by Liz Williams
My feeling was that they probably knew only too well. For these kappa, lost in the middle of their marsh, anything that came their way could be used as a weapon. Especially a weapon itself. With my lips to the marauder’s ear, I whispered, ‘They don’t know about the Library.’
‘I suppose that’s something.’ Rubirosa was grudging. ‘But without technology, the Library can’t do a whole lot.’
As she spoke, the warrior appeared behind her. ‘Good!’ she said, all approval. ‘You’re free.’
‘For how long, though?’ I said, since Rubirosa, deprived of the haunt-armour, could not see or hear the warrior. ‘Can you find us a way out of here?’
The Library sighed. ‘This is a maze. I’ve explored some of it. You should see what’s down the corridor.’ She gestured.
We followed her down the passage, ears cocked for movement. But though the low sound of voices went on, the kappa themselves remained out of sight.
The Library would not tell me what lay beyond, perhaps fearing that we might be overheard, or perhaps – with nearly human glee – wanting to keep it a surprise. She was partly a teaching mechanism, after all. I was expecting anything from ancient palaces, buried beneath the rising flood, to undersea caverns. But what we walked into was a munitions dump.
‘How old is this?’ Rubirosa asked, wandering around boxes and crates marked with the old skull symbol, a grin for danger.
‘This is a latent explosive,’ the Library intoned. ‘Deliver it, and it can take months to activate, burning through its half-life. The crates are shock-proof
‘It looks like they’re using it as a shrine,’ I added, relaying this to Rubirosa. I was standing in front of one of the boxes, which had been pulled slightly forward from those above it in order to make a shelf. On the shelf stood a row of what looked like dolls: some of them as squat as the kappa themselves, but some attenuated, with twig bodies and limbs made of reeds. Tufts of red and blond wool created hair. Rubirosa came to stand beside me.
‘That’s sad,’ she said.
‘Why so? It’s the custom of primitive peoples.’ But I didn’t think the kappa were that primitive, all the same.
‘Latent Life destroyed cities, when this was an empire,’ the Library said. ‘Londress and Hagen, Dam and Vennen. Paris, the nearest city to this place. All gone now, underneath the waters. But they were dead before they drowned.’
‘I’ve never heard of those places,’ I said.
‘They lived thousands of years ago. I have only fragmentary references to the wars that devastated them. Much was lost.’
‘And this has been here all the time?’
‘Just think what you could do with this,’ Rubirosa breathed. Her marauder’s face betrayed the avarice of the warrior.
‘If it’s still active,’ the Library said. ‘It may not be.’
‘Maybe the kappa are the best guardians,’ I said. But I was more interested in where the cavern led than in what it contained, although I filed the information away for future use. I’d already delivered one weapon to the Matriarchy, however. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about delivering another.
At the back of the shrine was a door. It opened easily enough and there was no sign of a lock, which struck me as odd. I was the last one through and checked the room behind, but it remained empty. I got the impression that the kappa, having captured us, had not really known what to do with us.
Narrow stairs and walls made out of pitted concrete, slimed with damp and earthstain. The Library paused, causing me to walk right through her.
‘Don’t do that!’
‘Sorry,’ the Library said, with faint surprise. ‘It doesn’t affect me, you know. There’s someone up ahead.’
We proceeded with caution. The Library was right: I could hear someone shuffling about, muttering and mumbling. I didn’t recognize the language, but it had to be one of the kappa.
‘If there’s only one,’ Rubirosa whispered, ‘we can tackle her.’
‘Agreed.’ With the Library close behind, we hastened ahead. The muttering was growing louder. I stepped through a doorway into dim light and stopped dead. The kappa had not been behind us all this while. They had been ahead of us. They stood in a semicircle, whispering to themselves, around someone who sat in a small pool of light in the centre of a huge hollowed chamber.
