Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  Outside, cushioned from the tumult within, the air was suddenly very quiet. It reminded me of Ombre itself, the still heart of winter. But I could hear distant shouts from the front of the building, and as I leaned over the balcony to see if there was a way down, movement attracted my attention. I heard Canteley gasp.

  A demothea was standing on the parapet overlooking the Long Reach, poised like a dancer. I recognized her in spite of the changes. Her back was slightly arched and one foot was placed forward, the toe pointed. She’d got rid of her Calmaretto clothes and wore something tight and banded, with coils and drifts of loose material that reflected her limbs. Her sharp face was upraised to the balcony. Under the snaky mass of hair, her face was probably still more human than it should have been, though elongated and different about the jaw and the hollows of her eyes. Her cheekbones stood out like blades. An ice sculpture, I thought, almost translucent.

  ‘Hello, Leretui,’ I said. Her voice floated dreamlike up from the parapet, but there was a sharpness in it and a grating hiss which wasn’t human at all.

  ‘My name is Shorn.’

  All right,’ I said. ‘Be Shorn, then. What do you want?’

  ‘Winterstrike.’

  If you’ve never had any power, and then some of it is given to you, sometimes you become what you’ve most hated. I don’t know how fine a line there is between envy and hate: not fine enough, if Shorn was anything to go by.

  Canteley was gripping the balcony. ‘Tui, I mean, Shorn – won’t you just come home?’ A child’s plea that I couldn’t have made. Can’t things just go back to normal? But Canteley was old enough to know how impossible that was, even if there hadn’t been the sounds of gunfire behind us. I’d like to say that Shorn’s face softened, that some remnant of love for her little sister was enough to bring her back, just for a moment, but the white face staring up at us remained the same grinning mask. Then she flipped over and up in a blur, and was down onto the canal.

  ‘Tui!’ Canteley shouted. Moving almost as quickly, she fled along the balcony to where a spiral stair stretched into the gardens. She ran across the snow to the parapet, with myself close behind, then went over the edge and vanished.

  It was my turn to shout. I flung myself at the parapet and saw that it retreated down to the surface of the Long Stretch in a series of steep, elongated steps. Canteley was scrambling over the last one of these. I stopped to slip on my skates and that was the undoing of both of us.

  It glided out from the shadows of the parapet, its robe swirling like a blizzard, just as it must have done all those months before. I glimpsed Shorn a short distance along the canal, watching and waiting, ready for flight. The vulpen seized Canteley around the waist and she screamed, but it was already skating fast down the Long Reach, with Canteley balanced on its hip like a captured doll.

  I dropped straight to the ice and started skating, not stopping to think, just moving fast. I was damned if I’d lose another sister to the Changed, but it seemed to me as I skated that this was truly the end: the city would fall and Calmaretto with it, and if we did not die, then we would go to Earth and start again in another world, without my mothers, without Shorn. And what the hell had happened to Hestia? And the Centipede Queen?

  The vulpen was skating faster than I could, faster than any human. As I followed, the cold air slammed into my lungs and made my feet feel leaden. In contrast, the vulpen skated with effortless grace, gliding along the length of the Reach with its robes whirling about it like snow. To think of it as merely an animal no longer made sense. I knew then that this must have been what Shorn had seen: perhaps half conscious of the change she was about to undergo, she’d recognized a dignity in the thing she had met, and this was why there had been so little remorse within her.

  But there was no sign of Shorn now. She seemed to have been swallowed by ice and lamplight and shadows, and her disappearance brought my heart into my throat. I had no doubt that if she felt she needed to, she’d skate out of the night and take me down. We were nearing the end of the Reach now. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw a flickering brightness. The Winter Palace was on fire. A drift of smoke, fragile as a ghost along the Reach, filled my mouth with the choking bitterness of ire-palm. Despite everything, I hoped my mothers had got out alive.

  ‘Canteley!’ I shouted after the retreating figure of the vulpen, more to give myself a measure of courage than anything else. ‘Hold on! I’m coming!’

