by Liz Williams
A bomb? And then, across the street, a storefront exploded. Both Rubirosa and I were already diving for the ground, smacked there by the force of the blast. Above us, a plexiglass window flexed, bent outward, flexed again and collapsed against its own pressure. I covered my head with my arms as pieces of the window fell in. Someone was screaming. There was an intense, unnatural heat but I couldn’t hear the roar of fire. Cautiously, I raised my head. I couldn’t see much beyond the window, only a white wall as though the snow had blown up, or someone had changed a programme to static. As I watched, a face bubbled out of the wall, mouth agape, eyes staring. And through its eyes, all I could see was stars.
Interlude: Leretui
She would enjoy it, Mantis told her with a brittle gaiety. It was a return to the ancient times; she must have read about such things, perhaps even seen videocasts, old and flickering. Leretui need not be afraid, because she would be high above the action and well protected.
Mantis would make very sure that she was protected. Leretui knew that, didn’t she?
So why, Shorn thought, did she continue to feel so strange?
There were other emotions mixed in with the fear, however. Mantis fascinated her. It was the way that she thought about things, so alien, so different.
‘You see, Leretui,’ she said, sitting in the chair in the chamber while Shorn sat on the bed, hugging her knees. ‘Things have been out of balance on Mars for far too long. The original matriarchies – progressive social experiments, that got out of hand. After all, Earth still has males.’
‘In a subservient role,’ Shorn argued.
Mantis shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But things could change. The oldest legends tell of cycles: how first women dominated, and then men, and now women again. We need to get past that kind of thinking. We need equality. That’s what the Age of Children was all about, you see. Equality between the genders. Equality between different human species.’
Shorn was silent. She did not see how equality could be possible, after so long. And Mantis was the first member of the Changed she’d ever really talked to at close quarters: you could not call the vulpen ‘human’. Yet something still skated through her mind, the long face, the bony fingers clutching her own.
‘You mentioned this – test,’ she said.
‘A chance for the vulpen to prove their skill,’ Mantis said. Her eyes shone, first dark, then pale. She spread her oddly jointed hands. ‘They demanded it, not I.’
Shorn did not see how this had anything to do with equality, or any of the theories that Mantis had propounded to her. The woman seemed to want a confessor, or at least, an ear. This proposed test sounded more like the sort of things excissieres went through, so wasn’t it just a case of males mimicking females, without any real understanding of what they were doing or why?
But the thought of seeing vulpen again – she didn’t understand how she felt about that, couldn’t seem to pin the feelings down.
You’ll enjoy it,’ Mantis said again, and she sounded very sure of it. So Shorn said, doubtful, ‘Maybe I will.’
She was looking forward just to getting out of the tower room for a while. The long view had paled, and it had become too reminiscent of the year she had spent locked in the heart of Calmaretto. She found that her thoughts had taken to spiralling endlessly around, like birds around carrion, dwelling on the past, on shame and humiliation. She tried to turn them away from the subject, but could not. So Shorn let herself sink into it, until the time came for Mantis to lead her down.
The tower was not, after all, as ruined as she had thought. At some point in its long history – more recent than not – someone had gutted the interior and replaced musty stone and rotting wood with a plastic shell, in plain muted colours. The floor beneath Shorn’s feet sparkled with shot light, running through the tiles, and occasionally faces appeared in the walls, eyes empty, mouthing words.
‘Who are the haunts?’ Shorn asked. Her hand was tucked into the crook of Mantis’s elbow and held there firmly. Under her fingers, the arm was unnaturally hard, like bone.
Mantis laughed. ‘Trapped souls, nothing more. I suppose I should have done something about them, but – well, it lends atmosphere, don’t you think? Besides, some of them are men, you’ll have noticed. I thought it’s an interesting reminder – what we were, and what we’ve become. So I decided to leave them.’
‘Do they ever – escape?’ Shorn asked, thinking of Calmaretto and its multiple wards.
‘Only occasionally. They don’t do anything, can’t be used for anything, either. Too diffuse. A shame, really. It would be interesting to question them, but they’re just images. Any content is long gone.’
But Shorn could hear something up ahead now, a distant, pervasive murmuring. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
Ah, those are your subjects, my lady.’ Her grip on Shorn’s hand tightened. ‘Don’t be afraid, now. You know they can smell it?’
And will I see – him – there? The one beneath the bridge? The one who changed everything for me? Shorn did not say this aloud. How would she know? she thought. They were said to look all alike, clones and shifts, like the female versions of the Changed. Then they turned a corner and she was standing in a great domed chamber, filled with long white faces like ghosts. All of them were turned towards her and the sudden silence was deafening.
This time it was her own grip that tightened on Mantis’s arm. Her breath sounded loud in the hush.
‘Don’t be afraid.’ Mantis’s voice was very solemn, as if trying not to mock. She led Shorn up a flight of stone steps and Shorn stared straight ahead, not looking down, wanting and yet not wanting to meet those inhuman eyes. Their gaze bored into her until she felt as full of holes as a sieve. Mantis led her into a rickety iron cage, dangling above the crowd. Once inside, she was ushered onto a red velvet seat. She perched there gingerly, as the cage swung. Eventually she forced herself to look down. The floor of the cavern was covered with a glassy oval: from the chill that rose from it, she recognized ice.
