Banner of Souls

by Liz Williams

  “They are coming!” the armor said urgently.

  Yskatarina shrugged. “Have it your own way. But I can get you out of here. All that I am proposing is a temporary alliance, nothing more.”

  “Where are we to go, then?” Dreams-of-War asked.

  “I have a plan. Follow me.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Elsewhere

  Within, the cavern was cool and strangely bright. Lunae could not tell where the light was coming from, but it fell all around her as softly as rain. The walls were covered with carvings, but they were so old that nothing more than a trace of the reliefs remained. Then she looked again, and thought that perhaps the patterns were only fungal infestations, or the rivulets carved by water. The floor, however, was smooth and hard, marble-veined. At the far end of the cavern stood a statue, but when she looked at it again, it was just an outcrop of stone.

  Essa, ignoring her surroundings, glided forward.

  “Where is this person?” the kappa demanded, sibilant voice hissing in echo from the walls of the temple.

  “She will be down among the fumes,” Essa said. She paused for a moment to pat the rough russet hair between her horns back into place, then vanished into the wall. Lunae, startled, followed and found a slitted opening. A breath of heavy air came from it: resinous and strong, forest-fragrant, followed by the sudden, salt-laden scent of the sea. Lunae stepped into it and followed Essa downward.

  The light here was somehow faded and stained, but still enough by which to see. Lunae trod upon metal steps, sending echoes up against the walls. The scent changed and grew stronger: old roses, an amberous pungency. Soon, the air itself began to thicken, until Lunae descended through a sultry haze. Behind her, the kappa began to wheeze.

  At the base of the steps, Lunae found herself in a small, round chamber filled with fumes. The smoke was so heavy that it was difficult to see. Her eyes watered.

  “Come forward,” she heard Essa say.

  Stumbling a little, Lunae did so. A figure swam out of the smoke, seated at a tripod brazier. Essa grasped her hand and again there was that odd sensation of unhuman fingers against her own. But when she looked down, Essa’s supple hand seemed wholly usual. For Lunae, however, the betraying sensation could not be overlooked. She snatched her hand away.

  “What are you? Are you Kami?”

  “Not Kami. She is a haunt.” The figure seated at the tripod spoke.

  “A haunt?”

  “A spirit in a shell of flesh.”

  “Isn’t that what everyone is?”

  “You know that the Kami possess others? They seek bodies for their convenience. But unless the possession is undertaken in early childhood, or lasts over a long period so that spirit and body have a chance to settle into phase, the new flesh retains a memory of its original physical host. That is why so many of them look one way and feel another. But Essa is born out of the land itself: nanotech, inhabited by a spirit from the far past.”

  “And who, in that case,” the kappa said, still wheezing, “are you?”

  Lunae went to crouch by the figure, looking up into her face. But the hood that the seated woman wore was enveloping, and her features were concealed within. The voice was remote and distorted by a curious buzz of static: a product of voice-technology, or a deliberate device to hide identity? There was something familiar about the figure, all the same.

  “You should not fear Essa,” the form continued. “She does not share the ambitions of the Kami. This is why we have brought you here.”

  “We?”

  “It hasn’t been easy to bring you through time,” the woman said. “To take advantage of the snatched moments when you shifted the temporal fabric, drifted free within the stream of time and could be ensnared.”

  “Like a fish on a hook?”

  “Like a fish in a net. I did not think we would succeed.”

  “But why?”

  “Because you are the hito-bashira, the woman-who-will-hold-back-the-flood.”

  Lunae said, “I have grown tired of asking what this means.”

  “Then it is time you knew. Your world and your time face an invasion, one which has already begun.”

  The kappa frowned. “From the Kami?”

  “Just so. You may believe the Kami to be alien, but they are not—though it is not quite true to say that they are human anymore.”

  “Then what are they?”

  “Ghosts?” the kappa whispered.

  “In a way—but not ghosts from the past, like Essa. They are the spirits of the future living, the last conscious remnant of humanity within the solar system. They come from a day when nothing remains of humanity in its ancient home except for disembodied semihuman consciousnesses. In your own day, Nightshade has found a way to summon these disembodied consciousnesses back through the Eldritch Realm, to harness their knowledge, their power.”

