Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  ‘To spy,’ the older woman said.

  ‘Fair enough.’ I suppose it was sad that this seemed so reasonable.

  The woman shrugged. ‘It is a time of war. The Queen was concerned. We joined the refugees out of Caud, as a cover, telling folk we’d arrived there by mistake.’

  ‘So where are you taking me now?’ I asked.

  ‘To the Queen. She wants to meet you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s for her to tell you.’

  ‘And what will she do with me?’ I was not sure I wanted to know, after Mantis.

  ‘Just to talk with you. Nothing more.’ The woman must have seen what I was thinking in my face, for she spoke reassuringly. As reassuringly as someone can when they have a foot-long centipede sliding about in their clothes, anyway. I couldn’t help wanting to scratch.

  The sky was starting to lighten above the trees. I didn’t understand why we hadn’t been pursued. It was beginning to dawn on me that I had become – in some way I did not understand – a valuable commodity. Given what I’d just experienced, I didn’t think this was at all a good thing.

  FIFTEEN

  Hestia — the Noumenon

  Obviously, I didn’t mention the Library’s reappearance to Peto or Rubirosa. Everyone was rather dour that morning, still suffering the after-effects of rogue haunt-tech and disinclined for conversation. We reconfigured the barge’s stabilizers in silence and set off towards the mountains. The surface of the water was lightly iced over, not enough to require a sonic ram, but enough to make it crackle as we moved.

  As the barge glided on, Rubirosa finally spoke.

  ‘Last night. What was that all about, do you think?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Who drew those things to us?’

  ‘They were stray haunts,’ I said. ‘Plains remnants, bits of old histories, nothing more.’

  ‘Yes, but things like that usually avoid human contact,’ Rubirosa pointed out.

  ‘Do they? I thought they were common enough.’

  ‘Not the winged forms. I don’t think you realized this, but they’re very rare. I’ve seen them only once before, much further south. One of my contacts had managed to catch a flock of them to power a – let’s just say it was a device, never mind what kind. She was stupid enough to get in amongst them; she thought she could cope. I saw what they left of her. She was no more than a shell by the time they’d hollowed her out.’

  ‘Good thing you didn’t tell me that last night,’ I said after a pause. ‘I might have been put off.’

  ‘There wasn’t time,’ Rubirosa said, ignoring my attempts at wit. Her dark, delicate face was sombre as she stared out across the mountain wall. ‘I don’t think that was a random incursion of loose haunts, my spying friend. I think someone was trying to kill us. Peto,’ she hesitated, ‘seems a placid enough sort, even if she does have some intriguing defences. That leaves you and me.’

  ‘You amaze me. I should think the only difficulty will lie in which number they are on the list.’

  Rubirosa’s lips twitched. ‘Not popular, are you?’

  ‘Any more than you. Let’s face it, Rubirosa, you might be trying to kill me. If we’re looking at lists, how about starting at number one and working down from there?’

  ‘You think that was my doing, last night?’ Rubirosa asked. She did not seem offended by the question. ‘No, if I had decided to do away with you, I’d have had much less complicated opportunities. Given the bomb, and all.’

  This was unflattering but probably true. The marauder placed her hands on the railing of the deck and leaned out over the ice-splintered water. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘If we really want to find out who’s trying to kill us, all we have to do is wait.’

  Unfortunately, I thought she was probably right. Peto came on deck at that point and I made myself busy with the early morning duties of the barge, but it was already apparent that we were nearing some semblance of civilization. A scatter of low-roofed compounds – thick-walled dwellings around a central courtyard – began to appear along the canal bank, and from one of them spilled a handful of children dressed in bulky red clothes, like stuffed dolls. All of them had milky blue eyes. They ran down to the edge of the bank as soon as they saw us coming and began to hold out baskets of various things for sale – fruits and wool. Peto waved them aside but they clamoured on, making shrill wordless cries. Rubirosa had departed for below deck and soon the children fell behind, but more buildings appeared. Here was a tall temple, shaded by trees with leaves that resembled white froth. A woman walked under the avenue they formed, an elegant creature in fur-rimmed hat and boots, with a trailing brocade coat. Two gaezelles, their horns clipped and bound with gold, strutted behind her on a leash.