TWENTY-FOUR
Essegui — Crater Plain
The centipede’s feet were sharp against my skin, like pins. As they scratched, information came to me: the vessel was descending, which I already knew, and the location lay within the mountains. And also, I was given the whereabouts of the Queen: a chamber not far from here, a series of left turns. I didn’t have anything to lose, I thought. I waited until Mantis had finished her work at the console and moved on, then followed the directions I’d been given.
The door was locked from the outside, an old-fashioned punch-lock. The centipede was too small to activate it, but when I touched it, it obediently swung open.
The Queen lay on a divan with her back to the wall. The air had that same curious smell of musk, a heady narcotic drift. Since her captors were unlikely to have provided her with an actual drug – unless she had talked the equivalent of One into giving her something – it seemed that this was some natural secretion of the Queen. It made her seem even more alien.
‘Hello?’ I said, pushing the door to behind me but making sure that it did not lock. Slowly, the Queen turned her head.
‘It’s you,’ she said, with a mild wonderment. Her words didn’t seem to be entirely in phase with her lips.
‘Yes. They captured me, too – at least, I’m not sure if they know that I’m on board.’
‘They may have picked you up through our tracker,’ the Queen said. ‘They have something which locks onto my people. They plan to use us.’ Her beautiful face reminded me of a porcelain doll that one of my aunts had given me as a child. I’d never liked it. I laughed.
‘I don’t know what use I’ll be to these people, I’m sure.’
‘I spoke of us,’ the Queen said, patiently. It took a moment to work out what she meant: herself in the plural, not herself and me.
‘I see,’ I said carefully, though I did not. The Queen smiled.
‘It’s happened before.’
‘Someone’s kidnapped you?’ She’d had an exciting life, for so young a woman.
‘No. I mean, to my lineage.’
‘Why? How do they try to use you?’
‘In many ways,’ the Queen said. She yawned. She seemed remarkably unconcerned about being captured and imprisoned and I wondered again about drugs.
‘We need to try and get out of here,’ I said. ‘When this thing lands.’ My shadow, outlined by the dull lights of the Queen’s cell, gave a twinge of pain.
‘No,’ the Queen said, placidly. ‘I wish to stay. I want to find out what they want, who they are.’
‘I can tell you who they are,’ I said. I related to her what the Library had said to me. The Queen leaned forward with the first signs of real animation I’d seen in her.
‘Mantis is a queen? From the past? How exciting!’
‘I’d far rather have a quiet life, myself I said.
Another gentle smile. ‘You are not a Queen.’
I wondered whether all of them were mad, then thought of Alleghetta, who hadn’t made Matriarch yet but who’d be a Queen if only she could. That would be ayes, then.
‘You must do as you please,’ the Queen said, as though we were on holiday. She waved a pallid hand. ‘I should not keep you here, if they don’t know you are aboard.’
But there were footsteps behind the door and the sound of voices.
‘Over here,’ the Queen said, her voice suddenly sharp. She undulated from the couch and drew out a long drawer: it looked as though the room had been used for storing bodies. Perma-sleep for space flight, or simply a morgue? I darted across the room and lay in the drawer. The Queen shoved it shut.
I could hear, but the dar
kness was oppressive and stifling, making my head ache along with the geise. Mantis’s voice said, ‘Have you reconsidered?’
‘I have not done so. I don’t think I’ll join you.’ She sounded as though she was talking about a party: I could imagine her examining her fingernails as she spoke.
‘Why not?’ Mantis sounded astonished, and angry.
‘It isn’t our history,’ the Queen said.
‘You think you’re better than us, don’t you?’ Mantis’s anger was growing. ‘They created you, just as they created us.’
‘Perhaps,’ the Queen said. She did not sound as if she greatly cared.
‘They must be overthrown,’ Mantis hissed. ‘We’ve suffered enough.’
‘You have suffered. But I am a Queen. We are worshipped, we give guidance to our people. We are the mothers, not the children.’ She spoke with a distinct condescension; I couldn’t entirely blame Mantis for becoming annoyed. I wondered who Mantis meant by ‘they’. I had a feeling it might be anyone who wasn’t of the Changed.
