Winterstrike (19 page)

I stared at the antiscribe in dismay, typing back, ‘Where has E gone? Do you know?’

Oh Essegui,
I thought. Spies should have no ties, but I thought of my cold-faced, warm-hearted cousin, the features I saw every time I looked in a mirror, and all those shared secrets . .
.

I turned back to where Rubirosa was reading a paperback novel of the kind much admired in Winterstrike forty years before, and attracting covert glances from the rest of the tea-house’s
customers. I wondered what they really thought. I wondered what they really
were.

‘Finished your messaging?’ the marauder said, without looking up.

‘It would appear so.’ I went to sit by her, at a safe distance. I was still thinking about Gennera’s instructions. ‘We’d better go,’ I said.

‘Agreed.’

When we left, the strip of sky overhead had become dark and starry. The Noumenon was filled with the glow of lamps, all the way up the heights of the cliffs. I wondered who had – and who
still – lived at the summit: perhaps government officials, or would they live at the safety of the base, a society geographically reversed? Rubirosa and I made our way through cramped and
narrow streets; it was like travelling back in time to an earlier Mars, or perhaps even Earth – some strange day when technology was unknown. A ground car, gliding overhead, dispelled this
illusion somewhat, but even that vehicle had an antique air about it. I thought of ruins, of a people glimpsed like shadows from the corner of the eye. I felt an electric tingling through my
eldritch senses, like the activation of haunt-tech. From high on the cliff above the rooftops came a great burst of light, a soundless shower of sparks that, from this distance, must have been
burning material that was several feet across. A moment later, the cliffside rumbled.

A bomb? And then, across the street, a storefront exploded. Both Rubirosa and I were already diving for the ground, smacked there by the force of the blast. Above us, a plexiglass window flexed,
bent outward, flexed again and collapsed against its own pressure. I covered my head with my arms as pieces of the window fell in. Someone was screaming. There was an intense, unnatural heat but I
couldn’t hear the roar of fire. Cautiously, I raised my head. I couldn’t see much beyond the window, only a white wall as though the snow had blown up, or someone had changed a
programme to static. As I watched, a face bubbled out of the wall, mouth agape, eyes staring. And through its eyes, all I could see was stars.

Interlude: Leretui

She would enjoy it, Mantis told her with a brittle gaiety. It was a return to the ancient times; she must have read about such things, perhaps even seen videocasts, old and
flickering. Leretui need not be afraid, because she would be high above the action and well protected.

Mantis would make very sure that she was protected. Leretui knew that, didn’t she?

So why, Shorn thought, did she continue to feel so strange?

There were other emotions mixed in with the fear, however. Mantis fascinated her. It was the way that she thought about things, so alien, so
different.

‘You see, Leretui,’ she said, sitting in the chair in the chamber while Shorn sat on the bed, hugging her knees. ‘Things have been out of balance on Mars for far too long. The
original matriarchies – progressive social experiments, that got out of hand. After all, Earth still has males.’

‘In a subservient role,’ Shorn argued.

Mantis shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But things could change. The oldest legends tell of cycles: how first women dominated, and then men, and now women again. We need to get past that kind of
thinking. We need equality. That’s what the Age of Children was all about, you see. Equality between the genders. Equality between different human species.’

Shorn was silent. She did not see how equality could be possible, after so long. And Mantis was the first member of the Changed she’d ever really talked to at close quarters: you could not
call the vulpen ‘human’. Yet something still skated through her mind, the long face, the bony fingers clutching her own.

‘You mentioned this – test,’ she said.

‘A chance for the vulpen to prove their skill,’ Mantis said. Her eyes shone, first dark, then pale. She spread her oddly jointed hands. ‘They demanded it, not I.’

Shorn did not see how this had anything to do with equality, or any of the theories that Mantis had propounded to her. The woman seemed to want a confessor, or at least, an ear. This proposed
test sounded more like the sort of things excissieres went through, so wasn’t it just a case of males mimicking females, without any real understanding of what they were doing or why?

But the thought of seeing vulpen again – she didn’t understand how she felt about that, couldn’t seem to pin the feelings down.