  “Haunt-tech,” Lunae said.

  “But there is a great irony. Humanity has achieved its greatest degree of knowledge of consciousness at the very end of human history, when nothing remains of the great worlds except ruin or flood, and there is no other life and little means of sustaining it except the eking out of an existence underground. The consciousnesses that are the Kami cling to the walls of their craters, thousands of them, like spectral bats. Until Nightshade summoned them, they were trapped in formlessness, but now they seek new bodies to inhabit, and Nightshade has helped them to find them—in the past, in other bodies.”

  “And do those people ask to be possessed?”

  “Would you?”

  “If I wanted knowledge, perhaps. But I would have to want it very badly, I think.”

  “But what is their aim?” the kappa asked. “To change history? Or just to provide themselves with bodies?”

  “They may wish to change history, but the outcome would always be the same. Nothing can save a dying sun. No, the last of humanity want a last chance at life: possessing the bodies of the living, holding sway over the worlds. Do not think that they will be generous mistresses. They are no longer human. Some seek power, but most just want the amusements of the flesh. Wars and combat, sexuality, perhaps—and on a grand scale. If their invasion goes ahead, the system will become their playground.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “Because I have seen it happen,” the voice said. The blurring was growing fainter now, the true voice coming through. It was the voice that Lunae heard every day within the confines of her head, or coming from her own lips. She sat back on her heels, staring.

  “Yes,” the oracle said. “Yes, of course you know me.” She put back the hood to reveal the woman Lunae had seen within her dreams: her own self. “Do you wish to see what a world under the Kami would be like?” her self continued, “for I can show you.”

  Lunae swallowed hard. “Show me, then.”

  Her older self reached out and took her hands. Lunae closed her eyes, but her older self said sharply, “Keep them open!”

  Lunae stared ahead as the walls of the cavern began to blur. She could feel her older self’s hands clasping her own, but then the sensation faded and next moment, she was skimming across water. Her own voice said into her ear, “This is Earth, shortly after the Kami invasion. We are not really here; I am weaving this out of memory. You are about to see Fragrant Harbor. Or what is left of it.”

  Land appeared on the horizon and Lunae recognized the Peak. Seconds later, they were diving down toward High Kowloon. Many of the tenements lay in ruins, burned and stripped of their carefully cultivated exterior vegetation, which now lay in steaming heaps in the street. “It is much hotter now,” her own voice said. “The Kami like the heat. They have spent too long in the cold.”

  Lunae’s consciousness skimmed through the streets. At a junction, she saw a makeshift edifice: a series of poles, joined by crossbars. From the poles hung the bodies of kappa. They appeared curiously deflated, as though their bodies had been sucked dry of flesh from within. But as they drew closer, Lunae
saw that one of the kappa was still alive. Its skin had dried into a mass of cracks. Beneath it a pool of thick fluid had accumulated. It blinked bewildered bloodshot eyes. A group of women stood below it, prodding at it with sharpened stakes.

  “What are they doing to it?” Lunae silently cried.

  “The Kami are obsessed with physicality in all its manifestations. And because they are disembodied consciousnesses, they have little real understanding of pain. It fascinates them. They like to experiment. They move from body to body, wearing them out and leaving them behind.”

  They flew on, leaving the tormented kappa behind, but there were other scenes. Lunae watched in horror as half-formed infants were methodically torn from growing-bags and dissected. She saw a woman chased to the end of a typhoon shelter and ripped to pieces. The women doing these things all had the same out-of-phase appearance.

  But on the slopes of the lower Peak, Lunae saw a group of peculiar beings: heavy and armored, like lumbering half-human turtles. The faces that squatted beneath their lowering brows were tight and gnarled, with small glistening eyes. They carried Martian weapons: shot-bolts and scissors, but the weapons seemed part of their bodies rather than separate tools. But they, too, were blurred and hazy, moving in and out of direct vision.

  “What are they?” Lunae whispered.

