Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  But it did not last long. Shurr and I had been walking for perhaps fifteen minutes when an awning at the back of the vehicle rattled up to expose some steps and a narrow doorway. We were beckoned inside by a tall, slim person who immediately struck me as wrong, although I could not have said what was the matter with her. A round face and plum-black eyes, with similar ritual scarring to the others.

  When I stepped through the doorway, it took my eyes some moments to readjust to the low level of light. There was a lamp high on the wall, emitting some kind of smoky substance, and the air smelled heavy and drugged. I had to struggle not to cough. Several people were standing in front of me: two of them I knew from the pilgrimage and my rescue, but the third – who was similar – was unknown to me. They all bowed, as if I was an honoured guest.

  The Queen will see you now,’ the third person said, and stepped aside.

  She isn’t human. That was my first thought. The thing that looked expressionlessly up from the couch was as lovely as a doll: almost naked, with skin as white and hard as the carapace of one of her centipedes. Her arms appeared boneless, but then she shifted position and I saw spines moving underneath the skin. Her face was oval, with huge dark eyes and a sullen mouth. Black hair fell smoothly from a central parting and was then caught up again in a complicated topknot. I could not see, but I strongly suspected that her spine was as ridged as the back of her arms. Her breasts were bare and lacked nipples, and her crotch was protected by a black metal patch that looked as though it had been inset into the skin; similar patches were set along her shins and around her wrists. From the look of them, they were probably some kind of haunt device, but I knew very little about Earth tech.

  And I didn’t really want to find out.

  ‘Your name is Essegui Harn?’ She spoke with wondering slowness and I became almost certain that she was drugged.

  ‘Yes. Matriarch,’ I added, just in case. No one had told me how to address her, so I opted for standard courtesy.

  The Queen patted a cushion and something slid deeper beneath it. ‘Come and sit here by me.’

  I didn’t want to obey, but didn’t like to refuse, either. I did as she asked, feeling that it would be a considerable social solecism to squash one of the Queen’s bio-eng pets. Nothing reacted, fortunately.

  The Queen immediately put up a hand, much faster than I’d have expected of someone in her apparent condition. Four white fingers and a thumb, as hard and smooth as glass, attached themselves to my face. I pulled back but the hand came with me until the back of my head was flattened against the seat. The pressure was unbelievable, coming from someone who looked as fragile as the Queen. She looked straight into my eyes and I could not look away: it was like staring down a well.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. Too late for that. I felt like some little animal caught in a predator’s snare. The bite started to throb and ache, the previous numbness now quite gone.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said out of a dry and nearly speechless mouth.

  The Queen opened her lips and breathed. It was like being trapped in Mantis’s haunt device. The Centipede Queen took from me all the visions that Mantis had conjured, and there was one more, too: one that had nothing to do with alien planets and drowned landscapes.

  Instead, I saw my sister.

  A fairy tale: a princess is imprisoned in a tower. She sits sadly by the window, her long black hair unbound and wild, her hands knotted in her lap, gazing out across a mountain range, at dusk. There are stars above her head and one of them suddenly falls, shooting out of the sky and burying itself with a smoulder in the stony earth. The princess gasps. There is someone at her shoulder. She reaches up and holds out a faltering hand. Someone takes it, someone who is wrong, just as the woman at the door of the jaggernath was also wrong. Someone – a thin dark woman in clothes the same colour as her hair – bends down and whispers in her ear. Then the window closes, shutting out the stars and the night, and the princess, from outside view.

  Just a fleeting snatch of image, but of course I knew her. It was Leretui, known as Shorn, looking different. Looking mad.

  ‘She’s alive,’ I heard myself say. Inside my head, the geise leaped and twisted like a fish on the end of a hook.

  ‘Who is she?’ The Queen’s voice was rasping, hypnotic.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ I said. ‘She’s missing. But I don’t know where she is. I don’t know how I saw what I saw.’

