Winterstrike (11 page)

On clear days, which were few, one could see the platform from the upper storeys of the Palace of Light: a spiky, attenuated porcupine shape far out to sea. Shurr had often stood on the
balconies of the Palace, watching the sharp sparks of incoming and outgoing haunt-ships rising and falling from the platform, and had never ceased to wonder where each one was heading, or had come
from. The choices were limited: Mars, Nightshade, the Moon, perhaps the strange rim settlements clinging to the rocks of the Belt or the scattering of vast post-orbital craft that glided between
the worlds. And each one whispered to her: she could hear the voices of the dead channelled through the Segments she had carried, for this was part of their function, too; to listen to the Eldritch
Realm and seek answers.

Segment Three must feel this now, for it stirred and quaked within her sleeve. Shurr ran a hand along the centipede’s spiny body, murmuring reassurances. Ghuan turned an unsettled face
towards her.

‘Do you think that’s our ship?’

Shurr followed his – no,
her,
she must get out of the habit of thinking of him as a man – pointing finger to where a dark shape was hovering over the edge of the platform.
Shurr had only once before been close to a haunt-ship, and then as now, the thing had been difficult to see: blurred around the edges, with detail suddenly illuminated as if by lightning. As the
sampan drew closer to the platform, the haunt-ship solidified, becoming a squat oval craft with gleaming metal sides and a bristling canopy at its summit. As Shurr watched, a gape-mouthed form,
barely recognizable as human, shot out from underneath the ship and skimmed across the water, passing through the sampan and stirring Shurr’s hair with an icy spectral breath. ‘Looks
like it,’ Shurr replied.

NINE

The sound that woke me was so faint that at first I thought I’d imagined it, or was still lost in dreams of the fortress bridge, blazing. Around me, the dingy room of the
boarding house was filled with a creeping light. The river birds which congregated around the gate were already shrieking and clucking with the approach of dawn and it must have been one of those
that woke me – but then I heard the sound again, a slight stealthy scratching at the base of my door.

Very carefully, I sat up. There was something glistening under the frame of the door, as though oil was being poured through the gap. Something prompted me not to put my feet on the floor. The
back of my neck was prickling with the recognition of something eldritch: the guest house was not, as far as I could tell, warded apart from some basic mechanisms around the front door, but this
had the twitchy feeling of sophisticated tech.

And the majike, at least, had known where to find me . . . But she’d offered help, hadn’t she? Somehow, I did not think this was it.

Standing on the bed, I reached for my pack and hauled it over my shoulder, grateful that I’d slept in my clothes. Then I climbed across to the windowsill, like a child playing a game, and
perched on it while I unclasped the window. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that the oil, or whatever it might be, was starting to coalesce into a greasy film across the rough parquet of the
floor. As I sent the window rattling up, the oil flashed like white fire and a shape appeared in the centre of the room. It lunged at me, a toothed maw, but I was already out of the window and
hanging onto the sill. I dropped ten feet into a snowbank and without waiting to catch my breath, ran for the gate.

I’d wondered how, without transport, I was going to get clear of the city. The majike had mentioned a pilgrimage, but I didn’t like the thought of relying on
information provided by someone who was, as far as I was concerned, an enemy. I didn’t have much choice, though. The Calmaretto carriage was a useless machine, used only for formal occasions
and short distances – the theatre, the park. On the rare occasions that we’d been taken up to the Harn country house – really no more than a cottage in the upland meadows of the
Saghair, and thus unusable for the cold months of the year, which was most of it – we’d had to hire transportation. Anyway, after the events of the early morning, I was reluctant to
draw further attention to myself.

Due to the outbreak of war, most public transport between Winterstrike and the region of Caud was on hold or severely compromised, although there was some canal traffic. It would, however, be
difficult to get from Winterstrike to the mountains by water. Normally, there were trains into the foothills, but now these, too, had been placed on hiatus. I spent half an hour or so huddled in a
makeshift tea-house within the lee of the gate, working out how best to hire a ground car anonymously.

