by Liz Williams
But her own people tended to have pale hair, the silver-blond of the Crater Plains, whereas Lunae’s own was that strange dark red. Like a Northern woman, from Caud or Tharsis. Did Lunae have Martian genes?
She found herself looking at Lunae with a newly appraising eye.
“Am I to have lessons today?” Lunae asked.
“No. The Grandmothers wish to see you, however. But first you are to go to the kappa and have your hand attended to.”
Lunae looked up, alarmed. “Are the Grandmothers very angry?”
“They are not precisely delighted.” Dreams-of-War suppressed a shudder. She had seen the Grandmothers take information from the mind: the lightning tendrils arcing out, too swift to be seen by the naked eye, but visible later on the monitors that the engineers of Memnos had built into Dreams-of-War’s armor. The Grandmothers used a technology that Dreams-of-War did not understand; she did not want to admit that it alarmed her. She was a Martian warrior, she told herself, not someone to be unnerved by two ancient women.
“Come, Lunae,” she said, more sharply than she had intended. “Do not keep the Grandmothers waiting.”
CHAPTER 4
Nightshade
She was apart from the Animus now; he remained in her chamber, chained to the bed by Isti. Yskatarina was painfully aware of the lack of him by her side and she frowned as she walked across the bitter hall of Tower Cold, to where her aunt awaited the boat sent by the Matriarchs of Memnos.
Stepping into the elevator, she watched the hall grow small beneath her as she ascended. A hundred stories, two hundred, three . . . Then the hall was invisible except as a tiny dark square, and Yskatarina rose out into the darkness above Nightshade. The Sunken World lay before her. She could see the frozen peaks and summits, the craters and gouges made by meteor strikes. At the farthest point, between the Horns of Tyr, was the sun: a little, blazing star. Above, to the north, Dis hung in the heavens, and then there was nothing but the great gulf, only debris and dust until the beginning of the outer systems, light-years distant. Only the boats went farther, filled with the canopics dispatched by the mourn-women and the Steersmen Skull-Faces—bodies embalmed in ultrasleep, gliding through the Eldritch Realm for whatever systems lay beyond the abyss.
Yskatarina closed her eyes to the dark, thought of the Animus’s sharp touch, and was glad when the elevator slid to a silent halt at the top of the tower.
The Elder Elaki’s chamber was round, with windows like portholes. Here, when she was not in the laboratory or the haunt-tech chambers, Yskatarina’s aunt sat out her days, her unhuman eyes fixed on things that no one else could see. She said nothing when Yskatarina entered, only flicked a hand at a kneeling-chair. The great eyes, owl-yellow, veined with broken blood vessels, blinked with an almost audible snap.
“Has the ship that is to take me to Mars arrived?” Yskatarina said. Near-worship flooded through her at Elaki’s proximity. She bowed her head before she knew it, then thought of Elaki’s overheard threat and grew cold.
“Not long. It approaches down the Chain.” The Elder Elaki gestured toward a window and Yskatarina could, indeed, see a star coming, rattling fast into the silvery shadow of the Nightshade maw of the Chain. “As you know, you have a task to perform very soon.” Elaki frowned. “You appear discontented. Why?”
But Yskatarina loved her aunt beyond love, and so, bitterly, said nothing.
“Your Animus will accompany you. I have impressed upon you the importance of this task, Yskatarina.”
Here it comes, Yskatarina thought.
“And if you should fail, I will have to take him away from you.” Elaki spoke with a twist of the mouth.
Yskatarina looked up at her numbly. Love for the Animus poured through her, and love for Elaki also. She felt torn in two.
“I will not fail, Aunt.” Her voice sounded as though it came from the bottom of a well.
“Then the Animus will stay with you, of course.”
“I am grateful,” Yskatarina managed to say.
“Yskatarina? Are you all right?” Elaki asked impatiently.
Yskatarina managed to mutter, “When will I be leaving?”
“As soon as I see fit. And now, there are things I have to tell you.”