  ‘Missing from a locked room,’ another voice said, across the chamber, but my head felt too heavy to lift and look. I felt something tickling the back of my hand and forced myself not to glance down. ‘How interesting.’ She leaned forward and opened her mouth again. I could see right inside it: not pink like a normal human’s mouth, but quite white and glassy, with a small spiny tongue and sharp ridges of teeth. She breathed once more and this time I found myself possessed of an unnatural and unfamiliar clarity. There was a strong fresh smell in the chamber, cutting through the musk.

  ‘Better?’ asked the Queen, with an arch of eyebrow.

  Thank you, yes, I think so, I’m not sure,’ I said, all in a rush. The Queen smiled.

  ‘Someone will bring you some tea. A good idea? Yes.’ She answered her own question. ‘So, now we know what you are.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  A sister.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Obvious enough, but the Queen went on, ‘Do you know what a whisperer is?’

  ‘Someone who whispers?’

  A whisperer is an old word for someone who hears things. Whispers, in the night. Long ago, they maybe thought they were hearing spirits, or demons, or gods. They are not. Now, of course—’ her mouth curled indulgently ‘—we realize how foolish and primitive such notions are, for we understand the nature of death, its animations. But then they did not. And later, equally foolish, they thought that the voices that they heard were evidence of madness.’

  ‘So what are they?’

  ‘Transmissions.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Let’s say – from the past. From things that should have died out long ago, and yet did not. Things who possessed the ability to speak mind-to-mind, through the medium of the dead world, the Eldritch Realm. I think you are sensitive. I think you can pick up things from other people, perhaps broadcast them.’

  ‘What do you mean, the past?’

  ‘Ah,’ the Queen breathed. ‘You know how it is, these days. The time of the bleed, my people call it. Ghosts are everywhere, the dead return through the aid of machines, those who are supposed to be long gone live on. Mars and Earth have had their day, Essegui Harn. Everything’s breaking down.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘And some people can hear the voices of the dead. Maybe your sister is one.’ A sly glance, as if she knew much that I did not.

  ‘I see.’ I remembered Leretui, folding to the ground beneath the weedwood trees in the summer light. But I thought the description applied more to Hestia, with her ability to steal souls and glimpse the future.

  ‘You said you heard whispering in me. That’s not from the past. That’s something my mothers did to me, and a woman called a majike – do you know what that is?’

  The Queen gave an indulgent smile. A sorcerer. Yes, I can hear that you’re cursed. But there are other whispers in your head. Echoes.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  The smile grew sweeter. ‘Neither do I. I wonder if your sister does. You’re an echo of her, you see.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked. And how do you know about this?’

  ‘My family has ancient texts, from before the Drowning. They give codes of contact, emblems that have reappeared. Symbols that were used by certain of the Changed, once upon a time.’

  ‘What if someone else has just – well, stolen them? The original species might have died out by now.’

  ‘No one steals from the None,’ the Queen said.

  ‘The None? Who are they?’

  The dead-who-speak.
It’s what they call themselves.’

  ‘What does everyone else call them?’

  The Queen smiled. ‘Everyone else just calls them destruction.’

  I was escorted back to one of the accompanying wagons. The group would, so the Queen had told me, release me soon and I would be free to resume my search for my sister. Shurr would be sent with me, to assist. I asked why they were prepared to help me, pressing the point, but the Queen would not reply. She asked me to tell her the story of Leretui’s disappearance and I did so, but I did not get the impression that she really understood the nature of my sister’s crime. When I mentioned the vulpen, and the act of transgression that Leretui had committed, the Queen’s gaze slid up to meet that of the dark-eyed girl, and of course it was then that I realized.

  The Queen had seen me looking. ‘Yes, he is,’ she admitted. ‘Although to come here, a physical change was necessary.’

  ‘She’s – he’s – been modified?’ He. How odd that sounded, that archaic Martian word, uttered without vilification or even revulsion. Despite my sympathies for Leretui, I had to stop myself from bolting out of the room; it was worse than the centipedes, in a way. And from the look in the young man’s eyes, the relationship between herself – himself, I corrected – and the Queen was not platonic.