  Next moment, as if my cry had opened a door in the air, they were gone. I slid to a disbelieving stop, skates grinding on the ice, and looked frantically around.

  We’d almost reached the end of the Reach, a T-junction where, in summer, a canal called Fountain Break ran parallel with one of the main lower promenades of the city. There were cafés along the length of Fountain Break and as its name suggested, a series of waterspouts provided coolness and ornamentation. Now, in winter, these central fountains were frozen tumbles of ice: they were left until spring, and there was a tradition of using the icicles in divination, examining the patterns they made and reading the results. All they spoke of to me now was failure. There was no sign of Canteley or her abductor.

  I called her name and there was no reply. She hadn’t made a sound since the vulpen seized her and that made me think that it had knocked her out, or drugged her. It wasn’t like my little sister to bear things quietly. I bent down, fearing at any moment a bolt between my shoulder blades, and examined the surface of the ice. A thin, faint line told me that they might have taken the turn to the left, so I skated along it, weaving in and out of the masses of frozen water.

  Then, a short distant along Fountain Break, something appeared which gave me hope. It was a culvert, leading under the bank to form a low, rough arch. It probably joined up with one of the other links of the canal network. I didn’t like going into it unarmed, but I didn’t think I had a choice. I skated into the culvert. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness and when they did so, I saw that I’d been wrong. The culvert was a dead end, terminating in a wall of ancient bricks. I was about to turn and skate out again when a very faint sound caught my attention. It was as though something had scraped against stone. Probably a rat, I thought, but it was worth investigating. Cautiously, I moved forward.

  The scraping came again, then stopped. I waited for a moment, fearing a trap. Looking around the corner, I saw a line of barrels. At first I thought this must be the entrance to some kind of storage cellar: perhaps one of the waterfront bars kept its stocks down here. Then I realized that the barrels, which were made of some rubbery substance, had originally been floating and were now locked into the ice. This wasn’t a storage place, but part of the canal barrage, used to regulate the water levels along with the complex systems of sluices and cisterns that lay beneath the city. At the end of spring, when the meltwater poured down from the heights, Winterstrike had in the last few hundred years been prone to floods. The barrages were emergency measures.

  And someone lithe could easily have clambered around it. There was a narrow ledge running along the side of the arch, about two feet above the ice line, enough for a canal worker to sidle her way along in pursuit of her duties. Now, it wasn’t necessary until one got to the barrels themselves, as one could skate over the ice, but the base of the barrels was wider than their upper parts – they looked as though they were half submerged – and I’d have to step up onto the ledge to get by.

  That wasn’t the hard part. The difficult bit was not knowing – or rather, suspecting – what might lie on the other side. I listened. The scraping had stopped, but I thought I knew what it had been – the sound of bladed feet on stone. Reaching the barrels, I hauled myself up onto the ledge and looked through. Balance was difficult with skates, but I didn’t want to waste time putting them on again when I’d crossed over. I half expected to find myself staring straight down into the face of the vulpen, but there was nothing on the other side except more of the passage. Here, however, it was lit by lamps and I could see
that the ice was scratched and scraped with a myriad twisting tracks. It wasn’t just the vulpen and Canteley who had come through here. I dropped onto the floor and skated forward. I thought I knew what was up ahead: the same low arch and narrow expanse of tunnel, so I was startled to find that the space in which I was moving had suddenly opened out. And I wasn’t alone.

  Hastily, I hid behind one of the thick columns that reached down from the roof. The tunnel had become a hall: low-ceilinged but immense, and relatively brightly lit. After a moment I recognized what it was. The culvert led into one of the big cisterns that lay underneath the city and it was in one of these that I now found myself. Not to mention the crowd of the Changed that thronged its opposite end.