  ‘I thought that was illegal,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe in Winterstrike.’ Peto’s face was expressionless; I could not tell whether or not she disapproved. ‘Up here? Things are different.’

  ‘We must be on the edges of the Noumenon,’ I said.

  ‘We are.’ Peto indicated the temple. ‘That’s the temple of the High Lost Matriarch, the one who’s said to have founded this country.’

  ‘Why is she lost?’

  ‘I think someone kidnapped her and didn’t give her back.’

  ‘Ah.’ I’d have made some remark about quaint country customs if the mores of Winterstrike had been beyond reproach. Unfortunately, this wasn’t so.

  Peto pointed ahead. ‘Look. You can see the city wall.’

  The canal was taking us straight to a gap in the mountain and the gap was entirely filled by a battlemented bastion, extending several hundred feet up from the valley floor to the summits of the interrupted ridge. Flags fluttered from towers at the top of the battlements and I caught sight of the flash of binoculars, turned in our direction.

  We’ll have to go through customs,’ Peto said. ‘Then through the Noumenon itself, and down onto the other side. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of days. I don’t think the place is that big, but there’s quite a lot of water traffic’

  I shrugged. ‘It’ll take as much time as it takes.’ I did not feel as nonchalant as I was trying to appear. I planned to make inquiries once we entered this mysterious matriarchy and see if alternative passage to Winterstrike could be obtained. Once I got back – well, we’d see what happened then. I didn’t like the idea of handing in my resignation at a time of war, but I was sick of being manipulated. Maybe I could serve the city in some other way.

  Nor did I like leaving Peto with Rubirosa and the marauder’s bomb, but I had a task to carry out. If I could find the device and defuse it before then, I would do so: I felt that I owed a debt of gratitude to Peto. Even spies strive for occasional honour.

  I had very little idea as to what relations between the Noumenon and Winterstrike might be. Peto had spoken of neutrality and the Noumenon had kept itself strictly apart until the strike on Caud, but things change fast, and even faster in times of war. I’d already been out of Caud for days, and with no concrete information as to what had been happening in my absence, I was reluctant to predict matters.

  We were almost at the gate. The wall rose above us in a series of massive smooth slabs, half-fused in consequence of some ancient struggle. The gate itself was a hundred feet high, to let masted craft through, and carved in the old style with glowering faces.

  Again there was a lengthy and tedious wait while details were painstakingly recorded on an antique antiscribe by a woman with a face like a fanatical bird of prey. She insisted on searching the boat and I admit to being just a bit smug about this, and a bit hopeful. But Rubirosa was nowhere to be seen and neither, apparently, was the bomb. Chagrined, I could find no way of alerting the guards to her presence and anyway, the same issues applied as had held me back at the start of the cut-off.

  The barge glided into the tunnel that ran beneath the wall. This extended a long way, with an arch of light at the end of it. As we slid through, there was a faint thud on the deck be
hind me and I turned to see Rubirosa standing there. Her haunt-armour picked up the reflections of the lapping water, turning her into a thing of mutable shadows, interlaced with red fire. A moment later she was gone – down below deck, I assumed. When I looked back, the light was growing stronger and we were almost through the tunnel.

  The Noumenon: a tumble of cliffs and ravines, crammed with buildings that rose on top of one another, as though the city had already partially collapsed. The whole city was encased between two sharp mountain ranges, their glacially encrusted peaks visible high above, but dreamlike against the green winter sky. Easy to see why their ancestors had chosen this cleft as a refuge: readily defended and with the canal running through it. But the place surprised me. From what I’d heard of the Noumenon, the Matriarchy had once been a thriving queendom, the centre of its own small empire of the Plains, but ruin had come to it during the wars of the Age of Children and now, so I’d been told, the Matriarchy was no more than a huddle of villages clinging to its mountain. This, however, was an extensive city. Maybe my informers had been wrong, but research in my own section was painstaking: it had to be, for our own safety.

  From the looks of them, the people of the Noumenon had conformed to the geographical restrictions of their nation. They too were elongated and narrow, with long suspicious faces. I now saw that the guard at the customs post was not atypical: in fact, she was probably considered a beauty. Sallow skins, somewhat grey in tone, were commonplace, along with pale, pebble-like eyes under elaborately conical hats.