‘What’s happening?’ she whispered to Mantis, who still had hold of her hand. Her fingers were growing numb.
‘A contest. They like to prove themselves.’
One of the vulpen skated out onto the rink, the blades of its – his – feet whistling across the ice. He wore black and white robes, a swirling chequerboard pattern, blurring into a blizzard as he moved. Shorn gasped. The long feet flashed beneath the hem of the robe, carving temporary patterns into the ice. He carried a pole of glinting metal, marked with long barbs. On the opposite side of the ice, another vulpen skated forth, wearing black and red. The barbs on his weapon were also red: a flaring crimson. Shorn craned her neck, trying to see if either of them looked familiar, but of course she could not tell: they all looked the same, with those pointed faces and small inverted ears, the arching brow ridges and bony skulls. The combatants hissed, displaying triangles of teeth. Black-and-white spun, whirled, whipping the barbed pole over his head and kicking out with one serrated foot. Red Warrior ducked, dived, skidded in a moth-flurry of robes across the rink, rebounded to his feet. A thin trail of blood followed: Shorn watched it, fascinated, the little drops marbling as they froze.
Beside her, Mantis laughed. ‘Nothing like blood,’ she said.
‘Will one of them kill the other?’ Shorn asked.
‘Perhaps.’ She did not sound as though it mattered.
White Warrior whisked over, stabbing down with the barbed pole. Red rolled, trying to avoid the stabbing point, which stopped just short of the ice. White’s skates cut graceful arabesques across the floor. Mantis pointed, said sententiously, ‘It’s as important to be beautiful as it is to be strong.’
Shorn would have liked to disagree, but the patterns that were forming before her were mesmerizing: black, white, red; blood and ice and the sad darkness of an eye. She leaned forward, forgetting Mantis’s grip on her hand, and watched the combat. She thought, for a moment, that she could feel Mantis’s smile.
R
ed and White were now both back on their skating blades. They rushed towards each other, poles forming wheels in the air and sending upward a draught that stirred Shorn’s hair. It was a dance as much as a fight, she understood, and yet the fight lay at the base of it all, the brutality underneath the beauty, and that was what made it exciting.
She’d seen violence before, of course. She was of Winterstrike. There had been the bloodgames played by the excissieres, running through the streets during Misrule. Shorn and her sister and cousin had not been allowed out of the house, but they’d watched anyway, hiding behind the windows of the winter garden on the roof and watching the silent violent dance in the snowy street below. The masques held by the coquettes – Shorn had been to a few of these and they’d almost always ended in a fanning, the razor-edges flickering out across a face. That was normal, just another side of life, but this was different, a different smell in the air, catching hold of her senses and twisting them in.
Red Warrior leaped, rising high above the rink and kicking down. White fell, throat torn out. The scent of blood struck Shorn like a blow. She watched, avid, as the vulpen clustered around and began, delicately, to feed on their fallen companion.
SIXTEEN
Essegui — Crater Plain
I wanted to sleep, but it wouldn’t come and so I stayed wide awake and stared out at the changing landscape as the ancient ground car sped along. I half expected to see Alleghetta standing out there amongst the scrub, but she didn’t appear either, which was a relief. Being haunted by one’s still-living (as far as I knew) mother was, I felt, coming close to the final indignity.
We came down from the mountains and out across the plains once more, whistling through the icy grass. It was still very early in the morning, with the stars speckling the sky. Occasionally we started flocks of hunting birds up from the grass and they flew upwards in spirals, like smoke. I had that early-morning sense of the world made new, that time when the planet seems to belong to you and your companions, and no one else.
This time, however, it was my companions’ disconcerting presence that was probably stopping me from sleeping. I hadn’t paid much attention to the bite on my arm after my capture by Mantis’s rider, but now it started to itch and burn, whether from mental association with the centipedes, or because the haunt-tech episode had dampened it down, or simply because I now had the leisure to think about it, I did not know. I pushed back my sleeve and looked at the bite: no point in trying to pretend it wasn’t there, I thought, seeing that the thing that had given it to me was probably lurking in someone else’s clothes right now.
And indeed, one of the women leaned forward and examined the bite with interest. It had become raised into a shiny knot, the flesh oddly twisted around a central core, like a mutated boil. I stared at it with revulsion.
‘It’s reacted quite well,’ the woman said, with approval.
‘Oh, well, that’s good, isn’t it? One of your familiars sinks its pincers into my arm and it comes up in a great oozing lump -fantastic’
The woman did not appear to notice any sarcasm. ‘Shurr, look at this.’
‘Sometimes there’s a very strong reaction,’ Shurr said. ‘Your immunity must be quite good. It can be painful.’
‘Why did I have to undergo it, in that case?’
‘It’s a tracking implant,’ the woman explained. ‘It’s how we found you.’
‘Let Three take care of it, now that we have more time,’ the other woman said. She tapped her sleeve and the centipede slid out of it. I didn’t like to ask what had become of the one that had liberated me from the cell: it must be dead, but I wasn’t sure that they were alive in the first place. This thing had a gleaming white carapace, unmarked except by a small silver dot near the head. It moved with smooth mechanical precision.