You’ll enjoy it,’ Mantis said again, and she sounded very sure of it. So Shorn said, doubtful, ‘Maybe I will.’

She was looking forward just to getting out of the tower room for a while. The long view had paled, and it had become too reminiscent of the year she had spent locked in the heart of Calmaretto.
She found that her thoughts had taken to spiralling endlessly around, like birds around carrion, dwelling on the past, on shame and humiliation. She tried to turn them away from the subject, but
could not. So Shorn let herself sink into it, until the time came for Mantis to lead her down.

The tower was not, after all, as ruined as she had thought. At some point in its long history – more recent than not – someone had gutted the interior and replaced musty stone and
rotting wood with a plastic shell, in plain muted colours. The floor beneath Shorn’s feet sparkled with shot light, running through the tiles, and occasionally faces appeared in the walls,
eyes empty, mouthing words.

‘Who are the haunts?’ Shorn asked. Her hand was tucked into the crook of Mantis’s elbow and held there firmly. Under her fingers, the arm was unnaturally hard, like bone.

Mantis laughed. ‘Trapped souls, nothing more. I suppose I should have done something about them, but – well, it lends atmosphere, don’t you think? Besides, some of them are
men, you’ll have noticed. I thought it’s an interesting reminder – what we were, and what we’ve become. So I decided to leave them.’

‘Do they ever – escape?’ Shorn asked, thinking of Calmaretto and its multiple wards.

‘Only occasionally. They don’t do anything, can’t be used for anything, either. Too diffuse. A shame, really. It would be interesting to question them, but they’re just
images. Any content is long gone.’

But Shorn could hear something up ahead now, a distant, pervasive murmuring. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

Ah, those are your subjects, my lady.’ Her grip on Shorn’s hand tightened. ‘Don’t be afraid, now. You know they can smell it?’

And will I see – him – there? The one beneath the bridge? The one who changed everything for me?
Shorn did not say this aloud. How would she
know?
she thought. They
were said to look all alike, clones and shifts, like the female versions of the Changed. Then they turned a corner and she was standing in a great domed chamber, filled with long white faces like
ghosts. All of them were turned towards her and the sudden silence was deafening.

This time it was her own grip that tightened on Mantis’s arm. Her breath sounded loud in the hush.

‘Don’t be afraid.’ Mantis’s voice was very solemn, as if trying not to mock. She led Shorn up a flight of stone steps and Shorn stared straight ahead, not looking down,
wanting and yet not wanting to meet those inhuman eyes. Their gaze bored into her until she felt as full of holes as a sieve. Mantis led her into a rickety iron cage, dangling above the crowd. Once
inside, she was ushered onto a red velvet seat. She perched there gingerly, as the cage swung. Eventually she forced herself to look down. The floor of the cavern was covered with a glassy oval:
from the chill that rose from it, she recognized ice.

‘What’s happening?’ she whispered to Mantis, who still had hold of her hand. Her fingers were growing numb.

‘A contest. They like to prove themselves.’

One of the vulpen skated out onto the rink, the blades of its – his – feet whistling across the ice. He wore black and white robes, a swirling chequerboard pattern, blurring into a
blizzard as he moved. Shorn gasped. The long feet flashed beneath the hem of the robe, carving temporary patterns into the ice. He carried a pole of glinting metal, marked with long barbs. On the
opposite side of the ice, another vulpen skated forth, wearing black and red. The barbs on his weapon were also red: a flaring crimson. Shorn craned her neck, trying to see if either of them looked
familiar, but of course she could not tell: they all looked the same, with those pointed faces and small inverted ears, the arching brow ridges and bony skulls. The combatants hissed, displaying
triangles of teeth. Black-and-white spun, whirled, whipping the barbed pole over his head and kicking out with one serrated foot. Red Warrior ducked, dived, skidded in a moth-flurry of robes across
the rink, rebounded to his feet. A thin trail of blood followed: Shorn watched it, fascinated, the little drops marbling as they froze.

Beside her, Mantis laughed. ‘Nothing like blood,’ she said.

‘Will one of them kill the other?’ Shorn asked.

‘Perhaps.’ She did not sound as though it mattered.