Then you can be mothers alone,’ Mantis snapped.
Lying there in the dark, in the sudden charged silence, I thought Mantis had a point. The Changed had, after all, been created by the ancient Matriarchy of Winterstrike with the expectation that they were to be an evolved form of the human species. It hadn’t worked out that way. The men-remnants were debased, bestial. I thought of the vulpen and shuddered. The female species were fragile, often weak, often simply mad. If you knew this, and your people had been reduced to a menial, marginal position in human society, why wouldn’t you rebel? But that didn’t mean I had to become a fellow traveller: these issues dated from the old days, they were nothing to do with us . . . Whatever my familial issues with the current Matriarchy of Winterstrike, I needed to let them know about this.
Light flooded in and I blinked. The Centipede Queen was staring down at me and in the swimming sensation caused by sudden illumination it seemed as though something crawled behind her eyes.
‘We’re landing,’ the Queen said, and blinked.
I couldn’t stay in the drawer, because if they came for the Queen, there would be no one to let me out. The Queen, I’d decided, could pursue her own agenda: she clearly had one, and I was under no obligation to rescue someone who didn’t want to be rescued. Besides, as the geise told me in whispered reminders of increasing insistency, I had an agenda of my own.
So I slipped out of the Queen’s chamber, making sure that no one was in view, and found a lockless storage unit in which to wait out the landing. The centipede came with me. It might, the Queen said with her customary vagueness, prove useful. I suspected it was a way of keeping an eye on me, and – remembering the bite – a means of control. But I saw little point in returning the thing: it was so small that it could easily slip back into my clothes without my noticing. So I accepted the Queen’s doubtful gift and made my way back into the depths of the ship.
The dreadnought had obviously been a high-tech craft in its day, but times had moved on. Despite the speed with which it was clearly capable of moving, its descent was bumpy and I had to brace myself against the sides of the storage unit, eventually sitting down with one arm wrapped around my knees and another gripping a nearby wall-bar. We shuddered to a bruising halt and the whole ship rang: it was like being back in the bell tower and I felt an acute and painful nostalgia which took me by surprise. At least life at Calmaretto had been predictable. Until my sister’s transgression, anyway.
Once the ship had stopped moving, I cautiously let myself out of the storage unit and found the nearest viewport. This revealed a high, bright sky and a quantity of red crags and gullies. Olym-pus’s cone rose far across the plain, visible at the end of a wash. We had not, in fact, come all that far from the point at which I’d been abducted, but were still up in the Saghair, not far from the Noumenon. From the position of the sun, it looked as though it was mid-afternoon: a bright winter’s day.
I hastened down the corridor, listening for any signs of life. The ship appeared deserted and there was a breath of fresher air across my face, making me realize just how stale the atmosphere of the ship had become. I followed the freshness, seeking a way out. After ten minutes or so, I found it: a hatch set into the wall of the craft that was ajar. Checking to see that there was no one around, I swung it open and climbed down the steps.
The ship sat on a plateau of rock, sloping down into the wash but surrounded on all four sides by the high rim of an extinct crater. The red walls completely concealed the dreadnought from all sides, apart from the end of the wash itself, but from the angle of the ship I didn’t think it would be visible. That was saying something: the dreadnought towered above me, a huge curving shell of green-bronze, its sides pitted and scarred with patches of rust. From this close outside view, it was at once both less and more impressive: I had time to note the baroque detailing on its flanks, the intricate care with which the rims of viewports and gun emplacements had been ornamented. But the decay was also highly evident: it was clearly a very old ship.
When I went around the side of the thing and looked across the plateau, a small procession of people was making its way to the slope of the wash. From here, I saw that there was a structure high on the crags on the far side of the wash: some kind of tower. It looked like many of the ruins that were scattered over the face of the Crater Plains: as ornate and twisted in its way as the dreadnought itself. The procession was making for it and I thought I glimpsed the dark, sleek head of the Centipede Queen. Mantis’s veil was a shadow in the sunlight.