Yskatarina’s gaze once more traveled to that traveling star, brighter now, blazing like a captured sun as it was whisked along through the maw of the Chain. A few moments later, the blaze sharpened, then faded. The boat sent by the Memnos Matriarchs was docking.
Yskatarina knelt before her aunt, head still forcibly bowed, awaiting her orders.
CHAPTER 5
Earth
For once, it was hard to track the kappa down. Usually the nursemaid hovered protectively near her charge, but now, perhaps not wanting to distract Dreams-of-War, the kappa seemed to be keeping out of sight. Lunae trudged through the house, eventually locating the kappa in the long chamber at the heart of the house, attending to the growing-skins.
Steam rose from the vents in the walls, each configured in the form of a gargoyle’s head. Cross-eyed faces opened mouths to emit plumes of mist; Lunae took care not to go too close. Along the metal-ridged floor, the racks of feeder orchids turned their faces toward the moisture, their petals swelling with water. Bronze walls dripped and ran with a rainy haze. The air smelled damp and hot, rich with loam and a meaty undernote of stagnation that only served to enhance the perfume of the orchids. Lunae always felt safe here, though she did not like to look at the skins, which occasionally bulged and writhed as if the contents sought escape. Lunae knew, however, that she herself had come from one of those fleshy bags, and perhaps this was why she felt so secure in this room.
She watched as the kappa wafted the mist over each skin. In the heat of the chamber, the mist swiftly accumulated into droplets, which ran down the outside of the skins before bouncing into the trays beneath, in an atonal accompaniment to the kappa’s movements. Lunae gave a delicate cough, remembering Dreams-of-War’s countless instructions not to interrupt people when they were busy.
The kappa’s head moved ponderously around, swiveling on the twisted neck. The toes of her wrinkled feet gripped the floor; the kappa found it hard to keep her balance on the lacquered boards of the mansion and the metal floor of the hatching room alike. Lunae could not help feeling a twinge of pity, which rang as plangently as a waterdrop inside her mind.
“We are above such emotions,” Dreams-of-War had told her in her first weeks out of the hatchery. “You are a made-being, even if your ancestors practiced bloodbirth, just as the lowest orders do. You are therefore superior, as I am.”
“Are you a made-thing, too?” Lunae said.
“I?” Dreams-of-War replied, with a disdainful tilt of her head. “Of course. And so is your nurse, when it comes to that. But the kappa is a slave and to be treated as such. Do not waste emotion upon it.”
“I see,” Lunae had said, but though she was then nothing more than a weeks-old child, there seemed something wrong with this picture. It seemed hard on the kappa who was her nursemaid, who walked as if her feet hurt her, and who seemed so encumbered by her heavy shell-like skin. And if the kappa were supposed to serve, then why did so many other folk seem bound to the factories and wage-shops of the city? Perhaps it was di ferent elsewhere. Yet Fragrant Harbor was rumored to be a good place. It did not seem good to Lunae.
Now the kappa said mildly, “You are in disgrace.”
“I know. Dreams-of-War has had much to say on the subject.” Lunae looked down at her hand, at a row of bloody dots that were the legacy of her encounter. “She sent me to find you, to bind this up.”
The kappa looked at Lunae’s hand and made a small scratchy sound of disapproval. “You should never have gone out of the house.”
“I know.”
“The Grandmothers want to see you. They are not pleased, Lunae.”
“I know.” It was beginning to sound like a mantra. “I’m sorry, kappa.”
The kappa reached out and gently to
uched Lunae’s hair. “I was very worried, Lunae. We all were. Terrible things could have happened to you.”
Lunae gave an unhappy grimace. “Perhaps terrible things did.”
“That remains to be seen. Now, give me your hand.” The kappa rinsed her fingers beneath a nearby tap, then took Lunae’s hand and began to swab at the bloodied holes with a leaf torn from one of the plants.
“Does this hurt?”
“Not very much. Kappa, I don’t understand why that woman—that Kami—even noticed me. Is it because of this—thing I am supposed to be? A hito-bashira?” Her hand was growing cold.
“Perhaps.”