  Unnatural. But not, it seemed, on Earth.

  Now, back in the swaying wagon, I thought of Leretui and of the dead and of men. I’d asked the Queen more about the None, but she hadn’t known, or claimed not to: it was a name from the far past, the lost long ago, a name around which terror still clung. It had been hard to make much sense out of the Queen’s ramblings. Something ancient had returned, or seemed to have done, and Leretui was connected with it in some way, but I could not see how.

  They’d said they could help me find Leretui, but they hadn’t told me how this would be done, either. The Queen had seen what I’d seen, that fairy-tale vision, but neither of us knew how to interpret it. I didn’t even know if it was Leretui’s real location, or a metaphor for something: such things had happened before. If only she’d been looking out at a public monument . . .

  I was so lost in my thoughts that it was a few minutes before I realized that the wagon had stopped moving. What amounted to a refugee convoy had progressed in fits and starts, so I thought this was just some inevitable hitch. I got up and went over to the window hatch, nonetheless.

  Outside was a sea of vehicles, stretching across the Plain. People were shouting and calling to one another, more than the usual subdued hubbub. There were cries from up ahead and the place where we’d come to a stop was strangely dark, though faint sunlight washed over the rest of the Plain. I went quickly to the back door of the vehicle and jumped down. Outside, I cannoned into Shurr, who was running round the side of the wagon. Her dark face was a distorted mask. She cried, ‘The Queen! The Queen!’

  ‘What’s wrong—?’ I started to say, and then I looked up.

  It was enormous. It was green and gold, like a beetle, shot with amethyst. From its gleaming carapace hung a thing like a huge hook, bristling with wires and sparks of electricity. It brushed against one of the pylons of the Queen’s vehicle and a shimmering radiance washed out into the air, penetrating the shadows in which we stood. Shurr was already running towards the Queen’s wagon, brandishing a small slim weapon, but the whole vehicle now was enveloped in sparkles of light, like the sun on water. I remembered the blue place I had seen, the place on Earth: Khul Pak. A terrible, desolate cry came from the interior of the wagon. The hook jerked and then the thing that hung above us was shooting upwards, a squat upper-atmosphere craft that quickly became a bright star in the heavens and was gone.

  Shurr threw open the doors of the Queen’s wagon. The young man sprawled unconscious, or perhaps dead, at the threshold. But the Centipede Queen of Khul Pak was nowhere to be seen.

  SEVENTEEN

  Hestia — the Noumenon

  Rubirosa got to her feet. I’d have followed her, but I was still transfixed by the spectral faces that were seething out of the white wall in front of me. I recognized a couple of generic types – these were women of the Southern Plains Matriarchy, that oval-faced girl with the sharp bones was surely from Ord. Haunts, used to power something and possibly connected with the bomb itself, and now released into the atmosphere. They shrieked upwards like rockets, trailing a smoky mist behind them.

  Someone was shouting: ‘Get out! Get out!’ I dragged myself away from the released ghosts and followed Rubirosa among the maze of awnings and fallen plaster. The shine of the marauder’s armour led me through the dim regions at the back of a tea-house and then we found ourselves in the kitchen.

  I straightened up. ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘Listen,’ Rubirosa said. She put out a warning arm, stopping me from going forward. Outside the tea-house, there was a high, painful whine.

  ‘Something’s coming down!’ A moment later, it hit. The teahouse shook and more plaster fell from the ceiling, but the beams held.

  The whole place is under attack. Anything to do with you?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’ The marauder turned to me with a frown. ‘I don’t think either of us is that important, are we?’

  Another hit and the tea-house would be down around our heads, I thought. I rattled the kitchen door, which had stuck, and wrenched it open. We fell back out onto the street, into a sea of panicking people.

  I shoved through the crowd, heading in the direction of the barge. A haunt screamed past me like a gunpowder rocket. Rubirosa grabbed my arm. ‘Look!’ She pointed upward.