I followed the procession, taking care to skirt the edges of the plateau where the rocks provided some concealment. If anyone might be watching from the ship itself, they’d have a pretty good view of my movements, but I had to take the chance: I couldn’t skulk in the shadow of the ship until nightfall, in case it took off again, in which case I might be killed or sucked back into it. Neither appealed. Besides, it was good to be back on the ground, even under such doubtful circumstances: to feel the cold wind on my skin and the red dust beneath my feet. The air smelled dry, of nothing, apart from an occasional sweet-musty scent of sagebrush from deeper within the wash.
The procession soon took itself out of sight. It was a little later than I’d thought; soon, the shadows of the crags were lengthening and my own danced long in front of my own steps. I went down into the cool dimness of the rocks, leaving the plateau and the ship and heading into the wash itself. I hoped nothing dangerous was living down here: it would be ironic to escape death at the hands of several kidnappers only to be devoured by vulpen or awts in the mountains. But there was no sign or smell of anything down here, only the dust and the sage. Thinking of the vulpen, however, prompted thoughts of Leretui. Where was she now? Was she even alive? If I couldn’t find her, I decided, I’d work passage to Earth and find a majike there to treat me, where no one would know me, or be likely to inform my mothers.
These thoughts were interrupted by a hail from the tower, which now lay ahead around a fold of rock. It sounded like a horn being blown, an ancient, atavistic noise that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was answered by a cry from up ahead, and then I saw them.
I’d been wrong to worry about wild vulpen living in the rocks. These were a party of four, robed and somehow stately as they walked out from the folds of rock to greet the procession, which had now come back into view. One of them held a long staff and their faces gleamed in the shadows like lit bone. I saw Mantis run forward, a sinuous gait, and greet the staff-bearer with enthusiasm. She even touched him and I repressed a shudder. The Centipede Queen was looking around her with what might even have been interest and I wondered what spiny minions she was sending out into the landscape. I glanced down at my wrist but this time there was nothing there. The wound had almost healed, but not entirely: a faint mauve stain on my skin, seeping a little.
The vulpen clustered around the procession, drawing them closer to the tower. I lingered in the shadows of the rocks
, waiting until the women and the men-remnants had disappeared, and then I followed them.
Vulpen. I thought of a figure, skating swiftly round a bend, reaching out to take a woman’s uncertain hand. The texts in the bell tower of Winterstrike had told me that answers, if there were any, might be found in the mountains of the Noumenon and now here I was, with the red crags arching up behind me and the ruins ahead. I walked down through the wash, weaving through the boulders, towards the tower.
TWENTY-FIVE
Hestia — Earth
For a moment, I didn’t recognize the thing that sat in the centre of the chamber, surrounded by the kappa. It took me a moment to realize that it was actually caged: the walls of its cell were vitriglass and so clear that only a stray reflection betrayed their existence.
There on the banks of the canal at the end of the lawn of Calmaretto, under the weedwood trees, dancing on water and fractured light . . .
It was a demothea, but it looked old: the tangle of tentacles that framed its head were drooping, released from the tight knots that coiled them in, and the huge eyes were dulled in its elegant, bony skull. It looked listlessly around, head moving from side to side, almost as though it did not see the throng of kappa, or as if it did not care. I suppose I should refer to it as ‘she’, but there was something sexless about it, something so inhuman that normal gender terms did not apply, and as such, it reminded me more of the men-remnants than anything else, of the vulpen with their white countenances and bony, spiny hands. The demothea’s skin was like wax; the eyes the colour of polluted milk. Its long hands twisted together in its lap, as a woman might express regret in some ancient play, but somehow the gesture did not seem to have the same meaning. It was as though the demothea was engaged in some kind of private communication. Skeletal feet, with an unnatural arch, protruded from the edges of its robe. Its toes tapped erratically on the floor, beating out a staccato rhythm. Its mouth, a small, prim oval, occasionally twitched.