  Peto was watching the passers-by with an expression I couldn’t interpret. ‘I suppose you get like that,’ she said ‘Growing up in the dark.’

  ‘Like mushrooms.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Here at the base of the valley, the sun must rarely penetrate. There were lamp globes along the length of the promenade, casting a pale radiance through the gloom. Snow still lay in patches along the lee of walls and the shadows through which the barge passed were cold. I couldn’t see far ahead: the canal entered a series of bends, angling around the sharp edges of the cliffs.

  We pulled into a small mooring place cut into the side of the canal, and were joined by most of the water traffic that had been following patiently in our wake over the last few days. Above us, the sky was deepening in colour; here in the cleft it was almost dark. Someone touched my arm and I turned to find Rubirosa at my elbow.

  ‘Had a word with Peto,’ she murmured. ‘Seems we’re staying overnight.’

  ‘There’s no other mooring between here and the end of this stretch, apparently. So it’s here or nowhere.’

  The marauder frowned. ‘I don’t like this place. There’s something odd about it.’

  I nearly laughed. ‘That’s Mars for you.’ But I was being flippant. She was right. There was something strange about this sombre matriarchy, with its cold corners, more sophisticated than it should be. The uneasy feeling that had been with me ever since we passed through the gate now sent chilly ripples up the back of my neck. It reminded me of the feeling whenever I used my own abilities: the chill that crept over me whenever I stole someone’s soul. I glimpsed figures from the corners of my eyes, seeing ghosts, as usual. I thought it was down to the haunt-tech they must be using: the Noumenon felt like the plain where we’d encountered Mantis’s tower and the ghosts. The scene slipped and bled.

  ‘You’re not in armour, of course,’ Rubirosa said. She detached the narrow collar of her gear and placed it around my neck. The gesture had an oddly symbolic quality, as though she’d conferred some honour upon me. Or placed me in a shackle. ‘Now try.’

  The borrowed haunt-tech filtered up through my senses, affecting each one in turn, and finally meshing with my own training-enhanced abilities. I grew colder. There was a gunpowder taste in my mouth and a burnt odour in my nose. I heard whispering at the edges of my hearing, as though people were talking about me, just beyond my view. But the greatest difference was in my sight. Whereas the vista of the Noumenon had previously been merely monochrome and bleak, with shadows congregating in the corners, it was now plain that most of the buildings were actually ruined. Shattered stumps of turrets, their battlements crumbling, squatted on the heights, and down by the waterfront the wide promenade was cracked and stained. The people themselves were shades, flitting by.

  ‘Half of this isn’t real,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Rubirosa murmured. ‘But it used to be.’

  ‘Yes, it did. I was told this place had been devastated years ago, never really recovered. So what are we seeing? Some kind of projection?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this.’

  Neither had I. But there were other issues biting at me. ‘I need to find an antiscribe,’ I said. ‘A proper one.’

  ‘Mind if I come with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rubirosa grinned, displaying her pointed teeth. ‘I’m coming anyway. I fancy a night off this boat whatever I’m going into.’ Myself, I thought she enjoyed the prospect of adventure.

  ‘What if you’re recognized?’

  ‘Unlikely But if they do – well, we’ll just have to see. I haven’t got any other clothes.’

  ‘Neither have I. And Peto’s too short to borrow some from her.’

  That seemed to be an end of it. I gave the collar back to the marauder and the city of the Noumenon returned to its gloomy illusion. I told Peto what we were doing, but said nothing about the city’s changes. Dishonest perhaps, but I didn’t want to alarm her, or come back to find that she’d gone on without us. I knew she’d take the opportunity to search for the bomb, although I didn’t hold out any real hope. If neither of us had located it by now . . .

  ‘Do what you need to do,’ was all that Peto said. ‘And be careful. This can be a – curious – city.’

  ‘I’d noticed.’ So perhaps I hadn’t needed to say anything, after all. She was probably grateful to have her two guests off her boat for a while, I thought.