  Something was descending through the cleft of the mountains, something familiar. It took me a moment to recognize it, then it turned and I saw the dreadnought I’d last glimpsed out on the plains, rising up from the Grand Channel and capsizing a ferry in its wake. Haunts were being sucked up toward it like moths to a flame, sizzling out against its flickering sides. A blast of light from its port bow sent fire shooting out across the valley and briefly illuminated a building at the summit as it erupted into flames, but I did not think it had been aiming at the building itself. A shadow passed over the peaks: another aircraft. Fragments of burning material rained down and one thin strand clung to my sleeve. I knew better than to brush it off: that was a good way to become possessed. I dodged under an awning, Rubirosa close behind, and we dived down a flight of steps. If I’d got my geography right, the mooring was not far away, but I wondered at the wisdom of returning to the barge: not the world’s swiftest craft, especially with a bomb on board and a captain I couldn’t trust.

  ‘The thing you put on the barge!’ I shouted to Rubirosa. ‘How sensitive is it?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘So all this haunt activity might set it off?’

  The marauder gave me an uneasy glance. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But you’re not certain?’

  Another blast from the dreadnought swallowed Rubirosa’s words. We ran for the mooring, arrowing through angled streets and leaping over fallen masonry. Then I leaped for what I took to be a low wall and fell heavily: the wall was low, but only on one side: the floor had caved into a cellar and I now sprawled on the rubble. Rubirosa’s face appeared over the top of the wall, looking somehow inhuman.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I was winded but not, I thought, seriously hurt, though there was a sharp ache in my ribcage when I breathed in which suggested bruising or a crack. ‘Yes.’ But then the shattered walls around me started to shimmer and break apart. A huge lump of rock came loose from the main wall and hurtled towards me. I tried to roll out of the way, but then it struck . . . and passed straight through. I had a sudden glimpse down into a gaping chasm, right through the middle of broken walls and floors, all the way down to what looked like a black pool. A moment later, I was lying by the side of that pool as the city broke down around me.

  I didn’t understand what had happened. Rubirosa’s face was nowhere to be seen but the stars above the city we
re very bright. I got to my feet, with a stab from the rib, and hobbled around the perimeter of the pool. It wasn’t until I reached the opposite point, halfway round, that I realized there was someone there: standing motionless in the shadows. I stopped dead. Beside me, the Library suddenly shimmered into sight. She said, whispering in my ear, ‘Do you see her?’

  ‘I see.’

  The figure was shadowy and wore a long hood that concealed her face. For a moment she shivered and I saw the outline of the wall behind her. ‘She’s a haunt,’ I said. ‘Or a hologram.’

  ‘She registers as real,’ the Library said.

  And she was real enough when she stepped forward and a sharp stinging constriction came around my throat. The figure raised a hand and pulled me in; I went stumbling, like an animated doll. Her hand closed over my face, I tried to fight but could not. Behind me the Library cried out, or so I thought, but this was not like the battle with the excissiere. From the corner of my eye I saw the Library collapse inward, folding down into herself, and then there were only shadows.

  I can’t say I was unconscious. I was dimly aware of what was going on, but it was vague and inchoate. I was led through a myriad of rooms and passages, some of them modern – all metal and polished stone – and some antique, no more than channels in the earth. For a few minutes I thought I walked across the surface of the planet as it had been before humans ever came, before there was any life at all except the thin smears of bacteria deep in the ice-locked caverns. I could breathe but the cone of Olympus reared up over me, pressing me down. My boots scuffed in red dust. Above me, the sky was a pallid ochre. It was very cold, colder even than Winterstrike in the depths of Ombre, but just as I was about to faint from it, a chilly wind blew and green curled up in the dust under my feet. Soon I walked through a landscape of needle pine and pitchwood, the early engineered conifers, saw the glint of water ahead. Olympus was still there, shadowy at the edges of my sight, but now its huge summit was white with snow and I could see lights on its slopes. I thought of spirits, of the old stories of the haunted hills, and shivered.