White Warrior whisked over, stabbing down with the barbed pole. Red rolled, trying to avoid the stabbing point, which stopped just short of the ice. White’s skates cut graceful arabesques
across the floor. Mantis pointed, said sententiously, ‘It’s as important to be beautiful as it is to be strong.’

Shorn would have liked to disagree, but the patterns that were forming before her were mesmerizing: black, white, red; blood and ice and the sad darkness of an eye. She leaned forward,
forgetting Mantis’s grip on her hand, and watched the combat. She thought, for a moment, that she could feel Mantis’s smile.

Red and White were now both back on their skating blades. They rushed towards each other, poles forming wheels in the air and sending upward a draught that stirred Shorn’s hair. It was a
dance as much as a fight, she understood, and yet the fight lay at the base of it all, the brutality underneath the beauty, and that was what made it exciting.

She’d seen violence before, of course. She was of Winterstrike. There had been the bloodgames played by the excissieres, running through the streets during Misrule. Shorn and her sister
and cousin had not been allowed out of the house, but they’d watched anyway, hiding behind the windows of the winter garden on the roof and watching the silent violent dance in the snowy
street below. The masques held by the coquettes – Shorn had been to a few of these and they’d almost always ended in a fanning, the razor-edges flickering out across a face. That was
normal, just another side of life, but this was different, a different smell in the air, catching hold of her senses and twisting them in.

Red Warrior leaped, rising high above the rink and kicking down. White fell, throat torn out. The scent of blood struck Shorn like a blow. She watched, avid, as the vulpen clustered around and
began, delicately, to feed on their fallen companion.

SIXTEEN

I wanted to sleep, but it wouldn’t come and so I stayed wide awake and stared out at the changing landscape as the ancient ground car sped along. I half expected to see
Alleghetta standing out there amongst the scrub, but she didn’t appear either, which was a relief. Being haunted by one’s still-living (as far as I knew) mother was, I felt, coming
close to the final indignity.

We came down from the mountains and out across the plains once more, whistling through the icy grass. It was still very early in the morning, with the stars speckling the sky. Occasionally we
started flocks of hunting birds up from the grass and they flew upwards in spirals, like smoke. I had that early-morning sense of the world made new, that time when the planet seems to belong to
you and your companions, and no one else.

This time, however, it was my companions’ disconcerting presence that was probably stopping me from sleeping. I hadn’t paid much attention to the bite on my arm after my capture by
Mantis’s rider, but now it started to itch and burn, whether from mental association with the centipedes, or because the haunt-tech episode had dampened it down, or simply because I now had
the leisure to think about it, I did not know. I pushed back my sleeve and looked at the bite: no point in trying to pretend it wasn’t there, I thought, seeing that the thing that had given
it to me was probably lurking in someone else’s clothes right now.

And indeed, one of the women leaned forward and examined the bite with interest. It had become raised into a shiny knot, the flesh oddly twisted around a central core, like a mutated boil. I
stared at it with revulsion.

‘It’s reacted quite well,’ the woman said, with approval.

‘Oh, well, that’s good, isn’t it? One of your familiars sinks its pincers into my arm and it comes up in a great oozing lump -fantastic’

The woman did not appear to notice any sarcasm. ‘Shurr, look at this.’

‘Sometimes there’s a very strong reaction,’ Shurr said. ‘Your immunity must be quite good. It can be painful.’

‘Why did I have to undergo it, in that case?’

‘It’s a tracking implant,’ the woman explained. ‘It’s how we found you.’

‘Let Three take care of it, now that we have more time,’ the other woman said. She tapped her sleeve and the centipede slid out of it. I didn’t like to ask what had become of
the one that had liberated me from the cell: it must be dead, but I wasn’t sure that they were alive in the first place. This thing had a gleaming white carapace, unmarked except by a small
silver dot near the head. It moved with smooth mechanical precision.

‘Is it real?’ I asked. ‘That is, I mean is it a machine?’

‘In part. A bio-engineered organism. Rather like your excissieres, I suppose.’

‘I don’t know much about how things are done on Earth,’ I said, ‘but aren’t those very expensive?’