“What is a hito-bashira? I have been told so often that this is what I am, but my memories tell me nothing and I can’t find the word in any of the data-tablets. Even—” Lunae stopped, not wanting the kappa to know that she had looked in places forbidden to her. But she’d had no choice, she had to find out. Limbo is being born in a bag, nursed by dragonfly and spider and toad.
“But it has been explained to you, has it not? You are to be a woman-who-holds-back-the-flood.”
“But, nurse, I don’t understand what that means. Which flood?”
“Ask the Grandmothers,” the kappa said, as she had answered so many times before. She bound Lunae’s hand with a creeper-bandage.
“But they just tell me to ask Dreams-of-War, and she tells me to ask them, or you. I go round and round in circles. Why will no one answer me?”
“Perhaps because it might hinder your development,” the kappa said.
“I am old enough!” Lunae replied hotly.
The kappa’s mouth creased, then split open like a melon to reveal a flash of pink, shiny tongue. “You are nine months old, grown far more swiftly than a normal child. I am a hundred and twenty, and people still won’t tell me anything.”
“But—” Lunae began, then stopped, for what she had been about to say was: That’s di ferent. Dreams-of-War would have approved, she knew, but she still did not feel that it was right for there to be one rule for the kappa, so old and wise, and one rule for herself. Perhaps the kappa was right; perhaps she really was too young. Maybe that was simply the way the world worked. She had witnessed it only from afar, heard snatches of sound from the inside of a litter. Who was she to question the workings of the societies beyond the weir-wards of the mansion? And yet she could not help but question.
The kappa seemed to take pity on her, for she said, “You’ll know when the time is right. Have patience. Enjoy your ignorance while it lasts.”
This suggested the knowledge would not make her happy, but it only made Lunae feel more eager to learn. The kappa stepped back from the skins with an air of satisfaction. “That, at least, is one task finished for today.”
“Why do the skins have to be kept moist?” Lunae asked.
“So that they can grow, of course. Though most of these will have to be pruned back, returned to the mulch.” The kappa gave a gusty sigh. “A pity. But they are too small and spindly.”
“Are we plants, then?” A strange thought. She pictured herself rooted in soil, reaching up toward the hazy sun.
The kappa gave her a lipless smile. “Of course not. You are a made-human.”
“And a hito-bashira,” Lunae said with resignation.
“Just so. There. By this evening, your hand should be healed. And now, the Grandmothers wish to see you.” The kappa fixed her with a round eye, green as moss. She patted Lunae on the arm. “I know you find them a little alarming, perhaps. That is only to be expected. They are ancients, and as such, they do not behave like you and me. It is their right. But you should have no fear. I am sure they love you, in their own strange way.”
Lunae would have died rather than tell anyone, even the kappa, that the reason she did not want to visit the Grandmothers was not simply fear, but revulsion. If she revealed this to the kappa, however, sooner or later the Grandmothers would travel inside the kappa’s skull and find the knowledge nestling inside the nurse’s simple thoughts like a moth in a chrysalis, all curdled toxic soup. The thought of the Grandmothers gaining such knowledge was enough to make Lunae grow cold, for she knew, without understanding precisely how, that the Grandmothers would punish the kappa and not herself. And she did not want to see the kappa punished.
She sighed. Sometimes it was as though the old kappa was the child, to be protected and sheltered, and she the nursemaid. If she told anyone of her feelings about the Grandmothers, it would have to be Dreams-of-War, and her Martian guardian had a frustrating habit of appearing to ignore such pieces of information, only to store them up and deploy them when one was least expecting it. Lunae would simply have to keep her feelings to herself.
It was a long way from the inner chamber to the Grandmothers’ room, and the kappa was unable to move quickly. Lunae, as always, wondered whether the kappa had originally been intended to perform household tasks, or whether she had been bred for another purpose entirely.
Lunae and the kappa walked along dim corridors, passing the familiar demon-swarming tapestries that the Grandmothers had brought from the volcano lands. They depicted figures of legend: the moon-spirits of the lunar craters; the great Dragon-Kings who, it was said, had risen from the depths of the oceans when the Drowning first began, to help humans hold back the surging tide.