The oil-thing had not come after me and this wasn’t a surprise. I’d recognized it as a roaming ward: a portion of someone else’s house defence hijacked and booby-trapped, sent
out into the world to kill. It wasn’t an easy matter, and that told me that whoever had sent it after me meant business. Not a comforting thought.

As I sidled out of the shadow of the gate, the geise nudging me at every step, I saw a procession coming down the street. This was motley, disorganized, and yet seemed to have an element of
cohesion. A large carriage in the centre of the procession swayed from side to side, drawn by two horned, lowing beasts, and a crowd pressed around it, banging hide drums and playing the mournful
flutes around which, in the south, entire orchestras are based. The whole procession was producing a doleful cacophony as it headed towards the red bulk of the North Gate. Oh, what the hell, I
thought. I had to find my sister and besides, someone was trying to kill me. I needed to make a decision. I ran forward and caught the sleeve of a woman walking behind the carriage.

‘Is this a pilgrimage?’

‘Why, yes. We take the mantle of Ombre to the mountains, we walk in shadow.’

The mountains: that meant the Hattins, which were effectively the foothills of the Saghair. From there I might be able to get canal transport or a train to the region that surrounded the
Noumenon, as the majike had suggested.

‘Can I come with you?’ I asked. The majike’s idea had held some sense, however little I might like it. Going along with the procession would provide me with a measure of
security – I could see guards walking by the carriage, weapons sheathed within the city walls but weapons nonetheless – and a reason for being out in the wilds.

All are welcome,’ the woman intoned. She did not sound happy about it. I wondered what private tragedy had impelled her out onto the road. Pilgrimages are rarely formed of the blessed.
I’d heard of the Mantle of Ombre; one of the lesser cults that had grown up around the festival itself, but it wasn’t one of the big state-sanctioned belief systems and I knew little
about it.

Thank you,’ I said, and fell into line behind her. I had no drum and no flute, but I followed the chants as best I could – some were old hymns that I’d learned at my
governess’s knee. I walked with the procession into the darkness beneath the North Gate and when I came out again, Winterstrike was at my back and the Crater Plains lay beyond.

An hour passed, then two. I realized how unaccustomed I’d become to walking so far and my calves started to ache again after the exertions of the day before. The pack I’d bought in
the matriarchy store was filled with no more than cheap underwear and a bottle of water, but it started to weigh on me more and more heavily as we walked on. Gloomily, I supposed this was natural,
and anyway it was so cold that the water must be turning to ice. But the pilgrimage had its advantages. The incessant chanting, which under normal circumstances would have infuriated me, served to
drown out the voice of the geise. It resurfaced from time to time, a little less insistent than before, and although I wasn’t sure whether this was a result of the chanting itself or simply
that I was doing what the geise wanted, it was nonetheless a relief.

I also took the time to study my fellow pilgrims, as covertly as I could. Most of them seemed to be from Winterstrike, to judge from their pale colouring, but there were a few exceptions. I did
not know where the very young girl with the long hair striped in red and black might be from: her skin was much darker than that of someone from the city and she kept casting nervous – no,
more than that, frightened – glances around her as she walked. And there were three women wrapped in brown veils, whose faces could not be seen and who did not, as far as I could tell, join
in with the chanting. I moved a little closer to them, out of curiosity, but they remained silent and paid no attention to me. As we passed one of the ruined towers that star the landscape outside
the city, however, one of the women raised an arm and pointed out the tower to her companions. I saw something sinuous slide along her arm, disappearing up her sleeve. A bracelet? But it looked as
though it had moved under its own power. I decided to keep an eye on the three brown-clad women.

The highest buildings of Winterstrike had become tiny by midday, far in the distance and no more than a series of blocks and domes. Here, heading north-west, the Plains themselves were still
monotonous under their covering of snow. In summer they would become all red soil, black grass, thin waving fronds planted in the very early days of terraformation and proving impossible to
eradicate. The towers, a legacy of some long-forgotten war, rose in vitrified obsidian splendour at intervals across the plain, each one bearing the face of a different demon, carved some twenty
feet in height. One of them was inhabited: a forlorn black and white pennant snapped from its ruined summit and a scuttling at the doorway as the procession drew near suggested it was some hermit,
perhaps one of the mad religious that haunt Winterstrike’s further boundaries. None of us cared to find out more. In the distance, after we’d passed the tenth tower, a moving herd
veered around and away, scenting us on the wind.

