiliar anxiety.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Shurr asked, risking loss of face for them both.

  ‘Mars is – a long way away.’

  ‘I know. But you’re female now. You’ve nothing to fear.’ ‘It’s not all that friendly to women, from what I hear.’ Shurr laughed. ‘It’s a hell of a lot less friendly to men.’ The litter was now at the end of the sampan, locked into the boat’s own system and surrounded by a faint glow. From the subtle lightening of the litter’s walls, Shurr knew that the Queen had activated the viewing switch and was taking an interest in what was happening outside. She followed the litter down into the rocking sampan. The motor was kicked into action and Shurr, Ghuan and the other members of the Queen’s party were whisked out into the harbour, past the teeming flotilla of boats which occupied the typhoon shelters and out into the wide open ocean. The city fell behind. Shurr glanced back at Khul Pak and from this new angle saw the Palace of Light rising on its slight promontory in the midst of the maze of waterways and canals. She’d heard that Winterstrike was built on water, as was Caud, and the other cities of the Plain. A sudden excitement filled her: the prospect of a new world, where the Queen’s lineage had once been revered and might be so again. Then the city was gone, lost in sunlight and water haze, and the sampan was shooting out across the sea to the platform.

  On clear days, which were few, one could see the platform from the upper storeys of the Palace of Light: a spiky, attenuated porcupine shape far out to sea. Shurr had often stood on the balconies of the Palace, watching the sharp sparks of incoming and outgoing haunt-ships rising and falling from the platform, and had never ceased to wonder where each one was heading, or had come from. The choices were limited: Mars, Nightshade, the Moon, perhaps the strange rim settlements clinging to the rocks of the Belt or the scattering of vast post-orbital craft that glided between the worlds. And each one whispered to her: she could hear the voices of the dead channelled through the Segments she had carried, for this was part of their function, too; to listen to the Eldritch Realm and seek answers.

  Segment Three must feel this now, for it stirred and quaked within her sleeve. Shurr ran a hand along the centipede’s spiny body, murmuring reassurances. Ghuan turned an unsettled face towards her.

  ‘Do you think that’s our ship?’

  Shurr followed his – no, her, she must get out of the habit of thinking of him as a man – pointing finger to where a dark shape was hovering over the edge of the platform. Shurr had only once before been close to a haunt-ship, and then as now, the thing had been difficult to see: blurred around the edges, with detail suddenly illuminated as if by lightning. As the sampan drew closer to the platform, the haunt-ship solidified, becoming a squat oval craft with gleaming metal sides and a bristling canopy at its summit. As Shurr watched, a gape-mouthed form, barely recognizable as human, shot out from underneath the ship and skimmed across the water, passing through the sampan and stirring Shurr’s hair with an icy spectral breath. ‘Looks like it,’ Shurr replied.

  NINE

  Essegui — Winterstrike

  The sound that woke me was so faint that at first I thought I’d imagined it, or was still lost in dreams of the fortress bridge, blazing. Around me, the dingy room of the boarding house was filled with a creeping light. The river birds which congregated around the gate were already shrieking and clucking with the approach of dawn and it must have been one of those that woke me – but then I heard the sound again, a slight stealthy scratching at the base of my door.

  Very carefully, I sat up. There was something glistening under the frame of the door, as though oil was being poured through the gap. Something prompted me not to put my feet on the floor. The back of my neck was prickling with the recognition of something eldritch: the guest house was not, as far as I could tell, warded apart from some basic mechanisms around the front door, but this had the twitchy feeling of sophisticated tech.

  And the majike, at least, had known where to find me . . . But she’d offered help, hadn’t she? Somehow, I did not think this was it.

  Standing on the bed, I reached for my pack and hauled it over my shoulder, grateful that I’d slept in my clothes. Then I climbed across to the windowsill, like a child playing a game, and perched on it while I unclasped the window. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that the oil, or whatever it might be, was starting to coalesce into a greasy film across the rough parquet of the floor. As I sent the
window rattling up, the oil flashed like white fire and a shape appeared in the centre of the room. It lunged at me, a toothed maw, but I was already out of the window and hanging onto the sill. I dropped ten feet into a snowbank and without waiting to catch my breath, ran for the gate.

  I’d wondered how, without transport, I was going to get clear of the city. The majike had mentioned a pilgrimage, but I didn’t like the thought of relying on information provided by someone who was, as far as I was concerned, an enemy. I didn’t have much choice, though. The Calmaretto carriage was a useless machine, used only for formal occasions and short distances – the theatre, the park. On the rare occasions that we’d been taken up to the Harn country house – really no more than a cottage in the upland meadows of the Saghair, and thus unusable for the cold months of the year, which was most of it – we’d had to hire transportation. Anyway, after the events of the early morning, I was reluctant to draw further attention to myself.

  Due to the outbreak of war, most public transport between Winterstrike and the region of Caud was on hold or severely compromised, although there was some canal traffic. It would, however, be difficult to get from Winterstrike to the mountains by water. Normally, there were trains into the foothills, but now these, too, had been placed on hiatus. I spent half an hour or so huddled in a makeshift tea-house within the lee of the gate, working out how best to hire a ground car anonymously.

  The oil-thing had not come after me and this wasn’t a surprise. I’d recognized it as a roaming ward: a portion of someone else’s house defence hijacked and booby-trapped, sent out into the world to kill. It wasn’t an easy matter, and that told me that whoever had sent it after me meant business. Not a comforting thought.

  As I sidled out of the shadow of the gate, the geise nudging me at every step, I saw a procession coming down the street. This was motley, disorganized, and yet seemed to have an element of cohesion. A large carriage in the centre of the procession swayed from side to side, drawn by two horned, lowing beasts, and a crowd pressed around it, banging hide drums and playing the mournful flutes around which, in the south, entire orchestras are based. The whole procession was producing a doleful cacophony as it headed towards the red bulk of the North Gate. Oh, what the hell, I thought. I had to find my sister and besides, someone was trying to kill me. I needed to make a decision. I ran forward and caught the sleeve of a woman walking behind the carriage.