  “They are the Sown. In your day, they lie within the Martian soil, bio-tech prototypes, waiting to be called forth. The Kami have called them and inhabit them now. They are the vanguard of the Earth invasion and they swarm across Mars, also.”

  “This is a dreadful sight,” Lunae said.

  “It is hell,” her older self agreed. “The Kami have brought hell to this system. Have you seen enough?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Then close your eyes and open them again.”

  Lunae did so. She was back in the Martian cavern, holding her older self’s hands in her own.

  CHAPTER 9

  Earth

  Yskatarina’s companion rustled behind them through the village of the kappa. All was quiet, the high-piled houses walled in behind night and salt air. The lamps were burning down to a misty dimness. From up in the crags Dreams-of-War heard something cry out, perhaps a hunting seabird. Yet despite the stillness, she could not help feeling that the town was awake and listening, that the kappa were only pretending to sleep. She thought of thick bodies, motionless as lumps, waiting to rise up in toad-silence and strike. The armor drew in upon her, sliding close over her skin. She listened ceaselessly for the excissieres, but there was no sound. It meant nothing, of course. The excissieres were huntresses of astonishing skill, and preferred to play a little before the strike. The thought raised the hair at the nape of Dreams-of-War’s neck.

  “Do you know where we are going?”

  Ahead, she saw Yskatarina nod. “But it will not be easy,” the woman from Nightshade said.

  Dreams-of-War bristled. “I am not accustomed to ‘easy.’ ”

  Yskatarina smiled. “Just as well.”

  The creature unfolded its wings with a rattle and took off, circling up through the narrow cracks between the houses.

  “Where is it heading?” Dreams-of-War said in some alarm. She had visions of the thing triggering alarms, rousing the town—assuming, once again, that they slept. “What if the excissieres see it?”

  “That’s the point,” Yskatarina said with barely restrained patience. “It’s gone to keep an eye on them, and if they come too close, it’ll draw them off.”

  Dreams-of-War eyed her askance. “What if they harm it?”

  “They will not. It knows how to hide.” Yskatarina spoke with confidence, but Dreams-of-War had seen an excissiere shoot a dactylate out of the Martian sky at dusk with nothing more than a slingshot.

  It was not just the excissieres who concerned her. There was also Sek, in the Grandmothers’ pay, who had been carrying the Grandmothers’ most precious possession, yet with no guards on the junk... Where was Sek, and what might she be doing now? Not to mention Yskatarina, and why Memnos might be after her. Assuming it was even true, and she was not leading Dreams-of-War into a trap... But in that case, why not simply let the scissor-women catch up with her?

  “We are looking for something,” Yskatarina said. She put out a hand, bringing Dreams-of-War to an abrupt halt. “Wait.” Her eyes were closed, her face dreaming. “Ah, I have it.” Dreams-of-War saw her smile.

  “What are you doing?” Dreams-of-War demanded.

  “I’ll show you.”

  Yskatarina stepped into a sliver of a passage, picked her way with exaggerated delicacy over mounds of discarded fish heads.

  “There is nothing down here, surely? Or do you seek a place to hide?”

  Yskatarina glanced over her shoulder. “I am not accustomed to hiding.”

  She said nothing more. Dreams-of-War, seething, followed.

  The armor bristled and prickled as they went, relaying information to Dreams-of-War’s weary, paranoid cortex. Yskatarina walked with surety through a labyrinth paved with fish refuse and shit, as though she knew exactly where she was headed. In some instances, the passages were so narrow that Dreams-of-War was obliged to turn sideways to enter them. Yskatarina’s secrecy was beginning to grate even more severely upon her. She felt constricted, confined, and when she glanced upward, she could no longer see the stars, only a haze across the sky. After the burning Martian nights and the clear desert air, this place felt rank, dank, and hostile. Occasionally, Yskatarina’s creature passed overhead like a great rattling bat.

  “That thing of yours will attract attention,” Dreams-of-War hissed. “Someone will see.”

  “It has its own safeguards,” Yskatarina replied, infuriatingly calm. “Do not worry.”