  Rubirosa and I strolled together down the promenade, endeavouring and failing to look like tourists. I kept thinking of what lay beyond my actual vision, the layer of the world revealed by Rubirosa’s haunt-armour. No one stared at us directly, but I was aware of sidelong glances, and the back of my neck burned.

  ‘I think we’re causing a stir,’ Rubirosa murmured. She took my arm, mincing slightly, and ogled a whey-faced girl with her crimson gaze.

  ‘Stop it. You’ll get us lynched.’ I was, all at once, a little too aware of her touch. When had that started to happen? It had been a while since I’d been involved with anyone, I told myself, it was doubtless simply a matter of proximity.

  ‘They’re supposed to be a people who mind their own business. You’ve seen why.’

  ‘Their business. Not the business of others, forced upon them. They can’t possibly imagine I’m your girlfriend!’

  ‘Why not?’ the marauder asked. ‘You’re not that ugly. Bit pale, perhaps, but I don’t mind that.’

  I detached her hand from my arm. ‘Stop provoking people. Whatever they are, I have work to do.’

  Eventually, we found a tea-house with a series of public anti-scribes set into the wall. Rubirosa lounged on a couch while I ordered local tea in a desperate attempt to appear inconspicuous, and logged on. The episode with Rubirosa had unsettled me, and my hands were unsteady over the console. I forced myself to concentrate.

  As I’d expected, there was nothing from Winterstrike apart from the usual stale pap of propaganda, but I was eventually able to access Gennera.

  Her pasty face popped onto the corner of the screen so suddenly that it was almost frightening, a spectral apparition. Or perhaps my nerves had been wound to a pitch by what I’d seen. The dissonance between the tea-house, so ostensibly normal, and what I’d glimpsed was starting to rub raw at my senses.

  ‘Where are you?’ she hissed.

  ‘I’m in the Noumenon.’

  ‘What in the name of the Bell are you doing there?’

 
‘You know what happened. I told you. Caud erupted,’ I typed, clicking off the voice link and rendering my message in code. ‘I had to run. Took a barge out. This was the way we had to come – I told you when I’d reached the plain. The canal was closed.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. It’s still open.’

  ‘What? But the pilot told me it had closed. I checked.’

  A cloying dismay had begun to settle around me.

  ‘They closed it for a day, no more. Then it opened again.’

  ‘But the barge, the pilot – I just got on at random.’ I sounded like a child. People can be bribed.

  ‘Get out of the Noumenon,’ Gennera said. ‘Get out now.’

  ‘I’m trying!’

  ‘Do so,’ Gennera said, and logged off.

  But there was another message waiting for me and it came from a surprising source: my aunt Thea. ‘Leretui missing. Please come home. We need your help. E gone after her.’

  I stared at the antiscribe in dismay, typing back, ‘Where has E gone? Do you know?’

  Oh Essegui, I thought. Spies should have no ties, but I thought of my cold-faced, warm-hearted cousin, the features I saw every time I looked in a mirror, and all those shared secrets . . .

  I turned back to where Rubirosa was reading a paperback novel of the kind much admired in Winterstrike forty years before, and attracting covert glances from the rest of the tea-house’s customers. I wondered what they really thought. I wondered what they really were.

  ‘Finished your messaging?’ the marauder said, without looking up.

  ‘It would appear so.’ I went to sit by her, at a safe distance. I was still thinking about Gennera’s instructions. ‘We’d better go,’ I said.

  ‘Agreed.’

  When we left, the strip of sky overhead had become dark and starry. The Noumenon was filled with the glow of lamps, all the way up the heights of the cliffs. I wondered who had – and who still – lived at the summit: perhaps government officials, or would they live at the safety of the base, a society geographically reversed? Rubirosa and I made our way through cramped and narrow streets; it was like travelling back in time to an earlier Mars, or perhaps even Earth – some strange day when technology was unknown. A ground car, gliding overhead, dispelled this illusion somewhat, but even that vehicle had an antique air about it. I thought of ruins, of a people glimpsed like shadows from the corner of the eye. I felt an electric tingling through my eldritch senses, like the activation of haunt-tech. From high on the cliff above the rooftops came a great burst of light, a soundless shower of sparks that, from this distance, must have been burning material that was several feet across. A moment later, the cliffside rumbled.