  Luckily for me, they were facing away from the entrance, so no one had spotted me. I made sure to slide around the column, so that I would also be invisible to anyone coming into the chamber behind me. I saw aspiths decked primly in fluted black dresses, all ruffles and frills, sulpice in leather and brass. There were a handful of vulpen among them, but their robes were white and shadow-grey and if the one who had snatched Canteley stood there, I could not pick him out from his fellows. Canteley herself was nowhere to be seen and one of the vulpen’s robes was spotted with bright splashes of what might be fresh blood. I swallowed hard and made myself keep watching. There was a palpable air of anticipation in the chamber, an electricity. A moment later, I discovered what they’d all been waiting for. There was a raised platform at the end of the room and Mantis stepped onto it, followed by Shorn. My sister’s unhuman hand clasped Canteley’s.

  She followed Shorn meekly onto the platform with a bewildered air that seemed foreign to the girl I knew, even given the circumstances, and this lent weight to my suspicion that the vulpen had somehow drugged her.

  ‘Look!’ Shorn cried to the crowd in her new voice. She raised Canteley’s hand high, swinging her arm up, and a murmur went through the crowd. ‘This is what I used to look like!’

  Mantis grasped Canteley by the shoulders and turned her this way and that so that the crowd could get a proper view of her face.

  ‘I am a Harn of Calmaretto!’ Shorn cried. ‘I am demothea; I am of the Changed.’

  Mantis said from the side, ‘She is our pioneer.’ A look of affection crossed her face. She reached out and touched Shorn’s shoulder. ‘She crosses boundaries, she has shown us the way.’

  It all seemed very staged to me, choreographed. Then, ‘She’s a city aristocrat,’ came an objecting voice from the crowd. I couldn’t tell by the accent who, or what, had spoken. ‘You told us Winterstrike would be ours. But this is a human.’

  ‘I’m not human!’ Shorn hissed.

  ‘Human enough!’ The crowd gave an uneasy shift of position and I thought I knew who it was who had spoken: a tall sulpice in a flowing robe of red and grey, a parody of Matriarchal garb which, in the city beyond, would have earned a fine or imprisonment under the Dress Code. ‘Human until last week, and Changed because of what? An experiment begun in a Matriarchy laboratory!’

  A note of alarm flashed over Mantis’s features and I wondered what kind of story she’d been planning to concoct about Shorn. A religious transformation, perhaps? Some kind of miracle? But the truth seemed to have seeped out, as truth will.

  ‘She—’ Mantis began, but Shorn was obviously keen to test her new abilities. In the blink of an eye, a long black whip shot out over the flinching heads of the crowd and flickered across the head of the dissenter. There was a burst of what, in other circumstances, I would have described as blacklight. The tall sulpice fell as if poleaxed. Then the whip was gone and Shorn was smiling. The crowd fell silent. Very slowly, the sea of people around the fallen body of the sulpice melted away, until she lay unmoving in a huddle of red and grey. Only a vulpen remained, staring down at the corpse with its sad dark gaze. Canteley gasped audibly, as if she’d woken up, and I could see her trying to tug her hand away from her sister’s grip. Shorn, however, did not let go.

  The mood of the room was altering fast. I could feel fear building up from the crowd, washing over me in waves. Mantis evidently felt it as well, because as the crowd took a step forward, moving unanimously, her smile faltered. Shorn wasn’t paying attention. The whip cracked again over the heads of the crowd and this time they surged towards the stage. I heard Canteley scream. Next moment, I was out from behind my hiding place, shoving and pushing through the mass of the Changed. I was, suddenly, pressed up behind the vulpen, my face against the musky robes. A hard, knobbly spine thudded against my cheekbone. With a strength borne of rage I gave it a great push and the vulpen stumbled, then fell, carried down by my impetus and the weight of the crowd. I leaped over into the small gap left by its fall and found myself at the front of the stage. I was looking at Shorn’s feet and she was looking over my head at the crowd. If I thought about that whip, I’d be lost, so I seized the front of the platform and hauled myself over it. Mantis whirled as she realized someone was coming onto the stage. I hit her full in the face and felt my knuckles crunch painfully on gristle. I knocked her off balance and as she went down I saw the crumpled imprint of my punch, as though I’d hit a sheet of plastic instead of a face. Then it rounded out, like someone popping out the dent on the door of a vehicle. I chopped down at Shorn’s wrist and felt something snap. Canteley’s hand finally broke free. Then the demothea was turning on me, whirling, and the instant between recognition and the whip flash was enough. I grasped Canteley by the wrist and dived for the back of the stage.