“Nurse, where do you come from?” Lunae asked.
It had never occurred to her to ask this before and she felt faintly embarrassed by it, as though the kappa was too much a part of the furniture even to have such an ordinary thing as an origin. But the kappa only smiled and said, “I come from the north, just like those tapestries. From the Fire Islands, the lands of the change-tigers.”
“Where are the Fire Islands, exactly?” Lunae wondered aloud, but even as she spoke, her buried memories were bringing forth an image of a scattered chain beyond the water-ringed summits of Fuji and Hakodate, beyond Sakhalin. Then memory supplied her with a name: Ischa. This was the word that Lunae next spoke.
“Yes,” the kappa replied. “I am from the clan-warren of Hailstone Shore, near Ischa, the southernmost town of the Kamchatka chain.” Her head swiveled around. “It is the only land left in that region of the world. All else has gone, under flood and fire.”
“Why did you come to Fragrant Harbor?” Lunae asked.
“I was sent here. I had no choice.”
“Do you miss your home?”
“If I did,” the kappa said, still smiling, “would you ask the Grandmothers to send me back?”
“I could try,” Lunae ventured, but she already knew what the answer would be. To the Grandmothers, as to Dreams-of-War, the kappa was no more than a useful thing. They would no more consider her desires than they would consider the wishes of a household kettle. The kappa said nothing more, but Lunae knew that she understood.
The shadowy corridors, each lit only by a single lamp, were comforting and familiar. When they reached the passage leading to the Grandmothers’ room, however, Lunae’s heart began to beat faster, lumping along beneath her ribs.
The kappa paused outside the Grandmothers’ door.
“Wait,” she said, then pressed her wrinkled palm against the lock-release and hobbled inside. Lunae fidgeted in the hallway, impatience mingling with reluctance. She wanted the meeting to be over, to leave Cloud Terrace far behind.
The kappa reappeared at the doorway and surveyed Lunae with a nervous, rheumy squint. “They say you are to come in.”
CHAPTER 6
Mars
Yskatarina stood upon legs of iron and glass, artificial feet planted firmly on the old stone floor. Her hands rested on each side of a window, from which she gazed out across the Crater Plain. Used as she was to the dim vaults of Nightshade, the brightness of Mars hurt her eyes. She reached up and touched the setting of her eyeshade, turning it to maximum. The light made her feel bleached and weak; for a moment, she hated the need that had brought her to Mars. Then guilt kicked in once more. Elaki had required it, and Elaki
must be obeyed. Conflict whispered inside her head, tearing at her. But now that she was so far away from Elaki, it seemed both easier and more difficult to think. Resentment was growing alongside the love.
The Animus had been left outside the Tower, at the Matriarch’s insistence.
“It is a male,” the Matriarch had said with palpable disgust. “We cannot allow it inside.”
Yskatarina had acquiesced with a semblance of grace, but she did not like it. It was as though her shadow had been torn from her, leaving her exposed in the light. She longed to return to the ship, but first there was business to be done.
From here, at the height of the Memnos Tower, one could see as far as the great conical summit of Olympus. The plain shimmered in the afternoon light, giving the impression of desert heat, but Yskatarina knew this to be deceptive. It was winter now in this northern region of Mars, with frost in the mornings in the shadow of the rocks and a bite to the air. She did not know what caused the shimmer, but she suspected some manner of force-defense. The Tower had been well guarded from ancient times. If she looked down, she could see the glazed crimson bricks of the wall, bare of lichen and moss.
Beside her, the Matriarch, dressed in red-and-black, exuded a satisfaction as chilly as the day. Yskatarina glanced aside at the Matriarch’s moon-face: the tight, pursed lips, the pale eyes embedded in bags of flesh, the moles that scattered the skin like ticks. She set her gaze once more upon the Crater Plain.
“You see?” the Matriarch said. “This is the first and last of the old fortresses, save only for the ruin in Winterstrike. Our ancestors built it in the days of the Age of Children, to guard against their enemies.” She reached up to touch the phial around her neck, an intricate silver cage, then let her hand fall.