  But Dreams-of-War could already feel a glaze of sweat frosting her skin underneath the armor. Who, exactly, had Memnos sent? She thought of the excissieres, bearing their scissors before them. Or the rarer cenulae, perhaps, seducing you with nets of sound and song, holding you in a trance before you complied with whatever they might desire you to do. Humiliation would be a part of it, she was sure: the warrior’s greatest fear.

  The sooty, stinking passageway grew even narrower. To calm herself, Dreams-of-War thought of her heroines, the women from the old stories: Teoris of the Plain, who had captured a thousand men when the brutes still roamed freely about Mars; Dei of the Olympian Heights, living with animals and speaking their speech. None of these woman had, to the best of Dreams-of-War’s knowledge, ended up in an alien maze that reeked of fisherwomen’s offal. It was the indignity of the whole affair that rankled, rather than a fear of Memnos. Or so Dreams-of-War told herself.

  “Your creature will tell us if they are near?” she said to Yskatarina.

  The woman looked absently back. “Who?”

  “The excissieres. Or the kappa. Or whoever else doesn’t like us and might even now be in pursuit.”

  Yskatarina nodded. “It will tell me. Ah!” She stopped, and began scuffling again in the fish refuse. Dreams-of-War eyed her with distaste.

  “What are you doing?”

  “My companion tells me it is here.” Yskatarina stood to reveal a web of dark fire set into the stones of the passage.

  “What is that?”

  “A door.”

  Dreams-of-War stared at the glittering square. “That is no technology of the kappa. They have surely progressed no further than the wheel and the village pump.”

  Yskatarina smiled. “Perhaps so. Yet here is a haunt-lock, nonetheless.”

  Her creature rocketed down to join them in a clatter of wings. It placed its mouthparts to the fiery web, and whispered.

  “And it is doing what, exactly?”

  “Opening the door.”

  “Where did it get the incantation runes?”

  “From something old and dead.”

  The haunt-lock flared up. A crackle of scarlet spread outward, like flame applied to charcoal. A moment later, a hole appeared in the floor of t
he passage. Dreams-of-War peered cautiously inward.

  “Are you sure this is a door? I can’t see a thing.”

  Yskatarina stepped onto the hole and stood there, ostensibly floating on air. “It is not open space. This is an elevator.” She reached out a hand. The creature sidled close to her. “Come.”

  Ignoring the hand, Dreams-of-War moved to stand beside them. The surface was glassy beneath her feet. Then they were hurtling downward, coming to a halt far below the earth.

  Dreams-of-War peered dubiously into the darkness.

  “Where are we?”

  Yskatarina appeared pleased, almost smug. She said nothing. Her face wavered through the halo of light that emanated from nodules along her creature’s abdomen.

  “Well?” Dreams-of-War folded her arms. “I shall go no farther until I know where we are going and what manner of place this is. This cannot be the doing of the kappa.”

  Yskatarina’s creature, wings folded, skittered up the wall and glided along the ceiling of the passage.

  “If this place is what I think it is, then it is old,” Yskatarina said.

  “Old? You mean, this may be an early Martian installation?” But this blacklight technology did not look quite like anything that Dreams-of-War had seen before. Ancient haunt-tech? The feel was the same—the same queasy otherness, the sad itch in the head, the heaviness of the heart—but there was no such thing as a homegrown version of haunt-tech on Earth. Therefore, this had to have come from elsewhere.

  “No,” Yskatarina said with amused patience.

  “But what is this? What is the function of this place? It feels like haunt-tech, but there was surely none such on old Earth, even if what you say”—she swallowed a bolt of disdain—“about the Martians is partially true.” She would not concede all of it. She was reluctant to accept even this much.

  “Perhaps” was all that Yskatarina said. “If I am right, we will soon see.”

  Yskatarina was clearly following her companion, but how did the thing know where to go? Its spidery form bustled unerringly around corners, down passageways, through arches. This place must be vast, Dreams-of-War thought with unease, extending right under the hill. Already they must have walked more than a mile. And what of oreagraphs, spy-eyes, weir-wards? Why were they being permitted to wander around like this? And, most pressing of all, where were the excissieres?