‘Gaezelles,’ one of the guards volunteered as I drew close to her.

‘Really? This far north?’

She shrugged. ‘They come up from the southern craters sometimes, if there’s danger.’

‘I’d have thought there was more risk here, near the city.’

‘Perhaps it’s worse in the south. Or maybe they’re short of food: they come up if their prey fails.’

I felt a little uneasy. In the olden days, they’d been designed as herbivores. So much for that. I knew they’d been revived, and it seemed there had been revisions. ‘Any
likelihood of attack?’

‘Probably not. But if they do – well, we won’t have to look far for supper.’ The guard gave an unpleasant smack of the lips.

By the time the sun sank down and cast the Plains into a russet shadow, I had blisters. The procession had not been permitted to halt apart from short breaks, but in the early afternoon a woman
had gone among the crowd dispensing meat buns for a small amount of money. Though I was not used to a midday meal – at Calmaretto this was always considered vulgar, like so many things
– I bought one anyway and ate it as I walked. But as the sun fell, I realized that the march-pace of the procession had been in order that we might reach shelter for the night, as I’d
suspected and hoped.

There aren’t many settlements between Winterstrike and the mountains. Unlike the south of the city, where the lakes lie and there are many small villages, this part of the region is still
relatively deserted, apart from the towers and their accompanying ghosts. The place we now came to had been an oasis once, during the ancient desert days, and its name was Gharu. In the lost years,
when this part of Mars had relied on beast-transport, it had been a way station and the old sinks and plunges were still there: pools of water beneath a thin layer of ice-trapped weed. The low
buildings beyond were only the top layer of the town, which extended beneath the ground to preserve the place from the worst of the winter winds. The procession came to a gate, seemingly standing
on its own: a rough black dolmen leading into nothing. At first, I thought it was some ritual structure, then realized that its appearance was deceptive. As the guards stepped up to it, the air
shimmered beyond and revealed a winding flight of steps, leading down.

‘Dormitories,’ the guard explained.

When we went down the stairs, filing two at a time, I discovered that the whole place was geared towards pilgrimages. This must be the only way the occupants had of making a living. Rows of beds
stood in nooks set into the walls, affording some privacy, and a hatch at the end of the long room dispensed basic meals. I claimed a bed, then queued with the rest and bought a mess of meat
porridge. Everyone seemed subdued, probably from fatigue. I kept thinking about Leretui, wondering where she was now, how she was faring. We ate in silence. I found myself facing the three
brown-veiled women: they conveyed small fragments of food to their mouths with deft movements beneath the veils, and drank hot tea through long metal straws. My own tea was too scalding to touch: I
watched in awe as the women sipped. They must have metal-lined mouths, I thought. I kept looking at their sleeves, but nothing else moved in them. I started to wonder whether I’d imagined it.
Then something glistened briefly at one of the women’s throats. I raised my head to see that she was, apparently, staring at me. They finished their tea and simultaneously rose, then went to
one of the slightly larger bed-booths, all three, and hung a blanket decisively over the entrance, blocking the booth from public view.

I wasn’t the only one watching. The woman sitting next to me, an older person, turned to me and said in an urgent whisper, ‘Do you know who they
are?

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ I said.

They’re a clone-group from the south,’ someone else said knowledgeably from across the table.

‘No they’re not,’ someone else replied. ‘They’re from Bale. I’ve seen people like that before.’

An argument, conducted in hushed voices, broke out around me as various theories were put forward and ruthlessly demolished. I finished my meal and debated whether to go outside for a breath of
fresh air; the common room was stuffy and smelled of hot wool. Then I remembered what had happened in Winter-strike and decided that safety would be the more sensible choice. I couldn’t rule
out anything befalling me in the middle of the mass of pilgrims, but whoever was after me would find it harder to accomplish in a crowd than if I was on my own. I bought more tea and took it into
my chosen bed-booth, electing to leave the opening uncovered. I stripped down to my underwear and took refuge under the blanket.