  My main thought was of getting free of Mantis and Shorn. My example seemed to have inspired the crowd and they were following me, a tide of the Changed breaking over the front of the platform and submerging Mantis and Shorn beneath them. Canteley and I made a run for the side of the stage and jumped down.

  A passage snaked off into darkness. We bolted along it like rats. Halfway down it, past a bend, the lamps on the walls were once more lit: we were running over damp stone. We followed the passage upwards.

  ‘The vulpen—’ Canteley panted.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘No one will know.’

  ‘Tui knows!’

  Suddenly I had an awful sense of history repeating itself.

  ‘Canteley,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to go back, do you?’

  ‘Of course not!’ We ran on and came to a flight of steps. There were cries from behind us, which reminded me of the scene at the Winter Palace. We seemed to be leaving disaster in our wake – but as long as it stayed in our wake, I didn’t care.

  The stairs were stone, and old. Something about them tugged at my memory, but I didn’t understand why until I reached the top. Here, an ancient iron door stood ajar; the metal polished to a dull gleam that indicated that it had been cared for – this damp underworld was a haven for rust. I pulled it open and we stepped through into a vast, dim hall, with columns marching off into the distance. And then I knew where we were. I’d been here before, watching as an aspith spied upon me. We were in the Temple of the Changed, which explained why there had been so many of them in the cellars, and why those arches had been used. Had Shorn been told she’d rule here, Winterstrike’s transformed queen? If so, her palace was empty now.

  At least, as far as I could see. The hall looked empty and yet it felt filled with presences: as I stared, trying to see into the gloom, something flitted quickly into the shadows.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Canteley, I don’t know.’ But at least now I knew how to get out. Assuming we weren’t stopped. Assuming we still had a home to go to. If Mantis and the vulpen had tried to snatch Canteley once already – as a hostage, or something even more sinister than that, a replacement if anything happened to Shorn – then they’d know where to find us if we went back home.

  But there was another place that could be more easily defended. If we could reach it.

  ‘Follow me,’ I said to Canteley. We raced across the hall, footsteps echoing on marble that was slick with snow. At some point
a window had been smashed, and the snow was already piling in, lying in drifts under the sill and scattering in tentative fingers across the floor. With Canteley behind, I made for the shattered window rather than the main doors, which might still be bolted.

  We weren’t quite fast enough. Just as I got to the window and boosted Canteley over the sill, taking care to avoid the sharp edges, someone cried out from the other side of the room.

  ‘There they are!’

  I didn’t stop to see who it was, but scrambled after Canteley. A shard of glass caught on the sleeve of my coat. I tore it free and dropped down onto the terrace, landing in a drift. Canteley was already running in a panicking zigzag line across the terrace. I caught up with her and together we sped over the long courtyard. I glanced back once, to see the Temple of the Changed rising behind me through the snow; its immense façade like a skeleton in the night. Ahead lay the crater, and the bell tower.

  Ire-palm does not shatter or break. It eats, melts, devours. I’d seen on the antiscribe newsfeed that there was still something left of the bridge that led over the crater to the bell tower, even though most of it had gone. It was fragile and I didn’t know whether it would bear the weight of both of us, but I am not heavily built and Canteley was a girl. I hoped it would hold and I clung to that hope as I ran, with the snow starring cold on my face and my boots slipping and sliding on the black patches of ice that made the courtyard so treacherous.

  It wasn’t until we drew close to the lip of the crater and saw the ruined middle section of the bridge with struts peeling away into empty air and the long drop, that I fully realized how much damage had been done. I nearly turned back then. Nearly, but not quite. Canteley and I reached the edge of the crater and looked around.