‘Is it real?’ I asked. ‘That is, I mean is it a machine?’
‘In part. A bio-engineered organism. Rather like your excissieres, I suppose.’
‘I don’t know much about how things are done on Earth,’ I said, ‘but aren’t those very expensive?’
The woman smiled as the thing slipped onto my lap. I tried not to flinch. ‘They belong to the Queen. They are hereditary, very ancient technology.’
‘I see.’
‘Don’t worry. It won’t hurt you again. Let it do what it must with the bite.’
I watched as a glistening droplet of moisture seeped from the centipede’s jaws and ran down one sharp pincer. It fell directly onto the bite and there was a numbing sensation, then a coolness, not unpleasant. The centipede withdrew until, to my great relief, it was no longer visible within the woman’s robes.
But with that drop of moisture came images.
There was a palace, a colonnade of stout stone columns. A vine climbed up them, bearing crimson and gold flowers, and the windows of the palace blazed with light. Voices came from within: it sounded like a party and reminded me of Calmaretto and the balls my mothers had hosted when we were growing up. Water flickered over the surface of a canal but it did not feel like Mars.
Then, dense jungle with a temple in the middle of it, all ruined and shattered, but clearly once a large construction – a ziggurat, carved around its base with figures in erotic configurations, and at its summit a round bowl of plexiglass, also ancient, I thought, but still much later than the temple. A thought came to mind: this is the Queen’s observatory.
Then I was standing on a boat and coming in to a long shoreline, edged with buildings under a hot blue sky. Everything was azure and gold and white, the buildings high-rise and shining, and I took a quick breath, because I knew that this was Earth. A light, bright place – but then the boat on which I was standing skimmed over choppy water and I looked down through the clear depths to see buildings far below. Earth the Drowned, and that made me realize that what I’d just seen was real.
The scenes flicked out like a dead broadcast. I said, ‘I had a vision.’
‘It stores memories. Sometimes there’s a little bleed.’
‘Was that Malay?’
‘Most probably. Its recent memory selection will be of Mars. I downloaded, but possibly not all. You need a good clean, don’t you?’ she added to the thing inside her sleeve.
From the front, the driver said, ‘We’re almost there.’
I looked over my shoulder at the receding mountains. We’d passed the main road out of Winterstrike – the one on which the pilgrimage had come – some time before and now were crossing the greater plains in the direction of what I estimated to be the Grand Channel, not far from Caud.
‘Caud’s at war,’ I murmured, just in case they’d forgotten.
We know.’
More traffic was appearing now. We passed a big government vehicle trundling along a commission way, bearing city colours. Caud, not Winterstrike. It only increased my unease. Then other vehicles started coming into view, lots of them, of all different kinds, straggling out across the plains. Refugees, fleeing the stricken city. The old ground car wove its way between them, deftly avoiding the heavier traffic, the thundering long-wheel-base trucks and buses without air capacity. All of them looked crammed full: I’d be surprised if there was anyone left in Caud.
Shurr spoke rapidly into the comm, in a clickety language that I did not recognize. A moment later, a reply crackled back.
They’re not far away,’ Shurr reported. We were in the thick of the refugees now but I could see the gleam of the canal in the distance. Then pennants and a tall construction. All the women in the car gave a little shout, like a ritual exclamation.
‘I take it we’ve found them?’ I said.
That’s the jaggernath, yes. The Queen’s waiting for you,’ Shurr said.
I could have found it by myself, I thought later. It did not look at all Martian, being covered with signs and symbols, with the delicate tracery of haunt-wards that looked nothing like those you found on Mars. The air around it seemed clearer than the surrounding plains, as though it was accompanied by its own a
tmosphere. Tall poles and banners clung to it. The ground car shuddered to a halt not far away and a girl ran out of the construction and clung to the step of the car. The woman in the back opened the door and let the girl inside, speaking to her in their own language.
‘Am I to meet the Queen now?’ I asked.
‘First, preparation.’
I didn’t like the sound of that, but it turned out to simply mean a wash. If I’d been the Queen, I suppose I’d have objected to meeting grubby Martians, as well. A truck followed the Queen’s own vehicle, and in it I found a makeshift sonic washroom with a change of clothes, slightly too large. I decided against these, apart from the underthings, and remained in my black-and-bone. Then I waited, was brought tea and bread, and then more tea, and waited some more. We kept moving all the time, travelling at a snail’s pace parallel to the Grand Channel. I amused myself by trying to identify passing ships, without great success. The geise snapped at me from time to time, but the centipede’s antidote, or whatever it had been, seemed to have put a dampener on that, too. I can’t say I wasn’t grateful.
Eventually Shurr reappeared and announced that the Queen would see me shortly: she’d had some unexpected business to take care of. We were to follow the jaggernath and wait until called. So I walked out onto the plain and followed the vehicle of the Centipede Queen, with the cold grass lashing against my legs and the watery wind from the canal on my face. It was one of the last peaceful moments that I remember from that time.
